The answer, my friend

Abby, Gina and I took one of our many neighborhood walks on Thursday. I snapped these dogwood blossoms blowing in a stiff wind in the late afternoon sunlight. I loves me some dogwoods. Some in this area have been truly spectacular this year. Last year they got zotted in the epic April freeze.

Blowing Dogwoods

My 30-day trial of Photoshop CS3 ran out and I haven’t wrangled another copy, so I downloaded a free trial of Lightroom. Lightroom doesn’t do all the neat stuff PS does, but it does have camera raw and I can always go back to using The Gimp. Anyway, Lightroom has these presets, one of which makes photos look aged. That’s what I used on this dogwood photo. I like the effect.

Abby is a big fan of picking stuff up and examining it. She amazes me by generally knowing what to pick up and what not to. She’ll always pick up acorns and worms and ladybugs. She won’t pick up spiders and snakes. So far, at least. While we were on our walk she bent over until her face almost touched the ground and yelled, “Caterpillar.” A closer inspection by Gina revealed the caterpillar was actually one of those pollen pods from an oak tree. Abby said, “Oh” and moved on to other things.

Rattlesnake Falls

Rattlesnake Falls

This shot of Rattlesnake Falls in the White Mountain Area of Northwest Arkansas is currently my favorite shot. You can see it on my Flickr page here where it looks better for some reason.

I used a neutral density filter and a polarizer to get a slow enough shutter speed to make the water go all blurry. I worked up the pic in photoshop using some skills I picked up from Scott Kelby’s 7-Point System for Photoshop. It’s a great book. I recommend it.

Justification

I kinda swore I would never blog, so this is how I’m going to justify it:

1. I’ve got a little kid and the relatives can keep up with her through my pithy writings.

2. I’ve really gotten into photography lately and a blog is a cool way to show off and talk about f stops and shutter speeds and other stupid stuff. I take a lot of photos of the aforementioned kid and posting some of those will support justification #1. (I’ve also got a Flickr account, but it confuses some people.)

3. Everybody’s doing it.

OK, now that that’s out of the way, I embark on one of the lamest things in the world.