Here is the result:

As far as I’m concerned, it’s completely worth the effort.

Of course, since the above image was made with a camera sitting on a tripod, I was also able to do some shooting with a telephoto lens for a more traditional liftoff image.

Finally, I had planned to attach my point and shoot camera to the tripod and shoot some video as well, but the crappy flexpod I bought that day fell apart on me. So, I ended up setting the little camera directly on the ground and crossing my fingers. I couldn’t get a clear view of the sky, but figured it was worth a shot anyway. The resulting video falls squarely in the “Happy Accident” category.

(Note: At about 1:50 seconds into the video, the rumble that starts is the sound from engines. It took that long for it to get to where I was shooting from. Prior to that, the all the rocket noise is coming from the audio on the radio. The announcer was obviously much closer.)

To give credit where it’s due:

• Thanks to Dr. T.S. Kelso from celestrak.com for helping make sure I was setup to capture the entire flight path.
• For a great set of notes on shooting launches, visit this page on phototrek.org.
• K4GCC (146.940) retransmission of the NASA audio which you hear in the video.
• M.C. for letting me borrow some additional gear.

Did some online car shopping over the weekend and last Monday purchased a 2005 Honda Accord. Still getting used to her, but I think we are gonna get along fine. Here’s hoping for another 200,000 plus mile car.

I really need to get back into using photoshop. Touch ups, contrast adjustment and color ballance are taking me forever. If I do much more of this stuff, I’m going to have to actually color balance my monitor too. Right now, I struggle to keep from just saying to hell with it and converting everything to black and white or a sepia tone.

A couple times I got too close and he did this:

Note: in this shot he was facing the other direction from the portrait above.

I probably couldn’t get that shot again with a point and shoot if I tried 1,000 times. I think would fall into what Henri Cartier-Bresson calls The Decisive Moment. From the Wikipedia article:

“Photography is not like painting,” Cartier-Bresson told the Washington Post in 1957. “There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment the photographer is creative,” he said. “Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.”

Speaks well for Toyota. I replaced the timing belt at 80,000 and 160,000 miles and had a few other moderate repairs, but other than that, all I really did was go through oil changes and tires. I knew I wanted to see if the little car could make it 200,000, but now I have to figure out if I want to have some work done of finally get a new car. We’ll see….

All in all, I’m really impressed with Lightroom. Before switching to it, I had been using Bridge and an app called BreezeBrowser that was pretty good, but I was running on older hardware and the overall experience was very, very slow. I’m not a fan of waiting on computers, so I tended not to do to much with the images. Worse than usual that is.

A while back I rebuilt my computer with close to top of the line components in anticipation of doing more photo work. That was money well spent. I don’t know if it was just the hardware upgrade or if the switch to Lightroom had an effect as well, but the difference is night and day.

Might actually get me shooting some again. Especially since the workload at the office is lightening up a bit. In the mean time, here’s one of my favorite images from the wedding.

Needless to say, it was a good time.

Thankfully, we made it out. We were delayed about an hour and a half, but managed to get past the de-icing line which would have taken another two hours. I haven’t seen snow in years, but I wasn’t too excited to see it. Worked out okay though.

Even though I really haven’t done much messing around with the images yet, it really got me thinking about how much I love photography. Now that I don’t have to dread the computer time, hopefully I’ll be more likely to shoot some. Of course, this will be after we get our redesign launched. But still, it’s nice to think about.

Incidentally, here’s an image to celebrate the fact that I can actually work with images now without wanting to stab myself in the leg with a fork to distract myself from waiting on the machine. It’s the drummer from The CodeTalkers. Or, at least it was the drummer back in Sept. 2006 when this shot is from.

I’ve decided to decorate my office with some 11×14s of my music images. I’m pretty sure this is going to be one of them.

And here is a link to the rest of the proofs: link