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Two years ago the city made me cut down a monster elm tree in my backyard. Now I have a really cool mushroom garden. The shot below was taken with my Canon G6, since it has a nice super-micro feature and a rotatable LCD making it easier to shoot lower to the ground.

I just upgraded to SwishVideoHQ this weekend. So I though I would give it test run using video I took of my dad fly fishing on Father’s day. The video below was taken with a Canon T1i and kit lens (18-55.) I tweaked the brightness slightly in Sony Vegas, then scaled it down to 400 x 276 and ran it through SwishVideoHQ using the new h.246 encoding and custom path mapping features. It doesn’t really do the Canon T1i HD video justice at this low resolution, but the h.246 encoding appears to work well and custom paths makes it so much easier to integrate video into a WordPress blog.

Good old Elmer’s never should have put “Flammable” on the label. Never leave a photographer alone with dice, rubber cement, a hot glue gun, a sheet of glass and some black construction paper? Oh, toss in a fire extinguisher- safety first kiddies.

I’m working on an idea for a short film. So on the way home I shot some test footage in the parking garage. This brief shot was captured using my Nikon S210. It was then color graded and edited in Sony Vegas 8.0c, where I added the emergency red and blue flash and sound effects.

I’m also testing the latest build of SwishVideo – v3.5 Pre-Release build 20090218 which now supports h.264 along with a few other minor player enhancements.

This Saturday, I made my way to Wisconsin, for the 2009 Hudson Hot Air Affair. While high winds prevented the Day’s balloon flight. The Moon Glow or “Field of Fire” in this case took place as schedule at sun down. The Hudson Elementary school yard was filled with 35 or so Balloonist all firing their burners into the air. A spectacular sight and one that warmed the frozen air.

The Moon Glow was a new experience in photography. I do a lot of firework and existing light photography, but this was very different from anything I’ve done before. The burners vary in temperature vastly over their burn cycle. Set your exposure too short you get a light blue light which is very dim. Wait too long the oxygen increases the burn and much more light emitted. Exposure control was difficult to say least using my old Canon G6.

I ran across a nice fireworks shot while doing my September archiving. It was taken during the 2008 Aquatennial fireworks, in Minneapolis along the Mississippi river front.

Each year I try to find a new location. This year I fought the crowds on the Stone Arch Bridge, I arrived around three hours early to beat the crowds and as a result had to put up with a drunken nut who fancied himself a “Photography Expert”. He insisted that I had to use a cable release and a wide angle lens to take “Proper” fireworks photos, and preceded to say so over and over and over again… Even after I politely explained for the sixth time, that I was using a wide angle lens and wireless remote. Agggh!

The Taste of Minnesota started this weekend, so I headed to Saint Paul this Saturday to photograph the fireworks. I arrived early and wondered for hours, but the crowds were just to… well crowed. The only spot I found to set-up had an uninteresting background. So I headed a mile or so down river. No surprise that the fireworks disappointing, hardly worth the five dollars for parking and four bucks for a bottle of pop. Oh well, once the brief display was over, I turned my camera on the Saint Paul skyline and was treated to this shot.

It’s been a long time between posts, I haven’t event had time to get out and take some photos. I grabbed my camera on the way to St. Paul this morning, and I ran across this city water park. Risking frostbite, I stops to get a few shots not realizing that the fence was 12 feet high locked, and with too many people around to climb over. Being the resourceful type, I considered breaking and entering until I remembered the Timer!

Holding the camera high above my head on mono pod, I tried to hold the camera strait and steady as I shivered in the below zero temp. Luckily the Canon G6 has a swivel LCD panel so It was a little easier to compose the shot. This was the best of the lot, and I still had to crop it, edit, and rotate it slightly.

This Sunday started out rainy and a little chilly. It was around 1pm when I noticed some breaking in the cloud cover. I ran down to Lake Harriet hoping to catch the last of the fall colors. I captured this shot of the Como-Harriet trolley line just as the sun peeked through a crack.

Another great weekend, I took a long drive out in the country on Sunday and came across this scenic hilltop and hour or so before Sunset.