I always liked the constellation Orion. Probably would have turned out better if I tweaked the settings better but it was dark and it's really hard to adjust a D50 in the dark. Also probably would have turned out better if I had a remote and didn't have to push the button manually. Oh well.

A picture of flowers that are growing in the courtyard outside my apartment. There's a bunch of women who live here that seem to enjoy gardening. I guess that's good for my pictures. :) I'd like to buy a lens that's better for macro shots but haven't decided yet which lens to buy so I'm still using my kit lens. The pictures come out all right though I guess.


I went to a coworker's place for a BBQ one sunday. The pictures of the bbq were ok. I like cats though so I'm posting pictures of his cat. This is Inode, an applehead siamese. I never knew there were other variants of siamese cats, but I think it's a very pretty coat.



Apparently Inode likes this window sill a lot.


I went to NJ this past weekend. A friend gave me a ride on the way to the airport, and we noticed that as we got closer to the airport (and to the shore) it went from very sunny to very foggy all of a sudden. I was too slow to get a picture while we were in the car (would have liked to get one of the fog in the distance) but this one from the sky shows why it got foggy so suddenly.


It kind of sucks taking pictures from an airplane when your seat is close to the wing. I'll remember that for next time I choose seats. Anyways, there was a mosquito (or some other insect that resembles a mosquito) between the panes of glass of my window. I wonder how it got there, and honestly have no idea how it could have.


I took a lot of landscapes on the flight to Denver. There were several factors contributing to the orientation of the following pictures. 1) I was sitting by the wing. 2) The window was pretty far forward relative to my seat. 3) The guy in front of my leaned his seat all the way back as soon as the flight was in the air. So.. yeah. Some I managed to get normal orientation but more often than not that was a pretty difficult proposition.

The following landscape is a little underexposed to bring out the colors. Not sure why but this is one of the only ones I really underexposed so the others all look somewhat washed out. Then again at the altitudes we were flying it was probably more accurate if they looked a hair washed out.


I really like this picture. The erosion from the river almost makes this look like a plant. A really really big plant.


This was some line where the terrain abruptly changed from one type to some other type. I thought it was pretty neat. You can see the striations in the rock to the left as well.


Some river. I thought the patters in the rock that has been eroded were pretty neat.


Not sure what this is, and wasn't sure whether I wanted to post it or not. Then I decided that in the time it would take me to decide I could just post it, so I went ahead and posted it.


I like this picture too.


The land here is kind of neat. This looks like a big maze. The terrain here looks like the badlands (red and white striated rock) but I think those are just in south dakota. Notice that this picture is also somewhat underexposed.


Clouds. I like clouds, I think they look neat. This photo was deliberately underexposed to get the detail of the clouds. I might be able to achieve the same thing with a polarising filter at more normal exposure levels, but I'm not entirely sure. There's only one way to find out.. but I'm not buying any filters until I decide what lenses I'm going to buy.


Sunset from the airplane. I like how the sun is reflecting off a lake in the background. I think that you can also see another airplane in this picture.


Driving from the airport in NJ. The other cars appear almost ghostly. At least in my opinion.


This is Carmen. She's a young kitty. Very playful. Also possibly the clumsiest cat I've ever seen. All in all a lot more fun than Inode, who tends to the shy side.


Here I'm trying to provoke Carmen into attacking my camera strap.


This is after I wore the poor kitty out.



refraction


This was on the flight to SFO. I liked the coloring of this cloud.


This was a really funny shaped cloud. Never seen anything like it.

Universal Studios (duh) on April 29.


King Kong (duh)


A torn apart airplane, supposedly once a functional 747, that was used to shoot war of the worlds (with tom cruise).


I thought the lighting in this picture was neat, even if it wasn't very clear. Like the airplane picture above, we were on the backlot tour.


Flood and rain simulation on the backlot tour. The flood water smelled pretty bad. It also got on me. Not too much at least.


Sunday (April 30) we went hiking. This is the creek where the trailhead splits into 7 falls, inspiration point, and some others I think. We went up to inspiration point. The lighting in this picture isn't that great, but I know now how I could have made it better (change shutter speed). Next time.


The view the other way at the creek.

Similar viewing angle as the last one, but closer up.


We saw a lot of lizards when we went hiking.


This one is blended in pretty well..


but is easier to spot in this 1:1 crop.


All of the lizard pictures have the lizards' butts. I guess they were trying to run away or something. Or just not running towards us. Or both.


I thought this was a neat picture in terms of content. The next is a 1:1 crop.



Some fungus we saw.


The view from the top. Unfortunately, on this day the view from the top sucked.




A picture of the hills/mountains from the paved trail that leads to the trailhead. I think the lighting was better in this picture than in previous ones involving the sky.

A couple notes.. I was using manual focus perhaps the first 1/3 or 1/2 of the cars. Due to not having much shooting time at each car (lots of people), I decided to go to autofocus since my manual focusing skills are not quite there yet. Both in terms of speed, and I think, accuracy. Also, due to lots of people and having to take shots quickly, the cropping is not so great in some of the pictures. I was too lazy to do any cropping with the gimp, so these pictures are all framed as the camera output them. Everything else was set to auto. Didn't have a huge amount of time, and I didn't feel like spending time playing with different settings today (or I guess technically now, yesterday). I blurred faces because I wouldn't want people posting random pictures of me online. On the other hand, I'm kind of tired, so I might have missed some. Lastly, the cars were displayed with other cars of similar type, so in one stretch would be the corvettes, in another mustangs, etc. For a lot of the cars I just took the first in line.. I'd walk past and think "hey that looks neat and is not something I've seen" then see more immediately after.

On to the cars.. this first one was the first car I saw that interested me.


I'm kind of partial to the cobras. I think they have great styling.


Not sure what kind of car this was but I thought it was neat. Actually, I'm not sure what many of the cars are, or what year they are. I didn't even bother to look at the information that was in the windshield of each car. Oh well, it's really not that important to me.


The engine of the previous car.


I thought this car had a great grill. (Buick 8)



Another cobra.



A newer looking cobra. Still a good looking car.



I'm partial to corvettes too.


For some reason this porsche reminded me of an Audi TT.


A real old school corvette. I thought it looked really good.




A thunderbird. I must have thought this picture looked better in real life because when I was going through my photos I thought it didn't look that great.



A Mercedes Benz with wing doors.


This bug reminded me of the "unpimp your ride" VW comercials. I bet the "VW in da house" dude would have a friggin heat attack if he saw this.


And this too. My first thought when I saw this VW van was that it was the first one I'd seen that wasn't in utterly terrible condition. Then I noticed that it's really short. Really the only word to describe something like this is "cute". And yes, there were females standing around it saying "isn't that cute?!".


Another buick 8, I think. I thought the hood ornament was great.


You can see me in this picture.


I don't even know how you can drive with this kind of hood scoop. It puts the WRX Impreza to shame.


I think this car was called "cherry bomb". Or "cherry popper"? Something to connotate a bomb. I forget. I should have taken a picture of the sign. Oh well. I thought it was pretty neat (a 1937 car, I remember that much at least), hence the larger number of pictures of it.




The car had a sign saying "don't touch the car" on it. I hit my camera bag against the door taking this shot. :P Thankfully, my camera bag is light, and has no sharp edges. I'm.. fairly certain.. the people who own the car would have been quite upset had I scratched it.



I liked this paint job.




Lastly.. I never knew they made boats with such ridiculous engines.