Kevin’s Photo Blog

I’ve decided that I need to pull the photo blog back beneath my personal domain name space, and as such, it means I have migrated all my content.

You can now find this blog at  http://photos.kevindevin.com

If you’re using the feedburner feed to catch the blog content, you should be covered as I’ve already redirected it, but if you were using WordPress.com’s rss feed, you’ll need to manually change it to  http://photos.kevindevin.com/index.php/feed/

Sorry for any inconvenience, but I felt the need for a change going in to 2008.  Come join me!

-KHD

Over the past few days I’ve been contemplating what I’d like to accomplish from a photography point of view in 2008.

1. Get a photograph published in some sort of periodical. Heck, I’d settle for the local newspaper! But I’d really like to see what I can do to get a photograph published in something outside of my company’s calendar. Not that that wasn’t a joy itself, but it’s definitely a limited audience.
2. Sell at least one photograph. I haven’t looked too deeply in to the microstock sites yet, and from what I have, it appears to be a stock photographer it would behoove you to be up on current trends in stock photography and know what the market is demanding at the time. I simply haven’t put that much effort in to that endeavor yet. Maybe this next year.
3. Print more photographs. I’ve discovered how easy it is to print at the local Costco, so now I have no excuses. Along with printing more photos, I need to be a better son and send more of them to my folks. Even though were in the digital age, there’s still something about being able to see a photograph on the wall.
4. Do more photowalks, and even better yet, more phototalks! I did a phototalk earlier this year where I recorded audio with my iRiver and snapped off photos. I then converted that audio and those pics in to an enhanced podcast. A nifty way of taking someone along with you virtually on a shoot.
5. Get more of my co-workers involved in our photography group at work. I’d like to schedule more outings with that group and at the same time see if we can’t increase the number of folks involved. The couple that we did this past year were a blast, no reason why we couldn’t do it more often and have even more fun!
6. Get my head wrapped more around lighting. Not having an off-board flash, I simply haven’t looked that deeply in to the lighting aspect of photography. In my mind, an entirely new dimension to photography. If I can score a flash, this one should be doable, but I’ll need to acquire a flash first.
7. Try and shoot SOMETHING every day. There were several days this past year when I would real off a couple hundred shots, but not every single day. Not sure how realistic this one will be for me to fulfill, but it’s worth a shot.
8. Have more fun! I REALLY don’t know how I’m going to improve upon this one as I have had a blast with my photography this past year. It’s been a great learning experience and fun the entire time. I may push myself to do more themes and such. Something to push me to shoot something specific.

So… those are my photography goals for 2008. I’m sorta anxious to see how many of these I’ll be able to mark off come this time next year.

What are your photography goals for this coming new year? Have you written them down yet?

The photo above was taken this past October at the Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando, FL. I was able to lie down on the floor in the conference areas and capture the light fixture above.

My brother and his family sent us some goodies for Christmas, and in it were some coffee samplers from the company my brother works for.

These were good. If I had to place them within an order of preference, I’d select the Alaska Railroad blend as my favorite.  Behind it would be the Colombia Supremo which was very close to my number one.  Number three would be the Chocolate Macadamia Nut which I’d consider just so-so.  And coming in at the bottom would be the Holiday Blend.  I really didn’t care much for the Holiday blend, but the top two certainly made up for it.  I’m going to see if I can’t purchase a couple of bags of the Railroad Blend for more than just a sampling.

Best shots… favorite shots… I use the terms synonymously.

With it getting close to the end of the year, I thought I’d put together a grouping of photos that I really liked that represented each month of the year. Fortunately, I was able to claim at least 2 or more photos for each month. I decided to keep it to no more than 40 though. There were others, but I had to stop somewhere.

Here’s to more photos in 2008!

This looks VERY interesting.  If anyone has an invite available, I’d certainly love to check it out.
photophlow: preview

I’ve been wanting to snap a few pics of our Christmas Tree at work — it looks really nice. So as I was leaving work the other day I decided to take a moment and snap a few shots.  There was this one ornament which made for a nice self-portrait.

I had to bump my ISO up to 1600 to keep camera shake from ruling the shot, but tossing the shot through noise ninja seemed to square things away.

How appropriate…

I’m just glad that it’s snowed during a weekend rather than a week day — I HATE having to drive home from work in snow.  Not that I dislike the snow… I dislike all the other knuckleheads on the road when it snows.

Last year, during one snow storm, it took me almost 3 hours to get home.  During another storm, it took me an hour to make about a 1-mile loop through the city of Redmond only to return to the office to wait it out.  Waited about 2 hours and cruised right on home with little to no delays.

I’m not overly pleased with this shot…  there’s simply nothing exciting about it in the least.  Snow on a leafless branch…  WOW, now THAT’s original!  ;-)  Oh well…  I wanted SOMETHING that I could use for this post today.

Yep… the lights are up and Christmas season is officially open at the Devin household. Had I gotten the lights up yesterday, I would have been first on the block again, but this year, I have to settle for a tied-first to have lights.

I can handle the bevy of Christmas cartoons, but an entire month’s worth of Hallmark Channel Christmas Specials…  I think I may explode!

In this shot, I waited until it was well in to the evening for it to be as dark as possible.  Getting the ladder out in the dark wasn’t much fun though.  The cool thing about these lights, they are LED lights.  Each run is nearly twice the length of typical external lights and considerably less power consumption.

Strike up the music from Jaws and it’s perfect!

I’ve been tinkering around with Lightroom 1.3 today and noticed that they changed the layout of the export feature as well as some of its functionality — for the better I might add.

If you use Lightroom, ensure that you’ve updated to 1.3 and then go download the Export SDK. In the SDK are a couple of free export presets, one for Flickr and the other for FTP. Pretty slick.

This shot was taken back in August when we took a quick trip down to Ocean Shores for some time off. Dan was a little reluctant to get too far in to the water. The tweaking I did with this one made that the photo stand out with the real situation — I think.

but obviously not while your standing.

I captured a few shots on my flight back from Orlando.  It was one of these situations where I didn’t really feel like shooting anything, but, I had always wanted to capture some arial shots.  I didn’t think they would turn out all that well looking out a scratched portal, but a couple of them didn’t turn out too awful bad.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything…  that’s primarily due to my lack of shooting very much lately.  I’ve been pretty busy with my new position at work and a class that I’m taking as well.  Combine that with family, and my shooting has taken a back seat for a little while.

However…  since this is effectively a 5-day weekend for me, I’m hoping that I’ll be able to get in some shooting time.  We’ll see.