When Kathy and I visited Washington D.C. in October of last year, one of the things we wanted to see was the Dr. Martin Luther King National Memorial which at the time, had been built but not yet dedicated. The sculpture of Dr. King faces the Tidal Basin. He seems to be gazing directly at the Jefferson Memorial which is quite fitting. The black stone wall that surrounds the memorial has been etched with famous writings of the slain civil rights leader. Kathy asked one of the visitor guides if we could use our tripods - fully expecting them to say no but the answer we got was "sure, go ahead". Wow! This must be the only memorial in Washington that allows tripods.

This is the West wing of the Smithsonian Castle which is located on the national mall in Washington DC. Designed by architect James Renwick Jr. this impressive space was originally envisioned as a lecture hall. With its abundant natural light it was also considered to be ideal for use as an art gallery. Today it holds a wide variety of exhibits from the Smithsonian's vast collection.

This is a 10 shot HDR shot with my new fisheye lens. I used my gorillapod to stabilize the camera and was hoping the guard wouldn't come in and stop me. The smithonian generally does not allow tripods in their museums.

This was from the 2011 Whittier Car Show held in August. As I mentioned on a earlier post, the organizers decided not to allow low riders at this show, and will instead hold a low rider - custom car show next year. So of course since Kathy and I love photographing low riders we were bummed. After we had walked around for a while she noticed several low rider owners had parked there awesome cars just outside the show limits so of course we spent a lot of time there.

This was probably the most spectacular of all the cars I saw this day, and I took quite a few HDR sequences of it. While I usually choose low angles when shooting cars, in this case given the spectacular flamed hood, I extended my tripod nearly to it's maximum height to better capture it. The only disadvantage was I was unable to look through the viewfinder. I'm 6'-5" tall but my camera was at least 7' above the ground. I took a couple of test shots to be sure I framed this up properly before capturing this sequence.

"...nowhere together with you is better than anywhere apart"

I really have a strong attraction to vintage Pontiac hood ornaments. I've posted other examples here before and I'm sure I'll post more. When I saw this one, I called Kathy who was also at this car show, and asked if I could borrow her 100mm macro lens which is very fast and sharp. It produces beautiful bokeh as well. I really like how colorful the out of focus areas are.

In San Francisco to work on a proposal and staying at the Hyatt Regency on the Embarcadero, I had a great view of the Ferry Building and Bay Bridge. On this particular day I got up around 4:30 AM, showered and went to get some breakfast. From the street level, I could see that the sunrise was going to be spectacular. I went back to my room, grabbed my camera, tripod, ExpoDisc and off camera shutter release. From there I headed for a secret balcony that I had discovered a few years ago on another visit. There's no sign that says "hotel employees only" or anything similar so in any case, I got the shots I wanted and nobody was the wiser. It was very windy on the 19th floor so my tripod shook a little during the long exposures, but not enough to ruin the shot. 10 Exposure HDR covering 10ev. Post processed in Photomatix, Lightroom and Photoshop.

This is the Sefton Grand Atrium in the San Diego Natural History Museum. It's a big space, 4 stories tall with 5,000 sqare feet of floor area. It's often used for special events like corporate parties and concerts.  When Kathy and I walked into the Museum, I looked up and knew I would want to get a shot from the top looking down. Just before we left the building, we took the elevator up to the 4th floor to take this shot. I had to do a 3 shot vertorama with my 14mm lens and I still couldn't fit it all in. Each of the 3 HDR shots was created from 10 individual exposures and then photo merged in Photoshop to create this composite view. I like the unique viewpoint of the Allosaurus dinosaur on the bottom center of the photo.

I recently purchased the Sweet 35 optic for my Lensbaby Composer. Rather than using aperture rings like other Lensbaby optics, it has a built-in f-stop adjustment. It's still manual focus as you would expect for a selective focus lens but it can render very sharp images if you accurately focus it on your subject. The depth of field changes depending on the setting used of course. I often will focus with the lens set for F2.6 and then stop it down to gain a larger focus sweet spot. The classic lines of this Mercury 8 seemed to work well with this new lens.

This pristine 1957 flamed Chevy hard top graces the Enderle Plaza car show in Tustin, CA. I haven't posted since the beginning of June. I just don't seem to find the time these days. Work is very busy and family life has been taking center stage. It felt great to get out and shoot again.