Footsteps

I didn't set up this shot. I just noticed that a kid had just left his wet footprints on the sand and snapped a couple of quick shots. I'm not even sure why the footprints only had a wet outline and wasn't wet all the way inside the print as well. I kinda laugh when I look at it because of an old Archie comic that revolved around the phrase, "footsteps in the sands of time." Nikon D7000, AF-S Nikkor 18-105mm f3.5-5.6 VR

Down by the seaside

Yes I'm not sure why but I'm still in a black and white mood. Anyway, I made a trip down to a seaside location to test out my 10-stop Neutral Density filter. What does it do? Well essentially, it's like dark glasses -- it makes things a LOT darker, and in a camera, this means slow shutter speeds, and the effect is that the sea is rendered as a smooth blur like this. The photo was converted from RAW and edited in Nik Silver Efex Pro 2 and slightly cropped. You'd be surprised how little editing there was to get it to look like this-- the major work involved removing many dust spots. The image was shot at f/32 so every little bit of dust that normally doesn't show up on wider aperture shots all made an appearance here, despite cleaning my image sensor before going on the photo shoot. Nikon D7000, AF-S Nikkor 18-105mm VR

Fire in the sky

Not sure if I ever mentioned this, but I'm a great admirer of the work of renowned B+W landscape photographer, Ansel Adams. Adams' mastery and understanding of the relationship between light and dark tones has always left me in awe and has always inspired much of my B+W work. Anyway, this shot was taken in Seattle from the top of the Space Needle. On that day, there was an amazing sunset in progress and I was lucky enough to capture this. Obviously, there has been some contrast and brightness adjustment done here (as Adams did-- his was a mastery of the darkroom as much as the framing) but the sky really was mostly like this. I'm quite happy with how this photo turned out. Nikon D7000, AF-S Nikkor 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 VR