Last Saturday - we went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park for a day of seeing the animals and photographing them. We had a great turnout for the club. The day was great - cool - but with lots of sunshine. This is a picture that I never expected would turn out. I was shooting into the sun and I expected the colors to be completely washed out. As it turned out, I ended up liking it a lot. I like the contrast of the pink birds against the dark green background and the dark brown water.
What do you think?


Here is a picture of Jesse in the petting zoo. He loved the time there. He has such a tender heart for animals. He was able to feed some of the deer and I was able to get some good shots.

I recently recieved an award from work. What do you think I bought with the money? Yep - you guessed it - more photo stuff. I picked up a Canon 17-40 f4 L lens to go on my Canon 20D. While this is not the fastest lens that I could have bought - it had very good ratings on color and performance. Here is one of the first examples that I have taken with it. So far - I am very impressed.
I also had to deal with a big issue with my computer - ended up reloading windows. After that - I had the pleasure (not) of re-loading all of my applications. I think that I am about back to where I was before. I am still having performance issues and ramdom crashes. It is working better than it was a few weeks ago.

I was assigned to Jury Duty today. While I was never asked to go to a jury panel - I did have a nice time at lunch. I had the opportunity to take some pictures of downtown San Diego, CA.






This picture was taken near the San Diego Convention Center. Love that green grass in the middle of January!





This is a picture of one of the larger buildings in the downtown area.

Of course: I have to have a picture of Sam the dog. He came all the way from the twin cities area.




Here is a photo that I took of the cousins. I used this picture as our lead-in to The Short Group. While this group is not used as much as some - it keeps our small family informed of goings-on.
Yes - the two taller ones are mine. The shorter boy and the girl belong to my sister. The cousins only get together about once a year - but they have a great time when they do!




Here is a picture that I liked of my brother-in-law. He lives in the Twin Cities area. He is married to my sister and they have a law office in the area where they live.

Each Christmas - we travel from San Diego, CA to Colorado Springs, CO to visit family. I get up early one morning to take pictures of the sun rising and hitting Pike's Peak (14110 feet above sea level). This is one of the shots that I took this year. I took many - it is hard to determine which is best.

This trip - we decided to not spend the time in a hotel - and drive straight through from Colorado Springs to San Diego. The weather was great - we get fairly good gas mileage on our car - and the kids are old enough to sit for a long time in the car. We made it home in about 19 hours. I was really tired on the drive in from Yuma, AZ to San Diego.

While this is my first post on this blog - I have used other blogs in the past. The most recent one I used did not seem to capture full sized photos. Since the bulk of what I want to capture here is photos with some interesting text - I decided to make a switch to this instead of the other blog.