Fort DeSoto

I decided to head down to Fort DeSoto this afternoon. There's a nice basin off the North Beach that is home to several different species of birds. This winter has been strange so the bird population isn't what it normally is but there were several birds available.

After finishing up with the egrets, herrons and gulls, I made my way to the Bay Fishing Pier in hopes of getting a dusk photo of the Sunshine Skyway. While I was unable to get a keeper of the bridge, I was able to get several nice sunshine silhouette photos so it wasn't a wasted trip in any sense.

(Click on photo to see full size image on Flickr)

Great Horned Owl

After work today a group of us planned a trip to Honeymoon Island to see if we could get some shots of the Great Horned Owls that make the island their home. It's a hit or miss endeavor but today turned out to be an overwhelming hit!

We first spotted the Male owl and got some shots of him then the Female decided to make an appearance from the nest and I was lucky to snap off a shot of her landing on a branch. She moved a few trees down and proceeded to clean herself.

We chased them around the island for about 90 minutes before it became too dark to get any more shots. Of course, no trip to Honeymoon would be complete without some obligatory Osprey photos as well. All-in-all, a great way to cap off a work day.

(Click on Photo to open full size image on Flickr)

Fun with smoke

This months Popular Photography has an article about taking pictures of smoke and the pleasant effects you can get. I was bored this evening so I thought I would give it a try.

It didn't take long to see that this was going to be fun. After about 20 minutes and 100 shots I dove into Photoshop to see what I had. Wow. Some of these are really interesting. What images do you see in these?

(Click on the photo to see a full sized image on Flickr)

Lazy Sunday Morning

I checked the weather report when I woke up this morning and decided to get out and take some photos. Since I didn't really have a plan, I just headed to downtown Clearwater to see what I could find.

I meandered through downtown (which is currently under heavy construction) and then decided to make my way over the new causeway. This offered me an opportunity to take 'shots from above' - a different perspective than what one normally gets to see.

(Click on photo to see full size on Flickr)

Lobstermania!

My wife and my father-in-law are active members of Rotary International. Today, the local Rotary club celebrated the opening of their new center on Honeymoon Island with a Lobster picnic!

Unfortunately, the love bugs and noceums were thick, but the food was good and the company better. After the picnic, I made my way down to the nature trail to see if I could find the Great Horned Owl or some baby Osprey. I struck out on both accounts but I did stumble across an Armadillo and got an opportunity to use my new Cokin "P" Series filters.

(Click on Photo to view full size on Flickr)

I drank the kool-aide

I was a programmer for 14 years and I still dabble in some of the web based technologies. Because of this, I always used to think that I had to "do-everything-my-own-damn-self". This meant a lot of manual HTML coding any time I wanted to update a webpage or display some more photos. Hopefully, that's about to change...

I drank the kool-aide today and signed up for a Flickr Pro account. Why? Because I'm tired of spending several hours processing photo's only to realize I still have more work to do with manual edits to a web-page. I'm going to just use Flickr and some of their automation tools and be done with it! When I have some good shots, I'll drop them here as well.

To start, I've posted the last three months of photo's as well as some of the better shots I've taken. You can view them here.

I guess I've finally figured out (after 39 years) that it's OK to let someone else do all the heavy lifting. :)

First Post!

Photography is a hobby for me. I take a lot of pictures. I think I've heard the sound of my Nikon shutter almost 9,000 times in the last 10 months. Are all of those keepers? No. Quite frankly, only a few make the cut and are what I would consider really good photos. Those are displayed prominently on the www.g33kart.com website.

However, that doesn't mean that the rest of the 8,950 photos I've taken are terrible. Each time I go out I manage to get more and more really nice shots. If g33kart.com is truly a portfolio of my best shots, then blog.g33kart.com is a running commentary on the journey to getting those great shots, as well as a vehicle for me to display some of the photo's that didn't make the cut, but are still nice shots in their own right.

I encourage feedback and participation. If you see something you like, let me know. If you see something that you think I might have done better, PLEASE let me know! As I'm finding out, there's a huge difference between taking snapshots and creating a compostionally correct exposure of a scene. Any feedback I receive will be greatly appreciated.

I've bored you enough. Enjoy the blog!