Mitch's Random: June 2012

Friday, June 29, 2012

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

Canon 40mm Pancake

I've been trying my new lens Canon just came out with. It's a 40mm pancake f/2.8 lens. It's awesome! When it's on my 5D I call it the "stealth bomber". Molly hates that. ;-)

Monday, June 25, 2012

We went to a family reunion today at Carnifex Ferry Battleground near Summersville Lake and the Gauley River. After the reunion we always go down by the river to mess around a little. This time we went down to the river below the dam. Just a little downstream from where whitewater rafts put in for Gauley season. There was no whitewater today though. You could easily walk across the river and not go above your knees.

Like the post title says, "natural beauty". The top two pictures need no explanation, but I'll give you a little background on the bottom one. Photo nerd alert! I made it with the Canon 24-105 mm zoom at 24 mm and f/8, a 75 second exposure time, a 10 stop neutral density filter and a circular polarizer filter. There was a pretty good breeze blowing, so if you look close you can see that a lot of the trees are blurry too, like the water. You can also see some blurring of the clouds from them moving across the sky during the exposure. That's all!

Saturday, June 23, 2012

White Ibis

Port Royal Bird Sanctuary and Nature Preserve. There are tons of different birds in this one spot. This was taken with my Canon 70-300 mm zoom. When we go back down at the end of July I'm gonna rent a Canon 100-400 mm zoom and see if I can get some closer and better shots.

Thursday, June 21, 2012

Gauley River

We took a short trip up to the Gauley river yesterday to hike and play in the water. We stopped at Smithers and picked up one of our cousins so she could go with us.

It's funny how that sometimes when something happens that's aggravating at first, then once you think about it it's not aggravating at all.

Kim was laying out on a rock and I asked her to hold my knife while I got in the water and swam a bit. After we had hiked back to the truck and were getting ready leave, I said "Hey Kim, wheres my knife?" Doh! It was still on the rock in the river. That was the aggravating part.

Here's the good part. While we were hiking out Molly wanted to run but I didn't want to leave Kim and Brooke, so when we discovered my knife was still at the river Molly and I got to run back and get it. I figured it was just a little less than a mile to where my knife was, so we made it a race against the clock. We ran across an old railroad bridge that the NPS has converted to a pedestrian bridge, then up the railroad and across another bridge, then down a trail to the river. We made it there and back in 19 minutes. It was a fun run through some pretty woods.

For photo nerds, the picture of the river was taken with the Canon 17-40 mm lens with a 10 stop neutral density filter and a circular polarizing filter. The exposure time was 75 seconds at f/8. You can't get exposure times that long in the afternoon without the black glass of the neutral density filter.