Aimless Wandering

We took The Boy to the Sacramento Zoo last weekend.  The Wife has a cousin there (in Sacramento not at the zoo!)  and this was an opportunity to meet up with him and his family for the day.  Personally, I would have preferred going to the train museum, but overall it wasn’t a bad option.  Plus zoo’s tend to be good for pictures.

The light wasn’t the best, but I still managed to find two really good subjects to take photos off.  One of my favorites happened to be this orangutan who was sitting and watching the world go by-

There were also some Red Panda’s that caught my eye.  Giant Panda’s may get all the press, but honestly I think that Red Panda’s are much more stunning.  The layout of the Red Panda enclosure made it difficult to get pictures, but I still got a few decent shots-

You’ll find more photos over in the Photo Gallery.

The other night I went out to Colonial Williamsburg to play around with some night photography.  I got out there at about 9:30 and it was DARK!  It was so dark that I had to use the manual focus because the autofocus couldn’t get enough light to work.

While the results weren’t as go as I had hoped, there are lots of BIG trees that obscure things, the sequence below should be pretty indicative of the keepers.

I decided to shoot down the green at the Governor’s Palace.  The green has a few small lamps and the palace isn’t lit (this is Colonial Williamsburg after all), I was hoping that there would be some torches along the green but not this night.  It was dark, and I had to manually focus on a light in the tower of the palace.  This give you and idea of what I was dealing with, although it’s light compared to what I was looking at:

In all honesty, that’s much lighter than what I had because I could barely make out the outline of the building.  However with the shutter open for 10 seconds I got this:

I like this shot a lot.  Considering how dark it was, I thought that the Palace really came out well.  Although I just had to go a little farther - enter Photoshop.  A quick tweaking of the levels resulted in this:

This just blew me away.  Despite the low light, not only did the Palace show up extremely well - but so did the green in front of it!  This actually makes it look like the Governor’s Palace at Colonial Williamsburg is well lit at night - one might say in a very un-colonial fashion…

Well, actually it was just part of Friday and most of Saturday, then I had to come home for my regular babysitting gig… But it was a good chunk of the weekend… This was actually two weeks ago, but I’ve been pretty busy.

I don’t know what it is about racing historic cars… I mean, I’m not a race fan… I can tell the difference between a Formula 1 car and a stock car, but that’s probably about it. I wouldn’t recognize say Michael Schumacher or Daryl Waltrip or some other race driver if I saw them on the street…

But for some reason, antique (as in 40+ year old) cars tearing around a track fascinate me. Heck, my big secret is that I can hardly be considered a car guy… Which is a little bizarre since I spent a year and a half as the President of a car club, a job I would have had longer if we hadn’t moved!

Yet I headed down to Monterey CA to spend a weekend at the Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca to watch the races… and enjoyed it immensely. You can find lots of pictures from the weekend over in the Photo Gallery.

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Our friendly neighborhood hummingbird was back again…  I actually made it outside during his visit today, he stopped feeding while I was outside and instead headed to a nearby branch to watch me.  I got to see a hummingbird at rest…

 

Apparently this hummingbird has a problem with butterflies, while I was outside he actually chased a butterfly away from the flowers that he’s been feeding off of.  

 

One of the cool things about our house (as weird as this house is) is that our yard happens to attract hummingbirds.

I actually saw my first hummingbird about a year ago when we were in Virginia. One paid us a brief visit to feed on some of the plants that were on our back deck.

However they come here quite a bit. On just our first night here we counted no less than three hummingbirds making the rounds in the yard at once…

Ever since I got my new camera I’ve been itching to get a picture of a hummingbird flying around the yard, but until this evening they haven’t stuck around long enough for me to get my camera out in time to catch them…

Click below to check out our visitor…

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