Baby Kong, A Chrismas Village's Nightmare

The above photo of our grandson Garrett trampling through a village began the day of his dedication. We were at his other grandparent's home in Macon. Billy and Nancy have a huge Christmas Village on display each Christmas. Thomas said, "Hey if I hold garret up in the village, can you do a pivture, put sky behind him?" I said sure.

 The photo at the bottom is what we shot that day.

I had been looking for the perfect sky since Christmas. Week before last I found this night sky as I was leaving a Westside basketball game. I wanted to have him circled by biplanes ala King Kong. I was worried about finding good biplane photos, but found some royalty free online.

I put the images together in Photoshop Elements 9. I bought the program to teach a class, and hve really enjoyed using it. A great program. It is a great program for the cost. I have dumped Photoshop from the laptop and replaced it with Elements.  If you are really interested in image editing, give it a try.



A Bit Of Solar Flair

I photographed a training day for teachers this morning at the Museum of Aviation. It was presented by the NASA Regional Educator Resourse and had some cool classes. One of the things I knew I wanted photos of was the awesome array of telescopes set up by astronomer Stephen Ramsden. He was allowing folks to witness solar flair up close.

I had to wait a while for someone to stop and look therough the telescopes. He was set up in the amplitheater between the two buildins that housed the varoius classes. Quite a few folks passes by before Nancy Sills, a science teracher from Harris County, stopped to talk to Stephen and look through the telescopes.

My first shots were pretty standard stuff, nice light, low angle. You could see Nancy and Stephen in the photograph. Then I decided I should show the sun. First I shot with the sun peeping over the end of the telescope, making a bit of flair. Guess I made a photographic pun, if there is such a thing.  For the last photo I moved a bit to the side, getting more sky and having the sun to the right of the telescope.

The lst two would have worked better with a little flash popped on the telescope and Nancy. This is one of those times when the old D-70 would come in handy with its ability to sync a flash at a really high shutter speed.

Oh, well, it will be interesting to see which one the editor picks.