The end of freshman year at college. The guys had just finished picking up, packing up and cleaning up their dorm room.

(This is a video, click on the image to play it.)

I shot this with my Olympus 770SW pointed out the window during a cross country flight and landing in Boston. The camera can sustain shooting at about 1fps in its lowest resolution mode, so I let it rip for as long as I could hold down the release before losing all feeling in my finger.

Unfortunately the weather didn’t cooperate. It starts with a nice view somewhere over MA, then dips into the clouds before emerging over a very bumpy approach to BOS. There are a few missing frames from when I had to reinvigorate my hand or the turbulence knocked the camera about too much.

So, this is a first try – I’m going to perfect this eventually with a better system for holding the camera against the window, and next time I’ll use a camera with a locking cable release (which my Olympus can’t use). And longer exposures to get some motion blur in there would be nice, too.

Young zinfandel grapes – really just buds on the vine. Seen on a great tour today through Rubicon Estate (aka Niebaum-Coppola) in Napa Valley. You can tell they’re zins because the bottom of the leaf is soft and fuzzy, or at least you can when you’re there.

Processed in Lightroom.

Some days are really beautiful, and you just have to get out and enjoy them.

Being a Golden Retriever, Shane needs to either be swimming or holding something in his mouth. Indoors that means a stuffed animal, which has been a puppy for the past few years. The puppy retired today and was replaced by this bunny – which has been in his mouth or under his chin since he got it this afternoon. There’s kind of a Linus/Blanket connection that happens with him and a stuffed animal.

This was a big day for our CMU ETC students – they “soft launched” the projects they’ve been working on all semester. We celebrated with some R&R this evening by having a BBQ at our house. I was so busy cooking that I forgot to take pictures of the real meal, but we did s’mores for dessert.

This is a candid picture, but it looks like a posed picture from a magazine. I mean really, one person cooking and everyone else standing around being entertained by it? But you can see that everyone else was already eating theirs. BTW, Soo here is trying the advanced s’mores technique where you jam the chocolate INTO the marshmallow before you roast it – that melts the chocolate, too. Yumm.

And Angel Food Cake is the prettiest.

This was taken during lunch at the baylands in Redwood Shores. I’m learning the names of our local fauna (and flora) because I always look up the creatures and plants that are in my photos. That way when I post the images it looks like I knew what I was doing.
The title for this image sounds like a Monty Python routine.

It’s always fun to play with power tools. I thought it would be interesting to catch the wood peeling out from a drill bit, but when I took the first shots of this on my drill press I discovered that the chips are much smaller than I thought and don’t really go that far. I had to jam the bit into the wood quickly and with a lot of force to create the explosion of pieces. This is not at all how you would want to bore a real hole.

A face off at our son’s high school lacrosse game. I love this moment. It’s the only time that the game is still – even the ref strikes and holds a pose – then: BAM, the action starts.