Here are some of my pictures from the Air Show a few weeks back. I am using a Fuji FinePix SL300.

I have had the camera for quite some time, and I'm a real novice when it comes to taking pictures. I was given a couple of books on digital photography (after I took these) and I really want to learn how to use to camera to its full potential.

It was a little on the cloudy side so some of the pictures didn't come out quite as good as I hoped.

I know they aren't they best quality, but I'm eager to get better.

Hi, I have been training, breeding, field trialing and hunting English Springer Spaniels for many years now. One dog we had injured himself in the field, and was unable to compete any longer at two years old. He was a sweet heart of a dog, so our family got a new house guest / companion. Sunny lived a full life with a disabling injury that would not allow him to run. He would be walking, turn around, look at his hind quarter and growl at it loudly. He put up with it, and we loved him dearly. When I saw this challenge to be creative with your pets picture, I went through ours and came across one of Sunny laying in the leaves in our backyard during the fall. He just loved the fall and his favorite time was to just play and lay around in the piles of leaves we would rake up. It was I nice picture, but thought I might make more out of it for the challenge. So I doctored it on DxO, and made it look more like a painting. I think the submission renders a great memory for us, and one picture that I will be taking down to our local framing shop, and have the photo put it on canvas so it looks like a painting............Bad Dog

This photo of the Milky Way over Superstition Mountain, and the Ironwood Tree was taken late on a moonless night on May 9th of 2021 as I was just becoming familiar with Astrophotography.

Taking the Picture

I spent several hours researching the Milky Way and when it would be in just the right position to lay across Superstition Mountain as shown in the photo, but I wanted more than just the Milky Way over the Mountain. The Ironwood Tree is a favorite subject of mine, situated alongside a well-used foothills trail, and I look forward to the short period each spring when it’s in full bloom.

The semi-translucent, bluish-purple blossoms of the Ironwood Tree are on display for only a short period, so timing is of the utmost importance in the making of this photo. Of course, the outstanding color of the blossoms are only visible during the daylight hours, so I was determined to bring along some flashlights to “light-paint” the tree as I was exposing for the mountain and the Milky Way.

I tried each of my LED flashlights in turn but wasn’t satisfied with the results, until I grabbed my trusty mini-mag light from my bag. The Mag Light uses a filament type bulb, and the batteries were half used, but the light being reflected from the Ironwood tree was soft and lit up the tree nicely.

As the magic hour arrived and all was ready, I began taking a series of ten shots, each with a fifteen-second exposure time. I repeated this for several groups of photos, just in case one series was better than another. In all, I wound up with fifty photos to take home for extensive in-depth editing.

Editing the Picture

Because of the light painted tree and the dark sky, the dark mountain, and the dark foreground, I was unable to come up with an acceptable final photo that I felt I could use for a quality print. So, I had to separate the sky from the foreground and process each part separately. When I was finished with each part, and was satisfied, I then re-combined those two halves into the final image that you see.

The photo was edited in Affinity Photo
Jack Olson’s Images in the Wilderness.

So I normally download my images every day and post the best one right away. We recently moved and we don’t have internet at the house so I haven’t edited any pics, until today. I don’t understand why I have internet on my phone though.

We have 3 hummingbirds living in a tree in our backyard, so I bought three feeders for them and have gotten some great pics, at least in the viewfinder they looked great. I like to have a shutter speed of at least 1/2000 for birds and adjust my ISO accordingly.

I downloaded them into Lightroom and all of my pics from yesterday looked terrible. Fuzzy, and out of focus.

So I did test shots today. Canon 1dx3 with my 500 f4 with a 2x making it a 1000mm lens. I stayed at 1,000 or lower ISO. It’s overcast so I had to shoot some at 1/800. The pictures turned out great humming birds at 30’ and pigeons and sparrows at about 120’.

The only difference was the ISO. 25,000 and the pics looked great zoomed in on the image preview but terrible in Lightroom. At 1,000 they look great in Lightroom.

Dummy me, but I learned a lesson I hope you can avoid. I only hope I get pictures of the hummers dancing together at one of the feeders again.

Live and learn.

Some of my recent photos.

My full kit goes something like this (not counting my iPhone):
Canon 80d
Canon 100mm L macro
Canon 18-135 nano
Sigma 150-600mm contemporary
Yongnuo 50mm f.1.8
reversing ring and extension tubes
Yongnuo ring light and strobes
misc. other junk that photographers accumulate

I take a lot of shots on my 20 acres, especially in the spring. Living on the west side of the Puget Sound also gives lots of fun places to go. All of these shots were taken within 200 feet of the house. Ok Hamtoro is not wild even if he thinks he is.