Springtime in Colorado

Jane and I flew out to Denver last month to visit with Brad (Jane’s son) and to generally site-see and also catch up with some other relatives and a friend or two who are living in the area. On our very first full day in town Brad drove us up to Red Rocks where I took the following picture.

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And on the following day were drove down to Colorado Spring for a visit to the Garden of the Gods where this next picture was taken.

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It snowed while we were in Colorado and as proof here’s a picture that I took mid-week in Golden

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And getting back to Red Rocks later in the week I was able to get a pretty cool picture of the Amphitheatre

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I’ll finish off this entry with a picture from Boulder where we visited Jane’s sister and her sister and grandson. It was a fun place to spend a sunny day, although my camera did get a little dusty at point point courtesy of a motorbike emitting copious amounts of exhaust and caused us all to hold our breaths. Unfortunately the Sony NEX-6 could not do that but at least I wasn’t caught changing lenses at that time. Anyhow, here’s typical shot in downtown Boulder.

Manatee Springs State Park

We got down to this park close to the Swanaee River just before lunch. Here are some photos of the springs and one of the river itself.

Just a patch of green

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No one on the water today

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Classic view of the springs

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A pleasant day for fishing

In the Butterfly Rainforest

During our stay in Gainesville Florida a few weeks ago we had the opportunity to visit the Butterfly Rainforest. I've included some pictures that I took while we wandered around looking for difference types of butterflies. It was a fairly simply challenge to get pictures in focus since they didn't move too quickly while feasting!

Some contrasting colors

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Perhaps looking for sustainence

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And now for a blue theme

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Thanksgiving Evening

After having Thanksgiving dinner at this place (sorry, no pictures) we drove home, collected cool jackets, walking shoes, and camera and drove down to the Atlanta Botanical Garden to see their Garden Lights Show.

Taking these pictures last night really exercised the camera and I think the iso was getting up to 3200 for most of the evening. I've processed shots through Lightroom with a certain amount of exposure and noise adjustments.

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I like this photo a lot, and the fact that it was not a flash shot shows that the camera performs well under natural light conditions. For other photos in the set (check out flickr). Except another photo in front of the tree my other shots of Jane and Brad (her son) are all using flash.

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And here's one of those shots with flash. I've taken to using bounce flash with the builtin flash on the Sony NEX-6 by pressing back the spring loaded flash that pops up so that it's light doesn't shine directly at the target. This technique seems to work quite well, but I can see it would be a pain to keep doing. Perhaps I can jam a piece of cardboard into the mechanism to keep the flash pointing up at an angle?

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Here's one more shot showing off the wide angle end of the 16-50 lens kit on this camera. Actually this is a RAW photo and apparently in RAW you get an uncorrected 14mm lens that shows vignetting under normal conditions. In this case I don't care since the corners of the image are already dark. Incidentally the camera corrects the vignetting when shooting in jpeg, and there's a just released Lightroom lens profile correction that adjusts vignetting in RAW mode.

Library Slopes

Just 3 shots today from the back of the library leading down to Mason Mills Recreation Center. I think they show off the camera and in particular I was able to shoot at widest angle with the lens kit, and correct for vignetting using this tool.

At Band Practice

I'm the unofficial photographer for the Seed & Feed Marching Abominable band. Here are some photos from last night's band practice. I've been testing my Sony NEX-6 at practice just to make sure that it's going to be capable of capturing band events where frequently musicians are moving around and the light's not always good. Most of these photos are at ISO 3200, and after some Lightroom work, I think they are quite acceptable.

Good focus on this one, but of course they are not moving around to much, except for the hands!


Betsy was jumping around somewhat, but she wasn't moving towards or away from the camera. I guess capturing people moving forward or backward (from camera) is the real test.


Another group shot of band members. Once again, there's not a lot of movement here, so it's a test of low light performance rather than ability to quickly focus.

Living Room

I stayed around the house today which is why I ended up just taking pictures from our living room. These photos were a test of focusing - particularly that last one. I used focus peaking to capture focus on the middle of the ornament. The automatic focus of the camera was attempting to focus on the dark object to the left of the ornament. I also tested flash on the third photo. This actually shows off the excellent quality of the sensor, where I show the photo without flash along with the shot with flash. All of the 4 photos were processed in Lightroom 4.2