Jim and April's Roadtrips

This weekend my sister April Galloway and I have been participating in the Spring Photography Weekend at Pennyrile State Forest and Resort Park’s Spring Photography Weekend just outside of Dawson Spings, Ky. I guess we’ve been coming to these events pretty much for 8 years or more now and also attend the one in the fall as well.

I love getting together with a large group of fellow photographers on events like this. The enthusiasm is always a shot in the arm when it comes to my photography. Getting together to talk photography, shoot pictures, critique pictures and complain about the one that got away, no it doesn’t just happen in fishing, is always fun.

In the past I’ve always tried to commit myself on these weekends to something that makes me a better photographer when it comes to shooting. One year I opted to shoot a total of four pictures for the whole weekend event. Usually there’s four different categories in each division, beginner, intermediate and master. I shoot the latter. This year I chose to shoot and process all my pictures using my iPhone 4s. …

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This weekend my sister, April Galloway and I have spent with our Aunt Jean in Piqua, Ohio on an upcoming family reunion in Northern Kentucky in June. She’s the last living sibling on my dad’s side of the family and so I brought a couple hundred old family photos that she helped us to identify people in.

After we finished the pictures I setup my video camera and we spent the better part of the afternoon, around 3 hours, where she talked about all her 14 brothers and sisters an their life growing up. Can’t imagine having that many kids in one family, but during the time it wasn’t unheard of. It was good to get a lot of this down on video and I plan on using the footage for a program we’ll present at the Pearson family reunion which is set for the weekend of June 2d, 2012. So, if you’re a member of the clan, mark that weekend on the calendar and you’ll be getting information as we firm things up over the next week or two. Also, visit http://www.mosespearsonfamily.org  website as I’ll be posting the information there about the reunion and other information.

Afterwards we went to Fletcher, Ohio for a fish fry at the volunteer fire department there, before heading down to Conover, Ohio where me and my family lived until we moved back to Kentucky in 1952 when I was two years old. I’ve always said that’s where I developed my love of trains as the station and railroad line was about a block from our house and I’m told that steam trains ran through there all the time. I like to think that anyway.

Tomorrow we’re headed to church with Aunt Jean, which is the one our family went to till we moved back to Kentucky. Looking forward to hearing a service there and I’ll add a picture and thought or two from there later next week. Till then… Keep on Track!

I’ve published my first Calendar on Lulu.com and it’s available for purchase!

On our recent roadtrip I wanted to get some photos of some of the rock formations and arches without the massive amounts of people that were visiting these same places during the daytime and I found that at night… they disappeared! Well, went to their hotels, homes, RVs or where ever, but they were gone. On the two nights I shot, I only encountered perhaps two other people out shooting.

In my opinion night photography, at least for me, has gotten much easier with the improvement of today’s digital cameras. Of course not all of them are created equal as some do a much better job of handling the noise (grain) that comes with low light and long exposures. My Nikon D700 is one of these cameras that really handles the higher ISO’s usually associated with night landscape photography. …

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Well, it’s been a week since we got back off the road from our three week trip and I’m finally getting around to editing the pictures I shot with my D700. I hope to have some of them posted for your viewing pleasure in the near future as I didn’t take the time to edit and process them from the road. Most of all the photos that you’ve seen from me during out recent trip were shot and processed using my iPhone 4, which still continues to amaze me what you can do with such a small device now days. As I told my good friend Jose Lopez Jr. during our visit with him in Crestline, Ca, I really like my iPhone!

Most of the photos I shot using the D700 during our stay at Arches National Park were shot as HDRs and therefore will take a little longer to process, but I think the resulting images have a greater impact using the dynamic range you get with HDR. – Stay tuned and check back!