Fun With Wide Angles & Macro

I was playing around with a friend's macro/wide angle lens adapter today (an Opteka HD Wide Angle Panaromic Macro mounted on an 18-200 macro zoom lens) and got a few good shots, posted on the Flickr page. Most are in the Max set but there are two macro flower pics that are "loose" in the photostream (I need to upgrade the account soon to post in more than just 3 sets).

I haven't really played with any true macro shooting before or a fisheye, but I liked both. I may have to add this toy to the camera bag, or start looking into dedicated lenses. I'm still planning on buying a good 50mm lens for portraits so might as well just add this to the wishlist. :)

-Alan

PS: Sure, it's the lens that makes Max's right eyebrow look like it's cut shorter than his left; it's not my terrible dog grooming skills at all, I promise.

Las Vegas -> Seattle Road Trip

As I mentioned in my last post, I recently took a road trip up from Las Vegas to Seattle. The primary reason was to drive up with our friend who moved to Seattle from Vegas, but it worked out to be a great excuse to hit amazing country and take some pics. And I was already in Vegas for work so everything just came together. :)

We left Vegas and went first through Death Valley, somewhere I've always wanted to go. I would definitely go back...but man it was hot, especially at Zabriskie Point. Then we drove up past Mono Lake and through Yosemite. Yosemite was actually a bit of a disappointment after living in the NW for so long. It was basically like our National Parks up here except many, many more people and cars. We actually got in a traffic jam in the middle of a National Park. Didn't seem right. So we went from planning on staying there for possibly two nights to just driving right through in a day. And that turned out to be a great move.

We left Yosemite and headed straight up to Mt. Shasta for a night. I've been through Mt. Shasta once before on our road trip a few years ago to Reno and Lake Tahoe (same trip we stopped at Burney Falls and Crater Lake). I'm not a huge fan of California, but Shasta is definitely somewhere I could spend a lot of time. We then left Mt. Shasta on a straight shot to the Oregon Coast.

We weren't traveling with GPS or anything fancy, just a good ol' fashioned map. Good thing because it was much, much more detailed than anything I could find online after I was back. We took a tiny logging road from Grants Pass, OR, across the Klamath Mountains and the Coastal Range over to Gold Beach. Then it was straight up the 101 through Bandan (another place that's on the list for a re-visit) and Tillamook (oh yeah, I came back with a bag of cheese :).

And that was it. Sus and I are already planning an Oregon trip in May, once the snow melts and before the kids flood the coastal towns. I can't wait.

- Alan

I'm Back!

Well I'm finally back to photo blogging...Well, now that I think about it, I guess I never really started. Has it really been since January? Wow. I created this site a _long_ time ago with every intent of keeping it current, but you know how that goes. Life, work, the dog, etc, kept me away. But I'm going to make a focused effort to keep this site current with what's going on with the Sealed Glass.

On that note, a few updates:

1) The site itself is pretty much just churning right along. I'm spending most of my down time going through years and years of archives looking for stuff that's worth posting, and that's going much slower than I would have thought. But it's going.

2) I'm working on business cards and an official logo and hope to have those done within a month or so. We're getting closer to being official.

3) It's still just me right now; I'm looking forward to wrangling Des back into the fold but I know she's busy with more important things, so I'll just bide my time until we can get some of her content posted (it will be worth the wait, I promise :). And I'm also really looking forward to her marketing expertise to help get this thing off the ground.

4) Finally got my Flickr account sorted out and some pics from my last road trip posted (more on that later). I'll be posting photos for the family and "rejects" that didn't make the Sealed Glass Photo site (rejects is a relative term; they're still great pics of course ;).

That's about. I should have some photo updates in the next day or so. Until then, check out the Flickr badge on the right. Enjoy!

- Alan