I signed up for a class at Samy’s camera to go out and do Astrophotography. I drove down and met up with everyone at Joshua Tree on a Saturday night and we shot until the wee hours of the morning. It was interesting to do some different type of photography and to get some what I thought were good shots of the Milky Way Galaxy. These shots were at 20s, 6400ISO 16mm with the Sony A7Riv and the 16-35 F4 lens. I think took them into Lightroom and only did some edits with cropping, but left the photo mostly as is.

I was in Vegas over the weekend staying at one of the hotels on the strip. I was looking around for places to go shooting and found out that there is a Wetlands Park where all of the reservoir water goes before it is filtered and used for other things. The park is pretty big and was an interesting place to go and shoot. This being my first time I spent quite a bit of time wandering around the park looking for things. There were several ponds all around and it made for an interesting place. My next trip out to Vegas will have me going back here and taking a look at shooting here.

Messing around taking pictures in the backyard of our puppy playing with her ball. Used the A9ii to grab the shots with the 24-105 lens.

Found this little guy in my backyard keeping my son awake most mornings. It was a cold morning so you can see him puffed out trying to stay warm in one of the shots.

Sunday was super windy with gusts up to 50mph, I decided not to ride my bicycle, but go out and do some shooting along the Santa Ana River Trail. For those that don’t know this is a 50 mile long path that goes along the Santa Ana River from San Bernardino through Riverside, and Orange Counties. It ends up at Huntington Beach. After shooting at Bolsa Chica a few weeks ago I wanted to go and work on my bird photography so I set out just after sun rise and started to shoot. I had some hits and quite a few misses. While I had the wind to my back, the sun was off to the side and I needed to find a way to get the sun behind me. A lot of my shots were dark and I couldn’t get a catch light in the birds eyes because the sun was on the other side of them and me. I drove up and down along the river and got out at a couple of places to take shots. Below are some of the keepers from the day, the misses have gone to the bit bucket at this point. Just wanted to capture some things that I need to do better and need to be more cognizant.

I parked at the Yorba Regional Park and paid the 5 bucks for it. There are some nice ponds in here that the birds will stay at so it made for a nice place to start the trek, it also provides convenient bathrooms and other luxuries, vs the rest of the places I went.

Went to the Bolsa Chica Reserve a couple of weeks ago and was able to shoot some of the birds that were in the Reserve. Had a good time and these were some of the more successful shots that I had.

I went through and decided to edit some of my photos myself using my own post processing skills vs what was done for me by the instruction. The first shot was done by the instructor, the other two by me.

Instructor:

Me:

Me: