Ocean City Memorial Day

My wife, son and I spent our Memorial Day weekend at the beach with my in-laws. We had a lot of fun. The first day my father-in-law, brother-in-law and I went out fishing and claming. My brother-in-law caught an 18 inch blue fish almost immediately and my father-in-law caught a 15 inch flounder that we had to throw back. We also managed to get about 30 clams that ended up being turned in to a really great new england clam chowder. We had a really wonderful sunset on the first On the second day we ended up going out on the boat again and my wife and brother-in-law went out on the tube to be pulled behind the boat. On the final day my wife and I went out for the morning while my in-laws watched our son. We went to a nice breakfast and also strolled the beach and boardwalk at Ocean City for a little while. After we got back the whole family went to Assateague to hit the beach. My son’s opinion on his first trip to the beach was mixed. He enjoyed staring at the rainbow colored umbrella, but he wasn’t a fan of the cold water (we dipped his feet), nor was my wife as you can tell by the pictures.

Local Coast Guard Station

Mother and Son

I’ve been playing with some more Ilford XP2 super lately and I had a chance to finish off the roll. Here are a few pictures from it. I title the series “Mother and Son”. It is still amazing to me how fast my son is growing up, and just how much fun a not quite 4 month old can be to play with. Once I finish scanning the roll of color negative I took with me I will also have a slew of Ocean city pictures up, probably tomorrow.

 

Weddings

I shot my first wedding about a week ago. My Brother was getting married and I had offered to shot the wedding for him. I thought it would be a nice present and it would help me hone my photography skills some more. Here are a few of the resulting photos. The two big things I took away from the wedding is that for any kind of larger wedding I need a more powerful flash (hopefully I’ll have that taken care of in the next few weeks) and I also need a fast portrait lens, such as a zuiko 85/2.

 

 

Arboretum revisted and more

I finally got the 2nd roll of film from the Arboretum developed. It has about half arboretum pictures. All of the arboretum pictures from the roll were from the Bonzai and Penjing exhibit. I only managed to walk through about half of the exhibit because of the heat, but here are some of my better pictures.

 

  

Here another nice picture from the roll of film for the heck of it.

I see this tree from my drive in to work every day and it had intrigued me. It was struck by lightening a couple of weeks back and I had been meaning to find a way to get up to it to take some pictures since then. I finally decided to after work one day. It took me 10 minutes of driving around and then a quarter mile run through waist high grass and plants (I was wearing shorts. Note to self, self is idiot. Second note to self get wife to dress self before leaving house). That quarter mile run was done while crouched over to keep unobtrusive so the guys at the work site nearby wouldn’t notice me…especially since there were plenty “NO hunting, fishing or trespassing, violators will be prosecuted!!!” signs everywhere. Oh well, I guess I just missed the signs

National Arboretum, et al

I remembered after my last blog that I had a bunch of other fun pictures on the roll of film I had developed. Here are some of them.

Eastern Shore, MD

We headed to my in-laws off the St. Martin river a few miles from Ocean City a couple of weeks ago for the weekend. I snapped a number of pictures, but other then family pictures this is the only real one of note from the whole time (I need to rescan the photo as I used to much compression on the JPEG as it is showing artifacts in the sky).

The front garden at home

I was just snapping a few pictures of the tulips in the front garden while they were in full bloom. The lighting was cooperating as this was about the only evening that wasn’t overcast or with completely flat lighting.

National Arboretum

Here are the first of several pictures from the national arboretum. As I mentioned before my wife, son and I went down for the day. The day turned out to be about an hour and a half as it ended up being mid 80’s, extremely hummid and sunny and my son was not tolerating the heat well. I have another dozen or so shots on a roll of film that is in my camera that I’ll develope soon. I have to burn off the rest as my brother’s wedding is coming up in about a week and I am doing wedding photos for them (first wedding shot for me!).

My wife and son patiently waiting for me to take the picture.

The only rose blooming on the rose bushes along the ‘herb path’.

Can’t remember the name of the flowering bush, but the bees were all over these flowers.

A nice shaded bench to get out of the heat.

Cooling off inside from the heat.

More pictures to come from the Bonzai gardens of the Arboretum soon.