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MN trip – July 2010 – Day 3 – Iron Range

mel320photo — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 16:09:09 +0000

Day 3 includes another road trip. Before heading out, I took a couple of quick shots of Pelican Lake and the flowers outside the hotel.

We left Orr and headed towards Grand Rapids, MN and then eventually on to Deer River and Jesse Lake. My mother grew up on a farm in Jesse Lake, with her 12 siblings and she attended Deer River High School. Our trip to Jesse Lake was to visit my father’s grave and where many of my deceased family are resting peacefully. It is a nice spot, wind rustling the leaves. Peaceful. Our round trip included a stop for lunch in Deer River and back to visit family in Grand Rapids. For those that don’t already know…Judy Garland is from Grand Rapids, MN and there is a museum there that showcases her life and career.

Heading back to the Iron Range, we stopped to see the statue dedicated to the workers and life of the Iron Range. The statue was created in 1987 by artist Jack Anderson and is titled “The Emergence of Man Through Steel”. It is 36 ft tall and is made of copper and brass. My teenage son is standing at bottom right to give you a sense of scale. Oddly enough, the miner depicted is cross eyed and stares down at the McDonalds that is across the street.

Fremont Street Experience

mel320photo — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 17:37:52 +0000

One of the most visited sites in Las Vegas is the Fremont Street Experience in downtown Las Vegas….or old Las Vegas. I do remember what it was like to drive down Fremont Street, way back when I was a visitor here myself. The Fremont Street Experience was built as a way to attract more tourists to the downtown area, to bring business back to the ‘old school’ casinos such as Binions and The Plaza. Essentially, it did just that. It is an interesting and unique spot in Las Vegas. Lots of photo ops, lots of unique characters…

In continuing with the Self Park series, this shot was actually taken last summer – during the Summer of ’69 celebration series. Both of the annual Kelby Photo Walks were at Fremont Street. I think for the next one I want to take it out to the Strip….I digress.

Whenever we go down to Fremont Street, we park in the main parking garage that is not part of one of the casinos – it is at the tail end of the experience, right above Hennesseys. I always thought it had a nice view from the parking garage, so I did finally make it down there to get a few shots. This is an HDR of five images, taken at f/25, tone mapped in Photomatix Pro and I made a few other adjustments with white balance in Lightroom. I have played with this with many different white balance settings – from the absolutely garish to the hardly there and this is the one I like best (today anyway). That is the beauty of expressing your self through imagery….you can make it whatever you want. There is still a lot of discussion out there in the photographic world on the right way to do HDR – I agree with those that are like minded with me – whatever level of tone mapping you do and your end result is up to how you want it to be. There is not hard fast written rule on how HDR should look, it is simply another way of translating.

Nikon D300, ISO 200, 32mm, f/25, HDR of 5 images

Weirdest thing I have seen in a long time

mel320photo — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 02:22:08 +0000

We were recently camping up at Mt. Charleston and I brought along my Canon G-10 to be my only camera for the weekend (have done this before when we went to Comic Con in July). But this time I wanted to use the Macro mode, as I really had not tried it out too much. OMG it is awesome. Captured the weirdest thing I have ever saw. I tried to figure out what this is, and so far the closest I can come from my Google search is this is a Bee Fly…..bee looking definitely, fly looking definitely.

Photoshop World in just two days….can’t wait!

Big lunch

mel320photo — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 16:27:59 +0000

Okay, so this one is not specific to Las Vegas, but this has to be the biggest sandwich I have ever seen, at least in person. This is the Motherlode sandwich from Claim Jumper. Claim Jumper is very much the ‘order based on what you want as leftovers’ kind of place. Same goes for desserts – I order one with the intent of taking four to five days to eat it.

Been really busy so have not been updating blog as much as I would like, but will get back in the swing shortly.