I finally decided to put together a gear list of items I use or have used in the past for my photography. It's amazing how the collection has grown over the years, and of course, I don't carry all of this stuff with me all the time. I'm sure I missed some odds & ends, but it gives a good overview of the main items I use. Click Here or on the photo above to see the list.

Some days are just too nice to stay inside. Sunday was one of those days, with cool weather in the 60's and partly cloudy, crisp blue skies. The sun would weave in and out of the clouds, leaving a perfect balance between hard and soft lighting for most of the day. It's the light I love for outdoor photography - not to harsh and not too soft.

I decided to stop by Theta pond and take a few photos of the ducks and geese. They're so used to being fed by people that they quickly swarm to anyone who approaches the pond edge. They posed and gathered all around me for at least 30 minutes before finally coming to the realization that the camera and lens I was holding were not actually a large black piece of food that I was going to tear apart and toss to them. I think next time I own them something.

Last night I went with a few friends to see and shoot the fireworks at Boomer lake. Click the thumbnail to see a small gallery of pics. I always enjoy the fireworks shows in Stillwater. It's small-town enough that traffic and crowds aren't any real bother, but big enough that the show is still enjoyable. The other nice small-ish-town bonus was being able to sit only 200-300 feet from where they launched, practically right underneath the explosions.

I shot the entire show with my new Nikon D7000, a Nikkor 35mm f/1.8G lens, tripod, and cable release. I also decided to leave my circular polarizer attached to darken the scene a bit since I didn't have an ND filter with me. That meant not having to stop down quite as far as usual, even though a 1-2 stop difference probably wouldn't have mattered either way. All of the shots were taken at ISO 100, between f/11 and f/16, with bulb shutter speeds from 4 to 11 seconds, using the NEF raw format so I could pick color temperature later in Lightroom. Most of the images seem to look best between 3000K and 3800K depending on the particular image and how warm I like it.

One of the best things about using the D7000 this year, along with more resolution and better image quality, was being able to use Live View to focus in advance. With my older cameras I could only take my best guess at focus through the viewfinder, or attempt to dial it in manually at infinity on the lens - and worry about focusing past infinity. With Live View I was able to preview the scene in advance about 30 minutes before the show, zoom in to 1:1 on the Live View screen and manually dial-in focus at a distant target. With relatively small apertures and deep depth of field, the fine focus probably didn't matter quite so much. But I still enjoy perfecting the techniques. Once the show started, I could just sit back and enjoy it, triggering long exposures with the cable release, and occasionally re-framing the camera on the tripod for different views.

Today I switched to Pandora from Last.fm for my streaming radio. I've been a Last.fm user and paid subscriber for quite a while and always loved it. But lately the Last.fm player for Windows has been skipping during songs so much that it's just too annoying. This happens at home and work on very nicely equipped systems with high bandwidth connections. I probably should have just contacted support, but instead I searched around their forums and saw a few users with similar posts and no replies, so I just didn't have the energy to battle it. I will miss several features of Last.fm, but for now I just want to enjoy skip-free music. And so far, that's exactly what I've gotten.