Just took this picture through my livingroom window, pretty cool lightning show this evening!

(10 sec exposure and aperture decreased by 5 F stops).

Happy New Year all! We got a bunch of snow overnight to wake up to on the first of January. So we went back to the Blackwell Forest Preserve and took some real wintery pictures, they are kind of dark but hey that’s the weather….. A great day for cross country skiing, ice fishing, and snow tubing as you can see on these pics. For more pics click here.

I took my mom and dad out to the Blackwell and McDowell Grove Forest Preserves out in the western suburbs, armed with my 300 mm lens (35 mm equivalent, 150 mm in Olympus 4/3 system) and an infrared remote control. After having a day with a realfeel of -25C the weather was gorgeous, just above freezing and sunny! Click on any of the pics to get to the main picture page.

First great test of the long focal length, Mr. Squirrel enjoying his christmas lunch. He did not have very good table manners, you could hear him chew all throught the forest. He was nice enough though to sit there long enough to have about 34 pictures taken.

Next I tried my IR remote, here you see me about 5 yards away from the camera trying to see if the remote steers the focus properly, those buttons are sensitive, I suddenly saw the aperture snap and this was the result……

Although the aperture effects are not so obvious when viewing long distance, you can still see the effect. First pic below has f/3.6 (short depth of focus) and second one f/22 (large depth of focus).

You can see a similar effect when you keep the camera low to the ground and have the leaves in the center in focus while the background and foreground are out of focus.

Alright, enough play for one day, let’s wrap it up with a freaky tree picture, a leave that got stuck in a crack in the road, and a white tree in blue sky. Happy Holidays!!

just a little picture of a candle. Took me a good half hour to get the lights, shutter and aperture set to make the crystal look blue in the raw image. Merry Christmas!!

I recently had the chance to make a quick visit to Quito, Ecuador. The old town center was one of the two first Unesco world heritage sites. It is the best preserved historic city center in Latin America, a beautiful city with a lot of great atmosphere (apart from the exhaust fumes from buses and trucks).

The equator runs about 20 km outside the city center, this is the place to be in the northern and southern hemisphere at the same time.

Outside the city center, there is plenty of mountain around to do a lot of hiking and biking. I would take some time to acclimatize though before doing any strenuous exercise, the air is thin at 2500 to 4100 meters altitude. We did one mostly downhill ride descending 1600 meters on a mountain bike on one of the rocky and muddy slopes of the Pinchincha. Easy to do with a bike rental of 5 dollars a day, the guy who invented double suspension mountain bikes deserves a medal. Further away from the city, towards Papallacta, there is great hiking areas with lots of volcanic hot springs to relax in afterwards. The views over the mountains and especially the peak of the Antisana at 5700 meters are really breathtaking.

This are just a couple of the photos, for the rest go the main Quito picture page.

Starved Rock is a great State Park in Utica Illinois. It has a lot of hiking trails and beautiful views over the Illinois River. At this time of the year, there is lot of nice autumn forest colors, but the waterfalls were not much more than my dripping kitchen faucet The falls should be very nice in winter when they freeze into a icefalls, I will go check that out for you later this year… For more pictures, click the photo below.

Do you have the problem I had until recently of not knowing the local roads to bike on, loosing your way, ending up on a gravel trail on your nice road bike, or a heavily trafficked highway? Here’s how to solve this. Go to

http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/

This website, based on Google Maps, lets you create routes by putting markers on each intersection etc, and then exporting them to gpx format, which most handheld gps devices can read. And if it seems like you need to go on a more busy road, zoom in and switch to satellite view to check if the shoulder is wide enough to bike on. Now if you use an old Mapsource version, like me, you need to go to http://www.gpsbabel.org/ after creating the gpx file so you can convert it to mps format before importing it in mapsource and transferring it to your gps. The route I biked today shows up on Google Earth like this.

Although I am surprised how courteous suburban drivers are towards bicyclists (more so than Santa Barbarian drivers), next time I would avoid Naperville Road going up through Wheaton, where certain drivers got the ‘if looks could kill’ look aimed at their rear view mirrors after passing less then a foot away from the handle bars. Other than that, I have to say most drivers here go all the way to the left of their lane and give you plenty of space. But that said, you only need one driver who is dialing somebody on their phone to spoil the fun so keep your helmet on… I rarely carry my SLR camera on my road bike on short rides, but here’s a couple of pics snapped with my cell phone in the Wheaton College area (sorry for the bad quality….).

The Fox River Trail is probably the nicest trail in the Chicago area for biking that I have been on so far. Very scenic, mostly asfalt with every now and then a couple of hundred yards of mud. These pictures are taken riding from just south of Geneva to South Elgin (see google earth track below). More photos are found here.

OK, here it is, I got the blog setup, now all that is left to do is add content, which will happen in August sometime. So check back for cool photo’s, here is two of them to start with. Water droplet falling into salad bowl while washing dishes .

…falling into bowl…….

…and bouncing back up..