Opportunity

I have been lucky in that I haven't been really sick for awhile. I generally take a vacation around flu season and make it a point to stop in Hawaii and get my flu shot. Unfortunately, work has been such that I have not been able to get to Hawaii and I got really sick this week. We are talking lay in bed for two days with a fever sick. But, by Thursday I was well enough to get back to work and Friday was better. I was hoping to get some photography in on Saturday but when I woke up it was storming. But American Samoa has unpredictable weather and at 4:30 it looked like the rain had stopped. I decided to grab a sunset at the last moment and made it to this spot just as the sun was setting. Luckily the drive was long and my camera was in a ziplock bag warming up during the ride (going from an aircon house to a humid environment means fogged lens if you aren't careful) so I was able to throw the camera on a tripod, stick a GND on the lens and this is one of the results. 30-minutes later it was all over and time to pack up. But I'm happy I went as the sunset was really nice. Now when I first started, I loved nothing better than a getting a photo of the Sun (larger the better) as it set. Now I don't care for the typical sunset photo (to cliche for me) and I normally carry a wide angle lens instead and shoot the colors. Nothing like some clouds to make the colors in the sky pop and this was a good day for that. Hope you enjoy this photo, which is hot off the press.

Important things

After missing the Tattoo festival in American Samoa last year, I was looking forward to spending a day photographing this event. But as luck would have it, the kids announced that their annual Halloween Party would be on the same day. Although I love photography and was looking forward to this event, my kids will always come first. Luckily, it looked like the event would start at 10:00AM and the party for the kids wasn't until later in the afternoon. Arriving at 10:00 it was soon apparent it was not going to start on time. So I blazed down to a sewing shop to pick up one of my kids costumes and then went back at 12:40PM. Still not really starting. It ended up with the show starting at about 2:00PM, which meant I would only have 1-hour before I had to leave. Ended up with a couple of photos before I had to pack up. But you know what, the kids had a great time at the Halloween Party and the smiles on their faces are just too important. Tomorrow the tattoo festival continues so maybe I will have better luck then.

The photo above was taken on Friday. Right after work I went home, grabbed the kids (they had a day off) and headed towards the beach Arrived in time for a nice Sunset and I really like this photo of a SeaScape that I captured. Setup was simple. Find the spot I liked and set up the camera with some GND filters. As the sunset arrived, took a bunch of photos, bracketing and watching my histogram. This was the one I liked. There is some vignetting on the top corners but I actually liked it so did not try to work that in Photoshop.

Ups and Downs

It's funny how we take so much for granted. It was a bad day today. The air con in the house was broken (if you live in a place with the humidity as high as it is here you would understand) and just wasn't a good day. Then went to the beach after work and watched a nice sunset and realized life isn't that bad. I'm lucky enough to like in a place that is safe and I don't have to worry about my kids in school (so much violence in drugs in a lot of schools now in the U.S.) and it takes me two minutes to get to work. And looking at CNN, just being happy I'm in a job that has some good job security (knock wood). It brought me back to when I first went to the Philippines. Prior to that trip I used to think I had life tough. Then I saw so many people living in homes that didn't have a toilet and shower, let alone hot water. So sometimes you just need to count your blessings and be happy with what you have.