More HDR

I'm still playing around with HDR stuff I did in Aruba...

Songs and Youtube

I recorded the song I wrote for Addy and put it on YouTube.

I was thinking it would be nice to put a few things up there as opposed to Soundclick so then I recorded another older song to put up as well. 12-strings are really hard to keep in tune.

A New Song for Addy

Addy has been having trouble transitioning to her new big-girl bed. She sometimes seems to be afraid, whether it be of something outside of her window or just the dark in general. Today I wrote her a song for us to sing before she goes to bed...

Oh God You are safe,

and I can trust You.

You are strong when I am weak.

So I will not be afraid,

for You are with me

when I wake and when I sleep.

Also, I added some other words in case I want to record a full song at some point. The whole thing is...

Oh God You are safe,

and I can trust You.

You are strong when I am weak.

So I will not be afraid,

for You are with me

when I wake and when I sleep.

So I'll sing this song to You.

For You are good my whole life through.

And when my heart begins to fear,

I will look to You

for Your love is true.

My life is in Your hands.

My hope is in Your plan.

Kristi thinks that the last line of the chorus should be "for Your love is near." But, I don't really like to mess with my original words unless it is an enormously better lyric...plus I feel like the original captures what I mean to convey in the song a little better.

Songs or Poetry

I've written a few poems over the past few years, and I've been thinking that maybe I've missed out on poetry...meaning I think I might have loved poetry if I had payed more attention to it in school. This made me purchase a collection of poems by Emily Dickinson, who is a wonderful poet to start with from what I hear. It also made me think about one of my favorite poems. I actually did a report on the author in high school merely because I love this poem so much...

Hold fast to dreams
for if dreams die
life is a broken-winged bird
that cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
for when dreams go
life is a barren field
frozen with snow.

Langston Hughes

Is it still spring?

We came home from Aruba to some pretty nice weather and some new flowers blooming in the backyard.

Aruba and Five Years

Five years of marriage seems like a long time to me. Kristi and I celebrated our 5th anniversary this past Saturday by taking a trip to Aruba (courtesy of my parents). It was a great vacation, although we did miss Addy quite a bit. I took over 800 pictures, but I tried to pick only the best or photos with the most personal interest to edit. I will be sparing with my words and mainly let the pictures tell the story. I'd like to add that most of my pictures came from a Tokina 11-16 ultra wide angle lens, which I rented from LensGiant for $60. I really loved the lens. It's only shortcoming was that it did flare quite a bit. I also learned that you can't really stitch photos from ultra wide angles because the distortion at the edges makes the pictures not match up. Oh well, I still got a few hundred photos I couldn't have gotten without the wide angle lens (at the moment my widest is 50mm since I sold my kit lens).

The first night in Aruba was short. It's amazing to me that I could be working in Easley at 7AM and eating dinner on a pier 15 miles off the coast of Venezuela less than 12 hours later. I think I slept something like 14 hours the first night...it is pretty rough travelling after working night shift. Kristi and I tried our best to enjoy a few things specific to Aruba while we were there, such as Balashi beer and Super Food grocery store. We ended up eating at the Pelican Nest, which was the restaurant we ate at the first night, 3 times over the course of the week. It's hard to pass up seafood while sitting on a beach pier...especially since it was one of the less expensive restaurants.

The second day wasn't filled with too much excitement, except for finding an awesome looking starfish in the water with my feet. I hadn't found one of these on my other 2 Aruba trips, so I was very excited. Unfortunately some guy working in one of the beach huts got mad at me because I was "suffocating" the starfish and took it and threw it back. Dude...I was going to throw it back, just let me take a few pictures.

The next day was a bit more adventurous. We had rented a car and Aruba is a pretty diverse island, so we drove down to Baby Beach for the day, and stopped a few places to take pictures. I took several bracketed photos this trip to do some HDR work, but I have since decided that you can accomplish most of what you can with HDR through Adobe Lightroom unless you want a really ridiculous effect. These first two are HDR:

and these are not:

We went to a restaurant called Pinchos that night, another pier and another one of our favorites from the trip.

I got up early several mornings on this trip to see the sunrise and to run. The next morning was by far my favorite, and I have a hard time picking which pictures I love the best because so many of them are so good. I made a couple HDR pictures:

and took a bunch of normal ones, of which I picked a few:

After getting up before the crack of dawn, I still had a full day ahead with Kristi as we drove all over the island to visit the Donkey Sanctuary, Boca Grandi, and explore the more vacant coast of the island. We saw sanctuary and wild donkeys, hiked cliffs, watched kite-boarders, and I even dodged waves to pull a shellfish or snail (I don't know the correct terminology) off of a cliff. The original plan was to boil it and keep the shell, but then I just felt too guilty and ended up throwing him back.

The only disappointment of the trip came that night when we went to an Italian restaurant. While the setting was amazing, we thought the food was really expensive for what it was (even by tourist standards) and it wasn't really that great. The restaurant did afford many good pictures, although I had to drive back to the hotel to get my memory card. I took a good number of night photos on the trip, which I always enjoy, even if they don't turn out the best.

We didn't do a whole lot the next day, although Kristi did enjoy ice cream from good old McDonald's several times during the trip.

That night though, we had the opportunity to go to The Flying Fishbone, which was already payed for by my parents. Eating dinner for free is great, especially when it's at the nicest restaurant you've ever been to. The food was good, but mainly the setting is incredible. It was a little cloudy, but as you can see the sunset still did not disappoint.

The next morning was another early one for me. I headed out to the docks before sunrise not only to take pictures, but to find a local fisherman that would let me buy a fish later in the morning when he returned to the dock. One guy wasn't very friendly, but he did agree to the sale and told me to come back around 10:30. He sold me a King Mackerel for $20 which I then got cleaned by another local for a few dollars. I wish I would have had my camera when I bought the fish, but since I didn't I don't have any pictures except for the marinating fillets. The fish was amazing, by far the best fish I've ever tasted. While I don't have a picture of the whole kingfish, I did get several other good nature shots. As you can tell I tried many times to take pictures of birds in flight...it is a lot harder than I imagined, and I didn't imagine it being easy in the first place.

Here's two more HDR pics for your enjoyment:

We went on a snorkel cruise the next day, which was very fun. The original cruise we wanted to go on was booked, but I think it turned out OK because I think the one we went on was geared a little more towards excitement as opposed to relaxation anyway. I tried to do a back flip off of the rope swing, but I didn't quite make it...I'm not as young as I used to be. In the first picture you can see the hotel we stayed in (the tall building to the middle-left).

Our last full day in Aruba I got up early once again to see the sunrise and to hike part of the coast on the non-tourist side of the island. Unfortunately it was too cloudy for a spectacular sunrise, but I did have fun exploring new areas despite the weather. For some reason people in Aruba build little towers with rocks everywhere on the mountainous side of the island. I tried to capture the enormous amount of these with pictures, and then at the end I decided to build my own.

We essentially ended our trip the way we began...with a meal at the Pelican Nest. Hopefully we will be back sometime, I could certainly use another freshly cooked kingfish in my life.

In case you were worried, Addy did pretty well without us. It was great to see her again though.