A nice tight grouping of Blue Angels jets, flying high over the Portsmouth International Airport at Pease, during the Pease Airshow 2010. Airshow shooting is all about keeping your camera firing as fast as possible during the fly overs, and letting it buffer out your shots while the jets turn around. Also, don't forget sunscreen. I was covered in most places but burned the tops of my ears pretty severely. Again, not a true HDR, but gussied up with some more Topaz. EF 100-300mm f/4.5-5.6 USM @ 100mm ISO 100, f/4.5 at 1/750 second

A wonderful shot of the Blue Angels at the Pease Air Show 2010. This was my first airshow, and definitely not my last. The long wait was definitely worth it when the Angels took to the sky. The other planes before them were cool, but these guys know how to steal a show. I'm thinking of doing a full airshow tutorial on my blog. I did one for fireworks and it continues to be one of the biggest drivers of traffic to my blog. Air shows are similar in that they're not hard if you have a DSLR, and are armed with the right lens and a little knowledge. In the mean time, if you're heading to an airshow, keep your shutter speed fast, your focus set to infinity, and don't forget your sunscreen and ear plugs. We were burned for weeks after the event! This image is not an HDR, as multiple exposures are obviously not going to happen. Nothing but good old Photoshop and some Topaz Adjust at work here. EF 100-300mm f/4.5-5.6 USM @ 100mm ISO 100, f/4.5 at 1/750 second

This photo is responsible for my new section of photographs, entitled Miscellaneous and Manipulations. As you can probably guess, this is a manipulation. While I'm frequently asked how much I change in my photos, I can always answer "I don't manipulate, I enhance". The HDR processing, the Topaz, the microcontrast adjustments in photoshop... all of these processes enhance details and colors that are already present in the image. Aside from a few spots (dirty camera sensor, aberrant digital artifacts etc) I avoid wholesale manipulation. Well with that in mind, I do feel bad sometimes that I never stretch my Photoshop muscle to its potential. So when I was processing this photo, the moon was present in the sky. Of course with an image shot with a wide angle lens, it was a fairly small ball. Being a sci-fi fan, I started wishing that the moon could be 100x larger in the sky. A day or so of searching for royalty free images of the moon later and this is what I came up with. It reminds me of an opening scene from a Final Fantasy game, moon larger than life looming over a castle in front of a lake... Maybe someday I'll have a good castle photograph to manipulate :) EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM @ 20mm ISO 100, f/22 at 1/90, 1/20, and 1/6 second

A Sea of Stars

A digital manipulation of a photo I took at sunset overlooking Hood Pond, in Ipswich. This Pond is accessed by Rowley Road, which was mentioned in HP Lovecraft's "The Thing On The Doorstep", as it runs towards the area of Ipswich known as "The Neck" (which didn't exist in 1933), but is where Lovecraft described the fictional village of Innsmouth. My original photo was lacking in detail some, my exposure wasn't fantastic in the shadows. But the composition, the fishing boy, and the sunset made it a great "if only" photo. I took Lovecraft's "The Stars Are Right" idea to heart and layered in a cosmic shot and did a little re-coloring and applied some manual grunge. I quite like the final result! Hood Pond, Ipswich MA

Looking for the ghosts of Livermore

Abandoned trail in the White Mountains of NH. Approaching the remains of the abandoned Livermore logging community.