We have electricity! The power was restored Friday afternoon. We went 5 days 22hours 56 minutes without power. It sucked. Yes, other areas of Florida, as well as several tiny island nations, suffered horrible losses. The scope of the outages and shitty management by our power provider were frustrating and brought our…

I went out to the beach at night recently to try a bunch of different setting combinations. The moon kinda bogarted the sky, washing out the stars, so I tried a few different things with it.

Totality. It was life changing.

There will be more coming tomorrow. I am going back to sleep. Totality was life changing. Holy shit.

The D5200 is in the shop getting a thorough cleaning, so I dug out the D3100. I needed to see how it was shooting as I want to use it for shooting wider angle shots during totality of the eclipse.

My new tripod arrived and we had a moment of sunshine today, so I went to go test out the whole rig.

Those are pretty cool.

So there is this solar eclipse happening soon. What is everyone doing for it?

So, I guess I’m on a bit of a lightning kick these days. I had to make a quick run to the store tonight and I noticed lots of lightning flashes in the sky, but couldn’t really see anything. I only knew which direction it was coming from. When I got home, I told the wife I was going out for photos.

Here they are, St. Petersburg’s 4th of July fireworks, with lightning! The lightning was gone by the end of the show, but what more could you ask for? Not only does the lightning just look cool, the flash would light up the clouds, giving the shots amazing depth. In some of the pictures, you can see stars in the upper…

How was everyone’s 4th of July? I’ll have pics done tomorrow to post, but really wanted to share this one right away. We had lightning with the fireworks! More to come!

This was a weird weekend. I found out late on Friday night that a friend died. After that, I couldn’t sleep and was pretty much for close to 40 hours straight. That sucked. On Sunday, after getting some sleep, th wife and I headed across the state to watch a SpaceX launch. I was even going to live stream it on…

I guess these are SFW. This is Agraulis Vanillae getting it on. Commonly called the Gulf fritillary or Passion Butterfly, which I guess is an appropriate name in this case. These were taken on July 12, 2013 in Tampa.

We finally had a mostly clear night, so I took the new lens out for a little night shooting in St. Peterburg. There is a park up the street that overlooks Tampa Bay. This patch of sky is pretty dark, considering the light pollution.

We finally had a few hours of sunshine today before the rain rolled in. So I took the new lens out to the Cresent Lake in St. Petersburg. It’s a little slice of banyan tree-lined heaven in the middle of the city.

I get didn’t get to shoot over the weekend as planned. Our plans changed at the last minute on Sunday, so my planned shooting while out didn’t work out. On top of that, it’s been cloudy and rainy.

Finally! I put it off long enough and pulled the trigger. Got a good deal on this little fella. UPS delivered it late in the day Wednesday, so I only snapped a few test shots around the house of some of the kids. I’ll have it out and about this weekend.

Hey everyone. I’ve been busy not taking pictures. Boo! But a few weeks back, I teamed up with a friend for a project. The header pic I snapped while we were setting up one of the shots for the series. It kind of gives you an idea of what was going on, behind the scenes, if you will.