Friday night I went back to one of my favorite places: Colorado Bend State Park in Texas. It is to the West of the Austin area, and well isolated. You can’t even get a cell phone signal out there, which is nice. I have been there before shooting the waterfalls and the night sky. On… Read More Dark Night at Colorado Bend State Park
I recently got an iPhone8 Plus. My old phone had a lousy camera, so one of the aspects of the new iPhone I was excited about is the camera (or cameras). Specifically, is it good enough to be a casual walking around camera for when I am not lugging around the DSLR gear. I have… Read More iPhone 8 Plus vs. Nikon D5300
I saw a little green lizard on my back patio, so I decided that I would try to catch him and get some close-ups of him with my extension tubes. I was careful not to hurt him and I didn’t want him to shed his tail like they sometimes do to get out of trouble.… Read More Chasing a Little Green Lizard
It’s Sunday morning, the first almost cool Sunday morning of Fall, so I decided to head to downtown Austin with my camera gear just before sunrise and explore a bit. Sunday mornings are very peaceful downtown, and you can park where you want and have the run of the place. Mainly just joggers and a… Read More Sunday Morning Downtown
Saturday I took part in a landscape photography workshop at Colorado Bend State Park in Central Texas. I have been to this park several times as there are lots of nice hiking trails. There are also some waterfalls in the park, and this was the subject of the workshop. There is larger waterfall, called Gorman… Read More Waterfalls in Colorado Bend State Park
I went out in the evening thinking that I would shoot some fireflies. There is a park nearby where they hang out around dusk. The mosquitos hang out there as well, but that’s outdoor photography. So, I had my camera and tripod set up attempting to aim in the general direction of the fireflies, and… Read More Shooting Fireflies
It was a nice evening and there were high clouds in the sky, so I decided to go down to the park and take some HDR photos of the sunset. These photos are all multiple exposures processed in Adobe Lightroom and Photomatix Pro. My histograms ranged between these extremes: Here is the first shot I… Read More HDR Sunset in the Park
A few times I have tried to make time-lapsed videos of the stars moving across the night sky. I have always found this to be a mesmerizing thing to watch in a time-lapsed video. The process is not very hard, just time-consuming. The first step is to find a truly dark place to be on… Read More Time Lapsed Astrophotography
I am trying to learn how to take nice sky pictures at night, to capture the stars and the Milky Way. One of the things that makes this challenging is that the stars are quite dim for the camera sensor and competing with this is all of the light pollution from cities and towns lighting… Read More Star Photo Stacking
I was driving in the county and noticed the sky reflected in a pond in the middle of a pasture. There were a lot of cows around and I thought it would make a nice picture, so I turned the car around and went back and pulled over to the side of the road. As… Read More Another From the Side of the Road
Jason Frels 