Photos make great Christmas gifts

It's been a while since I've posted something photography related. I did get the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L IS Image Stabilizer USM lens, but the weather has been so bad/cold here that I haven't had a chance to get out and use it yet. Monday and Tuesday are supposed to be sunny and around 65 F, so I am taking those days off from work to get out and enjoy the warmer weather and make use of this monster.

For Christmas, I usually do something photography related for my family. I usually create a calendar for my parents and sister. Last year the calendar was all photos that I had taken over the course of the year.

This year, I decided to do something different with the calendar. I have been teaching myself photo restoration and have made a project of restoring several boxes of my mother's old photos. For this year's calendar, I chose my sister and I as the theme. I sifted through 38 years of photos and picked out about 24 of my favorites to restore for the calendar. It was quite a time intensive project, but it turned out very nice and my sister and parents loved it!

I also chose to restore a 37 year old portrait of my grandparents (who are no longer with us) to give to my mother, her sisters (my aunts), and each of the grandchildren (my sister and cousins). I think that this really moved them. They had this picture already, but it was old and faded. I was glad that I could bring them so much joy and memories. This was a tough project because of the state of the photo, but I think my hard work on it paid off.

I used an Epson Perfection V700 Photo scanner, VueScan scanning software, Adobe Lightroom, and Adobe Photoshop CS3 Extended for all photo restoration work.

Hopefully I will have some photos to share on Monday or Tuesday. I will probably hit the National Zoo and the Smithsonian area in Washington D.C.. I may even head out to Arlington National Cemetery. I haven't been out there in a few months.

Zombie geese!!!

In honor of International Talk Like A Pirate Day 2007, I was searching for some images of zombie or undead geese, but a Google image search turned up dry.

Why zombie geese? Well to be honest... that just sounds too cool for words!!! It could be because I am psyched to see Residen Evil: Extinction this weekend.

But really it is because I went to one of my favorite locations to photograph on Sunday, Arlington National Cemetery, where I saw a huge flock of geese as I was leaving. There were hundreds of them spread out in groups through three sections of the cemetery. I pulled into a parking area so that I could snap some shots of them.




I visited the columbarium for the first time while at the cemetery. Almost all pictures that you see of Arlington National Cemetery focus on the uniform headstones lined up perfectly, but you rarely see pictures of the columbarium, so I wanted to share some photos of the lesser known areas of the cemetery.








With the recent anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, I visited the Pentagon memorial (another first for me). The memorial was done very nicely and several of the victems were laid to rest in front of it.






The full set of photos can be viewed at my Flickr page.

If you happen to have a picture of zombie geese, leave a comment!