Washington D.C. #1

Since there are so many photos from my trip to Washington D.C. I will have a couple posts, each with different pictures. I'll start at the beginning of the week and slowly move to the end of the week. For the first day we went to a few places but the three places that were my favorite and I have a lot of pictures from are, The Library of Congress, The Supreme Court, and Arlington Cemetery. All three places are extremely old and have so much history to go along with them it would take me forever to tell you, so I'll just stick with a couple of facts.

So, every single building that you go in has security guards and metal detectors. It is extremely irritating to have to go through one even if you want to just go to the bathroom. I guess they just don't want anybody to blow stuff up. Anyways, if you take any shots near the security checkpoints or of something that they don't want you to take pictures of, they will make you delete all of the shots you took.

A lot of the shots that I took are architectural, because the work was just amazing.

This is the Library of Congress. I wasn't able to get inside the actual library, I even tried just walking in and they talked to me and told me to leave and that I wasn't allowed to be in there. So of course they followed me out of the building and made sure that I left. All of these shots are outside of the library. It was an amazing place, all of the artwork and decorations were absolutely incredible.They kinda look like one of the sample images from the Canon tilt-shift lenses. Somewhat of the same style, i guess.

The Library of Congress had so much detail in every square inch of the whole place. You can really see it in both of these shots.

Here are some of the Supreme Court building. It isn't decorated as extravagantly but has some amazing features. I was laying on the floor for some of these, but then they kicked me out. I got escorted out by security guards. I got some great shots though!

The beautiful ceiling of the Supreme Court entry way. Everything is made out of marble.

This is a spiraling staircase that is in the Supreme Court building. The stairs are actually carved out from the wall, not just stuck onto the wall.

Arlington Cemetery was by far one of my favorite places that we went to. It was just absolutely beautiful and peaceful. The graves of soldiers and many other people just went on forever out into the distance. They never stopped going, it was truly amazing. We went in early evening when the Sun was setting and I got some good shots with the graves, but one of the coolest parts of the Cemetery was the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

These are from the Tomb of the unknown soldier. These are the guards who guard the tomb 24/7. The change the guards out every half hour.

A couple shots of the thousands of graves that are in the whole cemetery. The graves seriously went on so far in the distance you couldn't see the end of them.

Well that's the first day of my trip. We had a lot of the activities planned for the first day, so the rest of the week slowed down a little bit. I'll have the next post on my trip up soon. Any comments or suggestions would be great!

Thank you to everybody who looks at these posts! And also if you want to see anymore from these sections of my trip, please let me know.

-Kellan

Fire Arts

Soooooo many pictures to go through. So I just took a trip to Washington D.C. and am still sorting through the thousands of pictures I took. I will start with some stuff that I took before my vacation.

So, I am really into fire arts and fire dancing. I have even performed a few times in front of large audiences. Some of the stuff I do is...... staff, poi, devil sticks, and fire breathing. For this post I have some pictures of staff, fire breathing, and poi. All three of these are the most popular and well known. Some of the shots are just standing still and some are with the movements and spinning the fire.

The spinning and movent shots I have done before. You just set the exposure for a couple of seconds and the flame trails just fill the whole screen. Thats the easy part, and I have been doing those shots for a couple of years. Here are some from the past and present. Charlie, my friend, has been spinning fire with me for a few years.

One of the more recent ones. A shorter exposure making look darker. This is my friend Charlie.

Charlie spinning again. A longer exposure, a little brighter than before.

Here are some shots of something new I tried. Since I have a few studio lights, I set one up outside with just a modeling light setup, no flash. I was trying to light up just the person with out seeing the background. Usually you cant see the person when they are fire spinning, all you can see are just the flames. For the first time trying it, I think they turned out rather well.

First shot we did with the studio light trying to just light up the subject. Charlie is spinning for these two.

A little later, more of a flame but the subject is still a tad blurry.

After getting used to the lighting we tried a few a little darker. You can still see the background a little. This is me for these two. Charlie took both of these shots with me in them. Thank You!

Well this is one of the last ones that we did, the background was almost completely blacked out, but I reached my goal with all of the ratios of shutter speed and what not.

Also here are some really cool shots of Charlie kicking a can of gas. We managed to light half of the garage on fire, and some of my lawn in the backyard.

Thats all for this post. I have a couple more posts that will be coming really soon, they are about horse jumping and Washington D.C., two things that I have never shot before. Any comments or suggestions on this post would be great!

-Kellan

Big Basin Redwoods State Park

This past weekend I went camping at Big Basin. It is a huge redwood grove that spans for miles. It has waterfalls, tons of plant life, and it is just a beautiful place. This was the second time I have been there, I had gone a couple years ago but never had a camera. I had my 50D to shoot with, obviously. I had over 1000 shots but I picked the best ones.

While I was there I went on a 12 mile hike out to a group of waterfalls that just kept going, there was one after another, and they just didn't stop. I spent more time on the last one that we came to over all of the other ones because it was the biggest and was more beautiful than the others.

This was the first waterfall we came to, it was one of the smaller ones.

A small little river stream that broke off from the main river.

This is the huge waterfall that we came to last. I spent most of my time shooting here.

Just one of the sides of the big waterfall. I really like all of the ferns that grow around all of the water. They make it seem more wet and almost tropical in some ways.

There was such a diversity of plant life and habitats that it was impossible to get them all in just one day. I am putting up some of the best shots I got, I just had soooo many to choose from that I couldn't put all of them up.

This was a really cool plant with huge leaves that collect water. Since it rains so much it has huge leaves to collect water instead of drawing a lot of water from the ground.

I also tried some new stuff that I had never done before. It was Seth who inspired these shots, I remember looking at his website and thinking, hey I could try that. What he did was he had a really long exposure and then moved the camera in a spiral while its shutter was open making it look hella crazy and spirally. So I tried that but with moving up and down and side to side.

These two shots were definitely my favorite from the whole trip, I don't really know why though. All I know is that they look really cool!

Well that's it for this one, more will be coming in the near future. Any comments or advice is greatly appreciated! :)

-Kellan