VNS Photography's Blog

On 12-29-2010 I left in 29 degree weather to meet up with Pat Worley and Terr Wilson. Wow! Talk about a coincidence In my previous post I we left on 12-17 and it was 17 degrees, and for the church trip we left on 12-29 and it was 29 degrees. Hey Pat, maybe they will change the dates around so that there is a month with 55 days, this way we can go out in warmer weather. 🙂 LOL.

The first picture of the interior of the church was shot in HDR.

The next image is a special effect that Pat showed me how to do. It is to have the effect of rays coming out from the center of the picture. Terry and Pat have  better representations I do.      

It was a great day and we were inside for the entire shoot. Later we went to a very inexpensive and nice chinese restaurant.  Then Pat gave me a tour of beautiful Medford Lakes and all the log cabin homes in the area.

On 12-17-2010 Sue and I joined Pat Worley for a cold and blustery day of shooting pictures of snow geese At Forsythe. WE got there Early to catch the sunrise. We climbed the 2 story tower and the higher we went the colder it got. SEVENTEEN DEGREES. Most of my body was warm except where I had the finger tips cut off on my right glove so that I would be able to make adjustments on the camera. Well in about 5 minutes I couldn’t even feel my fingers tips and couldn’t feel the trigger on the camera. I did manage to get some pics of the sunrise and some of the snow geese. These pictures show the in great numbers, The next one is of them taking off and the last is of them gliding in for a landing.

Sue and I Belong to the South Jersey Camera Club. Every month they hold a photo competition. There are some mighty fine photographers and pretty stiff competitors. I am very proud to announce that me and Sue took Ist and 3rd place in the November competition.
This photo “Under the Falls” on the right,was taken by me at Watkins Glenn and took 1st Place and the “Black Butterfly” Photo was taken by Sue and took 3rd Place.

It sure was a great feeling to have won these awards.

It has been awhile since my last post. I am going to try to catch up with this post. One of the places that we have recently visited was a Civil War Re-enactment in Cape May. It was nice to see the great lengths people went to try to duplicate life during that time. We walked around for a while and then they started to have a battle. Guns were blazing and canons roaring and a victory was won by the Union Soldiers.

This picture to the right was in full color. I took the background and converted it to Black and White and then blurred it while leaving the two boys in color.

I mentioned about canons roaring. Here is an example of what I am writing about. Too bad you can’t hear the sound that it made.

Then there was the firing of rifles in a victory salute.

It was beautiful day and we really enjoyed stepping back in time for a while.

Below are some places and photos that we took when we were there.

One one room log home at lemming’s Garden Cape May.

Eggs fresh and ready to be eaten.

The kitchen and bedroom area. (These pictures were shot in HDR

Here are some other photos from Lemming’s Garden

Are those his eyes. Man imagine seeing him with “Sun Glasses” on.

I submitted this image on another website that I participate in and someone requested I post it on something other than that site because of the lack of quality or size. So here is the shot of 3 Bridges in NYC . I am at the South Street Sea port shooting up river. The first bridge is the Brooklyn Bridge, then the Manhattan Bridge and then off in the distance you have the Williamsburg Bridge. I was wanting to make this an old style photo and the sailing ship being there just happened to add to it. Hope you like it.

This past saturday it was a rainy day, so we decided to do something inside. Wea lso went to see Elaine Walsh and Ralph Berglund who were displaying there beautiful photos there.

It turned out to a very pleasant day. 

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On June 25, we went up to Endicott, NY to visit my cousin and also attend the graduation of her Grand Daughter. While there we attended a very nice BBQ on Saturday. Then on Sunday we decided to take a 1 hour trip to Watkins Glen, NY.

After searching around for a while we found the entrance to the gorge. I guess that is the Glen. Fortunately we ran into a local resident there who told us about the park and how to navigate it. There are a few ways to do the gorge. Walk “up” and “down”. (Insanity) Walk up and take the shuttle down. (1/2 insanity) OR take the Shuttle up and walk down. (Brilliant) We opted for the Brilliant route of taking the shuttle up and walking down. It cost $3 per person for the shuttle and belive  me it was the best $3 I have spent in a long time.

It sounds easy to say well you are going to be walking down. The only problem with that is there are hundreds of steep steps and plateaus spanning over about 1 1/2 miles along the gorge. Due to my physical restraints it was a questionable task for me to complete. It was one of those, once you started ten you were committed to keeping on going. Fortunate to say I completed the trip taking about 2 hours of walking easy and taking many stops to rest. Along the way there are many water falls and streams and plateaus with a real deep excursion to the bottom showing many high walls and falls. A cool thing about this trip was being able to shoot under some of the falls.

Unfortunately, the pictures that are being shown here don’t seem to be doing the beauty of the area any justice. (Run the slide show it shows the pictures better)

I would love for this to be a place to take one of if not both of the camera clubs we belong to here. It just doesn’t fit into a schedule for getting there a

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nd back in one day. If any one wants any info just email me.

As I mentioned in my previous post I took a try at taken 16 shot Manhattan to make a panorama photo. I did it with PhotoShop. It took PhotoShop just a bout 10 minutes to process the 16 Raw Photos I gave it.

Too bad the haze was there or else I wood say this came out good. For now I will just call it nice. It isn’t clear on WordPress because it was so large that I had to reduce it tremendously in order for WordPress to accept it. But the actual stitch is tack sharp. (CLICK ON PHOTO TO MAKE IT LARGER. IT LOOKS A LITTLE BETTER)

 

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On Friday June 18, 2010 myslelf, Sue, Doug Vernick and Lou Dallara took a journey into NYC. It was an absolutely beautiful day except for the fact that, the ever present haze that looms over NYC was there.

Our trip had a scheduled  stop at the Aircraft Carrier Intrepid.

Then over to Rockerfeller Plaza to go “On Top Of Rock”. A journey up 77 floors for fantastic views of NYC. We then were going to work our way back down to the Staten Island Ferry with a stop at the “Highline Of NYC”.

The Intrepid was great. It hosted a lot of planes and even included the Concorde. The Concorde Was a lot smaller than it had appeared the many times I had seen it flying over us when we would be out fishing. The interior was very plain and not too appealing. The cockpit was exremely small and very tight for the crew.

 

                                                                                                                                                             While on the Intrepid I got to see one of the aircraft I use to work on while I was attending Queens Aviation High School, in NYC. I took 4 years of aircraft maintenance as well as getting my regular college prep diploma. It was hard work but it all worked out in the end by giving me a good work ethic for the rest of my life. 

 

 

 

 

After the Intrepid we took a cab and went to go “On Top Of The Rock”. It was a very nice experience. It had 360 degree view. Unfortunately, it had the haze I had mentioned earlier in this post. I can only imagine how fantastic the photos would be from here if they were taken on an absolutely clear day.

I have taken many more pictures from the Rock, but I will have to try and work on them to try and get some of the haze out. I also have a nice long stitch to make out of 16 pictures with the hopes of getting a real nice panorama shot. 

Our next stop before heading to home was to be “The Highline”. This is a project that was started a few years ago and I only recently found out about it. It seemed like a good thing to include on this trip and I was glad we did. What they did here was to take an old elevated freight rail line and refurbish it and make it into an elevated walkway with gardens on the sides. It also has many places for people to sit and sun bathe. They left some of the old rails in place and made lounges out of wood that are on wheels and the lounges can be moved around on those wheels to put the lounges in different locations.

There were some very interesting and fun girls while we were there. They were more then willing to let us try out our modeling expertise on them.

The people that live in the Highline area are very fortunate to have such a great place to come and relax or even spend the day with family and friends. It had a very nice community feeling to it.

We then set our sights for home and the fact that we were leaving right smack in the middle of rush hour. I was really thinking we were screwed. There would be a gozzilian people riding the FREE yes that is right I forgot to mention the Staten Island Ferry is FREE, Both Ways. The traffic on the ferry and the roads wasn’t too bad and it really made for a end to a great day.

Please take a look at the Gallery Slide Show above and the gallery Below. If you want click on the photo to see it in a larger size.

I NOW HAVE MY NEW DOMAIN NAME FOR MY BLOG. (It stands for  V “vince” N “and” S “sue” Photography. Eventually we both will be posting here.

It is now set to  www.vnsphotography.com

Please switch you blog roll to that URL

Thansk Looking forward to you visiting my BLOG.

Vince