Day 3 of a 3-day weekend.

It's been an active weekend for me. The Daikin Festival Friday night, the balloon launch Saturday morning, photos at Crossroads Saturday night, European Grand Prix Sunday morning, church, Indy 500 in the afternoon then eating out with friends Sunday night.

Headed to Crossroads Saturday night to take some photos of Tim Tucker, one of Lesa's friends. He was wanting pictures for either a website or CD cover or something. I rode over with Lesa and Lori. Lesa assured me she didn't want to stay out late. She was lying at the time and I didn't know it. Brought along the big cameras, me with my 20D and Lesa with her D60. I got several good shots especially after I switched to not using flash to get more of the stage lighting effect. I used my fastest lens (f 1.4 baby) and cranked my ISO to 3200. I think Lesa gave everyone a tan with her flash. That night I realized just how powerful our flash units are. Holy crap. They can put out some SERIOUS light. I was ready to go a little before midnight. You can understand how twisted up I was when we didn't finally leave until 1:30 AM. Grrrr...

Despite the late night, I got up at 6:00 AM to shower and clean up before sitting down to watch the F1 race in Germany at the Nurburgring. Another EXCELLENT race! Renault, my favorite team won but I still felt bad for Kimi in his McLaren/Mercedes for his suspension breaking at the start of the last lap after he had led most of the race. THAT sucks!

Church went well. The music came together nicely. I had my doubts after our last practice. Good crowd there despite the holidays. Grabbed up some lunch at Quizno's before heading home to watch the Indy 500 race. Congrats to Danica Patrick for her great 4th place finish in only her 5th Indy car race! Not too shabby for a HOT 23 year old girl.

Met up with Kevin & Co. + Kyle at Kyoto for dinner. I had a filet and lobster which were extremly satisfying. Some other friends of mine showed up too and I chatted with them a bit. Swung by the bookstore on the way home to see what was new before going home to watch "National Treasure" on DVD. Good flick.

This morning so far, I've just done some demestic crap. Dishes, vacuuming, etc. Also finally took time to clean my pistols from last Sunday's range session. I've been needing to get all the funk out of my guns but was busy all week and didn't have time to do it right away.

I don't really have any plans for the rest of the day. I might try and do some photo work this afternoon with Jordan as she's got some poses she wanted to try. Sharon, Satcey's sister, has some studio lights and a backdrop with her. Hopefully, it'll all work out and I'll get some good stuff. We'll see.

Memorial Day

Let me start of by saying a sincere "Thank You" to the men and women that risk their lives in service to our country. An even bigger thanks to those who have paid for our freedoms with their lives.

Glennis and friend. LOL.

Glennis and I later on in the evening.

Me, Lori and Glennis at Crossroads.

Away it goes!

Looking up into the Pepsi balloon as it was moments before takeoff.

This was a SWEET shot right here. The pilot of the Pepsi balloon invited me and Lesa to stick our heads inside the "envelope" as he fired the burners. No one else but us got a shot of this.

Balloons everywhere!

Going up?

Inflate!

Events everywhere!

Last night, Lesa and I headed to the Daikin festival over at the fairground. Daikin is a Japanese company that has a large facility near the river here in town. For the past few years, they have put on this GIANT event with free admission, food, entertainment and prizes. It's truly an extravaganza. I heard a rumor that they budget around $250k for this one event... Kay met us there and soon my sister and a friend of hers showed up. Lesa and I shot a lot of photos and I helped her along with her camera settings. It's funny because she gets the 3 most important numbers on her camera mixed up... shutter speed, ISO and aperture. I'll post pics from that soon.

Got up this morning at 5 and picked Lesa up on the way to Point Mallard for the hot-air balloon launches. Lucked out on a super parking place and only had to walk a short way to the field. I surprised at the number of folks there.

Getting ready to head to HSV to shoot pictures of a friend playing at a club tonight.

Sorry!

I know that lately my postings have been few and far between. Truth be told, I've had so much going on the past few weeks that I've had to push blogging down on the priority list a good bit. Mainly, I've been backed up working on a few thousand photos to try and get them out to clients. To help speed up that process, I ordered another gig of RAM for my main PC to speed up the workflow process. It arrived today and I installed it right away. MUCH better performance now working on large files.

On the memory front as well, I picked up a 4 GB CF card for my camera. Everytime I've gone to shoot either an event or a model shoot, I invariably use up all my CF cards.. up to now I had been using a 2 GB, 2-512mb, and 2-256mb CF's. Those small ones fill up quick. The new card gives me a good bit of room.

Ran some cables at work to connect the network on 2 floors together. We're preparing to move into the floor above where at long last I'll have my own office. That will definitely be nice. I'll once again be able to think in peace.

Lot's going on this weekend. Plenty of photo ops. It should be a good time I hope.

The lobby.

Back porch of the hotel.

Here's the golf course right out the back door.

Clubhouse at the hotel I stayed at in Marietta.

Dave blasts a couple too.

In pieces.

Boom!