La Grange Winery in Haymarket

Late this afternoon, my hubby and I headed out to La Grange Winery in Haymarket, VA.  This was his first time visiting a local winery in VA.  Years ago, we had the opportunity to visit Napa and a few wineries including Kendall Jackson.

I really enjoy taking pictures here.  We arrived late and I missed the late afternoon sun, but I still took advantage of any available light.

On the lawn at La Grange

Checking out the vineyards

Scary balloons to keep out intruders

Grapes still on the vines

Barrels of wine stored in this small warehouse

Several barrels sounded like they were percolating.  I'm going to Google this device to see what it's used for

The main house at La Grange

The warehouse...it's a pretty place

Here's two pictures taken earlier this year using my D5000:

The award winning wines (D5000)

My brother and I took part in the red wine tasting...it was fabulous!  A bottle of Meritage came home with me (D5000)

Website: 
La Grange Winery

Another Year of Cherry Blossoms

A few days ago my brother and I headed down to the Tidal Basin to take some pictures of the cherry blossoms.  Unlike last year’s clear weather, the sky was overcast and there was definitely a chill in the air.  It was a cold and breezy day.  I forgot to bring my fingerless gloves (slap my silly head) and my numb trigger finger kept pressing the shutter release button in succession that resulted in several continuous shots being captured.  Nothing Kodak worthy to publish. 

I did manage to capture these: 

 

 

We headed away from the Tidal Basin and walked towards the Mall.  We kept walking in order to get warm and stopped whenever we happened upon a photog moment:

 

We headed north and had lunch at Ming’s in Chinatown.  We had a spicy lunch special of General Tso’s Fish Filet, rice, spring roll and hot ‘n spicy soup.  It was delicious and our tummy was nice and warm.

After lunch, we retraced our steps (route) and headed south along 7th Street.  As we were crossing in the middle of the street, I glanced to my right and saw a photog moment.  For a dismal cloudy day, I enjoy seeing bright colors pop up:   

 

It was a fun filled day of photo opportunities.  The cherry blossoms were gorgeous.

 

Here’s my brother, pausing for a pose.  I kept reminding him that he needed another neck to hold his 2nd camera: 

A Holiday with No Flash

Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, I ended up taking roughly 500 pictures.  My brother was in town and we decided to make this a photo opportunity and visit local places. 

We took the Metro and headed down to Georgetown.  Here we are at the Canal.  Georgetown Mall would be on the right and Pantagonia shop on the left. 

 

I couldn’t resist taking a picture of this dress (window display) inside the Mall. 

 

This picture is not as clear, but still the dress is beautiful. 

 

We headed north on Wisconsin Avenue and I just happened to look to my left and spotted these old tracks. 

 

Another day, we headed out to Merrifield Garden Center for another non-flash photo opportunity. 

Storage-How about a portable and functional netbook?

I've been looking for a device to store my pictures when traveling. For many years, I've used a PSD (portable storage device)...an Epson P-2000 Multimedia Photo Viewer (40GB). It's a perfect gadget to pack in a camera bag and use as a secondary storage device. For a small gadget, it's actually quite heavy. After a day of shooting pictures, I would take my SD or CF card and pop it into the Epson device and watch the photos get copied. I could review the pictures one by one or run the slide show feature. One could use this device to watch movies, but we're talking about looking at a 3.8" screen. Which is quite small. This device has a 40GB hard drive which I've come close to filling several times. Over the years, I've kept up with the download notices and upgraded the firmware. Currently, my Epson can only read up to a 2GB SD card. Kind of crippling in today's technology including the size of the hard drive and how heavy the device is. Now, I've been looking for a replacement.

I thought about getting a replacement for my P-2000. I've been extremely happy with this product and its reliability. The price for its replacement, the P-3000 is quite high and still only comes with 40GB of storage.

I've done a lot of research and finally came up with another portable device that is also very functional. A netbook.

This netbook idea brought me to another research path that was just mind boggling. There are a lot of netbook manufacturers out there as well as a lot of different models to choose from. I immediately searched for the "top 10 netbooks" and looked at the list from 2009 and from 2010 from various resources. I wanted to see which manufacturer consistently placed in both lists. I came up with four manufacturers that peaked my interest: Asus, Acer, HP, and Toshiba. (I'm familiar with the Asus brand as I used to build computers (many, many years ago) and had a lot of experience using their Asus motherboards). I made a list of the top important features I wanted in a netbook: hard drive size, battery life, and keyboard. Price was also a deciding factor.

I started reading the users' reviews. There were a lot of them. Some good, some bad. After a few hours of reading, I uncovered a few Mac users out on the Internet who bought a netbook. They were buying Toshibas. As a Mac convert, I knew I should take a bit more interest in their reviews which was mainly about the keyboard. I was able to narrow down the Toshiba model rather quickly and I came up with the NB305-N440BL.

Here's my new toy! This model comes in three colors and as you can see I selected the blue. The cover is nice and textured. There is little chance of this slipping out of my hands or getting fingerprints. Many of the other manufacturers are using slick and shiny covers.




The keyboard is nice and being a touch typist, it just feels good to type on. It feels like a full size keyboard.




There's a lot of status lights available to figure out what's going on with netbook.




Here's the left side of the netbook. There's an SVGA port, network port, USB port, and of course an SDHC card slot.




The right side contains a cable lock port, power, two additional USB ports, a Mic in, and Headphone port. I have my power cable plugged in. Also, I have a USB thumbdrive that's acting as my "ready boost"...giving me additional memory that the OS uses.





The newer netbooks come with Windows Starter 7. It's a limited OS. So far, it's working beautifully for me. I have upgraded the memory from 1GB to 2GB. Most netbooks only come with 1GB and one memory slot. So, if you're interested in 2GB, you have to buy a 2GB memory module and replace the one that came with the netbook. Yes, I had to do some additional research for the memory as this system was quite new and there were problems with older/existing memory modules.

This netbook comes with 250GB hard drive. More than enough to store pictures. I won't have to worry about running out of space. It also has wifi capability as well as an internal NIC if you want to be wired into a network. The battery life is awesome. I'm averaging about 7 hours and that depends on how I setup my screen brightness during the day and evening.

Installation and setup was easy. After getting to the Windows desktop, I was on a network within ten minutes and printing within 5 minutes.

Instead of narrowing my use with a PSD, I now have the capability to store more pictures, access the Internet, type up posts for my blogs, etc. This list could go on and on.

If anyone has this particular netbook and is interested in the memory module that will work with this system...leave me a comment.

I will be back to post the software applications that I'm using with the netbook. I've done some research in finding small footprint apps for manipulating photos, etc.

Taking Wedding Pictures

I had a wonderful opportunity to take some wedding pictures for a friend of mine from church. There was no pressure, as I was a backup photog. I'm actually my church's unofficial photographer and I'm always in learning mode. I keep that mentality, learning mode, so I can be as creative as I want to be.

The church's sanctuary has no natural lighting. It has a very high ceiling where bouncing a flash does nothing. I had rely on the equipment I had: my D5000 and SB-600 flash with diffuser and rely on my own techniques that I've learned while photographing inside this church over the last few years.






















Sometimes you just need to keep an eye on the bride, because you never know what she might do next...
















Overall, this was a fantastic wedding experience for me. I took over 250 pictures of pre-wedding, wedding, and post-wedding. Unfortunately, there are no reception pictures. My darling hubby wasn't feeling too well and we ended up leaving before the reception.

I set my camera to take both RAW and JPEG (fine) images. I didn't have any problems with camera lag time. My D5000 did a phenomenal job of keeping up with me. So did my flash. I used less than two SDHC cards (4GB each).

I'll be back to post more pics.


Camera: Nikon D5000
Lens: 18mm-200mm
Flash: Nikon SB-600 with Sto-Fen diffuser
Settings: Program, Single-point focus, Center Weighted
Post Production (PP) settings: Auto color and copyright information

More Hummingbird Pictures

Being Chased by Bees

Sometimes, you have to do what you have to do...to get a picture or two or three.

Yesterday, I camped out on the front porch enjoying the cool 80 degree (no humidity) weather we were having. I brought my knitting project with me along with bug spray and camera. The essentials. I could hear the birds singing, the hummingbirds chirping, and the bees buzzing all around me. The Swallowtail butterflies fluttering by. A perfect day to be outside!

The hummingbirds were hungry yesterday and camped out a few times in our dogwood tree close to our feeders. A few times, I caught them playing chase from our yard into our neighbor's yard.

Here's the result of my wait:









The honey bees have also found our hummingbird feeders. They share the feeder with the cute hummingbirds. I noticed they were starting to swarm around the corner of the porch where I was perched with my camera. It didn't take me long to figure out that I needed to get my rear in gear. Yeah, some of them started to chase me or so I thought. I could hear the buzzing around my head loud and clear. After waiting a few minutes inside the house, I poked my head out the front door and noticed they were buzzing around my knitting bag. Great! Didn't know that bees liked wool.

I'm wondering...do the bees like the bug spray I was wearing???? Must tell DH to move the feeders away from the porch.