Boise State Commencement

This last weekend I had the opportunity to work at the graduation ceremony for Boise State University. Mostly it was a herding cats job but since I had a lot of friends graduating I brought my camera and took lots of pictures. To start, the graduates lined up in the Bronco Gym before marching into the arena.

Instead of sitting through the ceremony (when you've seen ten, you've seen them all) I used the time to do a bit of a photo walk around campus. We had a pretty even cloud cover that diffused the light very nicely. It was especially effective down by the river which is still flowing at the high water mark.












Then the sun came out adding more contrast to the pictures I took.











And finally I returned to the tennis courts where our newly minted graduates would walk out to meet their families on the practice field. Everyone had a lot of fun.

Photo Study: Immanuel Methodist Church

In Boise's Hyde Park neighborhood is an old church that has served various roles over the years. Until fairly recently it was used as a kind of apartment building. Currently they tell us that it's planned to be remodeled to become an arts institute. The point of this exercise is to just spend some time studying the setting in question and looking for interesting pictures to capture. So I spent over a half hour walking around this old church, finding details I wanted to capture and then experimenting with various angles to see what I could get. Here's some of what I came up with.

Be sure to click on an image to see the larger version of the picture.

ND Filter Fun

I recently acquired an ND filter and decided to have fun with it. The filter is kind of like putting welding goggles on your lens. You may ask "why would you want to do such a thing?" The cool part is that I can now do long exposures in broad daylight. There's various tricks you can do with long exposures like light painting and such. Day time long exposures open up other possibilities. This weekend I went out with the intention of doing long exposures of moving water. The Boise river was up to flood stage and I wanted to see what would happen when I captured all of that moving water. Then I went up to the foothills and took some pictures of streams and the runoff canals. I hope you enjoy the results.
Also I might add that you should click on the pictures to observe the full effect.