It Happened

Shot of the Capitol on Christmas.

Last year, I posted a few of my favorite photos from 2010. Figured I’d keep the tradition alive this year as well. I tried to narrow it down to 1 or 2, but like last year, I couldn’t pick a favorite.

I saw a lot of improvement and milestones in my photography during 2011. After years of taking photos on a near-daily basis, I finally snapped a photo for 365 consecutive days and I’m still going strong on that. It’s also been fun to document CJ’s growth. I can’t believe she’ll be a year old in a few days! Last, but certainly not least, I shot a couple of weddings and had an absolute blast doing it. I can hardly wait to see what 2012 has in store for me!

So here we go (and in chronological order):

Three stitch panorama

Great Falls Park in Virginia.

View the high res version

An HDR shot from Theodore Roosevelt Island

Final shot before we left to go home.

The night sky on St. Thomas is full of stars. A few hours after the sun went down, a faint outline of the Milky Way was visible (two shots below). It was definitely the most stars I’ve seen since we left Idaho and the first chance I had to photograph the night sky. The top photo is the view we had from the hammock. The rest are various experiments I did. Considering these are my first shots of the night sky, I’m really pleased with them. Enjoy!

I absolutely love snorkeling! On Monday, we went on a catamaran to turtle cove at Buck Island. As the name implies, there are a lot of turtles. There’s also a reef nearby with a ton of coral and tropical fish. The crew of the sailboat took us on a swimming tour of the cove pointing out turtles, fish, coral, and even sting rays. The tour leader even found a sea urchin and brought it up so we could all hold it (photo of Jenny below).

After we got back to the hotel, someone overheard us talking about how much fun we had and told us we should visit Coki Bay. We finally made it out there on Thursday and it was absolutely gorgeous! It’s near a tourist attraction called Coral World, but it’s only open if cruise ships are in port. Since no ships were in on Thursday, it was closed and the beach was virtually empty. The bay is on the north side of the island, so it faces the Atlantic. The water was warm, but significantly cooler than the south side that faces the Caribbean. On the east side of the cove is a small reef with all sorts of fish and coral. It felt like we were swimming in a fish tank.

My only regret is not investing in an underwater digital camera before we went down. I was so busy thinking about everything else, that I didn’t think about photography in the water (yeah, quite the oversight, I know). So these were all taken with disposable underwater cameras; thanks, Kodak!

We spent August 29th snorkeling in a reef with urchins and sea turtles!

F/16, 30 seconds
ISO 200

The World War II Memorial

F/5.6, 1/40 second
ISO 450

The Vietnam Wall