Uneventful...

It has been an uneventful week here in Tulsa Oklahoma. Work was work with nothing interesting to break the blahs. Lisa is enjoying her new job, though. The training academy at EMSA is about six weeks and involves a lot of learning and testing. She had two major testing events this week and did well on both in spite of the stress. She did a ride out Friday night and from what she told me the calls are the same as they were back when we were both paramedics....alcohol and assaults for the most part.

Even the weather was uneventful this week. I guess that is a good thing for most people. As weird as it seems, I really enjoy severe weather. It is not because I have never been touched by severe weather. I have been in a tornado and my grandparents lost their home to a tornado when I was a child. I was old enough to remember everything. We got their the day after the tornado hit. I remember walking around in shock at the destruction. I'd never wish that on anyone. All that said, I'm facinated by tornadoes, hail, lightning, and the likes.

We did have one storm blow through on Wednesday, I think. I got a nice photo of some scud clouds after the center of the storm had passed.

Party

My closest friend's wife had a birthday this last weekend. We gathered at their house and celebrated the occasion. A good time was had by all and I got some nice photos in the process. We shot a little pool and I did not do well at all! I've never been the best pool shooter but I was ever worse than usual. Mike romped me badly.



After we tired of playing pool, we moved outside to his fire pit where we built a fire and enjoyed our drinks in the cool evening air. Fortunately, he lives in the country so we can enjoy this activity without alarming anyone.



All in all, it was a great evening and we really needed a wind down session after a rough week at work. We had our national auditors in for the whole week and it was quite stressful!

Movie Night

We had the whole family piled on the bed last night watching a movie. By whole family, I mean me, my wife, and the two dogs. My wife and I were not able to have children so we went the dog route instead. I think we both grew up loving animals so it is only natural that we would have pets now. Winston and Delia are like children to us. Most likely, we are closer to them than most people are to there children. How many people sleep with their 12 and 14 year olds? I had the camera out and decided to take advantage of the situation.

Dog Parts-Nose


I had my Tokina 100mm lens on the camera so it forced me to be a bit creative and I did a series of close-up shots. I ended up with a bunch of photos that I could not help calling "Dog Parts". I had fun and ended up with some unique photos of the pups!

Dog Parts-Toes

Weather Part III...

This spring is really getting started with a bang! Once again, we had more severe weather. The first round last night was mostly a rain and lightning event. I decided to brave the lightning and take some photos. I was very impressed with the D80! I have been shooting digital since around 1992 and noise has always been a battle with long exposures. Even with my last DSLR, noise would frequently ruin my long exposure photographs. I set up the camera on the tripod and took about twenty 30 second exposures. The D80 does an excellent job handling noise. I have read some less than flattering comments about the D80 and noise, but I was pleasantly surprised. Here is the first good capture I made:



It was the only cloud to ground lightning caught. The next was a decent cloud to cloud lightning capture. Needless to say, I'm still very happy with the Nikon D80. We had another wave of storms that hit around 3:30 in the morning. Being that it came with golfball size hail and tornado sirens, it was a lot less fun!

Weather Part II...

I'm glad I did as I said in my last post and kept my camera handy today. The meteorologist were correct in forecasting severe weather for today. We had some active weather in the area but nothing appeared to be an imminent threat. I walked by our front door an peeked outside and it was plain scary looking. I grabbed to camera and went out. The sky had a greenish tint and the clouds were quite ominous! When I walked around the end of the house to look across the field behind us, I was worried that i was seeing a wall cloud.



It wasn't a wall cloud, but the perspective made it look very threatening. Still the clouds were pretty amazing this evening.



Fortunately, we got away with just rain, hail and winds.

Weather...

We had some interesting weather over the last couple of days. I guess it is that time of the year again! Personally, I love severe weather. I have been fascinated with storms since I was a little kid growing up in west Texas. I took three semesters of meteorology while I was in flight school and ate up every minute of it. I'm trying to do a better job of carrying my camera with me everywhere I go so I hope to capture a few nice weather related photos this spring. I did get a few nice shots yesterday.

This was shot on the way to work yesterday morning. Storms were just moving out at sunrise and made for an interesting view.



Later in the morning, we had more severe storms move into the area. We had a couple of tornadoes in the area, but nothing too close to Tulsa. We did have heavy rain, flooding, lightning, winds, and hail.



They are forecasting more storms on Thursday so I'm keeping the camera handy.

Taken with My Nikon D80 using a Nikkor 18-55mm VR lens