I got a very spectacular surprise on Saturday going through Morganton, NC. The late afternoon sun was able to break through the clouds and illuminate random mountain peaks. Here is a spectacular photo of the sun causing steam to rise from the snow on Tablerock Mountain…

I’ve been going through a bunch of my older stuff. I’m almost ready to rescan a bunch of negatives, but I did find some halfway decent digital copies of a few older photos. With some Photoshop magic, they cleaned up nice! So you’ll see some re-done older photos in Landscapes, and a few new ones that I’ve never posted (but still from older photos). I like this barn!

Some new updates…new panos, new landscapes, abstract and more.

I like this old house. It’s not too far from where I live and it is very picturesque depending on the time of day and the light on it. This particular image I played around with a little bit, I wanted to accent the sunlight on the building so I did black and white on most of the image but let the sun bleed through where it hit the old wood. Very cool…I also like the morning shot of the combine in the fog. It was one of those shots where you go “wow, that looks cool!” and is pretty easy to take a good shot… Enjoy!

I want to give a shout out to my friends Goy and Darrell, who always critique my work and like most of it. They just picked through a bunch of my photos to find the 50 best (along with my wife and daughter), so I’ll probably tag those when I get a chance…

As per usual, I’m WAY behind on uploading pics. Had some problems with my camera this fall, and had to send in my telephoto lens for repair. However, I also found a great noise reduction plugin for Photoshop, which removes the grain on scanned in photos and dark photos…it works great! Expect to see it in action!

Obviously, a nice Halloween theme going here…

I got to see the ‘tactical reenactment’ of the Battle of Ramseur’s Mill this last weekend in Lincolnton NC. And was rewarded with a nice shot of a shot! This photo was of the ‘Loyalist’ side. If you take the link above to the Wikipedia info about the battle, you’ll see it really wasn’t much of one.

Also some more great photos in the people section of youth playing football, and two new spectacular backgrounds, one of a thunderstorm, the other of the Atlantis launch.

Got some new stuff I just posted! As well, on Transport.castlegraphics.com, there is an entire gallery of the launch of STS-125, space shuttle Atlantis (I posted just three on the main site, the gallery has all of them). I liked this photo of a lion at the Asheville (NC) zoo…looks like he’s thinking of what photographer may taste like.

Well, it took me awhile, but I finally got through resizing all of the older photos…the panoramics are now all done and I just posted them. So now I can go ahead and just put up new photos…whew!

Finally got the rest of the standard-sized photos uploaded (the 140 promised about 2 weeks ago). You can see them by going to the Galleries, and click on “Last Uploads“. A bunch of photos from over the past 2-3 years.

The photo I picked here is a recent night photo (full moon) of an old barn…you can see the blinking lights of an aircraft going over it, and Venus is to the center-left of the photo.

Now I have just 140 panoramic photos to post!

I’ve found a great utility to rename digital photos using the exif data implanted in each photo. Many of you may already know about this, if you don’t, I’m here to tell you that it works great!
What it does is looks in each photo and reads the exif data (provided you have not manipulated the file and that your camera date is correct), and then you can choose the format you want it to rename them to. If you have a lot of photos like I do, this tool can be very handy, especially if your camera has taken so many photos that it has stepped through all the numbers and is going around again. Go to Digicamsoft to read more and download the file.

I don’t plan to be political on this site, but I took this a few years before the great world financial crisis of 2008, and I think it gives a good representation of the state of American industry. Let’s hope we get our act together! I took this photo of an old factory building in downtown Charlotte, NC.