Habitat for Humanity

The end of May, I signed up to donate my time photographing a Habitat for Humanity construction site at Rainier Vista in Seattle.  I had no preconceptions about what it would be like, but I came out feeling like I drank the H4H punch.  It was a great experience!  Everyone was there with good intentions which created a great vibe at the site.  I will definitely sign up for a few days of construction work when my schedule allows. 

It turned out that I was focusing on the people at work rather than the objects at the site, the good energy of the people had me focusing on them.  I never photographed people working, my only experience has been taking pictures of people at parties but I found myself spending four hours photographing people.  Like all photograph enthusiasts, I feel like I could've taken better pictures had I had a nice portraight lens.  But I think I took some nice pictures with my standard 18-135mm canon lens.

All the other pictures have been handed over to Habitat for their use.  Here is photo #66:

Too much of a good thing - motorcycle trip to California

In early May, I got a chance to go down to California by motorcycle to meet my clients. I spent three days riding down and two days riding back up to Washington.  I spent three restful days in Cali, two of which were spent mostly with my little nephew, one day with the clients. This was great fodder for a motorcycle blog, which this is not... though I've been tempted to make it one.  It could've been an amazing opportunity to take pictures, thousands of pictures!  If I only had the time to stop every time I saw a picture to be had... There were lots of lost opportunities, a lot of it because it was inconvenient to stop and get off the motorcycle but I think the biggest obstacle was myself.  There were two reasons - I was enjoying the moment too much and the other one was there were too many potential opportunities.  If I were holed up in a 8'x8' box, I think I could take better pictures of that box than how I handled the picture-taking here on my trip.  I now realize that I'm the type of photographer (or photographing person) that likes to take pictures of subjects that I can concentrate on, ponder what the subject is about and try to convey through the photograph what pleases me about the subject.  Being bombarded by an endless number of photo opportunities simply overwhelmed me.  So I only have a few pictures that I can show.  Here's photos # 64 and 65.

 

Okay, I had to do it... here's a video from part of my trip...