How about a drive?

Marin is a beautiful place to live. Sometimes I worry that living in a place that is so eutopia-esque will eventually make me soft (a-la that Baz Luhrmann song) but as good as things are, there are still things to keep me on edge. One of them is highway 1. Few things are more fun then attacking the curves of highway 1. Guard rails are usually optional and with views like this, it's often tough to keep your eyes on the road. Miss this turn and it's a good 300 feet down to the ocean. ^_^

Fun with fireworks and long exposures

Few things are more 4th of July then sparklers. They bring the kid out in almost anyone. The cool thing about growing up though is you get all sorts of new and expensive toys that can help making things much cooler. Until we picked up our first DSLR, I would have never thought about playing with the shutter speed on fireworks. The big advantage of having a camera with all this functionality is you have some many possiblities to capture interesting photographs. The photos below represent only two of the 60+ sparklers that we went through that night along with several more adult fireworks. First is my attempt at making a hostess cupcake swirl.
Of course, I had to be up-staged by my sister-in-law. A truly awesome rendition of a hostess cupcake.
Unfortunately, the booth that sold the fireworks were closed the day after the 4th so we couldn't try this again but it was fun while it lasted.

On the technical side, all shoots were done under shutter priority (Tv) at a shutter speed ranging from 4" to 15". ISO was up at 1600 to capture as much light as possible.