This shot of the main stretch of Waikiki Beach in Hawaii started out life as a series of brackets to be used for an HDR. I had set my tripod up on a breakwater and shot back at the beach area about 20 minutes after sunset.

The shot above shows a portion of the north east coast of Oahu, Hawaii. My family and I recently visited Hawaii and one day while the rest of the family was off on a kayaking trip, I rented a car and took a drive around the island. It’s hard to get good landscape images when you are on vacation with others simply because schedules don’t always allow you to be in the right place at the right time to capture the best light. Instead, you just have to shoot what you are given. On my drive around the island I stopped at this small beach park. It was very windy that day and it made for some really nice surf. I took several pictures at this beach and when I was leaving I walked over to this area which was located underneath some trees. I liked the way the foreground plants and the tree framed the surf and the distant hills. Unfortunately the light was rather strong and created some haze in the distance, but I still liked the view so I took the picture.

With fall in the air and lacking something new to post I thought I would post this shot I took last year at Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. Greenfield Village was created by Henry Ford, so it’s not surprising that the Model T and other old Ford automobiles should be prominently displayed. The museum offers rides in some of the older cars. This visit occurred in mid November on a wonderful Indian summer day. It was getting later in the day and the streets of the village were becoming empty. The less crowded village streets became a nice background to the old Ford automobiles that were still tooling around the village that day.

I’ve been finding it difficult to get out and shoot new material for a variety of reasons, but today was such a nice day I decided to make an effort to get out and at least shoot something. I decided to take a short drive into Detroit to check out the progress on the Michigan Central Station. The owners are finally doing something to at least stabilize the building. Mostly this involves tightening security around the station to keep people out, removing the broken windows and putting in new windows, and working on the roof. Progress is slow, but they have definitely made some progress at least regarding the windows on the lower level. They haven’t actually replaced any that I could see, but they have removed the broken glass.

This is a shot taken recently in Chelsea, Michigan home to Chelsea Milling, makers of Jiffy Mix and also the home town of Jeff Daniels, whose family owns Chelsea Lumber Company. The main subject in this shot is the Clocktower, which was built by the Glazier Stove Company which once operated the worlds largest oil stove factory on the site. The Clocktower building was once the tallest structure in Washtenaw County. The tower served the dual purpose of holding a 20,000 gallon (76,000 liter) water tank for fires and for keeping time. While the Clocktower no longer serves as a water tower, but the old water tank is still encased within the tower just below the clock faces.

I’ve been rummaging though my archives looking for interesting images to post to Google+ and I came across this shot that I took in 2008. I was in New York on business and I was staying in Midtown. I had some free time so I took the opportunity to walk over to Rockefeller Center and take some pictures in that part of town. The GE Building, also known as 30 Rockefeller Plaza or just 30 Rock has a restaurant and club on the 65th floor called the ‘Rainbow Room’. On either side of the building there are entrances which are marked by these neon signs. I was feeling experimental so I took a few shots of the sign using a slower shutter speed and zooming my lens while the shutter was open. Of the ones that I took, this was my favorite.

At the Gilmore Car Museum they’ve built a replica of an early 30′s vintage Shell gas station. Many of the items inside and outside of the museum came from a Shell station which was located in Hickory Corners, just a couple miles away from the museum. More information about the building itself can be found here

No moody black and white image today, just a simple color shot of a wonderful automobile. This shot shows the exhaust pipes of a 1935 Auburn Speedster. The Auburn was manufactured in Auburn, Indiana and was noted in its day for being a high performance automobile. Before a customer received their automobile, it was certified to have been tested to 100.8 Miles Per Hour by Ab Jenkins a professional race car driver known for setting speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. I’ve always liked the look of the Auburn Speedster. There is something about the chrome pipes coming out of the engine that just looks cool and exudes speed.

I recently received an e-mail from Gary Grobson, a photographer and retired architect who had some nice comments about my web site. Of course I had to check out his web site as well and I was quite impressed by his work. One of the areas I really found fascinating was his Circles gallery. I really liked the interesting shapes and forms found in these images. I asked him how these image were created and he sent me a Photoshop action which he uses to create these images. If you haven’t seen these before, the images are created by taking a square crop and using the Photoshop Polar Coordinates filter a couple of times to create the circular image. Naturally I had to play around with some of my images to see what I could come up with.

I’ve always been attracted to images with a strong graphical quality, whether they are color or black and white. When I was wandering around our cruise ship I had my eye out for subjects which might make interesting subjects. This image was taken from a bridge which overlooked the pools on the Freedom of the Seas. The pools have a variety of colored elements which make for interesting visuals. For this shot I simply pointed down at a portion of the pool and attempted to capture an interesting pattern of shape and color.