Well, both my website and my Flickr pages have been noticeably quiet for a while. My only excuses are that I’ve been trying to keep my computer turned off more often (in an attempt to save power and be more green) and I’ve been trying to get back into my old habit of voraciously reading anything I can get my hands on. At last count, I’ve read 5 books in the last month and a half and am in the middle of 3 other books as I type this.

In the void, Lauren’s mom stopped out to visit for a week and Lauren and I also took a trip back east to visit my parents for both vacation and to get more wedding plans set in stone. Lauren toured the campus with her mother and I took a few days off to show her Mt. Lemmon and the Desert Museum. The trip back east was great; we spend a lot of time at their lake house and did everything from visit relatives, to hike at the local waterfall, to just relaxing. We went to take some July pictures of the wedding location to get ideas for next year and, at one point, Lauren took my sister dress shopping.

I’ll be posting tons of pictures to Flickr soon, so be on the look out for pictures of anything from our kittens, to a trip to the Sonoran Desert Museum, to my poor attempts at catching star streaks, to me playing with some new macro filters for my camera, to the Bushkill falls hike.

I’m hopping to get better about actively blogging at least once a week… we’ll see how that works out.

I was roaming the desert a number of weeks back and took this photo. I came across it in my “to be sorted” pictures directory and wanted to share. It’s best viewed large.

I just ran across this great website where you can print patterns for lens hoods for just about every lens made today. The site allows you to download PDF files with the patterns for you to print. Though they recommend A4, A3, or A2 paper, I found that printing to standard 8 1/2″ by 11″ paper with the Adobe Reader auto cropping allowed me to have the same results. These look like a great alternative to paying $45+ for the custom hoods from Canon. I’ll finish cutting mine out and snap a few pictures to see how well they work.

Update: The results were less than exciting, but, it does provide a temporary fix until you get fed up with it and decide to either opt for the rubber retractable lens hoods found at the local camera shop or shell out the big bucks for the real deal lens hoods from the manufacturer.

[via LifeHacker]

That is the moon taken with a manual 16 second exposure on my digital camera. Amazing shot!