I recently purchased the Pentax Optio W90 as a great little walking around camera.  It is dustproof, drop proof and water proof so it should be good to survive hikes, swims and climates I would not take my DSLR into.  It also has all of the features one would expect in a modern point and shoot camera, such as face and smile detection and HD video.  It also has a very nifty digital microscope mode and three LEDs on the front to help with super macro shots.  Other scene modes round out a very complete feature set (pet mode, landscape, night scene and night portrait modes, etc).  This is not a full review of the camera, there are plenty of those already around on the Internet; this is just a summary with some shots taken in my first few days with the camera.

A self-portrait taken with the camera at arms length while underwater in the pool.

My son doing a cannonball into the pool.

A beetle dining on a Hibiscus flower.

Some mushrooms growing out of some mulch.

I went out very early today to see if I could get some pictures of today’s lunar eclipse, but unfortunately the moon dipped below my horizon too soon.  I was out early enough to see the ISS fly overhead, but I didn’t have my camera setup.  I took some pictures at the reservoir, but wasn’t getting anything special so I picked up and left.  I was almost home when I saw the sun through some haze/fog and headed for the Oley farm fields.  I am pretty happy with the results.  I used a Cokin P121 (ND8) graduated neutral density filter on these to that I could get a well exposed foreground without an overexposed sky.  I mainly used cloudy white balance, using tungsten on one (look for the one that is blue ).  I pushed the contrast on some of these but other than that these are not processed.

My son was kind enough to pose for some shots at sunset while out with his new longboard. I used a single strobe on a Cactus V2S wireless trigger to add a little drama to the lighting.

On this one I also used a Graduated Neutral Density Filter to darken the sky, which made the clouds more dramatic

And finally on this one I used the strobe, GND and processed it with a couple of layers and blending to add even more drama.

Continuing my frequent Saturday morning sunrise series (when the weather cooperates and I can get myself up that early). I actually wanted to go to Hopewell Furnace, but the gates were closed and locked so I went a little further down the road to French Creek State Park and took some pictures of the sun rising over Hopewell Lake.

The last one with the boats is an HDR processed from a single RAW file saved 4 times (0 to +3 EV), processing was done using Photomatix.

Usually when I see a picture I took that has harsh shadows it quickly gets rejected. But, sometimes shadows can actually enhance an image. Below there are two images of essentially the same picture, the difference being the introduction of a light modifier.

The light from the side adds some contrast/texture on both, which you can see on the wall in the background. But when the side light was shot through some blinds the texture of the plaster on the wall seems to stand out even more. At least it does in my opinion. What do you think?

When I say “shoot through blinds”, I am referring to a flash. I actually wanted to shoot this using natural light, but it was rainy when I took this and since I had wanted the warm tones of a sunset I used a CTO gel on that flash. I used two other flashes as well; one with a DIY grid snoot to light the roses and another bare to provide fill for the pears and grapes. As a friend put it you can “create a whole nother world” using nothing more than flashes, light modifiers and some creativity.