Back in 2005 when I was stationed in Korea, we spent a whole day at an amusement park called Everland. In addition to some very cool ride, pretty flowers, and nice restaurants, they also had a zoo section.

Armed with my Sigma 50-500mm lens, I probably spent a good 45 minutes camped out near the Tiger enclosure taking pictures. The picture above is probably one of my favorite pictures of all time. That image was taken hand-held from probably 75 yards away. I took the picture, and even I was impressed with the detail.

Then again, I do love tigers, so I'm probably not too hard to impress.

Here are a couple more shots of the same Siberian Tiger ...

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The same Tiger taking a nap.

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And showing us one of his impressive teeth.

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I grabbed my camera bag and tripod, hopped into the car, and drove about a mile up the road to a little bit higher ground. I originally intended to shoot with the 17mm Tokina lens, but quickly discovered that the storms were so far away, that the 70-200 F4L, zoomed all the way to 200mm worked much better.

Since this was one of my first attempts at photographing lightning at night, and it was really a last minute decision to go, I didn't really get any of the "dramatic", sharp images that I think will really be display worthy. I'd like to put a little more thought into the foreground, and the camera settings. These shots were taking at ISO800 F6.3 with an 8 second exposure. (not sure if that was ideal).

That being said, the reason I'm making a post here is that one of the pictures was somewhat interesting, once I started editing, and zoomed in on the horizon. (100% crop of the above image below):

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In addition to the two cloud to ground lighting bolts, check out that interesting cloud formation that extends all the way to the ground.

This shot was taken at about 9:50pm (June 2nd) looking to the North West from Fort Hood (just east of Clarke Road/Tank Destroyer Dr).

At the time, there was still a Tornado watch in effect for the counties to our immediate west, although the cells were weakening, and the watch would be allowed to expire shortly. I didn't get to see the radar until about 20 minutes later. Looking at the loop of the SRM, there might have been some rotation in that area at around that time, but I can't be sure.

This is mostly likely just some low hanging clouds, or maybe some dust getting kicked up in the field. But, it was dark, and there's really no people or towns out in that direction to report severe weather ... who knows, maybe I accidentally got my first tornado picture since moving to Texas.

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Ok, so maybe it's not so much a picture of a beach bum, but it is my friend Will, waking up on the beach the morning after a drunken camp out. Our entire weather flight got together and took a trip over to Kaneohe. We got a pontoon boat, and went out to the sand bar for the day. Then we came back, set up out tents, started a fire, and drank a lot of beer.

I of course stayed sober enough to be sure I could still work my camera.

This particular image was made with my Tonkina 17mm prime, stopped down to F11, with a shutter speed of 1/160sec

One of many, many picture I took while I lived in Hawaii. But I gotta tell you, now that I've moved, I definitely regret all the times I didn't take my camera out and get more. There's no place like Hawaii for beautiful scenic shots.

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There was a box of baby chickens living out in the garage of a house where I was renting a room. I had just recently gotten my Sony F717 camera (if that gives you any idea how long ago this picture was taken), and was having fun experimenting with different shots, from different perspectives. In this shot, I was playing around with trying to get a shallow depth of field.

I thought the shot came out interesting ... and boy was that little chick a lot more evil looking than I would have expected.

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I took this picture from the balcony of my apartment in An Jung Ri Korea, using my Canon 20D, and 70-200 F4L lens. The thunderstorm was well off in the distance, so this is a very zoomed in perspective. I think this framing is much more dramatic than the standard cloud shot which included foreground objects.

When I first showed this picture to one of my friends at work, his first words were "who lives there, Luke and Princess Leia?"

Thus the name for the picture ... Cloud City.

p.s. this one is "wall quality" ... but it's my office wall, not quite my wife's taste for the living room.

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Back when we were living in Hawaii, we had the opportunity to attend a couple of luaus. This one at Paradise Cove, in Ko Olina, was probably the most "touristy" of the ones we attended ... lol, and the price certainly reflected it ... but we did have a good time.

This picture was taken when we first arrived at the luau, as people were exploring the area, and getting settled in. The main feature of the image, is the nice rainbow that had formed over the mountains in the background. Obviously I have many more pictures from this luau; unfortunately, that's one of the folders on my portable hard drive where 3/4 of the shots are still RAW unprocessed images.

Basically what I'm saying is that expect to see more Luau pictures in this category in the future.

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On my last deployment to Iraq, this is the one picture that I hoped to get while I was there. I'd seen those cool wall of dust pictures on the Internet, and I wanted a dust storm that I took myself. My only regret is, that I didn't bring my Canon dSLR with my to Iraq. This picture was taking with my Lumix TZ1. (next time I go back, the Canon 20D will be in my bag).

Given the fact that it was just taken with a small point and shoot camera, I think the picture came out pretty good (would have loved to have had a tripod and the 17mm Tokina lens). The fact that the dust storm was nice enough to come along just before sunset probably helped a bit. I like the contrasting colors, with the blue sky, and the sun setting behind the tan and orange wall of dust.

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Everybody loves a nice baby picture, and Jaiden is finally getting to the age where she likes to give me the occasional pose. This image was shot late one afternoon at the pool. It was quite bright and contrasty, even in the shade along the fence where she was sitting, so I used the on-camera flash, for a bit of fill light. I later softened the image, and enhanced a few of the colors in photoshop.

Although Jaiden wasn't smiling, I liked the way she was holding the hat, and the way her big brown eyes are almost the primary focus of attention.

... now if could only do something about that awful background, this one might make it up on our wall.

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All the of the training areas around Fort Hood are grazing areas for free roaming cattle. When we go out to do a field exercise, we have to share the space. While not "friendly" enough to just go up and pet, these cattle were not terribly bothered by the presence of people either.

In fact, this young bull, and a couple of his friends were quite curious. I took this picture with my Tamron 28-75 at about 60mm. So, I was really only about 7-10ft away from this guy when I took this picture. We got out there early in the morning, so the lighting was pretty good for this shot.

A little later in the day, using my "Bigma" (Sigma 50-500mm) lens, I got a couple more somewhat cool shots of the cattle herd.

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This was one of the nursing cows, with young nearby. Here's she's munching on some grass.

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We'd waited most of the day, but the big bull finally showed up to check on his herd.

That's it for this post, but as I mentioned, there are plenty of cattle around here, so I'm sure you'll be seeing more of these guys in the future.