Fall

I think fall is right around the corner.

Snapped this picture at the end of the steel match yesterday as temps (in the morning, anyway) were almost.... dare I say.... cool? For August in north Texas, I'll take it.

Steel is real

Fun steel match today, got a LOT of fun pics. Instead of just focusing on the shooting today, I tried to get some pics of the group as well - after all - in a day's worth of shooting, we might actually only get to shoot for a minute or two.

It's the rest of the day with your friends that makes it all the fun that it is.

That, and catching your friends goofing up on a stage!



JR has earned a couple of procedural penalties for not following the course of fire. And yeah, he knew it!



And here, Roy does the cutest little bunny hop getting into position.

Ahhhh, it was a good day.

The rest of the images found here.

Timing is everything

Heading out the door from work tonight I was rewarded with a few critters buzzing around and stopped to snap some pics. The light was just about spot on and if I didn't have to dodge traffic on the way home for a bike ride I would have hung around for a while longer....

You can find the rest of the set here.

Reflections

After getting hosed last night on some fantastic sunset pictures because I didn't heed my own advice and carry my camera with me, I threw the camera bag in the car when I left the house for my bike ride after work tonight.

Finished the ride, took a look at the sky and threw my bag over my shoulder and headed over to a nice little pond that I thought would catch the sunset just right.

Didn't turn out too bad after all; I can still hear the frogs and crickets making a racket and the fish jumping for bugs in the water.

Main Street

Folks, allow me to introduce you to the corner of Main St. and Colorado in Rhyolite, Nevada.



I deviated off of a trip to Lake Tahoe a few years back to hit this wonderful little ghost town in the middle of nowhere, Nevada. It was well worth the detour.

Gotta have the camera

if you wanna get the picture. After I missed several great photo opportunities, I just started carrying my camera around with me wherever I went.

Paid off today, as the light was right, the color was right, and a huge butterfly was in the mood to chow down on some flowers.

I snapped over a hundred images, and was lucky with a few of them turning out. This little fellow's wings were going about 90 miles an hour!



You can find the rest of the set here.

There's something....

about shooters and photographers. The more and more I get into taking pictures, the more and more I notice that there are a LOT of very talented shooters who also happen to be very talented photographers. Take Dave Re, for instance. Open GM (Grand Master, the highest level you can attain in USPSA) and a heckuva great photographer. Then there's Robert. While not a competitive pistol shooter, which we won't hold against him, Robert has been (and is) a rifle shooter competing at the highest level. And winning, too! Robert's also a stellar photographer. Albert too. While Albert may not be a GM just yet, he's still a very, very capable shooter. And a professional photographer to boot.

These three guys are just a tiny, tiny example of folks who shoot well - whether it's with a camera or with a gun.

I don't know if there's some sort of correlation or not, but it keeps my mind turning from time to time.

The match

This picture really sums up what a match is all about. You've got two people who are working very hard, concentrating on what is currently going on.

The shooter, of course, is busy manipulating the gun, hitting the targets, and getting through the course of fire safely.

The Range Officer (RO) is both timing the shooter - note the little gizmo held in the RO's hand - and making sure the shooter completes the course of fire safely. Both of these guys are focusing very hard - or at least, they'd better be - at the task at hand.

Contrast that to the group standing behind the action. One person (Rhonda) is ready to score the stage when the shooting is over. The rest of the guys are standing around waiting to tape, and take their turn at the line. And frankly, this is where you spend the bulk of your match..... waiting.

The shooters that can master the art of being relaxed when they are not shooting and energized when they are do very well in practical shooting. Note I said "energized" and not overcharged. Some folks get bored waiting to shoot and can't get going when it's their turn. Other guys get so worked up that they can't calm down and stay so amped up that their energy level dies off and they crash and burn at some point. There's only so long you can keep your mind crisp and focused.

The more I think about some of the shooting images I've taken lately, the more I like this picture and others like it that really tell the story. There's so much going on in this picture - the tension at one end and the expectation of tension on the other; all divided up by a little yellow line on the ground.

Well....

After getting some good advice (thanks Albert!) I've decided to start posting images I've taken. I've been a long time poster at the Texican Tattler and will continue to post there as long as JR lets me!!

However, over the past couple of years, I've been busy playing with a camera and I'm having quite a bit of fun with it.

My sight picture will be the place where I post select pictures I've taken; this will be a politics free zone! Mostly, anyway.

I have a smug mug page setup here, where you'll find my landscape images and a flickr page here where I put other stuff, like shooting.

I don't consider myself a "real" photographer by any stretch of the imagination, but I've got a couple of pretty nice cameras I play around with, and I'm learning a lot, just about every day, really.

The title of this page is an obvious play on words. For those of ya'll who don't know me from my posts on the Tattler, I'm a hard core USPSA (mostly) and IDPA (occasionally) shooter. The ability to have the right sight picture on the target is of utmost importance. Taking a good picture has a lot in common with taking a good sight picture - you've got to know what you're looking at and be able to put the lens where you want it - just like the front sight of a firearm. I also figure that something like "my picture site" would be pretty boring, so with a little play on words, allow me to introduce to you My Sight Picture.

I hope ya'll enjoy the images as much as I did taking them.

For starters, I present to you sunrise from this past Sunday morning, as I was getting ready to leave for the shooting range.