Well, I’m still learning my way through Adobe Lightroom. So many, too many options there. And it seems as if each time I return to a photo, I “develop” it slightly differently. I suppose that as I get more experienced with it, I’ll develop something resembling a style.

Anyway, I was going kind of nuts last night because it was a full moon over the sea, and I wanted to capture a shot of the moon in the upper right corner, the lit up villages along the coast in the lower left corner.

Those of you with far more experience than I know what I ran into. A full moon is much brighter than you realize. So despite trying all sorts of combinations of F stops, shutter speeds, ISOs, I ended up with shots where the moon was relatively well exposed and you couldn’t see the villages, or you could see the villages and the moon was a giant white blob. I suppose the answer is to do this in stages – two separate pics photoshopped together – yet I think there must be some way to capture this in one photo. Which means I’m either up against my limitations as a photographer or up against the limitations of my camera.

I finally settled on this shot of the villages along the coast.

11:42 PM, 46mm, 2 seconds at f/4.5, ISO 1600. And that last bit means some noise, duh. Because I had the ISO set to auto, duh. Next clear night like this I’ll drop the ISO down to 400, 600, 800, and go for longer exposures. But this shot has nice detail, check out the full sized version.

And in the morning, a gorgeous sunrise.

5:35 AM, 12mm, ISO 200, 1/40 second at f/3.8. Played around a bit in Lightroom to restore the pinkish red on the clouds. Click on the photo for the full sized version, it looks nicer than the thumbnail above.

Well, if the best way to improve as a photographer is to just keep on taking picture after picture, that’s what I’m doing.

Tips and comments always welcomed. (Luke, thanks for the reminder to clean my sensor. I really need to clean my monitor and get it more properly calibrated.)

We’ve all got our guilty pleasures in music, right? Abba, Michael Jackson, Monkees … Leonard Bernstein was a fan of the New York Rock & Roll Ensemble fer crissakes.

So I loves me some Lady Gaga. I suspect that most of my readers either hate her or just don’t know who she is. And with just one hit album so far, of course it’s too soon to know if we’ll even remember her in five years. But I think she’s the Madonna of the 00’s. My pulse quickens a little bit every time I hear “Just Dance” – even though I’ve heard it dozens, if not hundreds of times by now. It’s consummate pop music.

And whether you think she’s a beauty or a buttaface, her public fashion sense makes a statement. Half the time she just completely cracks me up with some of the stuff she steps out in. Like this pic, grabbed from Celebitchy:

And I quite like the gallery over at Bastardly, from which I grabbed these two shots:

And if you wanna see her full-on topless, check this out over at Inquisitr.

I hope she sticks around.

Or maybe I’m just not getting enough sleep these days.

Gmail is finally out of beta!!!!!!