San Diego Sunset

From my room on the 29th floor of the Bayfront Hilton hotel, San Diego, California (while attending an IT conference), looking west through a thermopane window - I saw the sun setting, and grabbed my longest lens (Canon EF 100-400mm L IS USM) and aimed dead center on the sun (to set the lighting), then focused on the palm trees on the hill, and shot away.  This is cropped about 50% and post processed a bit in Adobe® Photoshop® CS4 to deal with some of the flare/reflection that either the window created, or the fact that I was looking dead center into the sun - the original shot had a small reflection of the sun on top of the sun - floating in the sky, that needed to be removed.  Final product:

Where have I been?

It's been awhile since I've posted to my blog, and it's not because things have not been happening.  Early in May, I was in Las Vegas for a technology convention, but for a day and a half, I spent time at Bryce Canyon National Park, and then also a little time at Zion National Park.  In June, our oldest daughter was married, and the last week of July I spent in San Diego.  So I've been keeping busy with my cameras, but just have not found time to post updates to my web site (www.JHillmer.com) or here.  In August, I'm helping a high school band group with their "band camp" and that includes shooting them too. 

I just got back a nice shot from my Bryce Canyon collection, one that I had printed and mounted at Nations Photo Lab as a 20x30 inch, and then double matted and framed at a local framing store in town.  It really looks nice.  Here's a small version of the shot: