12 lb Female King Salmon from Racine Harbor

My fishing partner Jim and I went to Racine Harbor in Racine, Wisconsin today.  Lots of fish jumping around the boat dock area, but only Jim was able to catch a fish.  It was a 12 lb female King Salmon with lots of roe!

I'm done for the season with absolutely no nibbles or bites the entire season!  Terrible!  It was tough for everyone it seemed this year, but Jim was able to get a big fish earlier this season only to lose it when we tried to net it near the rocks.  This time, we made sure the fish was nowhere near the rocks when we brought it in!

Balanced Exposure Classroom Updated with 65" Monitor as well as 108" Projection

The Balanced Exposure classroom has been updated!  While the monitor on the floor might not look like much, the addition of it makes it a lot easier to see the sample images compared to the projector when the lights are still on (see the last image above).  Also, the maximum number of students allowed during a class has now been reduced to 14 for more student/teacher interaction.

9 lb Brown Trout - Racine Harbor - Racine, Wisconsin

Went fishing today at Racine Harbor in Racine, Wisconsin and got this 9 lb male Brown Trout. I said I got it, I didn't say I caught it! It was given to me and my fishing partner from another angler out there. He caught it but didn't want it. My wife said it's a "pity fish" for us since we didn't get anything. But I say, "A fish is a fish!" I also say, "Beggers can't be choosers!" We'll take it!

The fish turns orange during mating season.

Yes, it's dinner tonight!

Lunar Eclipse - Blood Moon - September 27, 2015

Like many of my students, I photographed the Lunar Eclipse last night.  The moon was very large and bright at 7:41 PM (CST), but later, cloud coverage at 8:10 PM (CST) threatened to ruin my chances for a full eclipse.  Luckily at 9:47 PM (CST), I was able to get a cloud-free shot of the eclipse!

Farmer's Market

Ever been to a Farmer's Market?  My wife and I decided to drive out to one!  Very interesting to see the various vendors and their wares.

Images taken with a Canon 70D and Canon 18-135mm f3.5-f5.6 STM lens.

Nikon 14-24mm f2.8 Ultrawide Angle Lens

The Balanced Exposure classroom / studio taken with a Nikon D750 full frame camera and the Nikon 14-24mm f2.8 ultrawide angle lens.  Very little distortion even with an extreme wide angle!  Vertical lines remain vertical.

William Close - Earth Harp - Willow Creek North Shore Church 9-13-15

William Close performed on the Earth Harp at Willow Creek North Shore Church this morning. He was a contestant on America's Got Talent. The Earth Harp is the world's largest musical instrument which he invented in 1999. The strings went from the stage all the way to the back of the auditorium!

This image was taken with a Canon 70D and a Canon 18-135mm f3.5/5.6 STM lens. 

6 Videos of the performance taken with the same camera and lens can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist…

"We Will Never Forget"

Tree Removal - Jesse's Tree Maintenance

I had an apple tree removed from our backyard last week by Jesse's Tree Maintenance.  Great job!

Four guys came in and removed the dead tree.  The owner, Jesse, also trimmed back a huge Magnolia tree that was getting way too heavy to be safe.  You can see Jesse at work using a long pole with a saw at the end of it.  He didn't even need to climb the tree!  The huge pole made the work a lot easier for him!

One of his crew had to climb my neighbor's tree, however.  His tree was hanging way over to our garage and he felt it was best to take some of those branches down just in case.  Since Jesse was at our home working, it made it easy for him to do this as well.  My other neighbor who had recommended Jesse to me in the first place came over and had him go to her house to remove an old tree stump in her yard.  The one stop to our home gave him two extra jobs!  Not bad...

I'd recommend Jesse's Tree Maintenance if you ever need trees to be cut down or trimmed.  They did all the work in just over one hour.  They were quick and reasonably priced.  I had another service quote the job and it was a lot more expensive.  By the way, the stump remover machine is awesome!  It essentially chops up the stump and turns it into mulch!

Catfish Caught at Racine Harbor

I went fishing this morning at Racine Harbor, but as usual, I didn't catch anything.

I saw at least 10 fish swimming directly in front of me!  I threw every lure at them even hitting a couple of the fish in the head with my bait... nothing!  I could not get them to bite!

Disappointed, I decided to travel down a little farther than where I usually fish and ran into this nice gentleman named Rick who told me he had caught a catfish!  In all the years he had been fishing out of Lake Michigan (since he was a boy), he had never seen anyone catch a catfish out of Lake Michigan!

He said while fishing, he caught a very small Gobi (which is an invasive species that we all don't want in the lake.)  He decided to use the gobi as bait and caught this nice catfish with it!  I asked if I could take his picture and he kindly obliged.  I'll email the photos to him.

While I didn't catch anything (nobody else did too except for Rick), at least this catfish got caught!  Congrats Rick!

Sunrise At Racine Harbor - Wisconsin

No fish caught last week, but at least I got some nice sunrise photos!  Images taken with a Lumix DMC-LX5 camera on 16x9 aspect ratio.  Manual mode - shutters vary from 1/320 to 1/800 sec with apertures from f2.0 to f3.3 and ISO at 80.

Concrete Poured on Driveway Entrance

Taken from the front window of my home, the Public Works crew are finishing the job by pouring the concrete.  Here's hoping they do a good job so we won't have standing water after a rain in front of the driveway!  The asphalt still needs to be fixed on the street in front of the driveway, so they aren't fully done.

(Edit Note: The street crew came by today - August 10, 2015 to repair the asphalt.)

United States Seal - Lodge Cast Iron

My latest addition to my Cast Iron collection.  This one is destined to be the next "collector's item" because they sell out very quickly when available.

I got this one at the Cracker Barrel in Gurnee, IL. It's a 10.25" model and was "on sale" too! Couldn't pass it up at $17.24!  I've looked for a while to get one of these, but they were always sold out. But on a whim after going fishing in Racine, I stopped by to check on my way home and lo and behold, they had a couple of the 10.25" models in stock!  The 10.25" size seems to be very similar in size to my old #8 Blacklock skillet that was made between 1896 and 1910.

Sorry for the "fingerprints" on the cast iron.  I was too anxious to take the photos and so I did not re-season the skillet first.

A Hole In Front Of Our Driveway

I was awaken this morning by noise that I thought was from our lawn maintenance crew.  But after checking out our front window, this is what I saw!

The Public Works department had put a huge hole in front of our driveway!  With our cars still on the driveway and in the garage, you would think that the workers would have at least knocked on our door to ask if we wanted to get our cars out first!

I called the Department of Public Works to complain and they sent their foreman out in 10 minutes.  He asked the guys working, "Didn't you think to knock on their door first before putting a huge hole in front of their driveway?"  The workers just looked at him.

He apologized and said that we would have to drive over the grass between our neighbor's home and our home and if the grass were to be damaged, they would replace it.  It would have been better had they told us first so that we could have driven our cars out before they ripped a hole at least 6-8 feet in diameter in front of our driveway!  Before they poured some gravel into the hole, it was deep enough for an adult to stand in and the hole would still be over his head.

They're Not The Same - White Balance Targets

For many years, I have been recommending the Photovision 14" One Shot Digital Target for use in performing Custom White Balancing for digital cameras.  While other custom white balance tools are available, this particular device allows you to correct your camera's white balance and then also confirm AND FIX again the white balance in Adobe Lightroom.  This is something many other white balance tools can't do.

But at a selling price of $39.95 on the B&H website, it's often more than some photographers are willing to pay.  Personally, I think it is way overpriced as well, but well worth paying to get perfect color balance.

Recently, I decided to see if I could find a less expensive alternative for my students.  I found one device on Amazon.com and decided to buy it to test it out.  The cost was only $9.28.

While it looked promising, after testing it out, I found that it was close, but still off.  The 18% grey seemed darker and slightly "off-grey" compared to the Photovision target.  It still produced a much better color balance than auto white balancing did on my Nikon D750, but it wasn't perfect.  The Photovision target produced a much truer color.

So while it's better than not having anything to produce custom white balanced images, it's not the same as the Photovision target.  I'd recommend it if you were on a budget and wanted something to use for custom white balancing your camera, but I would not recommend it if you want truer white balanced images.  It seems so far, the Photovision target is still the way to go.

There may be other devices out there that can compete against the Photovision target, but I'm not willing to purchase them all to try to find it.  For me, the Photovision target seems the most reliable.  Plus you can set your white and black levels too in Lightroom using the white and black panels.

The image above was taken with a Nikon D750 and Nikon 24-120mm f4.0 ED lens.  Custom white balancing for the shot was done with the Photovision target.

Sunset at Sister Bay Wisconsin

Sunset out on Lake Michigan near Sister Bay, Wisconsin - Door County.  Image taken with a Canon 70D and Canon 18-135 f3.5-5.6 IS lens.

Follow-up To Maintenance Man Found in Balanced Exposure's Storage Area

I filed a police report with Schaumburg Police Department concerning the incident from June 26, 2015.

After emailing our building management again and determining that this maintenance person was with Harvard Maintenance as a cleaning staff and not hired by Hamilton Partners (who manages our building), I was told that he gave neither Harvard nor Hamilton Partners a valid reason as to why he was in our office either.

To me, it's pretty clear that his intentions was not in doing maintenance work but rather to check out our space to see what could be stolen.  Because of this, I felt it was important to call the police department so that a record of his intrusion into the Balanced Exposure's office space would be on file and that if he ever tried to do something like this again at another company's location, he'd have a record at the police department of having done this before in the past.

While Hamilton Partners have banned him from working at our building, he is not their employee, so there's no way to find out if his employer (Harvard Cleaning) has released him from their employ or not.

Hamilton Partners will be installing new locks for my office as a result of the incident.  In addition, I will now have security every day escorting me to my vehicle as I leave the building, thanks to Hamilton Partners.  Great!

"Maintenance Man" Caught In My Storage Room At Balanced Exposure

Well today was rather interesting.

I walked into my school, Balanced Exposure, around 1:45 PM to find a young hispanic male in the backroom of the school.  He took me by surprise as I was not expecting to see anyone in the office space at all.

I asked him what he was doing there and he said that he was with the maintenance company for our building.  Well, I've never met him, so how would I know if he was telling the truth or not?  Plus, I had never heard of the maintenance company that he claimed to work for.  I only know our building's maintenance person that's been with the building for years.

I questioned him over and over why he was in my office space.  All he could say was that he was checking things out.  Checking what out?  He couldn't tell me.  So all he said was that he was checking a lot of the other office spaces as well.  Checking for what?  He couldn't tell me.

I told him to leave and immediately called our building's Office Manager who did not answer her phone.  I called her assistant... no answer either.  So I decided to call the management company's security team.  I made my report to the person who answered and after checking a little, he called me back to say that the person does indeed work for the maintenance company hired by the building management.

After checking around my space, I could not find anything missing, but I still felt uneasy about finding someone in my private storage area without having had any advance notice from the building management.

I wrote an email message to our building manager reporting what happened and asked that the company look into the situation and to institute better security measures and procedures for maintenance people to let us know in advance when possible if someone is going to be in our office spaces.  While this person was indeed an employee hired by the building management, there was no way I would know this.  Am I to take anyone's word for it that they are in my space to check things out without my approval or knowledge?  How would I know if he wasn't in there just checking out what to steal later?  Or was he in there just to case the location to send someone else in there later to burglarize the space?

I received an email response about a half hour after my email complaint from the building manager stating the the employee will no longer have access to our building and that the building manager would contact me at the beginning of next week to discuss the situation.

Personally, I think I had walked in during a time period that the intruder did not think I would be there and I surprised him in the act of casing my location.  There's no reason for him to be in my private storage area.  Even if he was there to check the air conditioning , the thermostat is in the main classroom area.  There are no controls in the storage area.

I also keep my equipment case in the back room and place it in a specific location and angle every day before leaving the school.  It was moved slightly and not in the same position I normally leave it.  Why would maintenance need to move my equipment case?  Highly suspicious!

We'll see where all this leads.  Did they fire the employee or merely move him to another building?  We shall see.

(Image borrowed from the internet)

Swimming With Whales

You know, swimming with whales in the swimming pool of a cruise ship in Alaska might not be such a smart idea...

Still following him...