While visiting my sister for Thanksgiving I took a break from all the turkey to have some “camera fun time.”

I had a couple of goals in mind while shooting. My first goal was to get some photos that my sister and her husband would want to hang on their walls. I tackled this by getting some shots of their new house and his old trucks, some old barbed wire for the rustic western look they are going for in their decor, and some shots of their kids and horses. My second goal was to get better at capturing clouds and good sky details in my photos while still getting good foreground exposure. My approach for that was to set my exposure to 1.5 stops under-exposed and bump up the foreground when I processed the photos on my computer afterwards.

Enough talk. Here some of my favorites and the slideshow.

The barbed wire shots.

My favorite of the barbed wire shots:

My brother-in-law’s truck (classic Dodge Power Wagon):

A couple of the scenic shots and my niece:

One of the “nice things” (frrm a photo standpoint) about the part of North Dakota where they live is the air pollution from the coal burning power plants and the effect that has on the sunsets. The one below is not at all uncommon. I loved it.

Some good friends had a string of unfortunate events and poor choices by their wedding photographer result in them not getting any decent wedding photos, and I was not OK with that. They are an amazing couple and great friends, and they deserve better, so I offered to do a wedding photo re-shoot for them if they wanted to get all dressed up again.

It ended up being a blast and I had more fun that I have had in a long time. Kelly deserves major kudos for not freezing solid while outside in very cold weather wearing just her wedding dress for a couple of hours (it started at about 50 degrees with a wind and just got colder as the day went on).

The shots were so much fun, I couldn’t pick my top 5, so here are some of my favorites. Be sure to watch the slideshow.

Got to love shooting under the lights. I went to see my Northfield Raiders play and brought my favorite toy (camera…) along to keep me entertained.

Shooting under the lights can be a nightmare. I have never done it before tonight with my current camera and lens, and it took a few shots (OK, the first 3 quarters) to get it right… Now that i have done photography through a whole game I feel confident that I could shoot any game and get good, consistent shots.

I did know a few of the guys playing and got some shots for one of them (family friend).

Here is the slideshow from the night: