My wife and I were at the University of Minnesota Landscape Arboretum on Sunday for a bit. Here some fun shots you might enjoy.

My niece, Callie Lee, was born 2 weeks ago on Sunday. Callie was born 8 weeks premature (she weighted in at only 3lbs 5.6oz and measured 16 1/2 inches long at birth), so she has been in the Minneapolis Children’s Hospital’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) since she was born, and will be in a hospital for another 4-6 weeks before she can go home, if all goes well.

As of today Callie is doing quite well and hopefully will be moving to the St. Cloud hospital soon to be closer to her mom and dad. She is amazingly cute and looks quite healthy (if you ignore the feeding tube going in her nose and all of the wires from the sensors that are connected to her).

My sister asked me to bring my camera with when I visited tonight. Getting good pictures in a NICU is not easily done without a professional camera. The unit is intentionally kept fairly dark, and the flash from a point and shot camera (pocket digital camera) tends to glare off of the glass of the isolettes (incubators). It is during times like this that I really love the low light ability of my Canon 5D camera and 24-70 2.8L lens.

I love taking pictures of babies and kids. Despite the risk of sounding sappy, I will admit it makes me feel all warm and bubbly inside. Knowing Callie and my sister are healthy and doing fine also makes me feel that way, so by the time I was done taking pictures and visiting tonight I was feeling pretty good about life.

Enough talk, here are some of my favorites. The complete listing of photos can be found on my galleries page.

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.