Turning My Little Brother Into A Climber

He didn't seem all that excited about it when I told him we were taking him climbing, especially when I said we were going climbing outside not in a gym. But he is a trooper and will try pretty much anything. And try he did! Actually he didn't even have to try that hard, he's a natural!

Seems like he liked it so much we even went for a second day of climbing at Great Falls (pictures forthcoming) and he was talking about joining a rock gym back in Phoenix. Once you start climbing it's hard to stop!

Lightroom 3, Animated GIFs and HD Video. Oh My!

I just got Adobe Lightroom 3! Whoo hoo! So far, so good. I'm already loving the new noise control, the syncing of initial processing settings, and the interface between Lightroom and Photoshop and Lightroom and Smugmug.

Sorting through the hundreds of photo's I took while my brother was visiting last week is taking me longer than normal since I'm trying to learn the in's and out's of Lightroom at the same time, but I can already see how this program is extremely powerful and should speed up my workflow as soon as I get a little more comfortable with it.

As I weave my way through both my pictures and the program, I get easily distracted (for anyone that knows me, that will not be a surprise).

So last week, in my endeavor to turn my brother into a climber we took him up to Carderock for his first outdoor climbing. With my new handy dandy tripod I set up my camera and took a series of shots of Paul climbing. Here are the 33 shots turned into an Animated GIF!

And more distractions, I spent over an hour in iMovie working on a video I took of my brother climbing (I remembered, for once, that my 7D has video), and as I was trying to figure out how to export it to a size that was actually usable, it crashed. And of course, upon reopening, the video is gone. Grumble.

On the bright side, I did manage to get a small, low quality copy of the video onto my desktop before the crash. Here is a video of my brother climbing. This is his first time climbing outdoors, and he's only climbed in the gym twice. He's a natural!

There's a little bit of No Doubt to go along with the climbing! Note: Don't make the video go full screen, it is crappy quality!

Rock Love

A couple weekends ago Paul and I went with our friend Jesse to Carderock for some climbing. We often go out on Saturdays and spend a few hours on the rocks and this time I brought my camera along!

Here are a few of the highlights from the climbs. You can see more pics on my smugmug site.

I gots the moves too! Thanks to Jesse for picking up my camera and getting a few of me while I climbed!