Happy Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving marks the start of winter riding for me. Most of my rides from now until March will be close to home. Although there is always to the possibility of a warm 60 degree day, most of the weather from here until spring will be in the 30s 40s and 50s with usually some type of wind.

This weekend for example I ended up going out on Saturday. At 45 degrees it wasn't too cold but the 25 mph wind was a little tough at times. Luckily I found 3 other people crazy enough to ride in the wind and take turns in front.

Although staying close to home means doing a lot of the same old roads I have been doing for years its still fun. For example I went to Cranbury last Saturday to try and catch up with some people I haven't seen in a while. I did end up seeing Ira and Marilyn but most of the other people I really didn't know. I ended up leading the ride, because Ira is not feeling well, and chose to do the standard Rue's Road route that Don taught me years ago. I hadn't been that way in about 6 months and forgot how much I enjoy that route.

A couple weeks ago I went on Ken's ride and ended up going to Delicious Orchards which I had never been to on a bike. It was a nice ride and I see a couple of other people are heading there also so I may go back again over the winter. Here is a route to Delicious Orchards that I came up with.

So even though I am staying close to hope in the winter it doesn't mean that riding is boring just a little colder and windier

Camera Tricks

This falls has been disappointing from a photographic point of view. The weather has been rainier and colder than normal which resulted in less then spectacular foliage. I went out to the hills of the Sourlands this pass weekend for a ride but the only thing I took pictures of was a few cows. Laura had on these funky tights that have a weird sequence pattern on them that kind of look like tiny fireworks going. While taking a picture of the cows I snapped a picture of the tights but to accentuate there brightness I made changed some setting on the camera to make the tights look brighter then they really are.

Over this year I have been experimenting with all the setting on my camera and now have a good understanding of what you can do with aperture, shutter speed, ISO and all the other settings on my camera. I don't know if this has help me take better pictures or not but I do have fun experimenting. One thing I tried the other day was some long exposure shots which you can see here. With my camera I can take up to a 15 second exposure. Using a tripod you can get some interesting shots.

For Halloween we had a flashing light that we put inside the pumpkin. The light flashes in different colors and if you swing it around it creates a rainbow effect. I took this light into a dark room then set up my camera on a tripod then moved the light around in front of the camera a different speeds. As you can see this produced some interesting pictures and made up for the fact that the fall colors weren't that good this year.