We got up later than usual, and it was windy outside. I had my normal breakfast then worked up a blog entry and processed images for a stock submission.

I had lunch around 12:10 of Clif Bars while reading some of the August 2010 Outdoor Photographer. There was some good information in it about processing images in black-and-white.

After lunch, I started to rewire the external cell phone antenna — one last time. The previous rewires were stop-gap measures, but now we finally had all of the parts in place to set it up so that everything was more accessible. Unfortunately, our cell amp is definitely dead. We received a new 12VDC-to-6VDC power supply from Wilson Electronics in the hopes that the power supply was the culprit, but it wasn't. So, I just wired in our new Wilson Electronics 859957 700-2400 MHz Splitter and we'll operate like that for a while. If, or when, we get a replacement cell phone antenna amplifier, it'll be fairly easy to install it because everything's up on a shelf behind a printer, including the new 12VDC-to-6VDC power supply that's ready to plug into the cell amp. I finished everything up by 3:50 and then installed a new cord on our toaster. I was able to use the plug and remaining cord from the cell amp power installation for the toaster, so I'll be able to return the extension cord I had bought to use for the toaster. (You may read more about the wire purchase on the blog entry for July 25, 2010.) It'll be great to be able to use the toaster on the dinette table now without having to get out an extension cord to power it. :) As I was doing that, J made a batch of her special baked beans and some Blue-Cheese Burgers. Then I did some computer work before setting up the grill and grilling the burgers.

We had dinner around 6:05 of the grilled Blue-Cheese Burgers, J's special baked beans, and watermelon — all very tasty.

We left in the Jeep around 7:20 and ...

Went to Dowdy Lake to photograph sunset. We checked a different location along the lake than we photographed from two days ago, but it wasn't very interesting. Then we went to the same area where we had been two days ago, and two fishermen were out wading among "my rocks"! That area of the lake shore was the best for photography, so we walked along it until we found different compositions that we liked. Once again, the clouds didn't cooperate. They lit up spectacularly outside my composition, and in order to capture the wonderful clouds, I would have had to have included people camping in the campground or fishing in the day use area. In the image to the left, I used a 2-stop graduated neutral density (ND) filter with a soft transition to help hold back the sky, a 1-stop graduated ND filter with a soft transition to help hold back the sky and the bright part of the water, and a 3-stop solid ND filter to increase the exposure time to make the small ripples on the water vanish. Then I processed the RAW file twice to further hold back the sky and bring out the foreground and then combined them by hand in Photoshop.

We returned to the RV around 8:40. I downloaded the images I took then downselected them in Capture One (C1). Then I spent most of the rest of the evening IDing some flowers that I had photographed in September 2008 so that I could process them for a stock submission.