Quick update.

Life has been flying by. Speaking of flying, I'm off to Chicago early tomorrow morning. I'll be there the rest of the week for some corporate stuff. With any luck I'll get home late Friday night and have a weekend off to kick back. Sort of forgot what a weekend off is like.

We got a police training class in last week. It was touch and go with the rain. We had a couple of sprinkles but the main bit seemed to just wrap around us and leave us alone. For once I had the chance to spend a lot of time taking photos. I'm shooting in raw these days. I actually filled the Nikon's memory card. There's a lot of great pictures to process. In the meantime, I pulled a couple out to share. Look for more photos and stories later. We were at an airport as well as the track. There's some photos of planes and motorcycles almost sharing the same space.

Here's a photo of Laurie's bike. Somehow I managed to make the bike pop out by using the telephoto to compress the scene and a large aperature to blur the background. I can almost do this on purpose, now!

This is Scott's Duc at the end of a maximum braking demo run at 70 mph. The forks are fully compressed and the front tire is squashed down a bit. Scott's darn good. This bike doesn't have ABS, either.

My fellow instructor Dan was mugging for the camera. Interestingly, the camera was dangling from my hand at the time. I shot this one from the hip. Sometimes those work out.

One great side affect was that I got my new rear tire properly scrubbed in. It's always worth a bit of bragging rights when you scrub the Metzeler elephants off a tire.

I took some action shots of Laurie then she returned the favor using my camera and 70-300mm lense. I told her to get my best side. Apparently we have a difference of opinion about which side that is. Most of her shots are of my backside.


I experimented with panning. It's surprisingly hard to get just right. This one came out halfway well. The background is blurred. The bike is almost focused sharply. You can still see some motion in the wheels. I should clone out the cyclone fence rail at the bottom. Still, though, it does convey a sense of speed, doesn't it? Not bad for the first practice session, if I say so myself. The vibration resistance in the Nikon lense works quite well. This is hand held at 170 mm focal length with a 1/100 shutter speed. All while moving the camera to follow the bike.



Later in the week I had to go look at some stuff on this fancy house. Factory rep and all that. The contractor tells me the house itself cost almost two million dollars. Funny. To me it looks like an industrial office building. It's very stark inside. Quite sterile. To each their own, I guess. The great news is that I took the back way into Newberg. In the process I discovered a road called Bald Peak Road. It's really windy as it goes up and over the hill then down the other side. The view from the top of the peak is outstanding.



Taught a class this weekend. Saturday was almost sunny. We got drenched on Sunday. That seems to be the normal pattern anymore. Great stories from this class, too. Plenty of material, just have to write it all down sometime.



It looks like things will finally settle down once I get the Chicago thing over with. Look for posts on cornering, downhill curves, braking, and the old "lay it down" thing. There are also plenty of great stories locked up. The plan is to revive the energy here. Thanks to those who have been hanging in here during the quiet time.

Miles and smiles,

Dan