Rushing through the rain, with heads held low under umbrellas, we sometimes miss the obvious.

Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan.

On my way out the door to catch an early flight, I noticed the sun rising over the city. The sky was a brilliant orange-red colour and I just had to capture it. Screw the waiting taxi, I thought. And I grabbed my camera.

Just as luck would have it, a flock of birds flew across the scene, adding some life to the image. I’m really happy with this one!

This image is unaltered, except for being cropped. It was shot through my living room window, in manual mode (which is rare for me to use, but was a lesson learned from my shots of the sun rising over Uluru in Australia). I basically set the aperture and adjusted the metering until the results met my liking. My lesson learned from this shot: I should have used a better lens, like my 70-200L. Oh well, next time…

Another shot of Uluru and the Australian outback.  Shot at 10mm you can really get a feel for how unique Uluru (Ayers Rock) really is in the vast outback.   There is nothing around it for many, many kilometers and the top of Uluru is about 1100 feet high so it really stands out .

This may not be the world’s largest monolith (some claim that Mt. Augustus is bigger–it’s also in Australia) but it certainly is the most impressive.

Taken in Amsterdam.  I think this was some form of art or something.  Basically these are red plastic plates hanging on strings over the entrance to a street.  It was very odd, but I liked the way it was illuminated at night.

I’m not really one for using selective colour on my monochrome images, however I figured this one lended itself well to the technique.  The image on its own was a little boring, and the background was overexposed.

The image was converted to black & white using an adjustment layer in Photoshop. The red areas of the bike were erased from the layer mask, letting the red show through.