One evening before dinner at the Mogotlho Lodge in Botswana I set my camera up on the deck for a long star trail exposure. Since the deck faces almost due south I thought it might make a nice shot. I used my portable flashlight to paint the tree for the first twenty seconds or so in the distance and then sat down for a wonderful dinner. Behind the camera was a fire pit which is providing the reddish orange illumination you see in the foreground.
Unfortunately my battery died during the exposure so the trails are not as long as I intended and the camera was not able to do it’s automatic noise reduction, nonetheless I believe it was a worthwhile exercise.

Last week we took a trip to Las Vegas to celebrate our daughters 21st birthday. We all had a great time. We saw a couple of shows (“Love” and “The Mac King Show”) “Love” was very good, although acrobatically not on a par with the other Cirque shows we have seen. So far “O” is my favorite. “The Mac King Show” was a last minute addition to our trip and a very pleasant surprise. He was quite entertaining & easily worth the inexpensive (for Las Vegas) $35.00 cover.
The above shot was taken from our daughters suite at the Bellagio. A couple of months ago I booked a couple of rooms at a cheapo rate through Hotels.com. I was rather surprised when we checked in and the front desk clerk notified me we actually had a suite and a standard room. Since it was Audrea’s birthday, we gave her the suite. A few hours later we were notified that there was an error & the suite was actually reserved for another John Rogers, however we were welcome to stay in the suite for the previously paid rate.  Sweeet! (Or should I say Suite!?) Later that evening the four of us watched the amazing choreographed fountains perform their magic to the music of “Chorus Line”
This is actually a crop of the full image. Since panoramic images end up so tiny here I thought I’d do a square crop for the blog.  Click here to see the full un-cropped version.

I had the opportunity to photograph these adorable cousins a couple of days ago. He is eight months old & she is six months. I’m not sure exactly what he is telling her but she was smiling!
It’s amazing how fast a 6 month old can move. With infants this age it’s great to have pro studio lights (in this case I setup in their home) that allow me to shoot really fast because every second these two had a different adorable expression.

As a side note; I’m actually doing this post from 38,000 feet flying to Seattle on our way to Fairbanks. Pretty cool technology!

I was quite pleased to be able to spend a bit more time working on Jena’s portfolio before she heads off to LA at the end of this week. (You can see images from her last session here & here.) This time I brought her inside & put her under the studio lights for a slightly more “classic” look. We did several different setups & we got a number of great images from each. It was tough deciding which image to post today. I guess I was just in the mood for a bit of purple.