Deerassic Park!
It’s a great time of year when Buck’s are in full velvet…they’re just awesome! It’s really magical to watch them grow… sometimes at the rate of an inch per day… into what this guy has on his head. Then, one day he strips the velvet clean into a hard horned rack…which is equally awesome.
My time this fall will be concentrated on these guys along with our beautiful Michigan fall colors. Stay tuned for more great buck shots!
Happy shoot’n!
Bob
Earlier today I sent out an email blast to our customers about the new Apex Bean Bag in True Timber Concealed Green camo. Usually we never get any replies from those, but this time was different. About 1 hour after the email blast was sent, I received an email from Steve Mandel. He purchased one of our Apex Bean Bags for his trip in Africa earlier this year. It was one of those emails that just makes you feel good inside and keeps you going.
Steve and his son Paul out in the bush!
Here is his email:
“Hi Travis:
I recently returned from Africa were I used the Apex Bean Bag. It was a tremendous asset and worked just great. See the attached photo. That is me, the old guy, and my son Paul who went with me.
The bag is extremely well made and functioned beautifully. It enabled me to capture some of the attached images. It is a great product and “I’ll never leave home without it!” after this experience. Really, its brilliant.
I made small “modification” if you want to call it that. In order to get it to stay on top of the jeep seat rail I had to bungee cord it through the bottom of the seat bench and around up to the strap. This worked very well.
Again, thanks for helping to make this trip a success.
Steve”
He also attached many pictures along with it (which are very impressive to say the least!)
To view more of Steve’s great work, check out these links below:
Thanks again Steve for sending this in! We really appreciate it 
Take Care,
Travis.
TGIF, eh?
Here is my follow friday list with reasons why I chose them! Please don’t feel offended if your name isn’t in here. I try my best to include everyone I have tweeted with over the past week.
@singraham- met him down at the Florida Birding and Fotofest in April, he’s a great guy, photographer, and birding specialist.
@tribefan4u- we’ve had some great conversations this past week about photography. He impressed me with some of his lightning images.
@snowbabies- always fun to tweet with. She lives over in Europe, so usually right before I get to bed, she is just waking up. She has an eye for photography as well
@Scott_Wood- an awesome lightning photographer. We often tweet about lightning photography and I also admire his work.
@EricBooth- great photographer and a funny guy. Very nice blog as well.
@ChrisKlapheke- one of the friendliest and most helpful people I know. Wonderful person, great bird photographer, and also just launched his awesome new website.
@jpons- wonderful person and awesome photographer (he has a great blog as well!) he is definetly worth following.
@BobPeltz- President of EPG and my father. Wouldn’t be the photographer I am without his help. He is the man.
Take Care and have a wonderful weekend!
Travis
Good morning everyone! The image above I made last night is probably one of my best storm images I have ever taken. It all started with hearing thunder in the distance….I quickly fired up the internet browser and looked at the local radar image. Sure enough, there was a nice thunderstorm headed my way. I dropped everything and got the 1D Mark IIn set up with the Lightning Trigger. Once set up, I went back down to the computer to monitor the radar (just to make sure it was actually going to get here). It then started to rain like it was going out of style. It rained for about 20 minutes, afterwords the lightning was more visible. I walked back upstairs and kept seeing flashes in the distance, but nothing too major. A few of the flashes were so bright that it hurt my eyes.
This was captured at 12:30 at night. Looks like a day time image due to the lightning flash.
After the storm was over Lake Huron, there was good cloud to cloud lightning, but I didn’t capture it unfortunately. So once I didn’t see any lightning flashes for about 10 minutes, I noticed a interesting cloud looming over my hometown of Rogers City, Michigan. The city lights were reflecting off of it, enhancing the dramatic detail. I thought I would be able to capture it on my camera. I turned off the lightning trigger, set the camera to BULB mode, pointed the lens towards Rogers City, and held down the shutter for approximately 25 seconds. During those 25 seconds, a small lightning flash acted like a strobe light in the sky, for it illuminated the background, helping the cloud above Rogers City to stand out even more. When I saw the lightning, I thought to myself, well there goes my image (probably over exposed in some spots now). That wasn’t the case, that little lightning bolt made the image. Without it, it would have been a boring shot. Below is the same image as the first one, except this one didn’t have the lightning flash.
Take Care,
Travis.
And the Winner is…..(queue drum roll please….) Rhonda Holcomb (@happeningsphoto)!!! Congratulations Rhonda! We are in the process of contacting you as I type this.
**A big thanks to everyone that participated in this giveaway, if you didn’t win, don’t be discouraged. I plan on having a lot more gear giveaways in the future (maybe even an unreleased product) Wait, what??
Welcome to Essential Photo Gear’s… Gear giveaway. I’m going to keep this post to the point. The rules are very simple. Leave a comment to this blog post or “tweet” this message on twitter, “Essential Photo Gear is having a photo gear giveaway, click the link for more info http://tinyurl.com/mlahtz ”
What can you win?
The winner can choose one of the following prizes: an Apex Bean Bag (black or camo), Kwik Camo Photography Blind (you choose the camo pattern), or an Apex Tripod Belt (you can choose Max-4 camo or black).
On Sunday, August 2nd, 2009 we will announce the winner. The process of selecting the winner will be completely random. Once the winner has been chosen we will make an announcement on this blog and also on our Twitter accounts (@TravisPeltz and @BobPeltz). The winner will then be contacted and their prize will be shipped out.
*This contest is worldwide. USPS will be used as the shipping method for outside of the USA. UPS will be used for inside the USA.
