And no, I don’t care about the commercials either.

Last night when the Stupor Bowl was about half-done I fled fromTwitter and Facebook to write this blog post until it was all over. However, in defense of the Stupor Bowl (defense – get it?) I will say this: there is someone I dislike so much that I did actually want the Seahawks to win, because this person is the most ridiculous Patriots fan I’ve ever seen – it’s practically his entire identity. So it’s really true how they say hate destroys the soul, because my hatred for this person actually made me care just slightly who won the Stupor Bowl. Of course I now know the dude is going to be intolerable for the near future; all the more reason to avoid him more than I already do. Moving on.

As I ramble I will share some more airplane photos as well as a few random others I’ve edited the past two weeks and have yet to upload. I didn’t realize how behind I am on sharing plane shots; there’s a whole slew of ’em to show. So, here you go:

That baby right there is a British Airways Boeing 747; it was the biggest plane I saw when I went planespotting last Saturday; really impressive. I took several shots of it:

This next shot was taken at the same time of day, but on its own it was rather boring, so I decided to really go for broke with my Topaz filters and attempt to make it a sunset shot. Judge for yourself how it turned out:

It’s not perfect, and personally I can tell where I did a little cloning to edit out the stupid wig hairs that were on my lens, but overall it came out better than I expected. For grins, here’s a before and after collage:

There were several pretty cool planes that landed that day on a different runway, so although I was able to snap photos of them, they were quite far away and my telephoto couldn’t handle the distance; at some point I’ll have to cough up a LOT of dough for a 100-400, I think. This one is great, but when it comes to planes I still could use more zoom. Anyway, I went ahead and processed the teeny little shots I have because, what the hell, I was there and I took them, but they aren’t thrilling at all:

Lufthansa #LH440 Airbus A380-800 flying in from Frankfurt

Volga-Dnepr Antanov AN-124 #RA-82045, flying in from Paramaribo; the photo was crappy so I played around with editing to pretend like it was intentional. It wasn’t.

Star Alliance flight; couldn’t read the registration number to get any information about this one.

US Airways Airbus A320-232; flying in from Phoenix. Couldn’t make out the registration number on this one either.

One thing I tried to do this time out was take some interesting close-ups of parts of the plane I don’t usually photograph, just to see how that turned out. I was seeing loads of United Airlines planes, since IAH is their home base, and I knew I didn’t want to sort through thousands of shots of the same plane to get to the unusual ones, so I got a little creative when they flew by to give me some images to mess with later. Here’s what I came up with – all of these shots are of United Airways (which I still want to call Continental) Boeing 777 #N78003, flying in from Amsterdam:

Wheels! Yay?

Love me some lens flare

Fuselage – YEP

Then, I also took a shot to show how close the traffic was coming in that day (between 3 and 6 PM seems to be the best time to go on a Saturday as far as air traffic goes):

There’s one gaining on ya!

Believe it or not, I still have a bunch of shots to edit, but we’ll see if I get time to do so this week. Let’s close this out with a few shots of Simon, who can always be counted on to provide me with a few poses whenever he’s around. I think this first one was taken during one of my purse shoots; I had a stool with a black blanket over it in front of a black background to photograph the purses, and at some point Simon leapt up there and made himself at home. Of course, much posing ensued:

And here’s one I shot back on ladybug day, when I didn’t capture the ladybug and took pics of Simon instead:

So there! I think that catches you up on all my recent edits. Much more to come, just not sure when. Happy Monday everyone!