Action photos at the lake.

I spent the July 4 holiday weekend at Lake Pateros in Washington State. Most of the time I wasn’t flying — I spent 3.1 hours on Friday drying cherries — I was holed up at the extremely pleasant (and helicopter-friendly) Lake Pateros Motor Inn. Mike and I lounged a bit on the upper deck patio walkway right outside our room. The lake was wild with boaters and jet skiers and wake boarders. On a whim, I took out my Nikon D80 camera and its 70-300 mm lens. I set the camera to continuous shooting, zoomed all the way, and started snapping photos.

To my surprise, a few of them came out pretty darn good.

I continued snapping photos throughout the weekend. On Saturday, Mike and I took a helicopter flight around central Washington and we took turns snapping photos out of the helicopter. (He’s a pilot, too, and we had the dual controls in, so I had a rare opportunity to use both hands and decent equipment for aerial photography with doors off.) Some of those photos were pretty good, too, like Mike’s shot of downtown Chelan.

This all goes back to my theory that if you have decent digital photographic equipment, are in a good place to take photos, have good photographic conditions (i.e., lighting), and enough storage space on your memory card that you don’t have to skimp on the number of photos you take, you have to get some good shots. Mike and I took over 200 shots from the air during a 3-hour flight the other day. I bet we only wind up with about a dozen really good ones.

Anyway, I put the Lake Pateros photos online on a new Web site I’m experimenting with: Flying M Photos. I’m hoping to build up a library of stock and fine art images, as well as event images like this, for sale. With luck, this will fund my photography habit, which is quickly becoming quite expensive.

Were you out on Lake Pateros during the July 4 weekend? Check the site to see if I got an action photo of you! If I did and you want to buy a copy to remember your day at the lake, use the coupon code LAKEP to save 20% on your photo order.