An old-school boat at Seattle’s Center for Wooden Boats:
This was my attempt at a conceptual shot for travel, exploration, and the like. What do you think?
Ready for an outing
Category Archives: Still life
Fonderie
A few months back, we took a trip out to Ohio to visit some of my wife’s relatives. One of the places we stopped in at was Lehman’s — a sundries store in the heart of Amish country, aiming to serve those that choose simpler lifestyles. Apparently they’ve hit on something, because the place is HUGE.
Anyway, I thought this was an interesting line-up:
I wouldn’t have thought of bells as being a big draw, but Lehman’s got a bunch of them in all sorts of shapes and sizes. I guess if you don’t use electricity (much less the internet)…
Jammer
One of the original red tour buses at Glacier National Park in Montana:
These sweet machines were built by the White Motor Company between 1936 and 1938 — and rebuilt in 2000 by Ford. Now they run on propane (93 percent cleaner running than the original engines) and have automatic transmissions, but the originals had somewhat finicky manual transmissions — thus the nickname, courtesy of the driver’s need to “jam” the transmission into gear.
Chalk it up to art
Seen at the 1st annual “Chalk it up to Education” chalk art festival; Littleton, Colorado.
I’m a bit rushed due to some off-line commitments, but I’ll follow this image with some others that actually have a story attached. Soon now…
Honest Abe
This is a pretty simple, staple shot inside the Lincoln Memorial at night. That said, it’s a surprisingly tough shot to get…
You’re not allowed to use a tripod inside the Memorial (some say it’s because the tripod legs damage the floor, others that tripods are a tripping hazard when the place is crowded). Meanwhile, the lighting is… subdued, to say the least.
I took this shot at ISO 1000 with an aperture of f/2.0 — and still, it required a one second exposure (and some noise cleanup with Topaz Denoise afterwards). Curious how to take a decent one second exposure without a tripod? It turns out that while tripods are banned in most Washington D.C. museums, monopods aren’t — not even ones with little pop-out tripod feet.
Go figure…
Technicolor greenery
On our recent Rocky Mtn. road trip, we spent one night in Great Falls, Montana — just to break up the long drive home. I don’t know about you, but I never would have expected to find a scene like this in Great Falls:
This casino’s parking lot display is lined up along the side of the interstate that cuts through town, in the middle of a cluster of cheap hotels. Big hit with the interstate trucking crowd.
A Vermeer of respectability
Seen at the 2010 Denver Chalk Art Festival.
Rhapsody in blue
Another “keeper” from my experimentation with smoke photography:
We just returned from a 10-day family road trip (no ‘net access on most of it) — so I’ll be catching up with everybody’s blogs and tweets over the next few days. Meanwhile, get ready for some cool pictures from Glacier National Park and the Canadian Rocky Mountains!
Dancing with fire
Another shot from my recent smoke experiments:
I thought this looks somewhat like a ghostly person dancing with red flames, thus the name. As before, this is the smoke off a single incense stick; most of the color comes from tweaks to curves in Aperture.
Coiled
I’ve seen a lot of good smoke pictures by other photographers, so I thought it was about time that I tried my hand at it as well. Here’s one result of my first go at this:
This image took a LOT of cleanup in post-processing (as will its brethern) — due largely to a physical set-up that I’ll do better with next time. Meanwhile, the image is growing on me…