Captured as we were heading to Juneau, Alaska — via the inland passage.
The inland passage is pretty calm to begin with — I took this shot early in the morning while the water was even more still.
Still waters
Abandon in Place
For those of you that don’t follow the space program in the U.S., this is always a sad time of year in and around NASA. January 27 is the anniversary of the 1967 Apollo 1 fire that killed Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee in a pre-launch test. January 28 is the anniversary of the 1986 loss of the shuttle Challenger in a launch explosion. Tomorrow, February 1 is the seventh anniversary of the shuttle Columbia’s loss during re-entry.
All in all, a rough week of the calendar for crewed space flight.
This is the foundation of Cape Canaveral’s Pad 34, site of the Apollo 1 fire. The steel structure was removed years ago (these things decay quickly in Florida’s environment), but the concrete base has been left in place as a monument to the astronauts’ sacrifices.
A memorial plaque was installed on one side of the structure, and when I visited, saw some remains of flowers that people have left at the site. It’s a tricky thing to get to, though — although if you’re lucky, you can occasionally get to it on a tour of the historic launch pads.
The (old) view out front
One of the precursors to actual photography was the camera obscura , in which a pinhole could be used to form an image on one wall of a darkened room or (later) a box. In their simplest form, these go back over 1,000 years — and if you’re lucky, you can occasionally find one to play with / in. Should you ever find yourself in the neighborhood, there’s a room-sized camera obscura at the Sherman Hines Museum of Photography in Liverpool, Nova Scotia. Although, as is generally the case with walk-in camera obscura, you can’t exactly point it:
So this is what you get if you photograph the image that the camera obscura has projected for you, inverted on the wall. A nice little historical view of the folks across the street…
BTW, Sherman Hines doesn’t get much press where I live (“south of the border”), but he’s a really impressive photographer — go check out some of his portraits and landscapes !
Blowin’ in the wind
On our recent trip to Hawaii, I was happy to see that wind power seems to be catching on there. At one point we were driving along a highway that essentially parallels the coast, and saw a wind farm in the distance. Since we had a bit of time to kill, we headed off down a local road to get closer.
I took this shot from the side of the road (a single-lane access road for the local short-strip “airport”), just outside the fence. Pity the sky wasn’t clearer, but I still like the contrast between the windmills and meadow. If I find the time, I might just have to tinker with this shot in Photoshop to get rid of the clouds…
Poised
A border collie gets lined up to catch a frisbee in the “Superdogs” presentation at the National Western Stock Show in Denver, Colorado:
I like this shot, but it absorbed far more time for post-processing than I anticipated. Let me count the ways:
1) The event center where “Superdogs” took place was lit far more dimly than I expected, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO (noise galore in the original image).
2) Given the pace at which the events took place, I spent much of my time shooting in “continuous” mode so I could pick a starting image that both had a survivable amount of motion blur, as well as had workable composition (i.e., you could see both the dog and the frisbee). Note that due to the lighting, I was able to take few images at faster than 1/80 second.
3) There was still “too much dirt” for my taste in the best starting image, so I used a little Photoshop (Elements) trickery to reduce the vertical space between dog and disk.
So a couple of hours of work later, here you have it. I’m still wondering if I shouldn’t have removed even more space in the middle, but I like this result (for now…).
Waikiki evening
On our recent Hawaii trip, we spent the better part of an evening wandering around the beach at Waikiki. Mostly I was hoping to get a good sunset shot (the previous night, the sunset was gorgeous — but I was on a bus headed to our hotel from the airport and couldn’t get a shot of it), but I figured I should make good use of the opportunity while I was waiting. In this one, you can just make out the silhouette of one person walking deeper into the water:
BTW, I never did get my sunset shot — night after night, the clouds wound up blowing in just in time to block the view.
Dancing toe to toe
One of the constants when you’ve got a kid in grade school is that you’ll be seeing a lot of small animals in order to keep your own small fry entertained. So it was that when the National Western Stock Show came to town this year, we just had to check out something called “Dances with Dogs.”
The event’s put on by a local group of people who dance with their dogs to keep them (both humans and canines) entertained and exercised. Here’s a miniature poodle dancing with her human:
I just love the engrossed look on the little dog’s face…
This blue merle Australian Shepherd was also part of the dancing:
Danglers
I saw these orchids along the trail to Akaka Falls in Hawaii, and just had to grab a quick shot or two:
Handy spot they were in, hanging from a tree right next to the trail, but with the background vegetation about 100 yards distant. I almost cloned out the little bugs on the blooms, but left them in so this image wouldn’t look too “antiseptic” — but I’m still waffling on this point, so may have to revisit the image. What do you think?
Beach ball
A farewell shot of Hawaii — this, from the Kekaha Kai State Park, just north of the Kona airport on Hawaii’s big island:
Thought the view would be a good fit for my crystal ball; my 7 year old should be credited with the name for the post. Originally posted on 12/30/2009 over on the old blog; on Flickr over here.
Red alignment
We’ve got relatives in Arizona, so occasionally when we’re visiting we get an opportunity to drop in on some local attractions. On one trip I thought I’d experiment with a long-exposure nighttime shot of one of the telescope domes at Flagstaff’s Lowell Observatory:
It’s odd, but once your eyes get adjusted to the lighting, you don’t particularly notice its red coloration.