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Olivia was intimidated, even a little frightened, the moment she saw the Saturn V. Once I pointed out the monstrosity in front of her was just like the toy she'd bought at the gift shop, she burst out, "daddy... this thing is so awsome!!!"
Olivia decided she wanted to wear her new pink NASA cap and her tiara. Problem? She made this decision when her tiara was in her bus seat, while she was on the steps of the bus entrance, with thirty people behind us. This was the result of the no she got. Note the position of the cap. I'm surprised Ellen didn't make her a permanent resident.
The "turtles on a hot... something... was completely unplanned, obviously caught from the bus. Best of all was the hyper-annoying power-mom sitting in front of us, talking to her six year old snowflake (and I am not making this up): "Oh Bobby, look, it's an aligator!"
Bobby: "No mommy! It's turtles. It's two turtles! What are they doing?!?"
HAPM: "Oh. Oh? Oh!!!"
I'm not sure, but I think she covered his eyes.
Well, now we know where Ron's actual family ended up. Goddamned NASA parking lot, that's where!
Look, ma! My laptop has a camera innit!
Normally I would not post a dorky pix of myself unless requested. Well a certain AMCGLTD member is in FL and made a request.
What do a bunch of adults exactly do at a party for a 40 year old? Well, you get the guest of honor drunk and make him sing ROCK BAND!
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.
Now for it in LATIN!
Still needs to be shaded. Being at a tattoo parlor from 1230 till 6pm is exhausting. Especially when you spend 2 hours on design alone. The rest of the pain involved, totally worth it.
Thanks Pop!
After watching Ellen try and get shots like this one, I can say with some confidence that it's not the gear that you use which makes this work, it's getting the @#$#@ bug to sit still long enough to snap the picture. Although admittedly having the correct macro lens definitely helps.
And I do wonder if the "rain" came out of a sprayer.
Olivia and I traveled a long way on the silk road, only to pick up some Greman Friar, with sunglasses he found hiking one day. According to the man of the cloth, 'free is always a good thing'.
This is our second year going to the festival. This is also the second year Scott would not dress up and be a dork with the rest of us, so he is behind the camera!
I guess if you try hard enough, any picture is possible. A macro pic of a hummingbird in flight. Now that, my friends, is perseverance.
While this list of things every digital photographer should explore may seem a bit basic to some, it still contains a lot of well-written tips about how to get the most out of your digital camera. Hey, all those buttons and dials actually do something! Whodathunkit?
These are the baby ducks from the San Diego Zoo. No, they were not an exhibit, but escapees from an exhibit they did not belong to. Apparently their mom was still inside with the Flamingos and they were out peeping away. So what did yours truely from AMCG do? I tossed them back through it. Thats right. I tossed each of them like a small NERF (note I said NERF- so it was a light toss) ball through the fence.
From the family reunion this past weekend. My grandmother, my sister, my mother, me and Olivia.
Better late that never. Here's a few from our July 4 mini-celebration, firing off the last of the previous year's fireworks. Not much, because giant thunderstorms were blowing through the area all day. It cleared off just in time, and with everything soaked we even had a reduced fire hazard!
Gramma note: O pix included!
This one was a gimme shot, something I did trying to avoid the security guards. But Ellen liked it a lot, so there ya go. This was the pool we didn't swim in, because it wasn't heated. San Diego's night lows just barely crack 60, so the heated pool just beyond was much more popular. For our own remembrance, our first room was on the top floor of the tower, left wing, second from the left. The suite is on that same top floor, facing front, one-two-three balconies across. Makes sense to us, all that matters.
To me, it looks like every damned post card I ever found stashed in the bedside table of all the motels we stayed in when I was a kid. Do they even do that anymore?
Say, about two miles away, across the highway, and up one steep hill. We tried to capture these windows for the entire trip. This was as good as it got. HDR through a 300mm zoom no less. What you don't see is Olivia with the remote, pushing the button like a trooper.
Yes, even more vacation pictures! What's not widely known is that when a non-profit sells out its hotel room block for a convention, the hotel throws their best suites in for free. Fortunately for us, the executive director wanted to go home on day 5 of his 7 day reservation. Which let us move in. More story to follow...
One can definitely get used to this sort of thing. The carpet was so thick you left footprints.
But most important to me were the memories. We'd been here seven years before, when the organization was in the depths of a financial crisis. People, good people, had been fired. Ellen was only just hitting the rock bottom of one of her worst depressions. We were across the highway, in Motel Hell, hoping the homeless trolls under the bridge didn't notice us. And this was the place, this very place, where all the bigwigs were staying. Where all the parties were. A very strange, yet very safe place, where I'd never be.
And I owned it. We owned it. Me and mine. My footprints. My family. My child. I couldn't make Ellen get it, I probably won't make you.
But maybe, some day, Olivia will.
Remember...
Those of you interested in the Midway carriers should peruse this informative Wikipedia entry. While impressive for the time, they definitely seem to have been a misfire in the annals of carrier design. I can't imagine they were ever much fun to serve on.
A3D Skyraider
F8 Crusader.
A7 Corsair II. About a second after getting this image, Olivia slipped an fell on the all-too-aptly-named non-skid surface covering the deck. Hilarity most definitely did not ensue. However, one trip to the gift shop later and all was well. Shopping. Is there anything it can't do?
Hangar deck from the bow looking aft. The middle blast doors are just visible to the right and left in the middle distance. Despite this impressively vast space, the entire Midway class was justly famous for its cramped quarters. This is a WWII aircraft carrier shoehorned into a jet age world.
The small size of the island is yet another relic of its WWII origins. Straight-deck carriers, as this one was when it was commissioned, had to scramble to get all the space they could for increasingly wide-winged aircraft. The invention of the angled flight deck allowed far more spacious island designs. Even Ellen noted how small the command structure looked.
Again, note the very close quarters.
The radar antenna was spinning when we arrived, and I'm pretty sure this scope was showing a real-time image. It certainly looked like the San Diego area. In the background Desert Storm comms were being played, bizarrely interlaced with snippets of Star Wars final battle dialog. No, really!
Welcome to the Navy, with career opportunities in the latest 1940s radio designs. Keep in mind this room was quite functional right to the end of the ship's service life in 1992
Although modest, this image represents what I like best about HDR pictures. There would literally be no other way to capture this image with this detail.
I have more pixes of this guy. The polar bears at the San Diego Zoo are one of the top attractions to see there. Always on the move!
This is how we feel right now. Sitting in the airport waiting for a 10:30 PM flight.
This cute show was about 2 seals trying to save a ship from being dry docked. They had to save the "Admiral", hence the walrus.
Brought to you by Pepsi Cola no less!
The Admiral. A very large one no less.
The ship! I has been saved! *Note the cute little otter on the guy's back!*
There was a 'touch pond' at Sea World. Basically starfish and urchins. Fun to touch until I witnessed Olivia 'chuck' a starfish back into the pool. Of course, Scott acted liked it was nothing. I was mortified.
At that point, it was tossed. Scott was just glad she didn't toss it on the ground. Of course like I said, I did the 'how could you let her do that' dance.
We hit Sea World today. We started at 10 A.M. and did not leave till 5:30 P.M> It is hard to go through 480 photos, so we are going to do this in stages. Tonight, you get the dolphins!
We decided to have a 'caricature' done of us 3 since no one can figure out my camera. This is the end result. We feel this drawing really does represent the AMCGLTD team. Err..not really. It's a cartoon... well an embarrassing one.
We are here! It has been 7 long years since our last visit! And we have a REAL hotel to boot! Enjoy the view!
Yes, I could be inverting the photo, but I'm not. This is the first helicopter I've ever personally seen that could do a split-S. He did three of them.
Interestingly enough, this was the first time I'd ever seen women actually flying the planes. Two of them, even, one in second solo, and the other second in the formation. They were both really short, but as you can see here (top plane, as I recall), were most definitely qualified.
Good composition, poor camera hold. Next year, I'm bringing a monopod and a tripod.
The weirdly tinted canopy is actually part of the stealth package. An instrument panel is still a flat surface, donchaknow?
While not as impressive as the F-22, this F-18F still managed to do an impressive imitation of a Pitts Special. America has the. best. toys!!!
Clouds are not so good for photography, but they're a godsend for photographers. Sunburns != your friend! Oh, and this guy was no Nancy Lynn, but he was damned good.
Well of course I'm going to try HDR here. Unfortunately, for whatever reason I was completely convinced tripods were verboten. Turns out, couldn't be further from the truth. So while your intrepid hi-tech photographer was trying to brace on any (rare!) level surface, he was surrounded by puzzled people hauling tripods from place to place. Next year, next year...
The highlight of the show was the F-22 demonstration. The squadron only went active last year, so this is one of the first operational demonstrations they've done. Let me tell you, 68,000 pound aircraft do not have any business doing the things this did. Remember that flat spin in Top Gun? Yeah, he did that, six or seven times, on purpose.
Another year, another JSOH airshow. This time, for the first time in four or five years, skies were clear and we got the "high altitude" show. It made a difference.
Yeah, and verily, it is better to be lucky than good. Or both at the same time, if you can manage. After 25 years of airshow photography...
From what I've seen, the vast majority of HDR photographers nowadays seem to want to make comic book frames instead of pictures. I just want to frame what I see. Not as exciting, but I like it better than the "pastels dipped in ink" look I see elsewhere.
I wanted to wait until everyone had moved out of the shot, but Olivia definitely wanted to move on. Snapped what I could.
Experimenting with a live model. Turns out the hardest part is keeping her from sweeping across to me and saying, "What the F--?!?!" between shots. Once I got her to be still, it worked, as an experiment. Props to her when it counted, she was completely still across 3 exposures, in this light, say, 30 seconds. Against a more neutral background, I think we might have something here.
In spite of appearances, I did not use a polarizing filter. Although I just might, next time. And I do hereby promise to bring a white sheet of paper with me next time, so I can white balance outside the camera instead of inside the darkroom. Twiddling can only recover so much!
Turns out you need a permit to take a picture of this fountain (at least with a tripod). Who knew? So this is the only shot I got before I got shoo'd away by the security guard.
Probably one of the most unintentionally enigmatic monuments at the cemetery. Students of a very specific point in history probably know what this is on sight (and groaned at my title for the same reason). But most likely nobody else would, and you'd probably have to explain it twice before they really understood. If then.
Yet there was a time when everyone thought it was all so important they stuck the mast of the ship in its own memorial.
How times change.
Oh, and unlike my cathedral pictures, these prints are quite available for purchase. E-mail me for (my very reasonable) pricing information.
So while the Tomb of the Unknowns has become many things to many people, all of them valid and important and deeply felt, originally the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was erected in memory to all those men that didn't just give up their lives but gave up their very identities in a terrible, terrible war. The remains of the soldier inside the tomb are a symbolic reference to the tens of thousands of soldiers who will never, can never be buried. We don't identify those remains because they're a symbol of all the ones that won't, can't, ever be identified. We guard those remains because we want to express that such a sacrifice is supreme beyond all others, and therefore requires the most supreme honors we can bestow. -- May 26, 2002
It's a musical reference. Go look it up. Bah, probably not even a cherry tree. Whaddayagonnado?
The advantage of taking Metro during a weekend, and just missing your train... an empty station who's manager doesn't mind you setting up a tripod. Three exposures, one of which was 20 seconds, and I still got quite clear signage.
We did a "family day" out to Arlington Cemetery. This was just a test shot to sort out my new remote. More to come.
Proof no matter how stable you try to make it, it's just about impossible to get three perfectly motionless hand-held shots in low light conditions. Each of the three elements was sharp, but I couldn't help moving the camera between them.
Keep in mind my only tripod was a very flexy bit of plastic about six inches tall. There aren't too many tabletops in the museum, so composition was a bit of a challenge.
The most polished aircraft I've ever seen. I'm sure there's a story behind that finish, I just have to discover the person to ask.
There's a whole story behind this aircraft's restoration (last paragraph). You'll find quite a few pictures of this display if you Google "Fw 190 Smithsonian." These provide a nice insight into what HDR allows you to do.
In all honesty, I don't know the story behind this one. It was just a neat plane with cool lighting.
From memory: Boeing employees in the late 80s got together and restored the only surviving 307 Stratoliner (a pre-war B-17 civilian variant) to flying condition, including the ever-so-rare interior. On its second, maybe third flight (say, 1996), something went very wrong with the fuel system, and to save their lives the crew bellied her into a lake off the end of a runway, ruining said restoration. The fished her out, re-did it all again, and then flew her straight to Dulles, where she remains parked to this day.
I only wish they could figure out a way to tour the inside.
Family outing to the Air and Space Annex today. This one is (so far) Ellen's favorite, reminding her of a swirl of airplanes.
Ok, this one, I got an "oh wow, that's pretty" moment. It's actually quite rare I'm able to capture in camera what I'm seeing in front of me. I got lucky at the cathedral. 50% of the pictures I took there were home runs (and I only took 20!) It's nice to know that, in a completely different setting, I can still hit the occasional single, maybe even a double.
Again, not an HDRI photo (the HDRI version is 2 entries down). I wish it were HDRI. Unfortunately the software's assumptions won't accommodate this sort of extreme. But the raw will do just fine for now, IMO.
This one's a regular, (relatively) unprocessed raw file. It would appear the HDR software I'm using was built around a certain set of assumptions involving a large bit of building on a cloudy day. When you don't take pictures that are even vaguely related to that assumption, the results are quite disappointing. Let's hope in future version it'll work with absolute white to absolute black.
But I still like this one.
See! I can take pictures of flowers too!
It seems that current HDR software isn't quite ready for absolute white to absolute black. The edges of the white are actually quite artificial enlarged. But I'm getting there!
Taken at the St. Patrick's Day Parade this Saturday. Yes, Yes SHUT up! I KNOW it was not the real St. Patrick's Day. Do I look like I run the damn city?
Taken at yesterday's St. Patrick's Day festival in Old Town Alexandria, VA.
Here we see the limits of my new favorite technique of HDR photography: namely, motion both inside and outside the camera. Because it involves three exposures, no matter how rapidly they're taken it's extremely difficult to hand-hold well enough for anything to be sharp (note the blurring at the back of the car). A tripod would, it seems, be in order even for daylight shots. I now also see what people really meant by "ghosts". People can move a very long way in the time it takes 3 frames to be taken, and the resulting images are very strange indeed. If this were something I were getting paid for, I imagine it would be quite possible to use the three images to "solidify" moving objects. However, it would most likely take several hours to get right, and at this moment I simply don't know how to do that sort of advanced editing. Maybe once I purchase Lightroom and an associated book, I'll consider such "repairs."
Most of the time, the extreme colors drove the white balance in the camera crazy. This time, however, it got it just right. This very small chapel was simply filled with these vivid colors.
One of the things discussed frequently about HDR imaging is how difficult it is to create such pictures without "ghosts" of moving objects. Personally, I think such ghosts add a very interesting touch. To me, they provide a kind of "19th century " feel to the pictures.
Note that, even though the window looks tilted, the base of the columns prove the camera was level. I'm not sure if this "tilted" effect is purely an optical illusion, or an artifact of using a very wide angle lens.
