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An Encouraging Sign
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Hanging in There
Ain't that bad. It'll buff out!
There’s a car down the street that I heard about years ago. It “lives” in the garage at the house on the northwest corner of my block. Until two weeks I’d never even seen it, but when I drove by the garage door was up, and a weathered old Mustang’s nose was poking out into the fading daylight.
Tonight on my way home I went by and for some reason, for the first time in who knows how many years it’s been ensconced in that automotive cocoon, the horse was out and sitting against the curb across the street. It’s seen better days, but this guy keeps hanging on to it. I think this is the same car I saw back behind a different rental in the neighborhood way back around 1986 or ’87. If so, it’s been like this for twenty years. Maybe in another twenty he’ll step up and use baling wire instead of rope?
Arrrrr! Here Be a Photo!
Avast, ye! Prepare to be sculpted!
They trucked in two tons of sand to Garfield Park on the south side of my town to do these giant sand sculptures. There are three major ones, plus a bunch of play areas where kids and adults can build their own. You can see by the guy standing at the right how huge this thing is. It’s probably around eighteen feet from the ground to the top of the pirate flag. How cool! There was another sculpture with a small boat with two pirates being overwhelmed by a kraken, and some really cool giant tiki heads on another. Nice bit of entertainment for an afternoon.
Okay, by singular demand (because I value every one of my Awesome Readers), I present another photo from the Pirate Sand Adventure. Ladies and gents….THE KRAKEN!
Three pirates being dragged to a watery death by the fearsome sea creature, the kraken!
Heavy Breathing
Looking down the throat of speed.
Every traditional car guy has taken this view at some point in his life – or her life, as the case may be. Some have come away with singed eyebrows moments after taking in this view. I’ve escaped that fate in my life thus far, although I got a warm breath near my face a time or two. This is the throat of a Holley four barrel carburetor, pretty much the standard of hot rodding carburetion since, well, since a really long time ago before I was born, probably beginning in the fifties, but I can’t recall off the top of my head. This is a 600cfm model. We upgraded to a 750cfm carb, and this one still sits in pieces out in the garage on the work bench. It’s a site that’s much prettier than the rest of the workbench, which should be all cool and hospital clean with tools neatly arranged and all that, but it’s a wreck, so I just shot this nice little image that makes up about one one-hundredth of the view.
Table for Four
Have a seat.
Went out to eat with a friend for dinner this evening. The place is a cajun place called Yats. My friend moved here from New Orleans, so she was happy for the suggestion. It’s very colorful inside, as one might imagine, and I just liked the juxtaposition of color on the chairs versus the table and walls. Plus, it gave me a little more of an excuse to work on the fancy-shmancy controls on the “new” software I’ve just started to explore that’s been on my computer forever, but which I’ve never touched.
Sharpening Up
Take notes, kids. There will be a quiz next Thursday.
Witness, a moment in time during tonight’s meeting of the Photo Venture Camera Club. Gripping, eh? I thought so. Nothing like a video slide of High Pass Sharpening to get you all up on the edge of your seats. A week ago I went to my first meeting for the club. I’ve been taking pictures for, um, well, a long time now – three years maybe? – and I’ve never gone to something like this.
They say that timing is everything, and I’ve showed up for this club at the exact moment that I was ready for it. Man, my photo software went down last night, and tonight I asked if someone could help me, and half an hour later I am SET, man! This is the first photo I’ve ever processed with iPhoto versus a much more basic program I was using called Picture Project. This is basic stuff, kids, really basic stuff, but it’s a step forward for me, and it’s going to be doing me a lot of good in the future. Hopefully you will be able to see the results as the year progresses. This makes me very happy, as previously there’d been a pretty big zero in my learning area on digital photo processing. This is good stuff. Very good stuff.
Toys and Prayer
Getch'er ministries an' yer toys right here, folks...or maybe it's clothing and toy ministries?
Taken on my way from one place to another. I drove through a part of town I have no reason to drive through, and now I want to go back just to see more stuff like this.
On a crappier note, my photo software has decided for the first time in two or three years to (&^*^&$% quit on me. I had to jerry-rig this setup to download the photos, which will NOT work if I have to do more than twenty or so pics. I hope to have this resolved before long, but if photos suddenly stop showing up here, you’ll know why. I’ll keep taking them, I just won’t be able to post them until I have this crap figured out.
Kinda Ratty-Lookin’
No, it's not a real rat. They're just relatives. Read more below.
I went for a short walk near my house this evening, and even though we’d had some pop-up showers, I figured it was a good idea to bring the ol’ Nikon with me. There’s a canal down the street (remind me to tell you sometime the interesting history of how they dug it and then the railroad came through a few years after and rendered it obsolete), and I figured that at the very least I could maybe get some ducks or people or people feeding ducks or, well, something!
I was shooting at the aforementioned ducks, as they are a common sight along the canal, when from almost directly below me at the base of the bank I heard a splash. I looked down, figuring that maybe I’d get lucky and there’d be turtle, but it sure wasn’t sunny enough for one of those to be out. What did I see instead, but a muskrat! Now, this isn’t like a moose or a bear or even a deer, but I’d never in 39 years of living in the area, ever seen a muskrat in the canal, and definitely never seen one up close. It demanded my full attention, and now, whether you like it or not, it’s demanding yours as well. Enjoy!
All the Cool Kids are Doing It
My niece riding her bike where it's very shady and I have few shutter speed options.
I had tons of pictures for today. Many of them were far technically superior to this one, but this one is fun. I gave my niece the camera a little while after I took this photo, and she proceeded to pretty much just flail around with it and shoot a bunch of nonsense while going, “Oh yeah! Oh yeah! That’s it!” like she was a Hollywood star photog or something. Thing is, I looked at all the pictures later, and hers are much more fun and cooler than the ones I tried to do *just right*. So, here’s one of the ones I did that I really liked the feel of. Where, like my niece, I was much more loose about how I was shooting. As seemed to suggest, it’s just for fun. I showed her how to hold the camera, but she gave me a lesson in perspective.
Oh, and believe it or not, I had another pic with a little more drama to it, but it involved yet another car accident near work – ambulances, police cars, the whole nine yards. I was even taking a different route home! Maybe I should start taking the bus.
It’s Hot in There
The photo quality is bad, but it was better than yet another flower pic.
The photo quality on this one is pretty terrible. Wanna guess what’s going on? I’m not telling, but if the pic was better you might be able to figure it out. Maybe it’s a little more obvious than it seems to me that it would be. I didn’t plan on using this photo at all. In fact, when I shot it I was sure I wouldn’t use it, but I have tons of flower photos from today because I was doing tests with the white balance setting and seeing how it affected colors. I just gave you a flower a few days ago. I’m not going to start repeating myself within the first week of this mess. So, you get a really dark picture of…something.
Gen, thanks so much for all your comments. You rock.