Category: Observation

Phoadtography: Checking Out Our Neighbors to the East (Pt 2 of 2)

Welcome to the 6th post for this month which successfully puts another check in the monthly post commitment and thankfully this one comes earlier than usual.  As you probably know I am usually rushing to get these babies done before day 30ish comes to a close.  Not this month, but that is primarily due to focusing on getting these done in order to spent the rest of the month (and some into the next month as well) focusing on a big personal event that is scheduled for September 11th.  Not really talking about it at the moment to keep from jinxing myself so we’ll just let that go for now.  On a side note, thanks to the ass Don Henley finding the need to come out in favor of the PROTECT IP Act (and using invalidated studies and hyperbole fear as a basis – must be learning from Gore), today marks the first day of never giving a penny to anything that funds the Eagles or Don Henley in any form.  This of course includes additional albums/CDs/DVDs to those already sitting in our shelves and god forbid anymore $75 tickets to their concerts.  Just my little way of helping make Donny-boy’s fake claims as real as I can – say, won’t you join me?

Enough ranting, you are hear for one and only one reason.. to fill the empty void when you found out there were even more phoadtography pictures from our Indy trip!  So, picking up where part one left off (link) I give you this sign found on a building as we were driving through a city.

Talk about a bad signage planning.  Reading this to someone would put them in a quandary.  Those Damn Pentecostals! or those Pentecostals are one Damn Ass Company.  If their lucky they would have seen the name of the city (Damasco) as they drove through.

As we drove into Indianapolis we spotted this hotel rising up above the trees.  From a design perspective it was pretty stunning and blended nicely with the environment.  Turns out our hotel was right near this Marriott and could have used it to navigate directly where we needed to be.  The construction around Indy had us uncertain we were on the right road and quite frankly the neighborhoods we were passing through had us a little concerned.  It all turned out okay, but simply heading for this landmark would have probably worked better.

Hit the jump to see the rest of the Indy Phoadtography Collection

Continue reading Phoadtography: Checking Out Our Neighbors to the East (Pt 2 of 2)

Another Check in the Bird List – The Scarlet Tanager

Can you tell I’m !#%!@@#$@ cooped up in the house this weekend with a hell spawned cold?  If memory serves (and it is on the fritz at the moment) this is the third post in three days.  Blogging at least keeps my mind off of the missed training runs this has caused which couldn’t happen at a more inconvenient time… but more on that in less than a month.  To be honest, today’s post is really more about a half check than a full check on the Life Birding List.  Linda and I headed out to a photo shoot at Wildcat Den about 30-40 minutes outside of Davenport in Muscatine County, Iowa.  We were in Davenport for our 3 day concert extravaganza (yes, that will be a future post topic) and figured it would be a good opportunity to take some shots at the State Park.  So we strapped on the backpacks, cleared out the memory cards and grabbed the cameras.  Needless to say with opportunities for wildlife, The Beast was in tow.

For the first hour there was not much action in the feathered category.  I decided to focus on some large butterflies while Linda busied herself with some water landscape shots.  From there we moved deeper into the State Park when Linda (so she says) pointed out a reddish bird sitting in the dense trees.  Having learned from previous mistakes, I dropped the tripod down and did my best to get a preliminary shot so I wouldn’t be leaving empty handed.  Once I had sufficient attempts  from afar, I slowly moved in to try and better the shot.  Out of all of them, this is probably the best one.

Hit the jump to see more pictures of this distinctive bird  … prepare yourself, some are a little scary

Continue reading Another Check in the Bird List – The Scarlet Tanager

“You Know … I Can’t Do Basic Math”

Cough howdy cough sneaze folks!  I have fallen victim to a summer plague given to me by a certain someone who will go namelindess.  As a result, most of my nights have been spent laying on the couch turning my brain to mush with reality TV – apparently this is the only programming on TV these days.  This has been extremely frustrating seeing as how it has prevented me from some important training runs.  The good news is my steady diet of vitamin C coupled with heavy doses of NyQuil have finally gained the upper hand.  Unfortunately, this hell spawn has reduced me to a short post today (besides, my posts of late have tended to be a little verbose so it is probably for the best).

Tonight’s post is as fresh as it gets folks.  This didn’t happen a year ago like my vacation posts, or even a month ago.  Nope, this entry is based on an experience that happened a mere 4 hours ago.  It isn’t so much one aspect of the event that caused my quandary as it is the contradictory logic involved.  Let’s get to the details shall we?  Linda likes to refer to me as Mr. PVC (actually that is probably one of the nicer monikers she uses).  This is due to the fact I tend to head straight for the white plastic whenever I need to translate a crazy idea into something tangible.  Take for example the Halloween decoration (link) or the latest example of the new bird feeder (link).  She nixed my idea of building our house out of the versatile product.  Needless to say, another project is at hand which involves the need to interchange certain parts.  A few hours in the PVC aisle solved the problem which included the three piece coupling pictured above.  A late design change (after a prototype flaw) required me to purchase 5 more of these couplings to perfect the design.  Not wanting to get confused with the half million (just a slight exaggeration) different coupling options available, I decided to take one of them into the store with me.

After work today, I decided to stop by the local Lowe’s store and finish the material purchases.  Conditioned by the annoying Walmart and Best Buy greeting system coupled with Sam’s Club’s “everyone that leaves the store is a thief” model has made me overly sensitive to causing a shoplifting accusation.  Big thanks to those three stores for making an honest person worry about this – all they need to do is add a TSA patdown when you come in and I’ll be turning Amish.  Holding my little coupler openly in my hand (picture above is almost lifesize), I waited in line at the return desk to get a sticker or something to indicate that I had already purchased it.  My turn came up and I held out my coupler and asked him if they needed to mark it.  The clerk looked at me and said “Oh no, we don’t sticker anything, just go right ahead”.  Ummm okay, that is both refreshing and concerning at the same time.  Hey, this company trusts me … or is it Hey, we have a sucker on the hook.  I decided to give them some credit and went with the former assessment.  Fifteen minutes later I had built the 5 new connectors and headed to the register.  I placed the couplers on the counter and made it clear to the clerk there were actually 10 end parts and 5 middle parts so again, no one thought I was trying to sneak something by them.  At the same time I showed her the one I had brought in and told her I brought that one in with me and put it in my front shirt pocket.  She didn’t hesitate a second and proceeded to ring up the 5 new couplers.  Wow, Lowe’s appears to have a well understood “trust the customer” policy.  There was probably a goofy grin on my face the whole time she was ringing up the items…. and then she hit the total button.

Hit the jump to read the rest about the rest of the experience.

Continue reading “You Know … I Can’t Do Basic Math”

Time to Print Another U.B. Shirt

Does anyone recall that wonderful day last year when yours truly was gloating about success at the local photography contest.  This major award (ummm, okay, it was just an honorable mention, but can you say F*R*A*G*EE*L*EE ).   This of course was followed soon by a devastating moment in my photographic history when my wife entered her GRluEAckT shot of a bee approaching a sunflower into another (smaller venue) local fair.  The outcome of that was a Best in Show for her efforts.  Although I did pretty well there as well, I had to accept my fate and put on the Umbrella B*tch shirt for the year.  Well, that was one long year folks and it was time to put it all on the line again.  First off was the HOI Fair (the larger venue I scored on the year before).  Sadly, we were both shut out at that event (everybody say “AHHHHHH”).  All was not lost for the Knox County Fair was soon to follow, but I was considered the underdog based on last year’s results.

Last week we headed out to the fair to see how our pictures did.  The fate of Umbrella B*tch was hinging on this event so we were both a little nervous.  Unfortunately for us, an awesome picture of a fox took the Best in Show.  Our hats off to that photographer for a fantastic job.   We definitely do not mind losing to quality (now that out of focus B&W at the HOI… well, that’s a different story).    So now the HOI event was taken out of the decision process and the Best in Show was nixed.  The good news is we ended up doing quite well in a number of categories.  In fact, Linda and I each took two first places.

Linda scored with her Zion (I think that is where it was taken) water silk and her portrait she took at her niece’s wedding reception.  Ironically, she really didn’t think that shot was that great, but I really like the composition and you can’t tell it in this shot, but there is some grain to it that goes well with the period shot.  Apparently the judges agreed with me.  I took first for my winter cardinal shot and a macro shot I took of a praying mantis.  That cardinal shot finally gets some appreciation ( it is probably one of my favorite shots with the red of the bird contrasting nicely with the snow around it).  Linda paid back the favor on the praying mantis.  I was unsure about entering that macro, but Linda really liked it and forced me to enter it – I owe her a thanks.  With each of us getting two first places finishes, that U.B. decision criteria was thrown out too.

Hit the link to read to see how the 2011 U.B. decision process plays out

Continue reading Time to Print Another U.B. Shirt

Number 9 Number 9 Number 9…

Wow, it is getting down to the wire when I have to resort to a Beatles song for a blog title.  Think of it more of a mocking gesture like when I attend birthday parties and continually tell people “Well it’s my birthday too, yeah”…Yes, I dislike that band.  Anyway, it is literally one day left in the month and I have one post to go to make my quota.  Fortunately for me, I already had this topic planned and just needed make sure I had 5 posts in before today.  It may have been planned, but I needed to successfully complete something first.  If you have been around the blog for at least a few years you know the end of July brings a very important event for me in the running schedule.  The BIX7 race was held in Davenport IA this morning and I was there wearing my racing orange.

Linda took my traditional pre-race picture and I must say I look a lot happier than I did for the Steamboat Race.  I can contribute a lot of that happiness to not having a bad hamburger the night before.  In fact, we made doubly sure nothing like the night before Steamboat happened again.   Instead,  Linda made my favorite spaghetti recipe rather than risk  another carry out catastrophe.  In the past, this has been the race I’ve trained for all year.  Normally I would be peaking at 8 miles the week before the race with plenty of hill work and a healthy dose of 5K speed runs to get the leg turnover I wanted.  That was not the case this year due to a Life List event planned for later in the year that is pretty much getting my full training attention.  This year I lined up with a completely retooled body.  I probably hit the line at around 153 pounds as a result of a planned shedding over 12 pounds of weight since late last year (click here if you want details on some of the loss).  With the weight off I could focus on resetting the body to meet the demands of the future event.  This brought me to a peak of 12.3 miles but at the cost of my previous speed, losing at least a minute per mile on average.  With all that considered along with the Bix@6 training run earlier in July the initial projections was to come in around the 63 minute mark…. ummmmm that didn’t end up happening.

Hit the jump to read details of the race and see the all important post race pictures.

Continue reading Number 9 Number 9 Number 9…

A View from the Zoo

Greetings from the road to Terre Haute.  Linda and I are on our way back home from our trip to French Lick (chuckle) and thanks to being so far behind on posts this month I have resorted to using our travel time to pump a few blog posts out.  Today we have a special treat and by that I mean a guest photographer.  The first stop on our mini-vacation was to the Indianapolis Zoo.  Linda and I loaded up all of our camera equipment and headed out for a day of mirror slapping.  Later that night, Linda post processed some of her pictures for her peeps on Facebook (sigh).  I must say, she produced some amazing shots and thought I would share them with you.  Let’s start with the big cats.

That cat came out tack sharp with nice detail in the fur.  The tiger also has a look of intent as it stares down a small child with a face painting of a deer… kidding, it was actually watching his mate (below) taking a morning swim.  In truth, I would hate to be a deer that came face to face with that killing machine.  The composition isn’t the only thing that impresses me about this particular shot.  The fact that it even came out at all is a credit to Linda’s photographic abilities.  The tiger was actually behind GLASS at high sun.  One might be able to dismiss this as pure luck (hints of a certain sunflower picture), but then she pulled out this shot.

She also captured the tiger’s mate taking a swim in their pond.  Again, tack sharp (check), captivating expression (check), difficult lighting (check) with the added composition element of reflection (score).  All that is plenty enough but yes, it was taken through the very same glass protecting it from us.  She actually manually focused these shots to compensate for the false glass readings.  My only credit point is I taught her how to take pictures in full manual exposure mode which she is now downplaying as just a refresher from her 35mm Pentax days.  This is probably a good time to point out that it was extremely hot the day we were there which is probably why a cat (notorious for not really liking water) decided to seek relief in the stream.  “How hot was it?… it was so hot, even the cheetahs had their sneakers off and lounging in the weeds.”

Although not through glass, this big cat shot was nicely done as well.  It was actually in mid sentence asking us if we’d be willing to get it a slurpy (antelope flavored) to help cool down.  One of the features at the Indy zoo was to test your speed against a cheetah.  I had heard the programmed announcer (Tony Stewart who helped fund this exhibit) initiating the races which were going off about 3 minutes apart.  I was actually feeling sorry for the poor cheetah having to continually race in blistering heat until I came upon the race site.  It was just an electronic simulation consisting of lights representing the cheetah’s speed above a single lane track for the human to run on.  If those lights were accurate, that cat can move!    The heat was getting to everyone that day and most of the animals were seeking any shelter they could find in their natural pens.  The polar bear below was taking a snooze when we first arrived at the zoo around 9:15am.

Hit the jump to see a few more great pictures of wildlife at the Indy Zoo

Continue reading A View from the Zoo

Bombs Bursting in Air

Greetings everyone from our hotel in French Lick Indiana (and no, I’ll never get tired of saying or typing that!).  Linda and I are on a mini-vacation to celebrate our 20th Wedding Anniversary.  To help bring back the memories from 20 years ago, the weather has decided to flashback as well and provide us a heatwave.  So it is in the high nineties this week which I am sure the Globull pundits are claiming are man-made, but for the record it was 105 in Iowa the day we got married which by my quick math was HOTTER than this week.  I’ll certainly save a post for our vacation experience, but as of now I am in a world of hurt on this blog.  I have less than a week to go and a lot of posts to get through.  With the training runs this week for the Bix7 next weekend and trying to get some blogs out, this mini-vacation feels a lot more like work.  But there is still time to pull this through, so let’s not waste anymore time.  In a continuation of the last post, I am bringing you some shots from a local fireworks display that happened on July 3rd. I just took a sampling for this particular post, feel free to stop by our photography website (eddiesoft.smugmug.com) to check out the rest of the images – actually the ones through post processing – there are still a number of them to get through from the Peoria display.

While reviewing the shots for post production, I was definitely in a less is more frame of mind.  Sure, the sky filling barrage and wall of sound is fun to watch, but a lot of the true beauty of the individual fireworks tend to get lost in all the light.  This also includes a wash out of an pictures if you are not careful about reducing your shutter speed or closing down the aperture when they start the huge displays.

There is definitely something in the simplicity that really appeals to me and I think highlights the creativity in designing and developing essentially missile (or rather a mortar) that delivers a specific pattern of light.  The last one is probably my favorite of the single firework pictures and one I’ll probably end up getting printed for my den (considering purple being my favorite color and all)  .  The following caught my attention from a Rorschach Test perspective.  Quick, what do you see in this shot?   If you said a headless praying mantis you are likely right there alongside me in the nut house.

Hit the jump to see more fireworks shots including my favorite one out of the entire set and some odd ones that caught my attention for their creepiness.

Continue reading Bombs Bursting in Air

The Most Annoying People at a 4th of July Celebration

Happy Independence Day everyone in America.  Always remember our freedom was not free.  When I was young, fireworks were legal (at least in Illinois) and we generally spent the weekend lighting up our Black Cats, Roman candles, rockets and all kinds of colorful fountains.  Today, of course, the legal sterilization of anything fun (spearheaded by insurance company lobbyists and over protective soccer moms I’m sure) has reduced the youth of today to looking on with gloom as carbon snakes smolder on the pavement and displays of mock enjoyment at throwing pieces of tissue paper on the ground to produce a sound slightly lower than a cap.  Those realizing just how inane that is usually whisk their kids into the car and head down to the local traffic jam they call a community fireworks display.  Linda and I try to make the best of it by hauling our camera equipment out and experimenting with slow shutter speeds.  Each year we encounter the same annoying types of people at these events and figured I would highlight them in hopes of stopping some of these trends – probably not going to happen, but at least I get to spend a post making fun of rude people.

The late arriver:

I have to put this at the top of my annoyance list because it breaks a common code of respect for other people who probably have no other course of action beyond just accepting the fact they have been victimized or doing something about it and likely spending July 5th in jail.  In blame of politicians who vote sterilization rules into law, community firework displays have evolved into big events drawing in lots of people from the surrounding areas.  Smart people are aware that is necessary to sacrifice a part of the day (length of time dependent on the investment in the the fireworks and distance to competing communities with their own show) to get situated in their favorite viewing spots.  Due to their disposable time, they are granted the privilege of selecting their choice spot.  I should point at this time, that I think it should be required that at least one of the party is in their chair for the duration of the reservation.  Running down early and throwing your chair in a spot and then hightailing it back to the air conditioner is a violation of the reservation integrity and should be subjected to having their seats moved to the back of the viewing area or into the water should you happen to be on the waterfront – by definition this means that seat reserving is generally only for parties of two or more since bathroom breaks could result in you having to dive in for your chair.  It is a good assumption that all the best viewing spots will be taken under an 1.5 hours before the show starts by individuals who have been sitting in their chair for hours possibly drinking lots of alcohol to help pass the monotony of having people ask them if the surrounding empty chairs can be hurled into the water.  Eventually the local radio announcer will get on the microphone to inform you of the one thing those in their seats ALREADY KNOW having looked at your watch every minute up to the moment he tells you the fireworks are going to start in 10 minutes.  In truth, this appears to be a signal to all the later arrivers to rush to the front of the walkway, fence, water’s edge (or whatever the natural barrier is between you and the gunpowder) and stand there.  I find this happen more in the larger city arenas (witnessed firsthand at Peoria’s riverfront a number of years ago), but lately it has been happening at the small community shows as well – take for instance last night at a local party down the street where all the hip college kids decided a blind person picked out their party spot and felt entitled to haul their coolers in front of the people who applied a little intelligence to their seating selection.  To be honest, those kids didn’t have a dramatic impact on the viewing since we were pretty close to where they were shooting them off.  Now the Peoria incident was a different story thanks to the launch angle of the fireworks and the difference in the levels of those standing and those sitting.  I kept my camera trained on some elderly couples up front waiting for something to come out of the arguments that were triggered.  Well, argument may be a strong word since that implies both sides engaged in a heated discussion where in this case the late arrivers simply ignored them and concentrated on the fireworks display they now had a perfect view of.  I think the only option in this case is to extend the chair rule to include throwing these idiots into the water as well… which brings us full circle to the July 5th comment.

Hit the jump to see a description of other annoying people encountered at celebrations of our Independence.

Continue reading The Most Annoying People at a 4th of July Celebration

Night Dwellers Part 3 – The Big, The Hairy and The Scary

So last post we brought out the big guns and showed you what the 200-400 Beast is capable of pulling in.  To contrast that, I figured I’d go all the way in the opposite direction and feature the 105 Macro glass for this post.  And the best picture opportunity for the Macro is?.. you guessed it, my porch.  Continuing the Night Dweller themed posts (here, here and here), I bring you the latest set of arachnids found late at night out here in the Midwest country.  Thanks to our toy poodles we often have the opportunity to check out the creatures that visit our house late at night.  As of late, the spiders look like they’ve been on a steroid kick resulting in some rather large specimens.  One night I stumbled on this huge spider and ran for the camera.

It always creeps me out a bit when looking through the macro glass.  The unassisted viewing reveals enough features to make your heart skip a beat, but add the full blown macro magnifications and it’s like you’re staring at creature from a bad B-Horror movie.  So there I was laying the ground taking pictures of this spider when a large moth dropped out of nowhere in striking distance from a natural predator.

This might get very interesting.  Both subjects remained very still which might have been due to my presence potentially interfering in the survival of the fittest experiment.  The small macro depth made it difficult to get both creatures in focus but it did create a nice effect.  (Yes, I had to manually fix the moth due to pet eye, but for my first attempt ever at it Photoshop it turned out pretty good).  After about 10 shots, there still wasn’t any movement between the two.  It reminded me of an Old West quick-draw, each waiting for the other to flinch.  Low and behold, another visitor showed up to take part.

The first thing that came to mind was the Mexican standoff from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.  Unlike the Eastwood show, only one of these competitors had a loaded gun in terms of a bite and venom.  Now I am officially way beyond the  field depth for an eye level view so I moved up higher in an attempt to bring a little more focus into the shot.  The Opilione (or as we call them around here – Daddy Long Legs)  and Moth are still on the wrong end of this fight for survival, unless they can team up – maybe the moth does a 360 maneuver to land on top of the spider while the Harvestmen (another common name for the Opilione) pokes the spider’s eyes out with its long legs.  Although this might be more difficult that choreographed since the Harvestmen can’t make out images with their eyes and thus have to use the second set of legs as antennae to navigate the world.  Come for the pictures leave with trivia – what a deal!

By the way, I generally try to provide some reference for size since the macro has the ability to distort reality.  There was no way I was going to stick my finger in that mess.  Instead I tried to get the old standby penny visual in, but even that proved difficult due to my reluctance to get real close to the wolf spider.  Here is the best I could do … sorry!

I have a lot more pictures of our eight legged friends after the jump (if you dare)- most of them have the more traditional macro shots showing them up close and personal.

Continue reading Night Dwellers Part 3 – The Big, The Hairy and The Scary

A New Checkmark for the Birding List

As a note, I highly recommend checking out this particular set of pictures on our SmugMug page at http://eddiesoft.smugmg.com.  The reason for this is the required size reduction for this blog really takes away from the detail and coloring found on the full sized shots up on smug – you can pick any size you want to view by putting your cursor inside the border for the picture and picking from the menu that comes up on the right.

Today is the true unveiling of the capability of The Beast.  We took it out one morning to see what we could find.  For the most part, our attempts to capture some interesting sunrises fell short.  A few of our favorite locations were either weak with color or there was nothing real interesting going on in the cloud front (trust me, sunrise pictures without anything to add to the composition are pretty boring.  Striking out there, we headed over to Jubilee Park to see what kind of wildlife was out and about.  That ended up being a great shoot, but more about that in another post.  I was elated that we didn’t come away empty handed and was feeling pretty good about the outing as we drove the short distance back to home.  That’s when the day turned from great to awesome.  It is a fact I am always looking around for any interesting wildlife.  To my surprise, this little guy was busy running alongside the road!

What luck.  Not only have I not been able to capture this particular bird on camera yet, but The Beast was already attached to the camera.  I quickly yelled out our code word for “Stop the car I see something worth taking a picture” (yes, we have a secret code for that since the time it would take to say all that could spoil the whole shot).  In immediate recognition of the command, Linda pulled to the side of the road and I brought The Beast into firing position through the open car window.  The added stability of the car frame to rest the camera on turned out to be a big plus.  This was the first outing with the big glass so there was some quick learning going on to figure out how to get the focus points where I wanted on a moving animal.  The size of the glass barrel may have alarmed it a bit since it tried to keep an eye on me as it ran around in the tall grass.

Again, it is hard to really see the detail in the small pictures here, but a quick crop should give you an idea of how pleased I was with the results.  Nice to know this huge investment pays off when it comes to the quality of the glass and the ability to get close enough to wildlife to see this level of eye detail. For the record, this is a Ring-Necked Pheasant for those keeping track and more importantly, a new check mark in the bird shot list.

Hit the jump to see even more pictures of this bird and more examples of the clarity the big glass brings to the table.

Continue reading A New Checkmark for the Birding List