I absolutely love this. Do I have your permission to make it my desktop background?
My wife has all of the good pictures of our trip. But this morning I was walking alone and my immaturity got the best of me.
Yep. I had to shrink the size to post it, so it may not scale that well as is. If you want to PM me an email address, I’ll send you the full-size version.
I would ask that if you share it, just give me credit, either reference my posts here, or I have an Instagram account that is slowly morphing into a page for my photography, viridiandreams.
I drove across the state to Tampa yesterday evening for a wedding today. I always like to drive the backroads across the state, because there is some real scenic pasture land. It was a clear sky and noticed this tree out in a pasture that lined up with the moon and Venus, so I had to pull over and try to get a shot. Not too bad, but not the best. These types of photos are tricky for me. The moon reflects a lot of light, so it’s easily over-exposed. But you want to get the detail of the foreground, so it takes some time, even with a fairly “fast” lens. Ideally, I you would take two exposures, one to capture the detail of the moon, and one to capture everything else. This shot is just one exposure, so I sacrificed the moon detail, but overall I like it:
Went home last weekend for what will probably be the last time for a while. Woke up and went to to the St Augustine Beach Pier for daybreak one morning and got some nice photos. While I was set up this kid started trying to catch sea gulls by sneaking up in them. I used to do this all the time as a kid at the beach, so it brought me a lot of feel-good nostalgia. I snapped a few shots of him that ended up being half-way decent. Eventually the kid’s dad called him to go leave, so I went over introduced myself and told him that I thought I’d gotten some decent photos that I’d like to send him if he didn’t mind giving me his email address. He did, and I finally sent him a handful of the ones I liked best. He emailed me back this evening telling me he loved them and that they were going to blow a couple up to hang. It made me feel good in a way that hasn’t happened all that often recently considering everything that’s going on.
Anyway, here are a few that I really like:
That’s awesome dude. I bet it was nice to make that human contact in the middle of all this COVID-19 stuff.
Also, I’ve really been enjoying your photography and commentary, keep it up!
Did a job 50 miles east of KC today, my 1st ever time at Whiteman Air Force Base. Was a total trip…
took some photos, but not this one, which likely would’ve required extra, double secret clearance.
Depending on how you look at it, that’s a cool billy on the roll there.
Designed and manufactured by Northrop, later Northrop Grumman, the cost of each aircraft averaged US$737 million (in 1997 dollars).[3] Total procurement costs averaged $929 million per aircraft, which includes spare parts, equipment, retrofitting, and software support.[3] The total program cost, which included development, engineering and testing, averaged $2.1 billion per aircraft in 1997.[3]
The street leading to the base is called Spirit.
never knew the plane was till today.
When I was in the plumber’s union apprenticeship program in the mid 90s, at least one of my classmates worked for an outfit that did the piping in the hangars that house those bombers.
Haven’t been going out too much lately. I’m lucky though, and I live in a small condo that is right on the intracoastal, so I can walk across the street and sit and watch the sun rise every morning from the sea wall. It’s a nice spot to meditate, and occasionally the conditions line up for some nice photos:
Re: the first photo, it’s tough to tell with this resolution, but in half the sky stars are still visible. My favorite time of day is right before dawn and right after the sun sets, as the light is just coming over the horizon or fading into it, you can watch starts become visible across the sky, it’s like physically watching the line between night and day slide across the sky.
A couple sunrises from back when I could get to the beach for sunrise. Also a bonus alligator skeleton I found last weekend in Big Cypress.
Wednesday was the 6-year anniversary of my dad’s passing. I usually try to mark the occasion by going out somewhere and taking some time to reflect on all the stuff he did for our family and the ways I’ve been lucky in life. This year it happened to coincide with with a new moon, so I thought it would be cool to go out to the western part of Big Cypress and spend some time under the stars and maybe get a photo of the Milky Way. That area is one of the darkest spots in the state, and I’d been looking for an excuse to go out, so around 9pm I made a cup of coffee, loaded up my camera equipment and headed out to the swamp. The weather semi-cooperated, there was light cloud cover over the eastern part of the sky, which is where the Milky Way was, but the western part of the sky was nice and clear. Other than being way creepier than I anticipated (there are lots of critters moving around that you can’t see, but you know can see you, lol), it was beautiful and such a great time. The midnight sky is one of the few things that still fils me with that childish sense of wonder. Anyway, around 2am the Milky Way just edged out the clouds, so I snapped a few photos somewhat blind, and hoped. I’d never tried astrophotography before, so I had no idea what to expect. Much to my surprise, I got one photo where you can see part of the Milky Way, along with Antares. It turned out to be a great night and I’m stoked I got a halfway decent photo I can remember it with: