The difference a season makes

In September I took the first picture of Torch Lake at the public access near the Clam River. The picture below I took yesterday.

Vacation Pictures

I know how much people enjoy vacation pictures. Here are a few of mine. I am up in northern Michigan for a week.

You can't fly directly to Traverse City from Charlotte. My first leg took me from Charlotte to Chicago. I like flying into Chicago because that city looks incredible from the air. This time we approached over Lake Michigan from the east and this was the first time I had approached the city from that direction and it provided a spectacular view. I should have had my camera ready but I'm not sure if my digital camera qualifies as an "electronic device." I should ask. It was also the second time I saw Wrigley Field from the air. Beautiful.

This picture below is the view of the skyline from O'Hare.


After we took off from Chicago we went north for a good while and as we started heading over Lake Michigan I saw this city and grabbed a few shots. I am pretty sure this is Milwaukee, WI.



On southern end of Lake Leelanau this weekend there was a group of locals on the ice sail skiing and ice sailing. I was really impressed by one who was ice skiing. It looked to me like he was wearing downhill skis while flying around the sail. I swear, he was pushing 40 mph when swinging around.


There are a few shanties on Lake Leelanau. There was a wicked wind blowing from the south and it was around 20 degrees. My fingers were useless after going gloveless for about thirty seconds.


I took my usual trip to Good Harbor for a look at the sunset. What a magnificent place.



After sunset at Good Harbor we cruised over to the Holy Rosary Church area and on the hill behind the church, looking west, I tried to get a another look at the fading sunset.


Before we headed out to Good Harbor, Allison and I stopped by Gabe's in Maple City and I purchased my usual batch of hot dogs. I saw something called a "potato sausage" and I had to buy a couple. I had one this morning and it is splendid. It has a nice touch of potato and onion. Unique and delicious.

Tomorrow I lunch with Kevin and then head to Antrim County for a few days. I'd like to get up early and catch sunrise at Torch Lake. I will probably settle for sunset.

Scott H. Biram at the Double Door

The other night I had a real nice experience at the Double Door. A singer/songwriter Scott H. Biram played a show. I discovered him just in the last few months and was hoping he would come through. His new album called Bad Ingredients is truly great. The song Broke Ass is a song about dating a stripper that Mike Cooley wishes he had written.

Biram is hard to describe. You can call it rock and roll, country, blues, shit kicking metal or all of that at once. He did all these with an honesty, ferocity, knowledge and skill that was impressive. He reminds me of Mojo Nixon, Bog Log and the Drive-by Truckers. He mixed it up a lot. He covered a Wood Guthrie song. He played I be's Troubled by Muddy Waters which is one of Muddy's first recordings. He played some Jimmie Rodgers. He bullshitted his way halfway through two Butthole Surfers songs that someone was bugging him for. That was fun for me when I finally figured out what he was playing. He closed the show by playing the full Am I Evil by Diamondhead, which was amazing. He also played a slew of his own material, all of it of very high quality. I was wondering if he could pull Victory Song off live and he nailed it.

One thing he does real well is drive a song. He can get that stomp board going and he can put an intensity into a song that is infectious. This was one of the few shows at the Double Door I have been to where the audience crowded the stage and really became part of the show. Biram fed off the intimacy and we all got sweaty and enjoyed the groove.

Biram has a bit of a reputation as a hell raiser and a few of the younger attendees were, well, drunken fuckwads. It was interesting to see Biram play this brilliant set of music and see several of these kids pound PBRs and generally act like asses. The songs he writes and the music he plays are so much more than that. The majority of the crowd was into what Biram was laying down and were with him but the idiot fucks were a distraction. After the show one of them was in the parking lot puking his guts out. It's the little things sometimes that make life fun. As this kid, who was wearing a jean jacket vest with a patch on the back that said "Wooly Wood," was hurling a friend of his hollered at him to go find a corner to hurl in. He said, "It's OK, (spew!), I'm almost done." This rocket scientist also spent a lot of the evening punching himself in the face in time with the beat. He also got tossed out.

Scott H. Biram at the Double Door by me.


A better photographer than me was there and you can view her pictures of the night here. She doesn't allow embedding so I can't post them. I don't understand why some photographers choose not to allow embedding. Do you not want people to see your work? Oh well.

Glen the Car Guy

I happened to glance out the window at work the other day and saw Glen the Car Guy pushing his bike on the sidewalk. I grabbed my camera and caught him right after he had climbed back on his bike and was coasting down a hill. It's like seeing bigfoot.

NYPL's moving 3D gifs

A blogger at his site called Cursive Buildings has been publishing animated gifs of old photographs from the New York Public Library's online collection. He even inspired me to make a few of my own.

I saw today that the NYPL was also inspired by him and created a webpage where you can make your own animated gifs from the stereographs in their collection. What a great way for a library to use the internet to play with and share their physical collection.

I made a few myself today.

Horse race in Poughkeepsie, NY in the 1890s

GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

Baseball game in 1880 in Rochester

GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

The Perkins Institution and Mass. School for the Blind. 1862?-1885?


GIF made with the NYPL Labs Stereogranimator

Wednesday Flicker Wowzers

Some dude went to Iceland



Some dude saw another dude mouth breathing



When I was a twenty-year-old dude I loved me some Okinawa Yakisoba



At 3am all the young drunk dudes loved their yakitori off the cart



This dude posted a panorama of an Okinawan sunset

HDR Camera

Yesterday I downloaded an app to my phone called HDR Camera. I got the free version just to give it a test drive. I don't know how familiar you are with HDR photography, essentially it's a process of combining three different exposures so you can have a photograph that is more balanced. Rather than having a bright sky and a dark foreground and vice versa, with HDR you can have a foreground and background with nominal exposures. I have seen some HDR on Flickr that are pretty impressive and some that are way overdone. I tried it out the front window here at lunch today and I am impressed by the result.

Camera reading off the sky


Camera reading off the foreground


Photo taken using HDR Camera


As you can see the HDR photograph has a much better balance. I wish I could have a setting for this on my Canon. That would be incredibly useful.

Jupiter

In September of 2010 Jupiter was really close and bright so I pointed my 200mm lens at it to see what would show. I was surprised to find I could see not only Jupiter as a distinct globe but you can see the Galilean moons. This is heavily cropped but it is what it is.

Foul Ball

I saw this video of a woman snatching a baseball out of a little girl's hands for the first time today. All's fair in love, war and souvenir baseballs but..c'mon.

It reminded me of a time I went to a Charlotte Knights game with my little brother Cody in the early 90s. He was a timid kid and not too fast on his feet so when it came to a scrum for a foul ball he wasn't going to have a good chance. We had talked about getting a foul ball and he really wanted one. We were sitting almost behind home plate and we had a ball and pretty close to us. I went for it and got the ball, beating out a couple of kids. I survived the foul ball wars at the softball field in Bellaire, MI in the seventies. Back then you got a fee bag of popcorn for retrieving a foul ball. It was a blood sport. Those kids at Knights Stadium never had a chance.

After I secured the foul ball I hear an adult say, "Awww, give it to a kid!"

I replied, "I am," and I turned and handed the ball to my overjoyed brother.

Check out that Form!

Is this good form or bad? I can't tell. I think this is me hitting my 5i hybrid. If this is the shot I am thinking of it was a doozy.