Mmmm… Coffee
I’m continuing to mess around with liquid and droplet photographs. Now I’m working with coffee. I haven’t quite gotten what I want yet, but I thought this shot had a nice zen-like quality to it.
I’ve always wanted to try this…
Here’s my first attempt at capturing water droplets. Well, it’s actually my 97th attempt if you count the number of shots I took. It’s really difficult to get the timing right, especially if you’re doing the water dropping by hand. I think I’ll need to make a little drip rig to simplify the process.
Home Sweet Home
I’m quickly getting hooked on panoramic photography. This is a 15 exposure HDR panorama of my neighborhood. The final image is about 30 megapixels and 182MB. It may look like we live on a corner, but the sidewalk is actually a straight line that’s been distorted by the extreme wide angle of view. I could start droning on about rectilinear projections now but I guess I’ll spare you…
A Franklin Sunset
I snapped this picture in Franklin a couple of days ago. It’s several exposures combined into a single high-dynamic-range, or HDR image. It looks like there isn’t another person around for miles. Fortunately you can’t see the busy highway lurking just over my shoulder.
Lounge the friendly skies
Back when I was 17 or so I worked at a place called New England Shade and Blind with a guy named Bill Simpson. Bill and I both worked in the shipping department packing boxes with product and using newspaper to wrap everything with. Both of us were into airplanes and other aviation related stuff, so whenever we came across a particularly cool news bit we’d clip it out and stick it up on a bulletin board we’d set up. Over time we built up quite a collection. By far our most treasured and inspiring story was a clipping and picture of Larry Walters, the “lawn chair pilot.” Larry tied 45 helium filled weather balloons to a Sears patio chair, floated away from his Southern California backyard and achieved an altitude of three miles, where he was spotted by an airline pilot and reported to the tower.
Larry’s quixotic flight in July of 1982 seemed too unbelievable to be true, yet it was. Larry died in 1993 but his legendary flight still captures the imagination. Just last week Kent Couch (yes that’s his real name) made an impressive flight with a similarly configured lawn chair and helium balloons. Kent had the advantage of a GPS unit and a slightly more sophisticated method of dumping his water ballast through a spigot. In an earlier flight Kent copied Larry’s method of using a BB gun to shoot out the balloons, but this time he used a better method of releasing a little helium at a time. His flight took him from Bend Oregon to a farmer’s field near Union Oregon, a distance of 193 miles.
This is just too cool.
Over the years I’ve lost touch with Bill Simpson, so if you know him, have him get in touch with me. I’d sure like to find out what he’s been up to. Meanwhile I’ll be keeping one eye on the sky in case he happens to float overhead in a lawn chair.