Filed under: Photography — chuck goolsbee @ 6:31 am
Last weekend I was in Northern Virginia and on my way back from the Bull Run battlefield I noted an exit for the Udvar-Hazy Center which was very close to my hotel. I popped in with camera to check it out. It was 90 minutes from closing, so I was unable to see the entire museum. I did capture some highlights however:
An F6F flies over.
The sole remaining Do 335 in the world.
The sole remaining Ar 234 in the world.
A P-38 with Patina
A rather historically significant B-29
You don't see P-61s around too often.
It was really a dash, with inadequate equipment (I really should have had my monopod for better shooting in the low light) but it was an interesting place that I’ll have to return to some time. You can see the rest of my shots here.
My life all went awry later when I received a call from home with Sue informing me that her mother had passed away. This news was both shocking and upsetting. Sue’s mom just spent several weeks at our home, on her usual summer trip to visit family, and she looked better than I’d seen in years. In fact she had accompanied Chris & I to the airport when I left for the east coast, as Chris was dropping her off at King Street station to ride the Cascades down to Portland to visit her brother next on her trip. Sue was beside herself, as you would expect.
It always seems that things like this happen when I’m away on business trips.
Thankfully my new employer is understanding and compassionate, and in short order I was able to change my travel plans, cutting short my stay in northern Virginia. I’ll return again sometime soon however.
I’m on the east coast this week, in Northern Virginia to be specific, visiting my new employer‘s facilities. As I have some downtime over the weekend, I figured I’d hit some sights that I’ve never seen. When I was a child I had relatives in Maryland and visited all the major sights of the Capitol: the Lincoln and Washington Memorials, the Capitol, and of course the Smithsonian museums. This time I decided to drive down to Manassas, the site of the first major battle of the US Civil War. I brought my camera along so I could share.
I stopped at a few sites of minor skirmishes, but the main battlefield at Henry Hill provided the best photographic opportunities…
The guns of the Union Army line.
An odd 1930's statue of Stonewall Jackson done up in what can only be called Stalinist/Superhero style
Guns of the Confederate line
Where Bartow fell
The Union Memorial, erected right after the war
Henry Hill
Where Thomas fell
Rickett's guns
Where Ramsey fell
After Manassas I drove to the Capitol and stopped along the river to shoot low-flying aircraft (seen above) and then over to the Jefferson Memorial. I’ll post those images soon.
2011 is the 50th Anniversary of the E-type Jaguar, and the Jaguar Clubs of North America are publishing a commemorative E-type Calendar. I’d like to submit a photo or two for inclusion. One of my car, and one of another car. Here are a bunch of good E-type Photos for you to pick the “best of.” Make your vote in the comments section and tell us why you like it best.
(sorry for the big red copyright notices… just trying to protect my images a bit)
Edit: I’ve been asked what camera gear was used to shoot these, so I’m adding that to the post…
Pardon the shameless self-promotion, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind my readers that prints of my car photography are available for purchase online. The above is a slide show of some of the shots you can buy. These are from the collection called “Action Shots”. Prints are available in various sizes, suitable for on a desk or hanging on the wall. They’s make a great gift for your Dad for Father’s Day, or anyone who appreciates cool cars anytime of the year! You can even have them framed and gift-wrapped! Right now through June 25th, I’m running a special for Father’s Day that gets you 25% off your order when you use the coupon code: “ThanksDad” at checkout.
To purchase your print select the image you want and click it. You’ll be taken to my online store.
(Proceeds go to paying for the upkeep of the online store first, and.. if I ever sell enough, a nice new wide-angle lens for making more great photos!)
Pardon the shameless self-promotion, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind my readers that prints of my car photography are available for purchase online. The above is a slide show of some of the shots you can buy. These are from the collection called “Action Shots”. Prints are available in various sizes, suitable for on a desk or hanging on the wall. They’s make a great gift for your Dad for Father’s Day, or anyone who appreciates cool cars anytime of the year! You can even have them framed and gift-wrapped!
To purchase your print select the image you want and click it. You’ll be taken to my online store.
(Proceeds go to paying for the upkeep of the online store first, and.. if I ever sell enough, a nice new wide-angle lens for making more great photos!)
The weather here over the past few days has been dramatically Spring-ish. Unlike our traditional multi-layer blankets of grey, we’ve been treated to dramatic broken clouds and sunbreaks. This evening as we were finishing dinner (Nick made pasta and meatballs!) the dining room’s eastern facing windows began bathing us in golden light. A large storm cloud was over the Cascades and was being lit by the setting sun. Nick said I should get my camera. I stood up and looked outside, and noted the towering, spreading cloud top and said that I really don’t have a wide-angle lens wide enough to really and adequately capture the moment. Then I recalled that I had a step-up ring that fit my Olympus 0.7x teleconverter. I dug that out of the camera bag as fast as I could and screwed together the bits I needed, and scurried out onto the deck. Sure enough the 9.8mm equiv lens couldn’t capture the entirety of the scene. (You guys need to buy some of my photos so I can buy that 7-14mm lens! Click over there!—> )
I shot about 50 images, most in JPEG then finally remembered to switch to RAW as the sun finally sunk over the horizon.
Two
Today, after chatting with a few folks about the fixes in the latest rev of Aperture I re-downloaded/installed it (after nuking all evidence of its previous existence off my disk.) Oddly the pixels right off the sensor were pretty damn good on their own! I performed minimal adjustments. These three images are straight JPEG exports from Aperture. No round trips to Photoshop for my usual “save to web” treatment. Which do you like best?
My 30-day Apple Aperture trial expired. I ended up deciding not to buy the software though. Why?
$199 seems steep for an application that runs like molasses on my fairly well-spec’ed machine; a MacBook Pro 2.53GHz with 4 GB of RAM. I like Aperture’s RAW editing features. Once I got the hang of them that is. But… damn this application is slow. This was with a library of less than 100 photos. I note that iPhoto bogs down once its library exceeds 5000 images. Aperture was dog slow right from the very first image.
Every once in a while I would see some moment of brilliance, and think I was falling in love with the software. Then it would smack me with a spinning cursor and drive me away. I would hope that a trial period would show you all the reasons to love a new product, but in this case it just drove me back to using iPhoto + Photoshop.
I’m open to being convinced otherwise, so feel free to chime in if you have a differing opinion.
