Smokies Light

These images are of the Ponce De Leon Inlet Lighthouse just south of Daytona Beach. In the image below I intentionally included the roof edges to try to provide some kind of scale reference since a person wasn't in the shot. It didn't work tho. I usually have enough common sense to take a second shot when trying something like this in case it turns out bad but common sense was on vacation also this day. The view from the top of Daytona Beach was spectaculary unremarkable.

I took this shot on the St. Augustine waterfront a couple weeks ago right at dusk when street lights and other lights activated by darkness start to flicker on. About an hour later well after dark, returning to my car along the same sidewalk along the seawall I could see a large dark figure up ahead, stretched out in a semi-prone position with his head appearing to be out over the seawall. It appeared from a distance he might be sick and vomiting over the wall. This area of the city is somewhat isolated and homeless people are common, so I was a little apprehensive about walking up behind a large man in the dark startling him as he was barfing into the sea. When I got very close I was relieved to find out he was just another photographer taking pics of the same scene. He didn't have a tripod so he was making use of the seawall which is about three feet high to steady the camera for a long exposure. He spoke with a heavy German accent and was very enthusiastic about the hobby, leaving his family in the restaurant in the background to come out and take the pic. We talked camera shop for a while and then both went on our way.

Wherever we want to go, we'll go. That's what a ship is, you know. It's not just a keel and a hull and a deck and sails. That's what a ship needs but what a ship is? what the Black Pearl really is? is freedom.
-- Captain Jack Sparrow

The Gaussian blur filter in Photoshop can add a soft glow to skin, and hide wrinkles and age spots. I went thru a gaussian phase on landscapes a while back. I found this link rather funny.

I mentioned a while back that I upgraded to Photoshop CS3. It has a new black and white conversion adjustment tool which comes with a tint option. One of the advantages or misfortunes of visiting this blog is you have to endure my Photoshop desecrations to images as I try new things. This composition caught my eye with the patterns in the wood and sand.

Breaking: The photostitch or merge feature is much improved. The shots below are composed of 2 pics each and didn't require any manual alignment shenanigans or blending the sky at the merge line. These were shot with a polarizer which before would mess up the the sky tones at the merge line. Maybe it was just luck with these two.

North Atlantic Right whales, which are an endangered species with an estimate of only 300 in existence, have been reported off the St. Augustine coast recently. Thinking this might be a once in a lifetime experience to see such a magnificent creature and get a photograph, I enlisted the services of Captain Brett Targin, proprietor of St. Augustine Sailing Adventures to take us for a Sunday afternoon drive looking for the whales. The pic above is of the city as we left port. The pic below is the 24 foot sailing vessel Lily J used for the expedition. I'll be posting a few pics from the outing this week, but I'll go ahead and say now that we did spot the distinctive blow pattern from the whales twice but they never surfaced again to have their picture taken.

The two towers are part of the Bridge of Lions which is being completely rebuilt due to its age. The road will pass between the two towers. The large structure with metal trusses is a temporary lift bridge, with the road bed lifted up for our tiny little boat to pass under. When the old bridge is returned to service the temporary bridge will be taken down and buried at sea to create an artificial reef. The image below is of the schooner Freedom which was also waiting for the bridge to raise.

The sea buoy marks the entrance to the St. Augustine inlet about 2 miles out into the ocean. Boats locate the buoy and then follow channel marker buoys on in to the inlet. The buoy is designed to emit a very loud and haunting whistling sound generated by the waves which can be heard a 1/2 mile away. The ocean in this area is shallow with strong tidal currents and the narrow channel of the inlet can be a boating challenge. In the satellite image below, the straight line is 1 mile in length, so the buoy is that distance again further out. In a boat you pass by breaking waves like on the beach on both sides a mile out to sea which is a rather strange sight to see.

I think there was a Hemingway novel by that title. Meet Captain Brett of St. Augustine Sailing. This outing was my first on a small sailboat on the open ocean with my previous experience limited to inland lakes, so I was wondering how it would go, whether I would get seasick and such. The swells were 3 to 5 feet, which is as calm at it gets this time of year. Picture taking was difficult but after a while you get into the rhythm of the swells and it wasn't bad at all. After chasing whales and dolphins a while and being two miles out, Brett cranked up the engine for some positioning. The oil filter decided to blow out so we were out there without power, well, without engine power but we did have sail power. Fortunately the wind was blowing from the east back to land this day so we sailed at a snail's pace back thru the inlet to the Bridge of Lions, tacked back and forth waiting for the bridge to open, then cranked the engine briefly to power under the bridge and once more at the marina near the dock. From the time the filter failed two miles out to the dock he had to run the engine only about one minute, and he really didn't have to run it all if that had been necessary.

These pics were taken with a 10-22mm wide angle lens which I've had in my arsenal for a long time but rarely use. In the pic below notice the distortion in how the walkway tilts. Also if you look close in the upper right corner you see a black smudge which is a filter on the lens. These things can be corrected but it's not worth the trouble. The glass and resulting images are not high quality but that's harder to notice on a web page.

Where have you gone Willie Nelson? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

...even after a veto override. I couldn't help but notice how these lines stood out in this article in the local paper about Everglades restoration:

How sad and pathetic. Government agencies and officials waiting on funds approved by law in the water bill are sweating bullets hoping that the Bush administration will actually disperse the funds. The fact that this is even a concern shows how no one trusts this administration to follow the law. I wonder how many other projects in the water bill are still waiting on funds to actually accomplish what they were designated for.

The audacity of hope.

Sounds like a pleasant place to be doesn't it? You might recall the post a while back about Christian Allaire's solo 'round the world trip in his sailboat. Chris posts videos occasionally to Youtube when he can get internet access. He's now hanging out in Rum Cay, Bahamas. I'll post his videos to the blog from time to time. In the image below, Long Island, where this video was taken, is just to the southwest of Rum Cay.

Last weekend's photo exercise was to capture birds in flight. Fortunately a few birds volunteered for the exercise. In the mountains this type of photography is not really possible with tiny songbirds flittering around in the dark woods. I need a big bird with plenty of light which this area offers. I'll be posting a few flight shots this week mixed up with the usual nonsense.

The above image is a crop of the full image below. In order to capture the feather details of a white bird on a sunny day required underexposing and then bringing it back to normal in Photoshop. I don't know how photographers got decent pics of white birds back in film days. Taking pics of moving birds is surprisingly simple with the right equipment. Just crank up the shutter speed, put the autofocus in "tracking" mode, and point the camera in the right direction. These type of shots are more indicative of the photographer's ability to spend money on quality autofocus tracking features and telephoto lenses rather than skill, plus the luck skill to be in the right place at the right time. You have no control of the composition, which is why the pic below is a bore. If there's any skill in photography these days, it's in the ability to see and capture interesting subjects in interesting compositions, which can be done just as easily with a quality point-and-shoot as with a digital SLR, and that ability is more art than photography, which is what it's all about for me.

Taken on a back alley somewhere in the St. Augustine historic district.

Sign Sign everywhere a sign
Blocking out the scenery breaking my mind
Do this, don't do that, can't you read the sign?
--Five Man Electrical Band

The snowy egret is easily identified by its yellow feet. This is as close to snow as I want to get this Winter.

Some nice pics of the Great Smokies and western North Carolina here. I'm ready for Spring now which I plan to spend back in the hills. After summer and boredom sets in, who knows. I can't sit still in one place, never have since I could walk. Do you know the way to Santa Fe?

You know you've reached the pinnacle of laziness when you get mad that your TV dinner requires you to nuke a few minutes, stir the food, and then nuke it again. TV dinners should be designed for just one long nuke to get it over with.

Dayquil is nothing but placebo pills.

HDR imagery sucks. If you like it or do it's fine, but it's not for me. If I'm going to screw up a photo I prefer it to look like a one hundred year old oil painting rather than something hanging on the wall one hundred years from now in a Futurama cartoon.

Sorry. A bad cold and long hours at work are getting the best of me, with no end in sight.

Update: Do you really think the nation is better off than it was 27 years ago? If so you are in the top 1% or sick yourself. It's time to dump the failed ideology of Reaganism on the dung heap of history with the other social diseases that have plagued mankind, like communism and fascism. It has failed, and even if we started today to rebuild in the right direction, the next generation will not be able to even conceive of how good it was, what the greatest generation gave to mine. In one generation we've moved from the greatest to the worst, but maybe this year we can at least try to make amends.

End of soapbox.

Maybe I'm overdoing this new toy b&w adjustment tool a bit, but I like to play with new toys tools.

On a very cool, damp and rainy morning the thought came to me,"I'm sure these birds could make a good living where it's warmer in the Keys or Bahamas and where the water is aqua blue. Why do they stay here?" Then the thought occurred to me,"They are probably thinking the same thing about me." The business name below came across as odd to me.

Captured this image on my afternoon walk. I really need to get out more.
(actually it was taken at Moo-rineland)

I couldn't decide which version to post so here's both. For a wallpaper version for large monitors, click here (800kb). Any of these pics on the blog or the commercial site you would like for wallpaper, just drop a note and let me know your monitor size (1024x768, 800x600,etc) and I'll send it to you.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

Scenes from the Guana Tolomato Matanzas (GTMNERR) National Estuarine Research Reserve. Say that five times as fast as you can. This reserve is just north of St. Augustine and is a very interesting place, but I didn't have time to explore it fully. I'll go back though.

Taken Tuesday evening after 8pm with a long exposure on the beach. Nothing to swim home about. I think there was an interesting composition out there somewhere but I missed it. I've tried in the past to get a full moon rising right on the horizon but they don't look very good with the haze and mist making the moon appear out of focus. It's kind of spooky being out there alone on the beach under a full moon. I kept expecting a sea monster to come up and drag me out to sea.

Another moonlit ocean shot taken tonight with a telephoto lens this time. The evolutionists claim we evolved from the sea. I don't know, but out there on the beach listening to the waves under the moonlight, you can really feel close to God, or maybe it's just because you're closer to home.

As we cast our gaze on the tumbling sea,
a vision came o'er me,
of thundering hooves and beating wings
in the clouds above.

The thundering waves are calling me home, home to you.
The pounding sea is calling me home, home to you.
--old Irish ballad

Created by artist and Flagler College student Kelly Sheridan pictured below. When the high tide comes in he will return to the sand from whence he came.

I've been searching for my dream
A hundred times today
I build them up, you knock them down,
Like they were made of clay,

Then the tide rushes in
And washes my castles away.
Then I'm really not so sure
Which side of the bed I should lay,

You keep looking for someone
To tell your troubles to,
I'll sit down and lend an ear
Yet I hear nothing new.

Then the tide rushes in
And washes my castles away.
Then I'm really not so sure
Which side of the bed I should lay,
--the Moody Blues

This pic posted to the blog last October got published in the February issue of Latitudes & Attitudes, a sailing magazine. It's fairly small in the mag and I didn't get paid, but it's still pretty cool to pick up a magazine at B&N and see your pic.

Photographing people is another skill I need to work on like taking pics of flying birds. With people like this one volunteering, it's a skill I will be developing as fast as I can.

Kind of hard to go back to boats and birds after that last pic. Oh well, we must soldier on and do the best we can with the birds, trees, and rainbows.

A famous local landmark in the historic district of St. Augustine. A palm tree grows out of a live oak.

Duke Energy has received permission from North Carolina to build a new coal burning power plant just 80 miles from the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Some background here.

Taken just now off my balcony. The background is actually the roof a condo complex next door. Creative croppings 'r' us.

The pelican can sometimes appear ungainly and awkward, but they are absolute masters of their environment. I've developed a respect for them right up there with the eagle.