EAT EN

I finally got the ultra wide lens I've been wanting; the Canon 10-22mm.  It came last week, so I ran home over lunch to play with it and got a couple of pictures I really like; this being one of them.  I took this across the street from my apartment in an alley between an old brick building and a new modern building that houses an architectural firm that laid off a bunch of its employees last spring (how rude).

What does this say?  I don't know.  What does it mean?  I don't know that either.  What I do know is that I thought it looked cool; especially from this perspective.

I got to thinking about what it might say and I've got a couple of theories.  My first theory is that it says EAT EN, and that's assuming this is supposed to be English.  Perhaps the person who wrote this wanted to write 'EATEN' but ran out of room so had to extend his word to a second line.

My second theory is that it isn't English at all, but was intended to profess a favorable opinion of one's favorite fraternity and sorority.  Now I don't speak Greek, but it is my understanding that the letters EAT and EN or the symbols E-Triangle-T and E-N translate into Sigma Delta Tau and Sigma Nu.  This reminds me of my encounters with the EAT sorority while I was at the University of Kansas (which were limited to me simply observing them on campus).  This EAT sorority was most unfortunately named, as every girl I saw wearing an EAT shirt was of the overweight variety.  Hilariously unfortunate.

Any other ideas?

Madison Square Fountain

Sure, everyone has heard of Madison Square Garden, but this the Madison Square Fountain.  Pretty clever right; I just made it up.

But seriously, I took this photograph in Madison, Georgia when I was down there for work.  Madison has a nice little historic downtown area with some shops and restaurants where we had dinner.  I did a little exploring just north of the main downtown and found this little square that was partially under construction.  I left the construction part out of the picture because it was boring; they were just pouring some concrete or something and doing some landscaping.  I enjoyed the fountain and the evening sky though.  When the place is finished it will probably look pretty nice, but at this time, the part under construction was uninteresting.  As you can see from the photograph, it was a nice night.  The days down there were extremely hot, but it had cooled down enough to make it a comfortable evening to be outside taking pictures.  The only problem was the mosquitoes; I got back to the hotel with quite a few bites.  I think it was worth it though for the pictures I got that night.

This is another photograph I combined from two HDR photographs to get a wider perspective on the scene.  I first shot the fountain and the lower part of the sky, and then tilted my camera upwards slightly to capture more of the sky.  I really like square shaped photographs for a lot of subjects, so that was what I was going for when I took these.

I just bought another new piece of equipment for my camera, but more on that later...

Doing Some Excavating

Although nice to look at, I didn't want to only share a picture of me today.  This is a photograph I took of an excavator that was sitting at the side of a big hole in the ground across the street from my apartment.  Someone has been working on a seemingly small scale construction project in the public parking lot across the street for, what I would consider, an disproportionate amount of time.

It all started a few months ago when I came home and noticed a small portion of the parking lot partitioned with orange plastic construction fencing.  About a year ago some developer had a sign up saying the parking lot was the future home of some new condos (terrible idea), so I wondered if they were finally breaking ground on these.  I slowly began to wonder if they were breaking ground on anything, as the site sat idle for the next couple of months.  Strangely, although the site was cordoned off by the plastic fence, there was still a place for cars to enter, so it was just an annoying mild inconvenience to anyone who wanted to park in that lot.  During this time we had a pretty strong storm with strong winds which came along and blew almost all of the fence down.  Until some guy came back by and put it back up a few days later, the inconvenience was even smaller, as people could now park directly on the fallen fence.

Finally a few weeks ago I woke up to see some construction equipment being moved in, and within a few days part of the parking lot was gone.  These guys actually worked pretty quickly for the first two days of this phase, but left and didn't come back for another week or so.  They finally came back and dug a bit deeper and cleaned up the hole, and left it in the state I found it in for this photograph.  They've done some work since, but the scale of this project doesn't lead me to believe these are the stupid condos that were planned.

Technically, this photograph is a combination of nine photographs I took in succession to get this point of view.  I then combined them using some panorama software, and did some post-processing in Photoshop.  I like this picture because of the point of view and the subsequent distortion in the image.  It makes me think of a super wide fisheye lens, but not quite as extreme.

Regardless of what these bozos are building, the best part was every morning when the driver would start the day out right with a quick 360.

New Equipment!

As I alluded to in Slender-Snouted Crocodile, I recently bought a new piece of equipment; a vertical battery grip.  It's a pretty sweet little accessory for my camera.  It attaches to the bottom of my camera and has a shutter button and all of the other necessary buttons for me to control the exposure of my photographs while holding the camera in the portrait orientation.  It also holds two batteries which were included in my purchase.  When I bought it I figured it would be nice to have while shooting in portrait, but I hadn't expected it to be as much fun as I have found it to be.  Having this should encourage me to shoot vertically more often.  I don't regret this purchase for a second.

You can see the new grip at the bottom of my camera in this self-portrait I took while in Texas last week.

Mountain Rocks

As I mentioned in Lufkin Civic Center, I haven’t felt much like working on my artism recently, any further than taking pictures. Luckily, I have a tendency to process photos to a state that is almost finished, but not quite ready for public consumption. It’s a bad habit, but worked out well on this occasion.

This is another photograph from the spring ski trip to Colorado earlier this year. I've had it almost done for a while, and just needed to put a few finishing touches on it.

I did quite a bit of talking in the last post, so I'll keep this one short and let the photograph do the rest of the talking.

Lufkin Civic Center

I haven't felt much like working on photos recently; I've been taking quite a few, but I haven't been doing much past that.  It's easy for me to get into that habit; it's what I've done with my photos for a lot of the time I've been a photographer.  This website helps a lot though, because now I have an audience who expects to see more. Not to go all artist on you, but I need to be in the right mood to work on my artism, and I haven't been lately.  I did get into the mood for a while last weekend though and finished a few photos, and started a few others, so updates should be coming more frequently for a while, especially if I can get some time at home, which has been rare as of late.

I was in Texas last week, and of course brought my camera.  I’ve never been to Texas, aside from layovers in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport, so I was excited to get down here.  I heard southeast Texas could be home to some interesting people, but unfortunately, I didn’t meet any of these people.  We got done with our work early, because I'm an extremely efficient field worker, so I was a little worried I'd run out of free time for photography before I left.  Luckily, the nature of the work we were doing down there took me all over the area around Lufkin, Texas, which is in southeast Texas.  I was able to scope out a few places I wanted to shoot and then go directly to them when we were finished with the work we had to do on the last day.

This photograph, of the Lufkin Civic Center, was not on my original list.  We journeyed into the heart of Lufkin to find a location to host a future public meeting, and this was our first (and most beneficial) stop.  I went outside as the woman I was with worked out the details of renting some space, and grabbed my camera.  With an audience of an obese woman in her truck yelling at her young daughter who didn't want to go to daycare at the church across the street, I composed this photograph.  Boring building you say?  Maybe it’s boring to some, but there is something about this type of large concrete building that I really enjoy.  I can't put my finger on exactly what it is about this type of building I like.  Maybe it's the overall look of this solid, impregnable, prison like building that was designed and built to be a Civic Center.  Maybe it's the fact that it's built to last a long time, and solidly constructed, unlike so many of the crappy buildings I see built today.  Maybe it’s the sheer size of this one story building.  The inside of this place is awesome; my apartment has 20 foot ceilings, and they’re dwarfed by the height of the ceilings in this place.  Maybe it's all of those things.  Regardless, I like this building, and I think the photograph is pretty nice to look at also.

I'll keep the technicalities short on this one, but I did want to mention that in addition to being an HDR photograph, this is a composite of "three" pictures I took of the building in succession.  I say three in quotations because each of those three is an HDR image, so each one of the three is actually five.  I really like the field of view in this picture; it’s around 90 degrees from left to right, mimicking an ultra-wide angle lens.  It’s also a little distorted within that angle of view, which happened during the process of putting the scene together, which I like also.

Slender-Snouted Crocodile

Last night, instead of packing for my trip like I should have been, I was out playing with my camera and new accessory I got in the mail yesterday (more on that later).  I got some photos I really like and was busy processing them all evening.

This photograph, I did not take last night.  No, this photograph I took on my recent excursion to Africa.  No, that's a lie; I took this a few years ago while in Africa.  No, that's also a lie.  In reality I took this in the Africa section of the Kansas City Zoo.  I went there a few weeks ago with some friends.  I had never been to the Kansas City Zoo before that day, and although it was a pretty muggy day, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  I've been to many a zoo in my day, but this one was definitely the most recent.  Seriously though, this zoo is pretty big; everything is very spread out, which means the animals have a lot of room to roam freely.  I didn't even see all of the zoo; we walked around Africa mostly, which has an abundance of interesting animals.  I definitely plan to go back though.  I have a number of other pictures from that day that I'll share later, but this one is of a Slender-Snouted Crocodile.

Upon researching what this thing is (I couldn't remember, aside from assuming it was some sort of crocodile), I found out that this guy's name is either Frank or Jesse.  Upon further research I learned that the Slender-Snouted Crocodile may not be a crocodile at all.  Recent DNA tests have indicated that the Crocodylus cataphractus (that is its scientific name) has less in common with the crocidile than was previously though, and it has been suggested its name be changed to Mecistops cataphractus!  I mean come on!  Although the jury is still out on science, one thing is for sure: like the alligator, these Slender-Snouted Crocodiles are so aggressive 'cause they got all them teeth but no toothbrush.

WSU Baseball

Last time I was in Wichita I had a little time to kill one afternoon, so I grabbed my camera and wandered down the block to Eck Stadium at Wichita State University.  I grew up just a block from this stadium and have watched countless games there.  In high school I even went to a few WSU baseball camps and played some games there.  They have a good baseball program historically, but I think their longtime coach has sort of lost it the last few years and the team is suffering as a consequence.

I wanted to try something a little different with this photograph.  Sometimes new perspectives don't work very well, but I like what I got with this one.  I figure the only way I can grow and improve my photography is by trying new things.

Vidalia Onions

I recently had the chance to travel to Georgia on business, and for part of the trip stayed in Vidalia, Georgia, birthplace of the Vidalia Onion. My hotel happened to be right next door to the Vidalia Onion Factory and Gift Shop, your one stop shop for all things onion. Before I go too far, let me explain that this "factory" is what I would call a southern factory, which in terms of the rest of the US, is more of a warehouse. Splitting hairs, I know, but I feel it necessary to be precise.

This was a very enjoyable trip, and having recently acquired an excellent travel bag for my camera, I brought it along. This photograph is (obviously) of the Vidalia Onion Factory. I learned a few things on this trip, the most notable being that people in southeast Georgia are some of the nicest, most sincere people I have ever encountered. I have examples to back these claims, so if you want to hear them, just ask.

While this photograph may not be one of my best technically, I wanted to share it on here. My hope is that my collection of photographs can be considered travel photography, so I wanted to share something from my travels. That's not to say I don't have more from this trip, so check back soon to see more from my Georgia trip; I found some pretty interesting places.