Schierer Space

Earlier this week there was an especially beautiful day on tap so I took off work early and we went to the zoo. This was our first time to the Rosamond Gifford Zoo in Syracuse. Nate seemed to notice the animals when they would move around and would get fairly excited. The rest of the time he would watch people walking by and point to things that caught his eye.
I, of course, took the opportunity to photograph the various animals and birds. This was a lot of fun, and quite challenging as most of the indoor environments were quite dark. The 70-200mm got quite a workout and I ventured into ISO settings that I normally don’t dare to use. In the end, quite a few shots were pretty compelling, but are not the highest quality due to noise or lack of sharpness from the lighting.

As we were about to leave, we noticed that on of the she-lions was right up against the Plexiglas. This was a nice opportunity to get closer to a lion than I remember being before.

Take a look at the gallery, here are some highlights.

We just returned from an overnight trip to Corning, NY, to visit the Corning Museum Of Glass. As a technical person I found the displays of how glass is formed, and the innovations made from glass to be very interesting. As someone who enjoys art I was fascinated by the sculpture and various pieces of art glass which fill the museum. There is an entire historical section which shows examples of the development of the glass working art throughout history (starting in 2000 BC or so).

The highlight of the visit was certainly the opportunity to go into the glass studio and make our own glass pieces. K and the in-laws made Christmas ornaments while I made a paperweight. We were each able to select the colorings to add to our pieces, and the ornament folks got to blow the end of the pipe to inflate the pieces. The paperweight was considerably more hands on. With no air required, the blob of glass had to be colored and smoothed (by them), but I held the tools to twist it and round the covering gather of clear glass on top. It was fascinating to feel the hot glass flow under the pressure of the block.

K made this ornament: