Schierer Space

As promised I’ve posted the best of the Niagara Falls images. (Technically, they are still uploading to the gallery.)

Overall conclusion, misty air around the falls makes for pretty blah photography in general. My favorites out of this set are definitely the macro shots of the flowers. There are a few interesting angles thrown in from when I was able to snap a quick shot between attempts to quickly remove the water from the lens filters.

Also, I’m noticing that the crud on my imager is finally reaching intolerable levels. I’ve been avoiding buying another bottle of Eclipse because it’s such a ripoff to pay $9 shipping on an $9 2-ounce bottle of methanol (half of which will evaporate between uses). Unfortunately, methanol is considered a controlled substance from a shipping to random civilians point of view. Otherwise I could buy very high purity stuff directly from a chem supply house for a fraction of the unit cost.

No time to comment as I’ve already missed too much sleep tonight trying to get stuff wrapped up before the Dragon*Con trek.

After our trip to Canada over the weekend to see Niagara Falls and other sights (pictures to follow in a later posting), we had the joy of experiencing the new and improved US border.

It took us about 2 hours to wait in line with the other cars for about 60 seconds with the border agent. What are we doing with all of the delay if the search is so cursory? I can only assume that somebody is getting the nth degree. The question, of course, is: Is it the right somebody?

Anyway, this sign says it all:

These pics are from the end of June, but for some reason I haven’t gotten around to posting them. K’s folks were out visting so we took Nate to the zoo with them. He was a bit more interested this time, or at least Grammy was able to keep him entertained.

In any case, here are some more pics from Rosamond Gifford Zoo.

We took Nate to the beach on Friday. This wasn’t his first trip to the beach, but the first time the weather was horrible and he was so small we didn’t get him near the water.

This time he played everywhere:

the dry soft sand…

the wet smooshy sand…

splashing at the thin edges of the waves…

watching the waves come in…

and wading in “deep”.

All of which culminated in some fantastic Daddy assisted body surfing.

More trip pics in the gallery.

With the grandparents watching Nate, K & I went down to the beach. After walking along the beach, we stopped in Old Orchard for a bite to eat. Parked at the side of the plaza was the “Conference Bike“*. Neither of us had seen such a thing and it is both a thing of creative beauty and a pretty cool mechanical gadget.

The quadricycle (double wheels at the rear) is powered by all seven riders while one steers and operates the brake and bell. Each rider has a seat and pedals (and can grab on the the circular bar in the middle) which connect by chain to a common drive shaft. The drive shaft is connected using universal joints to form a single drive which operates a heavier chain to the rear wheels.

The front wheels are turned via a steering wheel and what looks to be a rack and pinion type steering setup. The bike was available for rental at $70/hour.

There are other pics from our trip so far up on the gallery.

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.

And you can tell how busy by the fact that it’s taken me until Wednesday night to get anything online from last weekend.

AND my sister can tell because we completely failed to acknowledge her birthday on Monday (we suck!)… and now we’re in that awkward phase of trying to decide when we should call.

Meanwhile, life marches on.

My cousin Lisa was in Ithaca, NY, for training so she came by Friday night to visit. We spent the day together on Saturday out and about in the Cazenovia area. After a Central Daylight Time breakfast, we went to Chittenango Falls State Park for a picnic and a walk. The falls are running strong with spring run-off, although we haven’t had any rain in a week or two.

We also walked around the village of Cazenovia and did a little shopping. We also tried out Nate’s new backpack transportation. I think I need to work a bit more on the adjustments because I felt like I was going to fall over backwards most of the day.

On Sunday, Lisa headed home (visit again soon!!) and after church we went to a “kite fest” at a local park. It was pretty low key, although there was a fairly decent amount of wind. Rather gusty though so the kites were fairly unpredictable. Just a few people flying fancy kites and several kids flying the normal little kid variety.

On Monday (when I should have been calling my sister for her birthday {guilt}), I double checked all of my camera equipment for a photography gig Tuesday night. I borrowed another camera from a guy at work (an XTi) so I could run two setups with less lens swapping. It went fairly well and I came home with around 4.5 GB of images. That’s about 350 shots, of which I hope to get 50 good ones and maybe 25 really good ones.

I was going to make a blog post with pictures about our trip to TX last week, but our gallery seems to be nonexistent so I can’t upload the pictures. We’ll try and get it fixed soon.

Our trip was ok overall, but way too short. We had planned on it being a short trip, but between the weather delays and the stomach flu I developed just before take-off, we ended up getting there about 18 hrs after we were planning on.

We spent what was left of Saturday afternoon visiting with Chris’s aunt, uncle and cousin before taking Chris’s grandmother out for dinner. She was so happy to be able to meet Nate. Sunday we spent some more time visiting with G-Ma. She loved being able to introduce Nate to everyone at the nursing home. In the evening we hung out with Jonny playing with the Wii and Guitar Hero on the Xbox. Monday we stopped in for another quick visit with G-Ma before heading back to the airport. We ended up having a delay on the way home, but that turned out ok because it meant we didn’t have to wait as long in Chicago.

You thought I forgot, didn’t you? Well I finally completed the cropping and editing of the pictures from Luke & Lauren’s wedding. Although most of the pictures were the best of the bunch from any particular moment, if multiple pictures came out well or presented slightly different shots from a framing point of view, I left them in. A few relatively crummy shots are included simply because I didn’t get a better one that turned out. I did some strategic cropping and framing of some of the shots because of foreground obstructions (think people’s heads), but since I didn’t want to wander around during the wedding or barge in front of the ACTUAL wedding photographers… you get what you can get. On the whole, I think the reception shots came out better than the shots of the wedding itself. Added mobility probably contributed to this.

Anyhow, I think there are quite a few excellent shots, and if anybody in the family wants copies to keep or print, let me know. After all, the shots in the gallery are generally not full resolution. There are over 100 images posted in two albums: one for the ceremony and one for the reception.

A few highlights: (more…)

Although I’ve been home since late Saturday night, I wanted to share the shots Greg took in the car on the way back to Denver from Steamboat Springs. That beautiful powder we were skiing in was also falling in Rabbit Ears pass. I was driving, so Greg had fun with my camera.

Vehicle in snowbank 1:

Vehicle in snowbank 2:

Vehicle in snowbank 3:

(You get the idea…)