Mother-in-Law's New House

I was asked to take pictures of my Mother-in-Law's new house.  My wife brought the camera (she picked me up from work), but it only had my 50mm lens on it.  This was good because it was relatively dark in the house, but I wasn't able to get far enough away from things to get wide-angle shots.  I decided to do slightly more artistic shots of the house. I would consider these the best three:

The Long Break

Sorry that I have been absent for so long.  Life is insane.  I have been taking pictures a lot over the last many months, but have not had time to even read other people's blogs, let alone post anything to mine.  I will try to post some things over the next week.  Here are some pictures that I took a couple of days ago, looking for the perfect pictures of the kids...

A Few Random Pictures

Ladybug on Smart Phone:

Fall Colors:

Top Flight Dragster:

Crab Mama:

Neighborhood at night:

Halloween 2010

Crab Boy = a Professor; Crab Girl = Zombie Bo Peep.

Rocket Launch 2010

As many of you know, I teach a class called "Rocket Science 101".  It is a general science class for non-science majors.  This means that there is very little math and lots of entertainment.  One of the things that I do to keep their attention is to give extra credit for bringing a model rocket to class on a particular day.  We all go out to a field and launch rockets.  Imagine launching about 100 rockets in an hour.  That is what we do.  Here are the three best pictures from the day:

Rally to Restore Freedom

Crab Mama and I went to Washington DC to attend the Daily Show's Rally to Restore Freedom.  It was a pretty fun day.  There were an estimated 220,000-280,000 people there.  Here are some pictures from the trip.

This is the line that we waited through to get onto the Metro at Greenbelt.

When we got there, we dove right into the crowd, which was a little stupid.  Here is what everything looked like from inside the crowd (except we can see color - well, a bit of color).  Notice that we couldn't even see the stage.  I could see the last Jumbotron, but Crab Mama was too short.  So all she could see were the people.

We fought our way to the side where there were significantly less people.  From that point, we could see the Capital and the Washington Monument with all of the people.

People were so desperate to see that they climbed up on top of the port-o-potties:

The signs at the Rally were very good.  There were a lot of very creative people there.  Here is one of my favorites:

This is after the Rally, behind the stage, in front of the Capital:

A picture of the Washington Monument:

An extremely symmetric building:

We met some friends after the Rally.  Here is a picture of Will sitting in his living room reading the paper.

And, finally, Todd and Laura standing in front of the Smithsonian:

Some Pictures from Sunday

On Sunday I got a little time away from everything.  I had to go run some errands, which gave me an opportunity to stop the car and take pictures for a little while.  Here are some of the ones that I like. As you might be able to tell, four of them were taken from roughly the same spot.  There is a really nice metropark close to our house (ok, there are 5 of them within spitting distance), which is very pretty.

This is from a random lake that I was zipping by.

 

These are from the dock at the metropark: 

 

(I will probably use this one as a screen background.  I love these types of shots with nothing being the focus.  Just sort of abstract.):

 

As we were headed home from the store, there was a balloon coming over the trees next to our neighborhood.  I waited for about 5 minutes so the balloon and tree would be in the right lighting conditions. (Patients, eh?)

The Camera In Front of the Man - Day 365 (Last Day!)

Crab Mama suggested that I take a picture of all the camera stuff that I have purchased over the last 8 months.  So, for my last picture, I present a little bit of camera love.

The Man Behind the Camera - Day 364

Sitting in my hotel room in DC.

Cloud Shadows On Lake Erie - Day 363

So close to the end, but no time to take nice pictures.  Must take picture from airplane.  Must. I got better framed shots of more interesting things, but the window was so dirty, that they looked like crap.

Looking up at Night - Day 362

Boring! But love the detail...

A Pirate - Day 361

Here is another amazing sight from the Renaissance Festival.

Hawk - Day 360

We went to the Renaissance Festival today and saw many amazing things, including this hawk.  You should blow up the picture.

Monarch - Day 359

The caterpillar turned into a butterfly!  Here it is moments before it flew off into the wild blue yonder.

Fam and Clouds - Day 258

Up the Stairs - Day 357

This is looking up the 8 story stair case in the hotel in Washington.

Sessions and Sessions - Day 356

I am here in Washington DC organizing a meeting in San Fransisco in December.  There were 18,000 suggested presentations.  I was in charge of organizing 700+ of those in a total of 50 different sessions.  Each session is one note card.  My note cards are the light green ones in the foreground.  It is hard to image how much work goes into organizing this meeting until you see the cards.

Two for the Price of One - Day 355

I had some hopes for the picture from the airplane, although I knew as soon as I elected to not take my low light lens with me, I would want it.  But, the picture is not very good at all.  I was able to take the picture at 1/4 s exposure to minimize some of the airplane motion, but still, an airplane moves around a LOT.  The second picture I took because I thought the airplane picture turned out badly.  I was totally going for The Shining look.  I think that it accomplished this.  So, two for the price of one.  And, if you combine two marginal pictures, you get one really good picture, right???

Rooftop - Day 354

I walked a little extra to get this picture today.  I decided that I had 10 minutes before class to look for some interesting shots, and I walked towards the smoke stacks that you can see from the bus stop.  Then I went into the Undergraduate Science Building (really?) and looked for some nice shots.  I taught in this building a couple of years ago, and knew there were some interesting views, and this is the first shot that I took.  I thought it was going to be horrible, but I really like it.  It has a lot of stuff in it, but it is all clean lines and various colors. I will post another picture from just down the hall tomorrow (unless something better comes up...)

A New Shower Head - Day 353

Having a removable shower head is very useful when one needs to wash a dog.  This isn't in the one for the new shower, but, since we were at our local big box store, we thought we would pick this up too.

Bowling - Day 352

Another Tree - Day 351

This was taken on the way to work.  The sky here is rarely so blue.

Horses - Day 350

Today was a bit foggy outside.  I was hoping to get yet another nice fog picture, but there really wasn't enough for that.  So, I took a picture of the neighbor's horse, standing there looking at me.

Spider on the Wall - Day 349