Now It Begins...

Well, it has started snowing.  It's Sunday night and it is supposed to snow all day Monday, and Monday night and into Tuesday night.  The accumulation totals are all over the place from 6" to 10" and then that was revised to possibly 12".  It is a coastal storm and what is really interesting that it is forecast to last so long.  Usually a storm arrives, produces snow and then leaves all in 24 hours.  But not this one.  It is snowing lightly, so we will see what it looks like in the morning.  If you click on this you will see snowflakes in the dark part of the photograph.  Stay tuned!

 

Not Quite Currier & Ives

I know that it has been really cold, but I had not thought about Scudder's Pond until I walked by it today and saw that there were people ice skating.  There were a lot of hockey players but there were some adults skating with children.  When I was growing up I could walk down to the pond at the end of our street.  I always loved ice skating.  I haven't done that in years.  Maybe it is time to buy some ice skates and join the people having fun on the ice.  The title of the blog refers to the wonderful prints of Currier & Ives which were published between 1835 and 1900, which often includes winter scenes of ponds and ice skaters.

 

The Challenge

 

So I decided that I would give myself a challenge and see if I could come up with some closeup photographs instead of just wide-angle landscapes.  Two houses away from our house I stopped to look at these grasses growing in our neighbors garden.  I thought the colors of these grasses were just beautiful and had subtle differences in color.  It felt like fall to me.  I kept on looking for more closeups as I walked, so please stay tuned!  This looks really nice if you enlarge it, by clicking on it.

Water Reflections

On my walk today, the tide was low.  I walk along the sidewalk which is well above the waterline.  Along the edge of the sidewalk there is installed a steel bulkhead down to the water.  After the tide is out, trickles of water come out of the bulkhead until the tide comes back in.  It may be fresh water running out because there are underground streams that have been there forever.  The funny thing is that historical photographs show that part of land that Shore Road runs on was a wetland, that had to be filled to put the road in.  Anyhow I love the shapes created in the sand as the water trickles back down to the harbor.  The trickles of water are only visible because the setting sun is reflected off the water.

 

Ghost Moon

I love looking at and photographing the moon in all its phases, from crescent to half moon to full moon.  I always try to take the sharpest photograph possible using either camera lenses or telescopes.  On the way back from my walk, I saw the nearly full moon but it was above some thin clouds which gave it a ghostly appearance.  I really liked the feeling of that, and I just needed to find some kind of foreground subject to go with it.  I tried telephone poles and various tress along the route of my walk, and finally the out of focus branches of this tree, on my street.  I really love how the branches of the tree seem to be reaching out to grab the moon.  I hope you love ghosts.

 

Hieroglyphs

I have shown you some of the things going on with the horizontal boring process that has installed two 6" diameter plastic sewer lines under Shore Road.  I have more to show you in the future. But meanwhile I wanted to show you some things that went on in order to safely allowing boring to take place.  They used special magnetic sensors and records from the utility companies to determine where things like gas pipes and water pipes are under the street.  Then they mark these symbols on the sidewalk and street so that when they are excavating, they don't risk damaging the utility pipes.  In this case they are showing where a "Gas Main" is located, and the fact that it runs underneath another pipe.  I just found these symbols fascinating, and thought of Egyptian hieroglyphs, even though they are actually quite differnent.

 

Strange Light

I love this photograph because it is so strange.  It will take you a minute to get your bearings.  I was going up to bed last night, and turned out all the lights downstairs.  As I stood in the darkened room, my eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness and I noticed faint areas of light on the walls.  So I waited for my eyes to adapt more and realized that the brightest light on the wall was from the streetlight on the front corner of the property.  Then I noticed another light coming from almost the same direction, but fainter.  I checked and realized that light was from a neighbor's "security light" on their house.  I freaking HATE security lights!  They steal the night from all of us, and don't add any "security."  They can make it really difficult to do astronomy when they are on.  I digress.  I just thought that the strange lights in the living room were amazing.  Oh, and one other thing...  If you look out the window it looks like daylight and you can see our neighbor's car in her driveway.  That, is from the nearly full moon shining on the landscape!  What is so strange is that if you were standing there with me, you would have been looking at an almost completely dark room!  Such is the power of digital photography and long exposures to gather enough faint light to reveal this scene.

 

When The Wind Blows

It has been cold and windy lately.  And when the wind blows we get waves in the harbor, and they make the water look so much more interesting.  It is particular nice before sunset when the low angle of the sun accents the waves.  But i'll tell you, it was COLD out there when I shot this!

 

My Cycling Award!

This is my cycling reward that I just got!  Well I just got it because I just finished making it!  I glued some pine boards together and then routed a cove around the edges, and then put three coats of spar varnish on it.  Then I fastened these bike shoes on it with screws, and made a label for it.  The story is that when I retired, there was a small party with friends and colleagues, and they took up a collection as a gift.  I used the money, $168 to buy these shoes, back in March of 2008.  They were shiny silver in color when new.  I have ridden my bike with these since I retired, and stopped using them in September of 2020.  I don't consider myself a disciplined person, but I am proud of my riding discipline.  9,134 miles in these shoes!  I do have another bike and other shoes for that one, so my total mileage is more than this.  But this is significant mileage.  A lot of time on the road!  Here is the text I put on the board.  Please click on the photo to see how beat up these shoes are after all these years.

 

Clouds at the End of Day

I try never to go out without at least one camera when I leave the house.  Usually, for a trip to the store, it is my "toy camera" the Sony Rx 100.  I had that camera with me today when I went to the grocery store.  On the way out of the store I looked up and saw these clouds.  I stopped immediately because of the late afternoon sun illuminating them.  I love the curve of the clouds, from the orange ones down and around to the gray ones on the bottom.

 

First Quarter Moon

 

Forgive my fascination with the Moon these last couple of days.  I know I just posted a photograph a few days ago, and here is another.  The difference is that I used a 600mm lens on my camera to photograph the moon then, and this time I am using a telescope with a focal length of 1378mm.  So today's photograph of the moon completely filled the frame of the camera.  In fact, had it been a full moon, it would not have fitted within the frame at all!  What you are looking at, starting on the right side is the Sea of Serenity (I will leave out the latin names...)  The curving mountain range in the bottom center is the Apennine  mountains, and the largest of three craters, just to the left of center and up near the top is Archimedes.  If you come look through my telescope, I will show you even more interesting things!  What a wonderful thing is the surface of the moon!  Please click on the picture to see it in more detail.

I thought that you might be interested in seeing the size of the original photograph, and you can see near the top of this photograph of the moon, where the small area I showed above came from.

THIS. IS. NUTS!

Wow, look at all these boxes on the front porch!  I wonder what's in them?  I actually did wonder because I had just placed an order a few days ago, but what I ordered were three small things.  So I brought the boxes inside, cut the packing tape, removed all the bubble wrap, and couldn't believe my eyes at what I found!

I had ordered two small white photographic umbrellas, and an umbrella clamp.  And they put EACH piece in a separate box.  The worst offender was the longer umbrella in the picture above - THAT'S what was in the largest box.  And you mean to tell me that all THREE of these objects would not fit in the one large box?  Man, what is going on in the shipping department of B&H Photo!  This is just crazy!  And wasteful beyond imagining!

 

Evergreen

This is another of my late day walk photographs.  Another photo taken when it was almost too dark to see.  But the sky to the west still had a bit of a glow to it so I took a chance.  I set the "film speed" to 1600 and stood very still, and shot this photograph at 1/15th of a second, wide open.  I was surprised after I looked at the first shot that I could see the tree against the sky, so I shot some more.  So this is crazy, but this evergreen tree is on a small strip of grass in a huge parking lot at the beach, not somewhere in the wilderness!

 

The Waxing Crescent Moon

I never tire of looking at the moon.  It changes every night, night after night.  This is a "waxing" crescent moon which means it is growing in size each night. The opposite of that is the "waning" moon, meaning the illuminated part we see is getting smaller each night.  Please click on this photo and look at the detail of the craters in the lower left side of the photograph.  It is a beautiful and yet astounding object, especially if you can view its battered surface in a telescope.  Stop by some time, and I will show you the moon.

Grace Likes Kathy Better Than Me!

Grace really does like Kathy better than me!  Even though I feed her sometimes, and make sure to pet her lying on the foot of the bed when I go to sleep at night.  But when Kathy is lying on the couch reading, or watching TV, then Grace climbs up on the couch and sits on her, or on her leg as long as Kathy is there.  I don't get no respect!  I do love to photograph her though - she is always paying attention.

 

Topsy Turvy

I have talked about the construction down on Shore road where they are drilling under the street, and installing two black plastic pipes for the whole length of Shore Road.  Turns out they are sewer pipes for the new condominium complex just beyond the old LILCO plant and the sewer pipes go all the way to Glen Cove, to their sewer treatment plant..  They take 30-foot lengths of this plastic pipe, and put the ends in a machine that heats both ends and then bonds them together in sections that are over 1000 feet long.  You can see two sections of the long pipe here on the ground.  They put traffic cones around the pipes because in this area they are on the sidewalk.  What caught my eye was how topsy turvy the cones were, instead of sitting flat on the ground, they are leaning on the pipes, all topsy turvy.  I thought it looked funny, and worth a picture.

 

Jitterbug

This is amazing!  I was walking pretty much in the dark on the way home when I noticed that a boat moving slowly across the harbor had made all these beautiful, smooth waves, and they were moving toward me.  I could barely see them in the dark, but I took a chance, put my camera on the railing to steady it, and then shot a series of photographs as the waves changed.  The exposure was 1/8 second wide open at 1600 ISO and I was amazed that the camera was steady.  It is just what is happening to the reflection of the lights on the waves!  When I was trying to think of what to title this I looked at all the jiggly dots of the lights on the water, and "Jitterbug" came to me.  That's the best I can do!   :-)  Please click on the image to make it larger - it is amazing!

 

Harbor at Dusk

One of the interesting things is that when I start my walk later in the day, is that I get to photograph in a different kind of light than I normally see.  This is interesting because to the eye, it was almost completely dark.  So I set my camera on the railing and cranked up the sensitivity of the camera to 3200, and shot this at 1/10th of a second with the lens set at 150mm and I took a number of exposures to make sure there was not any camera shake.  What's fascinating is that there was not even a hint of color when seen with my eyes.  It was such a surprise, and a pleasure to see the pink color in the sky and reflected in the water.

 

Heads Up!

 

And now for something completely different!  I love the things I can shoot in close-up with my long lens!  I can zero in on a small happening in nature.  These three Mallards were feeding at the time.  They are foraging aquatic vegetation on the bottom of the harbor.  This is a feeding technique that they prefer and use most often.  What's funny is that when the tide goes out, they could just walk over to where they are now and eat, but they don't.  The trick for me was timing.  I would see one with head down and two with heads up.  Then two with heads down and one with heads up.  I stood in one spot for several minutes before I got this perfect shot!

The Disk of the Sun

I started my walk a bit earlier today, so that when I got to the harbor, the Sun was still in the sky, although it had settled into the treeline over on the Port Washington side.  I watched the Sun go down and photographed it as it did.  I like this photograph best, because the Sun is surrounding a single tree.  It is so handy to have a 400mm lens for scenes like this.

 

A Walk After Sunset

I left late for my walk this afternoon.  The sun had set just before I got to the harbor, and the colors in the sky were subtle and beautiful.  I shot a bunch of photographs of the sky and the water, from several different vantage points.  This photograph is my favorite of them all.  It was nice having a few seagulls in the foreground, and of course when I saw the single gull who flew through the scene, I clicked the shutter to record this.   

Building the Heathkit

So many people wrote me and said that I couldn't have been smart enough to put a Heathkit together!  But today, completely randomly, I found evidence!  OK, this is unbelievable!  I went up to the attic to start going through old photographs in boxes that haven't been looked at for YEARS.  Seriously.  Had no idea what was in them.  I took about 8 boxes and started through them.  And this is what I found!  I mean, this is astounding!  I had no idea that I still had these photos!  This is me, standing in the back yard with the box that my new Heathkit kit came in!  You can tell I am excited, because I am standing in snow with no jacket on.

And here I am on my desk with a pair of needle-nosed pliers, wrapping a wire around a terminal of a potentiometer, before soldering it.  The soldering iron is in its holder in the lower right corner of the photo, and the partially finished Heathkit is in the center of the photo.  What else do you notice?  That I am wearing a striped shirt, instead of my signature white shirt?   :-)  Below I am hunched over some part of the construction, using my soldering iron to make connections.  Seeing all these photograph brings it all back!  Wow...  OK I was kidding about people telling me I wasn't smart enough to build this.  I just was checking to see if you believed that...   :-)

 

Hard to Part With...

This is my first Ham radio Transceiver, a Heathkit HW-101.  I bought it as a kit and assembled it myself.  It required a lot of soldering and wiring and installing small components on circuit boards.  I worked very carefully, and triple checked every step I did, and when I turned it on the first time, it worked perfectly!  I remember my first contact with another Ham, an electrician who worked in a coal mine in West Virginia!  We used Morse code and slowly tapped out messages back and forth with a telegraph key.  That was a thrill - communicating by radio.  I think this was about 1978 or so, long before the advent of computers.  Later I talked to people all around the country and the world by voice, instead of Morse code, with this radio.  I even met one of my best friends, Chuck, who was in Texas, when we met just by chance on the radio.  Eventually I bought a more modern commercially made transceiver, and this one sat on the side unused.  But it has a special place in my heart because I built it, and because it was my first.

This is what the inside of the radio looks like with all the old-fashioned radio tubes! It has spent the last 40 years pretty much unused, stored in the attic or in the basement.  I don't remember the last time I used it.  But I held on to it for all these years.  Until today.  It was time to take it to recycling and leave it with the rest of the electronic waste.  Man, it was SO hard to leave it there and walk away from this!  The radio, as you can see, is in mint condition, but most likely the capacitors in it are dried out and no longer working, but it still looks nice. But it is time to clean up and throw out and get rid of "stuff."

 

The Beauty of Flight

I went for my usual walk late this afternoon, and took a detour through the beach where we have our Tuesday coffee and donuts.  There was a tree I wanted to photograph against a clearing sky, and after I did that I continued walking in the sand.  Suddenly a group of a dozen seagulls descended from above me and several of them passed by me in flight, very close.  I couldn't believe how close this one came to me, so I quickly got off 3 shots as it passed.  I love the beauty of birds in flight - perfect, efficient, beautiful aerodynamic beings!  I didn't need a telephoto lens for this one because it was so close.  The beauty of the photograph is also enhanced because of the gray clouds above, with faint hints of blue.

 

The Delicacy of Nature

I try and remind myself to always look for photographs of things seen up close.  I am amazed at how often I don't think to do that!  My Nikon camera has a special lens called a "Micro-Nikkor" which will photograph things at their exact size.  So a 1" wide object will fill the frame.  But I don't have a lens like that for my Canon T7i, the smaller, lightweight camera that I bring with me all the time on my walks.  So I did a really old fashioned thing I would have done when I was in high school - I bought a glass closeup lens that screws on the front of the camera's lens.  It's not very sophisticated but it works!  This is one of the remaining stalks of ornamental grasses by the front steps.  This part of the plant is called a seed head, and it is such an incredibly delicate structure on the plant.  

 

The Electric Tree

I photographed this tree, standing on a lawn down the road from our house, as I returned from a late afternoon walk.  I am coming to love the trees decorated this way.  I have seen many trees in shopping center parking lots illuminated this way.  I think this is more interesting all by itself.  It is interesting, that when I took the picture, to my eyes, the sky was black.  What a surprise to see it in a beautiful dark blue in the photo, which only makes the photograph more beautiful.

 

Red, White & Blue

I just found this photograph that I took with my iPhone back in the middle of November.  Sometimes I lose track of some of my photographs.  I took this with my iPhone because I went to the wine store without a camera!  Then I saw this horse, which has been there for a long time, but usually it is standing in tall green grass.  So I thought it would make an interesting photograph with the straw color of the grass and the horse against the blue sky.  I did not post this today for political purposes, but it did occur to me which part of the horse was painted red...

 

Modern Art Painting in the Back Room

Late in the afternoon on a sunny day, I saw this composition made up of things, of shadows of things, and of reflections of things!  I was sitting reading and looked over to the wall where this long thin table with metal legs sits against the wall with a green glass top on it.  On the table is a clay pitcher with a handle that I got in France years ago.  And then we are seeing the shadow of that pitcher.  And, we are seeing the shadow of a small stick with a star on it from a wooden Santa that sits on the table as well.  And because of the green glass table top, all the light on the wall below the table is green.  I keep thinking it looks like some kind of modernist painting.  I think of the work of Piet Mondrian, but his paintings are bursting with bright colors and my abstraction is not.  Oh well...

Snow Capped Mountains

For years I have seen this concrete wall that is leaching either salt or lime.  I keep looking at the wall and trying to see if I can see a photograph there.  For some reason, the other day, I thought that I was seeing snow-capped mountains!  Now that I have told you that, you should be abele to see snow-capped mountains as well.  Such is the way the power of suggestion works!  You're welcome!

 

Birds of a Feather...

"Birds of a feather, flock together."  That was what came to mind when I was trying to think of a title for this photograph of two birds sharing a rock for a moment.  The big one is some kind of Heron - sorry that's the best I can do - and the small one is a Herring gull.  Actually, they are not of the same feather, becuse they are two different types of birds, but I was desperate for a title.  I am not sure why I thought this was interesting but I don't normally see two different birds sharing a rock.

 

What a Difference a Day Makes!

Yesterday afternoon I took my walk along the shore and I was a bit late in getting started.  The sun was close to the horizon when I arrived at the water.  Lucky me!  Look how beautiful this scene is right at the bottom of our street.  The beautiful warm light from the setting sun, down low, leaving long shadows.  How lucky we are to live this close to such a beautiful place!

Today's walk, and view, was entirely different!  I took my walk earlier in the day because rain was forecast for the late afternoon.  It has been overcast all day as well.  So when I got to this spot, I thought of how beautiful the light made everything yesterday, and thought I would take the exact same photograph again, in this soft gray light.  I suppose there is beauty in this light, but I prefer the more dramatically beautiful image of the day before.  Please click on each of these photographs to see them in more detail.