Just Clouds

I hate to give away family secrets, but here goes.  We have gotten into the habit of perhaps twice a month driving down to Wendy's to get their little chicken sandwich!  We first had these in Los Angeles when visiting the girls.  I will tell you that the BEST sandwich was the Spicy Chicken Sandwich!  Wow!  But it is twice the size and twice the calories, so we just get the Crispy Chicken Sandwich and bring it home to eat.  When walking back to the car after getting our sandwiches I noticed these Cirrus clouds in the western sky.  This is a subtle photograph, as opposed to being dramatic, as some of my cloud photographs have been.  But I love all the subtle shapes overlaying other shapes.  There is something so beautiful about Cirrus clouds and I cannot not photograph them.  Please click on the image to see it larger - there is much to see in this.

 

That's a Lot of Paint!

Every time I used up all the paint in a can I just put it on the floor of the basement and opened a new one.  I would use the old one to fill up halfway to take up the ladder and paint from.  When I was all done I realized that my basement was full of paint cans!  I started stacking a few together and then it hit me, this would make a great photo.  So I took them all outside today and stacked them on the picnic table and here you are!  Each gallon of paint was $67.50!  When I first painted the house after we bought it in 1970, I think a gallon of paint was less than $20.

 

Pick Your Favorite Ghosts (picture)

I was driving by this house the other day, early in the day, and saw some ghosts hanging from the trees in the front yard.  The light was too bright, though, so I made myself a note to come by late in the day, and so I did that today.  I love these ghosts!  They are the ones that you make by blowing up a balloon and then draping it with an old sheet and then adding eyes. Very cool.  So it was fun to photograph two of the three and try and find the best shot.  But you will have to tell me your favorite, because after shooting about 30 exposures it was really hard to narrow it down.  I chose these three images.  I like this close in image because it is more dramatic than the other two, below.

Maybe up close and more dramatic is not the best way to present these two ghosts.  So I backed away some and gave more a sense of the surroundings, and this is a nice photo.

So here is one that is in-between really close and further back.  So your job is cut out for you to decide which one you like best.  Thanks for the help!  Please let me know.  Thanks!

 

Cracks

I have been painting rather than out taking photographs.  I found this image in a folder marked "Possible Blog," and checked to see if I had used it before.  And I think I have not posted this before.  This is a home in Sea Cliff that was made from a garage kind of building and it is really nice inside.  Some years ago they had a sale of "stuff" and I went and was surprised how nice it was inside.  Anyhow I forgot what brought me to this side of the house, on a side street, even though the front of the house is on a main road.  I was taken by the pattern of the cracks that have been filled with some material to seal the cracks before the building was painted.  I was just fascinated by the pattern of the cracks.

 

I Was So Scared!

I went to the hardware store for yet another gallon of white paint for the house.  I am nearing the end of painting at long last!  As I came out the front door I turned left and at the next door on the building, which it turns out, is part of the hardware store and sells outdoor furniture and other seasonal things, had this woman on display in the doorway!  I nearly had the life scared out of me because of this scary woman! Oh my heart!  Whew!  It took my pulse rate a few minutes to get back to normal!  Actually I was once again desperate for a blog shot so I set the can of paint down on the sidewalk and grabbed my iPhone and took this "just in case!"  Good thing I did, huh?

 

"Cosmic Microwave Background"

We had a brilliant professor from Stonybrook University as our speaker tonight and she gave an amazing talk about observatories being built to explore the Cosmic Microwave Background.  She is the principal investigator of a new one under construction in the Atacama desert in Chile.  She made some complex concepts more easily understood. The "CMB" is microwave radiation that fills all space in the observable universe. With a standard optical telescope, the background space between stars and galaxies is almost completely dark. However, a sufficiently sensitive radio telescope detects a faint background glow that is almost uniform and is not associated with any star, galaxy, or other object. This glow is strongest in the microwave region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The CMB is the key experimental evidence of the Big Bang theory for the origin of the universe.  So why is this photo in black & white?

This is what the original photograph looked like.  Why is it all yellow green?  This light is from the digital projector in the ceiling.  Because it is a color digital projector it doesn't transmit white light.  I think at high speed it rapidly creates an image using red, green, or blue light. So when my camera shutter goes off, the camera may be capturing only one of the three colors in the moment it was displayed.  I thought that when I converted the color to black and white, the image was more attractive. 

So try and figure out this photograph which has the correct color.  The speaker and the group are illuminated by the light of the screen where the photographs and charts are projected. But for some reason, all the photographs like this one have the correct color.  I am at a loss.  Life is complicated!

 

 

A Flying Saucer Invasion!

We went to McDonalds tonight for a three course dinner - burgers, fries and a hot fudge sundae for dessert.  Living large!  I looked out the window at the twilight and noticed that the lights in the ceiling in McDonalds were reflected in the window. Flying Saucers! An invasion!  We quickly finished our hot fudge sundae and got out of there as quickly as we could! Kind of a cool shot, on't you think.