Some Flowers I've Seen Lately

Since I got the new camera I've been taking pics of anything that catches my eye. Sometimes that something is a flower. Here's a few that I've found around my yard and in my Mother In Law's yard.

From my yard.

My Mother In Law Jane is unbelievable at growing flowers and other plants. This is one of the ones I saw on Easter while we were out in the yard.

Another from my yard.

Another of Jane's

And one more from her yard.

Some Architectural Fun!

A while back we went to New Orleans for a visit. While there Allison and I wandered around the Quarter and took some interesting pictures of buildings. Now it's time to share some of those with you....

The granite entrance to a building. I wish my old camera had been capable of getting more of this entryway into the shot. It was a very interesting building and I don't think this picture does it justice but I do think it makes a nice picture.

LOTS of cool balconies around the Quarter. I liked the look of this one and snapped the pic. I did zoom in for this one.

Even better was that the whole building looked cool. When you can have that much interesting detail on the corner of a building you know you've done good.

Just a cool looking window in a building that was being remodeled.

Something about the symmetry and squareness of this building caught my eye. I ended up taking 3 or 4 shots before I caught what my naked eye was seeing. I like how the stairs look like they could be raised up and fit right into the balcony going around the building.

We Had A Little Rain Last Week.

This is my yard during last weeks storms. I took advantage of the rain to do some more experimenting with the camera.

Not sure what setting I used in this one, but it worked. as you'll see in the others auto was not a good setting to choose.

In this one I set the camera to "aperture priority" which is basically where I pick the f/stop, but the camera picks the shutter speed. It seemed to work good for this.

This picture was taken on auto, as you can see the camera tried to focus on the rain drops and didn't take too good of a picture. Kinda neat, but not good.

Same thing with this one, but it's so bad you can barely see the road. All in all this was a pretty good session because I was able to try some of the things I've been reading about and at the same time learning that auto just doesn't cut it sometimes.

Stay tuned, I'll try to get some more interesting pictures over the next few days.

A Cabin In The Woods...

A picture I took of the Walker Sister's Cabin in the Smokey Mountains Nat. Park. Lotta history around that cabin. It seems my Grandfather stayed there when he was a kid and that we are related to them by marriage. Whatever the connection my Mom loved this place and I must have inherited it because I get a very peaceful feeling whenever I'm there.

I got Allison to sit on the porch in the same pose as one of the Walker Sisters in an old picture I saw years ago. Too bad I didn't have the book with me when I took the pic so that I could have gotten it a little closer to the original. It's close, but I'd prefer it to be closer.

.The old picture was in one of my books so I scanned it for you. The photo credit says 1936 by E.E. Exline

Airplane Pictures

One thing I love almost as much as motorcycles is old planes. Especially WWII planes. I've posted most of my pics on the other blog, but thought I'd share these here.

This is the bombsite that crushed Nazi Germany. The Norden bombsite was the most sophisticated device of its kind during WWII. The standing orders were that if the plane was crash landed you were to destroy the sight at ALL costs. Now of course we can see them and see just what all the fuss was about. This one is in the nose of the B-17 Liberty Belle. We're actually pretty close to my house here so maybe I was planning on quieting those damn kids that always run around <grin>.  Nothing fancy to this shot, I just like it.

This is the cockpit of a B-25 that crashed in Lake Murray SC back in 1943. It was recovered a few years ago by a crew from the Southern Museum of Flight were I was a volunteer at the time. This was taken after the 3 feet of mud had been flushed from the cockpit area. A lot of this corrosion was caused by chemicals the Corp of Engineers used in the lake to control the algae. It was a mess to clean up, but you can still see this aircraft at the Museum of Flight in Birmingham. More info can be found here and here.

I took this photo with my old VERY cheap ebay camera so it is not that great, but I thought y'all might appreciate the shot.

Spenser Welding and Color Correcting Photos.

I took this picture of Spenser doing some welding on Saturday. I had the camera on auto and this is what it took. I really like this pic and even the way the weld flash messed with the camera's sensors. I think it's a really cool look. Then I decided to see if I could make it look more like what the room really looked like when I took the shot. Thanks to the magic of Photoshop I was able to do that. Just remember if a picture doesn't look quite right, but is still a good shot you can take advantage of the file being digital and make it the way you want. I adjusted the levels just a little and then shifted the color balance on the shadows and highlight levels. Play around with the controls and just remember that if you don't like it, just undo it. You'll be amazed at what you can come up with.

The original shot with the room given a yellowish look.

Color adjusted and looking more like real life.

I REALLY do like to get pictures of stuff being created. We need to get our hands dirty more often.

Forgotten Cemetery

On my rides sometimes I go down Shannon-Wenonah Road. Along this road is an old cemetery and when I say along the road I really mean it. There are grave-markers within 10-15 feet of the road. I decided to stop on the way home from work the other day and take some pictures of the place. It kinda makes me sad to see this. It looks like it was used up until the 60's and I HOPE all the holes I saw are from loved ones being relocated and not just sunken graves, because those holes are everywhere. Sadly it seems that not everyone has been relocated yet. Hopefully the powers that be will ensure that these folks get the respect they deserve one day. Maybe I'll go out there and do a little clean up sometime. There is at least two Veteran's graves and one of my yearly projects is to go around and take care of forgotten Vet graves on Memorial Day.  I guess this place just got added to the list. If you know anything about this cemetery please post it in the comments, I would love to know more about it.

Thee are a couple of these homemade marker stones. It's a neat idea for folks who can't afford a fancy granite one.

One of the Vet's graves out in the woods, it looks like someone was removed from right next to him.

There are still some really nice stones here, someone did care about these folks at some point in the past.

Another of the homemade stones.

Yes, that is THE road right there in the back of the picture. Some graves are even closer to it.

The first view I had of this stone as I was walking around a little further into the woods. I thought this was a good representation of this forgotten resting place. Man made beauty overgrown with nature reclaiming us as her own.

Closer to the backside of this one.

Wood Can Be Pretty Cool

I was riding around killing the rest of my lunch hour this week and saw a huge pile of logs along the edge of the road. (some kind of pulp wood business). There were some REALLY interesting logs on the pile and I took a bunch of pics, but these are the ones I liked the most. Hope you enjoy them.

To me this one looks almost like you're looking down into a canyon of stone instead of decayed piece of wood. I used auto, but got in real close to get the effect.

This had to be te most interesting piece of wood I saw. I would LOVE to cut about 2-3 feet back from this end and make a table out of it. The shape is really cool and the colors are beautiful.

Playing around a little.

Getting real goofy now, but I thought it was kinda cool.

A nice play on life and death here. The vine is growing and living while crossing the log that has ended its life, but is ready to go to the next period of its existence.

Playing With Camera Settings

One of the cool "scenes" on the new camera is "color accent" where you basically pick one of the colors in the shot and then all the other colors are converted to B&W. I took these two pictures of the Hydrangeas in the yard with this setting. It takes a little practice to get the camera to pick the color you want, but once you figure it out you can have some fun.

Looking at the plants in the back yard.

Close up

I also took a really fun shot of my Triumph while I'm working on the re-assembly. I'll try to keep the bike shots to a minimum but this picture needs to be in this post.

To get this kind of a picture before I had to do a LOT of work in Photoshop. Now I can do it right in the camera.

A New Start.....

I started the "What I See" blog to show the pics I had taken over the years, but it quickly evolved into a place where Motorcycles dominated. That's OK, bikes are who I am. When I was hit by the truck and broke my leg, they were rolling me through the Emergency Room I passed my Wife and told her "You do realize I'm getting a new Harley out of this right?". That's a big part of my life, but there are other things I like and for those things I'll put them here. You may see anything from pictures of my dog Merlin to a tree in the yard or maybe even a model of a Huey helicopter or even an action figure posed in a weird way. If it catches my eye and I take a picture it may just end up here. .

So, for my first post on this blog I'll begin with my "best buddy" Merlin. I took this picture with my new Canon G12 on the auto setting. I bought a great book about using all the cool stuff on the G12 so hopefully you'll see some interesting stuff as I learn what I'm doing

I took this one on the walking trail at Ross Bridge. They have a nice little park around the Civil War era  bridge the development is named after, but once past that it's just a nice trail that eventually runs into the maintenance trials for the storm sewer. I was still using auto, but I zoomed in quite a bit to see how it changed the picture. I can't tell you what's different about it, but I can sure see it. Hopefully you can too.