This is a Cape Thick-knees -- a bizarre name for a bird, non? This lil' guy reminds me of the stern eagle from The Muppets Show. :) Shot at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha. Click to enlarge.
Looks a bit like a doe to me -- but it's a Klipspringer. Native to Africa, apparently this little guy can jump like nobody's business! Click to enlarge.
Some more from the Omaha Henry Doorly Zoo (click to enlarge):
"Hi, I'm Wilfred Brimley, and I'd l like to talk to you about diabeetus. Did you know that some Americans don't know about dia... what the hell is that in the sky?"
I have days like this.
I really don't know what motivates these guys to strike these poses in the water -- I'm not sure if they're showing off, or if this is a seal's idea of fun. :)
Today's photos are of iridescent jellyfish as the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha. Actually, I'm not sure if these bad boys are glowing, or if they somehow react to blacklight. Either way, they were fascinating. :) Click to enlarge.
This bear at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha seemed extremely fascinated with his own arms and claws -- he kept stretching them out above himself and looking. Click to enlarge.
Today's photo is of a large, beautiful parrot preening his feathers at the Henry Doorly Zoo in Omaha, Nebraska. He was a very photogenic lil' guy. :) Click to enlarge.
I'm back! It's been a crazy month; I got married then I got really sick... and now I'm back up to speed. :)
Today's photo is of a Gibbon at the Omaha Zoo (click to enlarge). My wife decided that since I'd never seen the Omaha Zoo before, it was imperative that I went there forthwith -- and boy, was she ever right. I think I'll be getting a yearly membership!
Every now and then you see a video so amazing that you kinda step back:
You can hear the chatter between the spacewalker and control in the background. Now try to imagine how mindblowing that must be -- to be out in the blackness of space putting something together with your little space hammer while you coast along at a jolly ol' 17,000mph, when suddenly you see the eye of a Category 5 hurricane zip by 200 miles underneath your feet. Holy cow.
Being an astronaut is fraught with danger, but it clearly is the coolest job in the world and I envy every last one of those guys.
Someone asked me where I shot the creepy-looking severe storm photo in my post from yesterday -- the answer is from atop an 8 story parking garage. It's not quite as scary as you'd think (the bulk of the storm had passed), though there's always a slight worry about lightning when you're that elevated near storms. Anyhow, the shot above shows another photographer that was up there snapping away at the storm clouds overhead at sunset. Click to enlarge in a new window.
So, we had a severe storm go through Lincoln today...
And this was right after it passed. Looks like Memorial Stadium (where the Huskers play) is a portal to another dimension or something. (Click to enlarge in a new window)
The storm itself was quite wonderful -- golfball sized hail, gusts that were bowing the trees over, typical Nebraska summer stuff. My coworker got caught outside on his break and got a welt on his head from a hailstone. Oh, how I hope I never have to move away from this place.
I had to shoot a wedding this past week; I've been going through the shots. I made a point of shooting an HDR of the place (St. Teresa) while I was there. Not quite Notre Dame, but not bad for Lincoln, Nebraska. :)
Ah, the Badlands! A startlingly cool geological oddity in southern South Dakota -- it seems like it belongs in Arizona, not the northern high plains. If you look close, you can see a hawk soaring over the landscape. :) This is a shot from 2002; it was shot on Velvia with a Canon EOS-3 and a Sigma 70-200 2.8EX lens.
This is from an old storm chase last year. Me and Josh were on a supercell near Clay Center Kansas, if I remember correctly, following it north as it dropped several tornadoes. We were on the ass end of it, so while we did get to see the tornado, it was from quite some distance (about 5 or 6 miles), and we never had much chance of catching up to it, mostly because it was moving quickly and we had to, at one point, stop to wait for it to cross the road a couple miles in front of us. (Unfortunately, it was on the other side of the precip that time, so no pics of the tube. I kinda wish we'd stopped and taken a couple snaps of the damage path; it was eerie to see the exploded grain silo scattered across the highway and the lush green farm fields. I made this one extra big for web resolution because it loses a bit of impact when it's tinier. Yes, it's registered at the U.S. Copyright Office. :)
This was taken with a Canon 20D, using a Canon EF-S 10-20mm lens backed out to 10mm. Exposure is 1/100th at f/5, ISO 100.
This is an HDR photo of a home in Kearney, Nebraska. It was assembled with Photoshop CS3 using 9 photographs, each spaced one stop apart, at f/5.6 using a 20D and a Canon 10-22 lens. The shortest exposure was 1/2 second, the longest was 242 seconds.
Okay, okay, okay, I'll write a blog post about this. :) I usually don't put much in the way of personal stuff up here, as it's not really of interest to the wide world, and most people I know get to hear about my riveting life (ha!) in person.
So, some backstory. Last year, I took a trip with my dad to New York City and got a chance to snap about a brazillian photos of the place -- it's an extremely photogenic town. I ended up with a candid shot of Samuel Jackson, an illustration of me in Time magazine, and a whole slew of other awesome photos. And now, it seems, I ended up in a major motion picture. :)
Basically, our hotel was across the bay (Jersey side) from the WTC construction site, and getting to Manhattan meant riding the PATH to the WTC station. (This was a surreal experience in itself, as the train circled the entire perimeter of where the buildings were, and you ended up looking out into a massive hole of construction.) While we were at the WTC site, my dad noticed that there was some kind of press conference being set up. It turned out to be Pataki -- and since I was in NYC to take photos of anything halfway interesting, I figured the NYC governor would make a nice snap. Of course, I had to shoot from outside the fence, as the public weren't allowed into the "public press conference"; only the press was.
So anyhow, the other day I downloaded the torrent of SiCKO. Normally I don't download online movies, as it's a good way to end up on the other end of a lawsuit barrel, but the film's creator, Michael Moore, had already said publicly that he didn't give a fig if people downloaded it online. Good on you, fine sir! About an hour and 36 minutes into the movie, they cut to a Pataki press conference at the site of the former WTC buildings -- and I said to myself, "self, that looks just like the press conference I stumbled on!". And then, suddenly, I'm having an out of body experience:
Yup! That's me on the left, with my telephoto wedged through the gap in the fence. My dad is the dude in the background with the sunglasses, craning his neck to see what's going on. They actually start out with a zoom on me, then pan out and to the right. NYC is truely a hub of media -- on just the first day wandering around, I ended up in a movie, in a magazine, and getting a picture of a A-list movie actor. And on top of it all, you can hardly drop your camera there without taking a great photograph. :)
I'm not a big fan of games these days -- for the most part, there just isn't time, and really, there are so many better things a man can do with his life than play with a computer or a Playstation.
However, over the years, there were a few that captured my imagination -- one of them being Microsoft Space Simulator. What made Space Simulator something special was that it literally put you in a space craft and allowed you to do, go, or land anywhere that you wanted in the the solar system -- and it even had a feature that allowed a type of "fantasy" ship with drives that would get you up near light speed. With time accelleration, you could visit other stars -- and it all fell within the realm of 'real' physics. Of course, if you didn't know a whig about orbital mechanics, the game would do all the hard work for you and let you cheat -- nobody wants to learn math to play games, right? :)
I'd pretty much forgotton about it, but then I discovered a couple years back that someone had taken the idea and ran with it -- in an open source, freeware kind of way. The result was something called "Orbiter: Space Flight Simulator", and it is just exactly that. This is, first and foremost, a simulator of physics; while it is technically a 'game', there are no real objectives other than trying to get, say, the space shuttle into a stable orbit or to do the complex orbital calculations required to get your landlubber butt to the moon. And I really do mean that -- the game's website reccomends that anyone who wants to try the game read a large primer on orbital mechanics and physics. Learning how to get into a stable orbit takes quite a bit of time; learning to get to and dock with the ISS is nearly impossible, and a moon shot is so complicated that you wonder how in the hell anyone ever managed to do it.
Now, as far as the shuttle is concerned, the game is somewhat unrealistic in that it forces the player to manually fly the thing. The shuttle is mostly flown by computer; the astronauts generally sit there and run through checkflights, pressing buttons and flipping switches -- they aren't expected to manually roll and pitch the shuttle during the ascent and re-entry, at least up until the actual landing. But it's a great simulator of what it'd be like if you literally had to grab the stick of the shuttle and pilot it into space.
Anyhow, what makes this game interesting is that it actually makes you a bit smarter. If you can figure out how to get into orbit, you understand quite a bit more about physics than you did when you started, unless physics is already your specialty. If you can figure out how to execute an orbital transfer to Mars, you probably know more than most freshman Physics students about orbital mechanics. I've often thought that one of the best ways to learn things via computers is by experiments and simulations that allow you to play with settings and try different things and see what happens -- this game does exactly that.
Above is a video capture of a shuttle from launch to the beginning of orbital insertion (there is still a good 5 minutes of burn left after the end of this video, and a apoapsis burn on the other side of the planet, but that would be boring.)
