As a followup to my snow photos from Champaign at Christmas, here’s a sample of a few photos documenting what it takes to shutdown much of Huntsville:
Archive for the 'Photography' Category
Finally getting around to going through photos I’ve taken recently and uploaded a set I took of the snow while we were in Champaign for Christmas. Here’s a sample that I liked with Sarah chasing Rachel down the street with a snow shovel full of snow:
A couple of weeks ago, we went up to Nashville and hit a number of the sights. I’ll go ahead and split this into two posts, since I’ve only uploaded some of the relevant photos so far. The first day, we hit their recreation of the Parthenon. Apparently, it’s actually the second replica they’ve built, with the first being built in 1897 to celebrate their centennial but it was only built to last 6 months. The locals liked it so much, they elected to rebuild it in a more permanent manner. It now also hosts the city of Nashville’s art museum.
After that, we hit the Frist Center for the Visual Arts to catch their exhibit featuring Monet to Dali (on loan from the Cleveland Museum of Art). The other exhibit featured some of the work of Angelo Filomeno, who does really interesting (if a bit disturbing) embroidery work on large silk panels. From the Frist website, his works feature “embroidered images of fanged skulls, exploded peacocks, and hovering insects.” Strangely enough, that was about all they had. I have to admit we were a bit disappointed overall. We figured there’d be a more substantial art museum in a city the size of Nashville, but we arguably had a better time at the Huntsville art museum (especially given the difference in the price of admission).
Finally, we hit the Lane Motor Museum before heading home. By far the best stop of the day, especially since admission’s only $5 for an adult. I don’t know what Mr. Lane does for a living, but apparently he must do pretty well for him to have accumulated such an impressive selection of unusual autos predominantly from Europe and Japan. The collection includes everything from cars to trikes to motorcycles to a massive US Army LARC and other oddities like the Helicron. All sorts of cool stuff. Go check it out!
Finally caught up with going through my photos and uploading to Flickr. Katie was in town visiting this past week (Spring Break). Aside from the holy week activities (choir tired now), one afternoon Amanda and I took off work and all three of us went to the Space & Rocket Center. Lots of interesting historical NASA stuff (early V-2 rockets, Saturn V/Apollo stuff, etc), but I have to admit some of it felt a bit slapped together. Amanda’s description of the presentation in the new Saturn V building: “high school science project… factually accurate, but looked like it was printed up on the parents’ inkjet printer and put in a cheesy plastic picture frame.” Since they only opened that recently, I can only assume it was a rush job and they’ll hopefully gloss it up a bit as time goes on.
The older part of the museum could definitely use a revamp though. Didn’t seem to be organized in a way that someone without a fair bit of previous rocket/NASA knowledge would get much out of it. Felt like what you’d get when you ask a bunch of scientists to design a museum. Again, factually correct, but rather dry and lacking the polish you’d hope for in a museum that was aiming to appeal to the general public. The multimedia parts felt really dated. While they’d spent the bucks on upgrading to nice fancy plasma TVs, they were still obviously playing videos produces back in the ’80s that were being played back on VHS tapes that dated back to the same time period. Ignoring the crappiness of ’80s production values, the audio and video quality were pretty lousy to the point where you were glad they had the closed captions turned on everywhere so you had some idea what they were actually saying. I distinctly remember one video that had some cheesy ’80s music that sounded like a bunch of kids singing at the bottom of a well…
On the drive back from Savannah, Charles and I quickly stopped in to visit the Robins Air Force Base Museum of Aviation. Didn’t spend very long there, but it wasn’t too much out of the way for the drive back and had a chance to take a few pics. There were some more unusual planes there that I’d meant to go back and look up info on, but obviously hadn’t since I only just pulled the photos off my camera a few days ago with the rest of the photos from Savannah.
Took a trip for work back in December to provide cluster training for some of the engineers at Gulfstream. Seems like we also did some very minor maintenance on the cluster we administer there. Anyway, I brought the camera along and had a chance to take a few pics while wandering around the riverfront. Only got around to pulling them off my camera today, so here they are:
I’m finally getting around to sifting through some of the photos I’ve taken over the past couple of months and uploading them to Flickr. Here’s the one from the first batch taken at Cathedral Caverns in Scottsboro, AL:
And here are some shots I took of the Autumn trees from up on Monte Sano:
And a few shots of our pumpkins from Halloween:
Apparently it’s been a busy week for my flickr photos. I’ve had two that were selected for inclusion in various web things.
First, one of my Ireland honeymoon photos was selected for inclusion in Schmap Dublin Third Edition (check out
Literary Dublin: Trinity College). Oddly enough, it was a photo I took while we were wandering around Trinity College. Here’s a little descriptive blurb from their website:
Exploring a Schmap Guide is a uniquely interactive experience: maps and guide content are dynamically integrated, allowing intuitive, real-time access to reviews and photo slideshows for places of interest.
Then, one of my photos from Hong Kong was selected for use in a Wikipedia article: Hong Kong Basic Law Article 23. It’s a picture I took from a trolley of a huge demonstration protest against “Article 23″. For the longest time I’d wondered what the heck Article 23 was about and why it was so unpopular. Jeff and I had asked the guy who was showing us around but he didn’t seem to know. Best guess was it had something to do with encroaching communism since the UK’s rental agreement was about up on HK, and so the PRC was working on stepping in. From the Wikipedia entry, it sounds like an unsurprisingly unpopular bit of legislation that ended up being shelved.
Those of you who know me should know why I haven’t updated in a long time. Amanda and I had a very long month when we went down to Huntsville for Mike’s wedding. We had our baby Isaac prematurely, and after fighting for three long weeks in the Huntsville NICU, he passed away peacefully in our arms. We’re still having a hard time with it, but I suppose it’s good to talk about it.
But I suppose I should continue to try and work on returning to “normal” life, so I’m going to go ahead and post some photos I took while we were down there.
We took a hike at the state park up on the top of Monte Sano:
We also took a trip to the Hunstville Botanical Gardens:
And on our way home, we stopped by the Jack Daniel’s Distillery which is just across the border in Lynchburg, TN:
Took some pictures of the snow yesterday and put them up on flickr:
We definitely got a fair bit of snow, and some of the drifts were pretty impressive. Unfortunately, the winds and the city plows concentrated and packed the snow on our side of the street (but it did mean our street was plowed a few times as opposed to the more minor streets that maybe saw one pass… benefits of being a city and school bus route). Fortunately, while I was out there starting to shovel when someone driving a pickup with a plow attachment came by to do the neighbor’s driveway. Asked if I’d like ours done as well for a small fee, and I jumped at the chance. Good thing too because it left some impressive snow piles that I don’t like the thought of making with a hand shovel:
There were also some pretty neat patterns in some of the snow drifts that I thought made cool pictures:
