I always liked this photo. It was taken at Wood Lake Nature Center in the spring of 2007 as my internship as a seasonal naturalist was drawing to a close.
The class theme was 'flight' and we made these water rockets that you pumped up with a bicycle tire pump to the near busting point, then let them rip. And rip they did.
Here Leah is pulling the cord on one and the range of expressions on the kids is great. Everything from shock and fear to wonder and anticipation. We were getting at least 75 to 100 feet of straight up altitude out of these things and the water spray was tremendous.
It was good practice for shooting my camera at high shutter speeds, these are in the range of around 1/2000th of a second. It always seems to out-shutter it's meter at these high speeds. Maybe if I would have had a polarizer on, it would have reacted differently, maybe for the worse.
Here Scott is popping one off, it looks like it's been on a few rides already due to the bent tail fin and dirt impacted into the nosecone. I think we all learned a lot that day. It's amazing how far something can travel in a few thousandths of a second.
This is a scan from a 2 1/4" Kodachrome slide. The beach at Carlsbad State Park north of San Diego, California. Some of my first real surfing water. Beautiful sunsets every night, and falling asleep to the shimmering stars, and roar of the rocks and surf washing up and down the shore.
I got super lucky in that I was sent out to Del Mar to work at a carnival for three weeks and through no error of mine (I swear!), the company sent me out a week early! What was I to do but camp out on the beach for a week. Bummer. Golden Days.
At the other end of the spectrum, this is a spliced together panorama of the Stone Arch Bridge in downtown Minneapolis, taken on about the coldest day in February a few years ago.
Twenty-something below and wind-chills in the don't-even-bother-looking range.
I was down there helping out The Friends of the Mississippi River with a PR gig and would go out for spells of hyper-photography before my batteries, nose, and hands began to freeze up.
This was during the river's 'drawdown', where they opened the adjoining dams during the time of the season when the water level was already it's lowest, lowering the Mississippi to a trickle so that maintenance work could be done on the spillways that come in from the various creeks that run under the city's downtown.
It was a pretty bizarre scene. You can see some more photos of the day here.
The way our weather is outside now, I'm again reminded harshly of it.
It was worth it though, I'd do it again in a heartbeat. The river hadn't been that low in the last 13 years. It was quite an event and drew a lot of local interest, even excitement speculating as to what you would see. We saw some pretty strange trash, including an ancient snowmobile, shopping carts, bikes, and much more.
If that weren't enough, an iconic downtown bar caught fire on the same afternoon and the news crews were running back and forth like the keystone cops.
So that's the move. No more Candlewasting. Well, not as a blog anyway. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog, right after these important messages...
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