No Lightning

I drove home from the movies last night in and out of some rough thunderstorms. They were all localized, though, so when you weren't right under them, you got a pretty good light show from the lighting. Once I got home, I grabbed the camera and the tripod to see if I could get some pictures, as it wasn't raining at all near my house. I tried for about half an hour at three in the morning to capture some shots, but I got nothing worth anything. These are the best of the shots, and you can actually see a little bit of flash in two of them, but not enough to make it interesting, I'm afraid.



I've had a little more luck in the past, but it takes some pretty specific conditions to get decent lightning shots. You can check out my old pics here and here.

Air & Space & Dulles

Since I just mentioned it in a post, here are a couple of pictures of the Air And Space Museum at Washington-Dulles International Airport. You can visit it on it's own or you can visit after checking your baggage for the flight home after a long weekend of shooting pictures in DC. It's got some pretty impressive stuff on the inside, well worth the fifty cent bus ride from the terminal. And since it's a branch of the Smithsonian, entrance is free!

Star Trek

The new Star Trek movie came out the weekend I was in DC for a wedding, so I wasn't able to see it. I finally got to see it yesterday, almost a month after it came out, and man, is it good. It's got plenty in it to recommend to the non-Star Trek fan, as well as plenty for the long-time Trek boys. So be sure you go see it before it leaves the theaters. We had to trek to two different theaters to find one showing the movie at a reasonable hour, and the auditorium only had about a dozen people in it during the showing, so it may not be showing for much longer. Now, perhaps the way to see it is to seek out a local IMAX theater. When I visited the Air And Space Museum at Washington-Dulles, they were playing the movie on the IMAX screen, and I got an email from Kennedy Space Center the other day saying it was playing there as well, so seek it out on the big, big, big screen.

Lithia

As I hinted about a couple of days ago, here are a few shots from my quick trip to Lithia Springs last weekend. When I was a youngster, we'd occasionally go here to swim in the big spring, and occasionally in the little spring, the one you see here, when it was still allowed. Eventually, enough people tried to dive into the cavern beneath the water, got stuck and drowned, that they had to post it off-limits and keep people out. The bottom of the spring that you see below is about 16 feet underwater. I'm told that it opens up into a cavern, but I've never seen it, and never been tempted to try and look.

All of these shots show the minor springs. The major springs are much larger, and packed with screaming kids. I suppose I was like that when we used to visit in the summer. We also went to Crystal Springs a lot, but that's been closed and is now used by Zephyrhills Spring Water as the source of much of their bottled water. Shame.

I know you won't believe me, but all of the greenery you see here is maybe three feet under the surface of the water. It's that clear! Plus, I used a polarizing filter on my camera. That helps remove the glare of reflected sunlight. Sorta like polarized sunglasses, but for the camera.