Eleven Years And Counting

Some months back I found the ultrasound above in a pile of photos somewhere. I wanted to post it in November to mark the 10th anniversary of my diagnosis with type 1 diabetes. Then I noticed that the date on this was May of '97. This scan was taken several months after the diagnosis because I was having trouble keeping food down. I know that I was originally diagnosed in November, because there was some concern over whether I would be out of the hospital in time for Thanksgiving or not. Turns out that I was out in plenty of time, but it took years before I was able to enjoy a holiday centered around food again. But I guess the real point of the story is that I missed my tenth anniversary, and this is the eleventh year I've survived. Anyhow, I saved the scan above because I always thought it odd that they found a little, distorted Playboy bunny deep in my liver. Imagine that...

I hope everybody out there has a great Thanksgiving, and realize that we all have something to be thankful for.

Pigs On The Barby

Still plenty more pictures from the Australian Pink Floyd show to share, including this little surprise. If you're going to see them soon, I apologize for ruining all their surprises, but these pictures are just too cool to share. All during the show, we had been hoping they would play some music the LP Animals. Eventually they played Pigs (Three Different Ones) (I was hoping for Sheep myself, but you can't always get what you want), and sure enough, a few minutes into the song, here comes the pig! He was an ugly fellow, with glowing red eyes, big tusks and a rather nasty disposition. But more importantly, he looked cool. The audience went crazy when he first appeared, but it wasn't the last surprise of the evening.

Still More Aussie Floyd

One of the great things about the Australian Pink Floyd show was that they played music from all phases of Floyd, from the early psychedelia of Astronomy Domine & Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun to the Roger-less Division Bell. They also took visuals from all eras as well. Above is a bit of the imagery from Pulse, and below is a picture of Floyd founder Syd Barrett.


Another part of the fun of Aussie Floyd is their incorporation of Australian culture into the Floyd mythos. In the shot above, you can see their pink kangaroo making an appearance on the Wish You Were Here album cover. He shows up a lot throughout the concert. The shot below shows an image taken from the Floyd box set, Shine On. These guys did as good a job with the visuals as they did with the music.

More Aussie Floyd (Not Uncle)

As I mentioned, I saw The Australian Pink Floyd Saturday night in Atlanta. They played at the Fox Theatre, a great venue right in downtown Atlanta. This was the same theater that saw the premier of Gone With The Wind way back in 1939. We had visited the box office earlier in the day to find out if I could bring my camera in or not. Turns out that they permitted cameras, but only point-and-shoots and cell phones. So my big SLR was out. I borrowed a friend's camera, and spent about 30 minutes trying to learn how to operate it in the dark. I was still finding my way around it when we arrived. My first shot was the marquee out front, where I had to block traffic for ten minutes waiting for the coming attractions to loop back around to the faux Floyd.

Once inside, this was what we saw. I spent some more time trying to make adjustments to the camera, finally settling on a maximum aperture of f2.8 (depending on the focal length) and an exposure time of 1/30 to 1/60 of a second, depending on what lights were lit on stage. The ISO was set to 400, so if you look close you'll see quite a bit of grain in these shots, especially the ones I've cropped a lot. But they are still pretty good for shooting in the dark.

The concert began with a complete performance of Wish You Were Here. Not just the song, but the whole LP. They didn't hold anything back, throwing themselves into the performance right off. If you've ever seen the real Pink Floyd, you'll recognize many of the visuals. Even the stage state mirrors the real Floyd. The round rear-projection screen is vintage Floyd. The pyramids are a typical motif, as is the diver below in Mono Lake. Very impressive.

The Week Of Thanksgiving

Yep, that's right, Thanksgiving is here, and long-time readers of the blog know what that means. The rest of you will just have to stay tuned. In the meantime, this lovely shot is Bridal Veil Falls in Bedford Reservation in Ohio. Gotta love that fall color!

Aussie Floyd

Through the miracle of an unsecured wireless router, my laptop is suddenly online. That means I can show you a picture of the concert from last night, less than twelve hours after the fact. What you see above is the Australian Pink Floyd, in all their reflected Floyd glory. Much, much, much more to come when I get back to my own computer.

Greetings From Atlanta

Sorry about the dearth of posts this week. I've been sort of busy getting ready for the upcoming holiday season, and now I'm in Atlanta for the weekend. I'll be at the Australian Pink Floyd show at The Fox tomorrow night, so maybe I'll have some pictures of that for you next week. And for the record, this is my first post from a Mac. I am not impressed...

See you all next week. ;)

The Next Week Of November

November is really flying by, isn't it? I have so much to do before the Christmas season starts, I don't see how it's all going to get done. Time will tell, though. But at least you get a calendar page for this week. I love this shot of an osprey giving me the evil eye as I photograph his nest. I shot this out at Myakka River State Park. There's a long line of power poles alongside a road called, no lie, Power Line Road. Atop each pole is an osprey nest. As I walked along, an osprey or two would fly away from each nest, circle around a few times, then land again after I had gone. I managed to catch this fellow right before he took off.

Now It Can Be Told, Part Four

I just can't get enough of these awesome Cube pictures. I stood there for almost an hour taking these shots, slowly circling the artwork trying to find just the right angle. Turns out that the best angle is head-on to one of the open sides. The lights inside this thing are capable of producing 14.7 million colors, or at least something close to that. I think it's got something like 7000 watts of LEDs in there, all computer controlled, changing every 90 seconds, thus the title of the piece, Pulse.

Be sure to go visit this, and all the other artwork, along the Sarasota Bayfront as part of the fourth annual Sarasota Season Of Sculpture. I met the director of the shindig tonight, so if you see her there, tell her Ernie (with the camera in the dark) said Howdy.

As time permits, I hope to be able to shoot the other pieces in the exhibit. I'm afraid I'm a little prejudiced though, since I had a small part in building this one.

Now It Can Be Told, Part Three

I omitted one small detail about the cube I showed you the other day. It lights up. I shot these tonight handheld. I need to go back with a tripod, I bet I could get some really awesome shots. Not that these are bad. Some of the more abstract ones are really cool.

A Ding Dong Dandy Christmas Indeed

I don't normally talk about what I'm going to share out at Christmas, but I'm so excited that I can't keep this one under my hat. The record you see above popped up in a pile of vinyl at the Goodwill this afternoon. It may be mono, but it's still awesome. I'd never actually seen one in person before. If you don't know why I'm so excited, just wait until Christmas rolls around and check back. You'll understand then...

Now It Can Be Told, Part Two

What does it take to move a sculpture that towers almost 14 feet in the air (And weighs 7100 pounds) from the parking lot where it was assembled to the bayfront for display? A lot of work and a little bit of luck. A mobile crane had to lift the unit not once but twice to get it onto a waiting truck. Turns out that the truck couldn't wind it's way into the lot where the assembly took place, and the weight of the piece prohibited the crane from moving it too far in one pass. So the second move got it onto the trailer.

Even though our shop is in an industrial park, it's not designed for easy truck access. We scraped against trees on both sides on the way out and had to pick plenty of leaves out of the unit later on.

Getting the unit on the trailer was only the first step. Then it had to be driven nine miles down the road while looking for low-hanging wires and traffic lights, driving at a leisurely 20 miles per hour or less. We had a guy in the cab of the truck ready to jump out at any sign of trouble and lift any low-hanging wires that might prove a problem. But luckily the route was scouted out well enough that we didn't encounter any problems. The driver did make sure and try to drive in-between lights, just in case. There are a couple of lifting eyes that stick out the top of the unit that would have done some serious damage to any traffic lights that happened to get in the way. Those lifting eyes were supposed to make it easier to move the unit, but after all the assembly work was said and done, nobody trusted them to support the weight of the piece, so we wound up running straps around the whole thing whenever it got lifted.

About halfway through the trip, I realized that we would drive right by the artist's previous sculpture of a similar design. So we drove on ahead and scouted out a good spot to get both works in the same shot. Look close to the right side of the picture above and you can see a similar white cube, only this time with a red interior. That earlier version could fit inside this new one.

Now It Can Be Told, Part One

For the past month or so, we've been working on a special project in the shop. It's something a little different from the usual industrial sheet metal we usually do, so I figured I'd share a bit of it here at the old blog. Today was the day that it finally got installed on the bayfront in downtown Sarasota, Florida, so I figure it's OK to talk about it now. The giant white cube you see above is a sculpture named Pulse, designed by local artist Christine Desiree (Hi Christine!) and fabricated in our humble Bradenton shop. To give you a sense of scale, each side is 12 feet, the opening in the center is 9 feet, and the base it's sitting on is 18 inches high.

This sculpture was created for the annual show on the waterfront, which runs for about the next six months. They've been installing pieces for the past few days, and there are still quite a few to go. As you can see, this one got a great spot right on the water.

I was quite involved in the manufacture and assembly of this work of art, so I don't have pictures of the entire process, but I do have some I hope to share with you over the next few days. So if you're curious about how something like this comes together, stay tuned, and you'll lean more than you really want to know. Those of you who are anywhere close to Sarasota will want to drive out to the bayfront and see this show sometime soon. It looks to be a promising event. I'm a little prejudiced when it comes to which piece is my favorite, though.

The interior of the piece is filled with free-hanging mirrored plates that move about in the breeze. They also make a lot of noise when the wind gets going. It was rather loud as it got carried down the road on the back of a lowboy trailer.

More For November

This weeks picture is a great shot of Tampa Bay from one of the smaller bridges leading to the Sunshine Skyway Bridge. It was mid-morning one day when I was driving North, and I just thought I should stop and get some shots. I was extremely happy with the pictures I got, with the dead-calm water and the great clouds making for a perfect symmetry.

November, Part Dos

Here are the other two calendar pics for the month of November. The shot above is the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. I didn't actually go inside on the trip I took this picture, but I caught it on a later trip. It's pretty cool, but I don't know if it's worth a special trip to Cleveland. Something that might be worth the trip is the beach below at sunset, or, if you prefer, at moonset. It may be hard to see in the small version below, but if you look close, you'll see a tiny crescent moon following the sun to the horizon. I shot this a couple of years ago in Nokomis, Florida, while waiting for the annual Christmas nighttime boat parade. This shot was far better than any of the pictures I got of the boats.

November, Part Uno

Here's the first pair of calendars for the month of November. There seems to be an architectural theme going on here. The shot above, from the Florida set, is Castillo De San Marcos, the old fort at St. Augustine. This is the oldest remaining structure built by Europeans in America. (I have to be careful how I word that...) Not nearly so old, but probably just as striking is the church below. I forget the name of it, but this is in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, right off of the little square in front of Terminal Tower. I love how the skewed perspective makes the steeple reach for the sky, as if it's straining to somehow match the skyscrapers around it. And catching all the birds in flight is just icing on the photographic cake. I'll stop now...

The Onset Of November

Rumor has it that today is the first of November, so that means calendar pages! Here's the weekly page for the last half of this week, featuring some sort of fall-themed tin man or something. I shot this at Stan Hywet in Ohio a year or so ago during their Fall festival. They had lots of decorations like this, each of which sort of anthropomorphized some aspect of the house, this character being based on some of the vents atop the house. I'm not sure how successful the execution of the idea was, but it was a good idea.

Moldy Oldie

Something scary showed up in my email this morning. The two pictures you see here were taken sometime in the fall of '89, or maybe the spring of '90, not sure which. This was me and some of the guys on my floor in the Weaver dorms at UF before a big formal event. I think we were volunteering to help with security or something, which is how we rated tuxedos. I'm positive I wouldn't have provided my own tux just to go to some residence function. Even though these pictures are over 17 years old, I've seen all of these folks within the past year or so. Some friendships last forever. For those of you who don't know who I am, that's me in the dark glasses. You probably could have figured that out since I'm the only one who's in both pictures, but it's late and I'll cut you some slack.

Big thanks to Al for sending me the pix. He's on the left in the top picture. Al also sent me this other picture I shared sometime back.

Porter Wagoner, RIP

I used to listen to lots of country music when I was little, so I can remember plenty of Porter Wagoner on the radio. I can't say as I've listened to him any recently, but that doesn't mean I won't remember him in some small way. And to help you remember him, here's a version of Frosty The Snowman, as performed by Mr. Porter Wagoner. Enjoy!

"Visit the Country Music Hall of Fame, Nashville, Tennessee."

The Last Few Days Of October

In honor of Halloween being this week, you get this creepy looking vulture as your calendar picture. I shot this guy out at Myakka River State Park. There are always lots of vultures hanging around out there for some reason. Not sure why.