I had just commented the other day on how much I loved this photograph. And then Friday shows up and I’ve got a chance to use it. This is for Photo Friday and this week’s theme is Sexy.

This photo was taken last summer on Lake Huron on the Canadian side.

PS – Did you notice the conflicting product placement..?

This is the path the shuttle takes when it’s on the massive crawler and has to go from the VAB (vehicle assembly building) to one of the launch pads.

It’s the wide dual dirt/gravel roads (with the grass strip in the middle) towards the back.

The launch pad all the way to the right is 39A and the other (a little to the left) is 39B.

If you click on the photo you now get the huge version which is 3,900 pixels across and 700 pixels down (if it only shows up as wide as your browser, click again, then you can scroll right and left). You can click for a more normal 1024 pixel size too. Sorry, I appear to have problems uploading the huge version of the panorama from my phone. I’ll fix later at hotel.

Here are some newly released aerial photos of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center from the New York Times. I can’t believe this was over eight years ago…

The images were taken from a police helicopter — the only aircraft allowed in the air space near the towers on Sept. 11, 2001.

ABC posted 12 other photos from the collection of the 2,779 pictures. Some look to be the same or awfully similar.

Found at Zudfunk.

So I was in southwest Michigan the other day and managed to catch the sunset. I snapped a few photos with my Digital Rebel XT. Actually I snapped a bunch of photos, but I picked these three to share…

These were all taken in a little roadside park in St. Joseph, Michigan.


I really like this one, but I wish the bushes had a bit more detail.

I’ll have to play around with these and see if I can get a little more detail out of the trees and bushes.

Great day outside on Hines Drive today. Lots of great colors as fall approaches. Here’s a panorama I took with my iPhone (and stitched it on my iPhone with AutoStitch on the phone too!).

I think it took eight or nine images to build the whole thing and it came out to 4000×506 pixels. This program works quick: I took the photos with the camera app, ran the AutoStich program, clicked the photos, it built a tiny thumbnail, I clicked the stitch button and few minutes later I’ve got the panorama on the screen!

Click to enlarge panoramic image, if it doesn’t load correctly, here’s a 1024 wide image.

The Lens Day Challenge for this week is Traffic.

People in Costa Rica barely look at the stop signs. Do they really think someone is going to read this one? This is a pretty busy sign, no matter where you are. And just in case you aren’t sure: Alto means Stop.

This is on a busy side-street in San Jose, Costa Rica; It’s a block or two east of La Sabana Park. I think it’s this messy intersection off of Calle 40; but if that’s where it is, it’s not even a very good representation of the intersection.

I was at the Detroit Opera House the other night to see Tori Amos in concert (that’s another post) and I really like the building. I’d like to see it in better lighting and take a bunch of pictures with my nice camera to see how good they might really come out.

These were just with my cell hone but I think they came out pretty good.

I really like the above one with the jagged edges since it shows the ceiling so well.

These are actually exactly the same photo but just cropped differently. It’s five or six photos stitched together (but they were stitched together using AutoStitch on my cell phone) to make one big photo.

The banner is an edit from a photo I took in Cardiff, Wales. It is of the Wales Millennium Centre (see photo) with (what they simply call) The Water Tower in front of it.

These are located in Roald Dahl Plass (plaza) dedicated to the Cardiff born author Roald Dahl. This Millennium Centre is beautiful at night, I didn’t have my camera when I wandered down there when I was in town, but that photo will be on my list for the next trip. And hopefully there will be water coming out of The Water Tower next time too! The Plass is lit very pretty too!

I’ve been thinking about Cardiff and also thinking about changing my photo so I choose this. I don’t have a lot of really wide photos that crop well so I looked around and found this one. Plus, I’ve got Torchwood on the the brain this week (month).

On the photo (in this post) if you read the right half of the building you can see it says: “In These Stones Horizons Awen (Awe and?) Sing”. The left half says something in Welsh. I was told the building is built from materials made all in Wales.

So Cobano is a nearby town of Montezuma it’s about 7 km away. It’s kind of the centralized place for the bus transfers, a few more restaurants, way faster Internet and some larger stores. Also it’s the nearest bank, ATM, pharmacy, gas station, hardware store, appliances, bicycles, etc. Even with all that, it’s pretty small. I was waiting for the bus the other day and shot this time lapse footage of the main intersection.

Here’s the direct link to the above video.

I also shot this photo of the sky as the sun was setting. I thought the colors were great!

I wish I had a few more photos from around town…

Haven’t been doing much the last few days. I’ve been experiencing the other Montezuma so I’ve been under the weather. Here’s a few recent photos all from the Montezuma, Costa Rica area.

This was my view from where I sat and had my lunch.

One of the water outlets to the Pacific Ocean.

I always like trying to catch photos of birds flying, but I’m never close enough.

A new canyon that I found :)

The El Chorro waterfall two hours up the north beach.

You can’t click to enlarge these, larger versions will probably show up in some other album later…

I thought this was funny that someone stuck this sticker on their motorcycle.

 

 

 

So I’d really been looking forward to the fire dancing in Montezuma. I haven’t seen it done as much the last few trips and I knew it was on the schedule as entertainment for the Film Festival. It wasn’t the local group that I’ve seen do street shows before but they were excellent. Most had some kind of costumes or makeup on which added to the whole effect.

It’s hard to capture but I think these turned out pretty good. A few of the ones in the woman in costume I pulled from video I took so the quality might not be so great but I wanted you to see…

I only show a few photos here, the other dozen are here (including larger versions of them all) or click for the fire dancing slideshow (same photos).

This is a problem!!!

Someone else dropped something into the river and I made a grab for it an my camera fell out of my pocket. I meant to only leave it in that pocket for a minute when I thought the water might reach my pants pocket and I forgot to move it back. I’m am so bummed…

The lens was closed, it was under water for just a few seconds, I wiped it off with a dry towel immediately and pulled out the battery. Needless to say I didn’t take any more pictures, I had a few from today of the ocean and monkeys but I bet those are fine. I hope the monkey shots are, I got a monkey (with a baby on it’s back) that managed to snatch a shaker of parmesan from a restaurant and were eating it up in a tree!

Now the camera, the chip and the battery are in a zip lock bag with some dry rice (to soak up the extra moisture). I’ll leave it for a day or so and see how it is. Kitty litter is supposed to work well too, but I didn’t need a 25 pound bag of it in my tiny room.

It’s a great camera, I’d definitely recommend the Canon SD1100 with image stabilization. It’s been in my sights for ages and I recently found a great on-line deal for it from Dell (that’s where I bought my SLR Canon camera too).

I’ll definitely be adding the WP-DC22 Waterproof Case to my wishlist (assuming the camera still works). It’s good for 40 meters underwater (130 feet) and is supposed to also be great for “beach, rain and on the ski slopes”.

Later: Oops, the waterproof case is more expen$ive than the camera was!!!

I thought the tiny UPS truck was interesting.

I haven’t seen any other 3 wheeled vehicles this trip.

 

So if you buy one of these at the airport is there any music on it? Is it even fully charged?

They should come with a sampler? or an audiobook! That’d make for a good impulse buy…

 

‘iPod vending machine…‘ uploaded by garylapointe

Wow!!! I was just looking outside the airplane window and and there in the sky were contrails from another plane that must have flown by recently. It looked very cool and I had never seen any from the air before. I hope the pictures came out okay! Yes, I know it doesn’t take much to excite me :)

Contrails are the cloudy streaks that an airplane sometimes leaves behind in the sky, right? That’s what I saw, even if I got the name wrong.On a side note – I need a good dictionary for my MacBook that doesn’t need me to be on-line to use it. Just a big PDF would work fine. Anyone know of anything semi-recent in the public domain or something? Or if I can purchase one somewhere? Something old enough to have copyright expired probably would not have “contrails” in it…

So the first thing I head this morning as the alarm went off was all about the icy roads in the Detroit area. Specifically between me and the airport. Not a good sign, especially since I didn’t have that much extra time allocated since it was a morning flight and I didn’t know about the weather before had. But all was fine, a little slow on the roads but I got the airport fine. The airport was dead, I’ve never seen it so quiet there.

Got checked in, got me a morning McSandwich and got to my terminal with just a few minutes to spare. Someone took the seat next to mine so I moved to the back row, no reclining but i’ll live. I’ve got an empty spot next to me, an adorable little 8 month old boy on his Mom’s lap that I was pretty excited about, he had been pretty friendly the few times I had run into him. I thought he was going to be a lot of fun but he passed out a few minutes into the flight (boring!).

It’s beautiful up here in the clouds. We’re just above them and the sun is lighting them up perfectly. Looks like snow, maybe more of how I’d picture it in Antarctica (or some other vast snowy land). My cell phone photos just don’t do it justice at all; should have pulled out the real camera.

Bonus! They just brought us a bowl of cereal (Total) and a banana, don’t know if I’ve ever gotten that for a non-international flight. I’m a much happier flyer if I’m snacking and staying hydrated, it really makes the flight more comfortable for me. On a side note, I can’t believe the number of people drinking mixed drinks already!

So I’ve never noticed one of these signs at a Burger King resturant before.

 

‘Burger King Sign‘ uploaded by garylapointe

 

I noticed it’s hard to see how big the sign actually is, so here’s the other photo I took to give you a frame of reference.

I’ve posted a photo album of various animals that I’ve taken here and there (Zoo, Costa Rica, London).

Some came out really nice and some are just okay (but I needed a few more to make an album). I uploaded them to my FaceBook photo album section, feel free to add me as a FaceBook Friend while you’re there.So is this photo too big for my blog page? Does it expand out of the center column too much? At all? Just right? It was bigger than I meant to upload but then I thought it looked nice…

(I didn’t realize that these public links to Facebook photo albums expire, I’m not even sure how long they last. That’s annoying, I’m glad I only used them for a few albums…)

So I keep saying I was trapped in Liberia, but it was a really nice town. When I started to build this album I thought I had taken more photos, but I guess I didn’t, so it’s kind of a mish-mash. Here’s a map of Liberia, the place I stayed (the El Punto) is just south of the Santa Rosa Mall.

Next time I fly to Liberia I’ll definitely be spending the night and checking out the town some more, the nearby African Zoo and the Rincon de la Vieja volcano (which I had gotten a recommendation for).

Here’s some photos of Liberia that I took.

Here’s a random batch of photos from the past few days in Costa Rica. These mostly have some titles or captions to go with them.

Just an assorted few that I enjoyed and I hope you will too!

 

I thought I lost my photos from Chicago the other day but I purchased the $20 software CardRaider from ecamm and now it’s all better. I download the program, it scanned my files and I think it recovered them all (movies and photos). I’ll try and post some tonight post some tomorrow (I forgot I’ve meeting Mom for dinner).

There are a lot of software programs but most are a lot more expensive. Thanks for the recommendation Dave!!

I’ve got a very strict process I follow when copying photos from a camera:

Lock the memory chip (which I always forget to do).

Copy the photos to a computer.

If I copy the photos to another device (CD, DVD, FTP, external hard driver) then I delete the files from the memory chip.

If I can’t copy them, I move them to a folder on the chip “to delete” so that I know there is a copy somewhere but not a great copy yet (and then I don’t confuse old pictures with new).

I was in a hurry I wanted to get that stuff done before the train took off, I figured someone would sit next to me since the train is sold out and I wanted to get all the USB SD adaptor and cameras put away.

The first thing I did was that I moved them to a new folder and then something bad happened. I’m not sure if I tried to drag the new folder to my computer too soon or what but I had to force a reboot and they chip is now goofed. I will be using some recovery software on this. I had just quick reformatted the chip so all the files should be sequential so I’m hopeful.

I took lots of photos and video while testing this new camera out with the bloggers and while running around Chicago. I’m so bummed. I guess I’ve got 5 hours on the train to see if I can find some software to download to fix it. I do have a few photos I took on my other camera, but none of the DaveCago people are on it and neither are any of the night shots I was taking (after a second look, other than out my hotel room window, I really didn’t take any with the other camera).

Any Macintosh software suggestions? I have a Windows machine if you have a Windows only suggestion.

So I got some more photos up. London Day one, not a lot, but I did do some okay descriptions :)

So when you take digital pictures, it records the date and the time with the picture. I’m a little slightly obsessive compulsive about the settings on the date and time and when my two cameras are both set for different time zones and neither of those are the correct time zone it tends to annoy me.

So from now on I’m keeping my camera’s set to GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) so it’ll always be consistent. If you don’t know, this is the time zone where the clocks are set at “0″, for example when you set you clocks to EST (Eastern Standard) it sometimes says “-5″ hours, that’s 5 hours off from GMT. I’m not sure how this will work for me in the long run but for now it seems like it will be consistent for me.

The biggest problem I see for now it is that other devices like my camera phone will till record in the current time zone. But since its a phone, the time on that should always be correct, unless of course I’m traveling in a country where I don’t have reception and the clock would be wrong…

So I got some of the photos from Mom’s Surprise party up. This first one is from in front of the house, my cousin and uncle decorated it during the night. The rest of the photos are from the party.

I posted about 18 and hope some of the others with cameras will send me some. I you missed the post, the surprise party was yesterday.

These are really old school photos of my grandparents kids, my mom is in the lower-right.

WordPhoto.org appears to have just gone back to a daily format (probably just Monday through Friday). They change the topic everyday and you can upload a photo related to that topic. Pretty simple, eh? Here’s all the photos I’ve submitted are and here is a list of the archived words. PS – Once there’s a new word, you can’t upload an old one any more!

I found these lovely plants with their lovely reds and purples and greens. The were in a spot either welcoming me to Evanston or Northwestern’s Campus (or maybe the downtown Evanston area). They were just really bright and cheerful so I took a few photos :)

The photos didn’t come out as well as I’d like but you still get to see them since I liked them. The two that didn’t get thumbnailed are here and here

Can anyone tell me what these are? (Perennials?)

Totally off topic: So sometimes when it’s late and I can’t sleep I’ll occasionally take a sleeping pill, I don’t do this too often but my schedule is a little off so I needed to get to sleep. The point of this is that it makes me a little loopy and when I opened the draft of this post this morning this is how it read, “I found these lovely plantsa wwith their lovely reds and purple and green. The were in aspot that made me think they cow accopmplisment and would you survive.” So it has some typing and grammar issues but those last four or five words really confuse me. Fortunately they must have been enough for me to not hit post :)