UFO sighting...

Somewhere on my blog, although I can't find the post right now, are photos of this car in its former home, at the gas station on the corner of 56th Street & Keystone Avenue.

Thanks to Jerry the alert blog reader for sending the link!

(If the link gives you fits, you might try manually copypasta-ing this one "https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/missouri-deputies-pull-over-vehicle-resembling-ufo-out-of-this-world".)

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Apropos of nothing in particular...

"Strip Mall Funeral Parlor" is the name of my next band.

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The neighborhood hangout...

I got around to processing a couple of the shots I took at Fat Dan's on Saint Patrick's Day.

Taken with the Canon EOS-1D Mark IV and the EF 70-200mm f/4L IS, which is one of my favorite combos.

Muck Raker

I've seen a lot of things in the canal up in Broad Ripple Village proper since I first moved here years ago: bicycles, lawn furniture, a picnic table, ducks, electric scooters, drunk fratbros, Indianapolis Colts punters (but I repeat myself), but this was a first...

The big tracked excavator in the background, the one atop the pile of rock, was scooping up loads of rock and dumping it into this tracked dump truck. (Googling around says this is technically a "crawler carrier" with a "dump chute", I guess?)

The dump truck would then trundle its load along the canal to the other tracked excavator, which would scoop it out and use it to reline the banks. It'd drop a couple scoops and then use its bucket to... WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! ...smoosh the rocks it had just dropped into the bank of the canal.

"I'm not lost, I live here."

The bartender at Fat Dan's Chicago Style Deli, photographed with the Samsung TL500. I was shooting in Program mode with the ISO set to Auto, and the camera picked ISO 200 and 1/30th at f/2.3, thereby illustrating the advantages of the lovely, fast Schneider-Kreuznach glass (most pocket cameras will only open up to f/2.8 or so at their widest; the TL500 will go all the way to f/1.8 if necessary) and Samsung's optical image stabilization.

His shirt touts Rocky Ripple, an eclectic little urban village nearby. Nestled behind levees on a floodplain island between the White River and the canal, Rocky Ripple is only accessible by two road bridges over the canal and its denizens often sport bumper stickers on their cars that read "I'm not lost, I live here."

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People in My Neighborhood

My Fujifilm kit has been missing a dedicated portrait lens. I fixed that.

Fuji X-T2 & XF 50mm f/2 R WR

Trail's End

Here are the keepers from my last stroll with the Nikon D1X, wearing the Nikkor 17-55mm f/2.8G ED AF-S zoom lens...

This was shot at ISO 800 indoors, available light with the 17-55/2.8 wide open.

A Storm of Sparrows

One of the houses that backs up to the alley leading to Fresh Market has a small tree in its back yard that is laden with red fruit in the winter months. I believe it's a choke cherry, but I used woodcraft as a dump stat, so I have no real clue.

At any rate, I'm strolling down the alley in the bitter cold on the way to lunch when I hear a frantic racket of chirping coming from its boughs.

I glance over and there's a small mob of sparrows, little spherical feathered balls that frantically bouncing up and down and hopping from branch to branch and yelling for all they're worth.

Normally, being at eye level in the bare branches there, if I turned and looked right at them, they'd skitter off to someplace safer, but their attention is absolutely fixed on something other than me, so I glanced up into the tree to see what had them so worked up.

Ah, trespassers!

The cardinals around here have been extremely camera-shy in my experience. Just turning and looking at them will have them dart away to safety before I could even get my camera to eye level, but these two were as intent on the sparrows as the latter were on them.

Mr. and Mrs. Redbird obviously wanted to horn in on the smaller birds' winter larder.

I found myself wishing for a longer lens or more megapickles. The 70-200mm on the APS-H sensor of my EOS-1D Mark III gave me an effective maximum equivalent focal length of 260mm, and the 10MP sensor on the older DSLR didn't allow for a ton of cropping. I'm keeping an eye out at Roberts, hoping they get a good used 70-300mm f/4-5.6L IS lens in on trade. That would be a good lens for shooting classes and matches, too...

Curiosity

I was walking down the sidewalk the other day when a squirrel up ahead of me noticed me coming and bolted for safety. However instead of running into the front yard of the house to my right, she jumped for the tree growing in the devil's strip to my left.

The tree was not very big. My camera, however, was quite large (Canon EOS-1D Mark IV), and I managed to get it up in front of my face before she peeked out around the trunk to see if I was still there.

With the camera in front of my face, instead of being confronted by a pair of forward-facing predator eyes pointing right at her, there was just a blank black rectangle making clicking noises.

Curiosity overpowered caution, and the squirrel sidled toward me along a branch as I shuffled slowly forward with my EF 24-105mm f/4L IS zoomed all the way to its limit (136.5mm equivalent on the 1D's APS-H sensor) until I was practically up in her grille.

Finally her nerve broke and she scampered back down off the tree and across the street to the safety of a larger tree.

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Wild & Free

There's a local quasi-feral cat in our 'hood who our neighbor named Copper.

She's been a neighborhood fixture for many years now and had several litters of kittens by numerous feline Lotharios... I remember one notable occasion where I turned the corner on a side street in the neighborhood, only to find Copper and one of her babydaddies, a burly scarred gray & white tom named Thug, taking the advice of McCartney and Lennon right there in the middle of 56th Street and not at all inclined to move for the car.

She's very skittish and it was several years before she was successfully trapped and taken to have her baby-makin' bits deactivated. She still roams the neighborhood, although she's no longer helping populate it.

I was surprised that I was able to get this shot, even with the long 70-200/4L on my 1D Mark III. Normally if you turn and look directly at her, even from several houses down the block, she'll scuttle for cover. I guess having the camera up in front of my face blocked the threatening gaze of a pair of eyeballs.

Squirrel(s)!

The leaves are off the trees and the squirrels are plump and active, foraging for acorns to bulk up for winter. It's too cold to sit outside at Fat Dan's and wait for neat cars to drive by, but primo squirrel-spotting season, and that means it's time for longer zoom lenses on my walkabout cameras.

The upper photo was shot with a ten year old Nikon D7100, wearing a 16-80mm f/2.8-4E VR zoom. (The best all-round DX Nikon zoom, period.) The 120mm equivalent long end on this lens makes it a little short for optimum squirrel spotting. The little dude upside down on the tree trunk was only a dozen or so feet away, but only the 24MP resolution of the D7100's sensor allowed me to crop it down to something useful.

The photo below was shot with the 2004-vintage Nikon D2X & 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6 VR II combo. That extra focal length helps, as this photo didn't need near as much cropping, even though the squirrel was twice as far away.

Drumstick Dash

Once again, fifteen thousand runners and walkers massed in Broad Ripple on Thanksgiving morning for the Drumstick Dash. This year they raised over a million dollars for Wheeler Mission, moving their feet so others may eat.

You get serious racers...

...and some who are running hard but only racing themselves.

Some folks are out for time with family...

...or friends.

A good time was had by all... including yours truly, who is just tickled pink to have such a great photo op come trotting practically right past the house!

All but one of these photos were shot with the Canon EOS 5DS & 70-200mm f/4L IS.

I tried something new this time by shooting in shutter priority. I figured that 1/500th would be enough to adequately stop motion and I gambled that it would still be reasonably sharp at 200mm, so I put the mode dial in "Tv" ("Time value" in Canon-speak, it's the position on the dial that's marked "S" for "Shutter" on pretty much every other manufacturer's cameras) set the ISO to 200, and rolled the dice.

I'm not unhappy with the results.

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Red Tail!

I happened to have the Pentax Q-S1 with the 15-45mm f/2.8 06 Telephoto Zoom on it in my jacket pocket yesterday when a red-tailed hawk alit on a street light right in front of me. 

On the little 1/1.7" sensor, that lens is the equivalent of a 70-200mm on a full-frame.

EDIT: My birdwatching friend tells me this is probably a red-shouldered hawk.

The image above is lightly cropped. Un-cropped shots look like the one below.

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SoBro has a new book store!

Ever since Big Hat Books up by the Broad Ripple Brewpub went toes up, our neighborhood has been a book desert... (if you don't count the Tiny Little Libraries that are seemingly on every other block around here.)

But now there's Golden Hour Books down at 52nd Street & College Avenue, just south of The Aristocrat pub, in the storefront where National Moto + Cycle used to be.

Bobbi and I visited it last week when she was on vacation to show some support. Here's hoping they make a go of it!

Puppers and Doggos...

In the beer garden behind Half Liter on Sunday afternoon were plenty of good doggos.

Fortunately I had the Canon EOS 40D and EF 24-105mm f/4L IS along with me that day! Thanks to the 1.6X crop factor of the 40D's APS-C sensor, the lens acts like a 38-168mm lens, which gave plenty of reach for pupper portraiture.

Crossposted at the other other blog.

Geritol Alert

So my friend came down from Da Region to visit today and we went down and took in the Indiana World War Memorial and University Park south of it.

Afterward we tooled back up to SoBro for an alfresco lunch on the patio at Fat Dan’s… we’re heading into the time of year where these outdoor dining opportunities are rare and treasured …and we both of us commented on the excellent Spotify channel playing on the sound system. It was a festival of The Cure, Depeche Mode, INXS, Talking Heads, B52’s, The Clash, Echo & the Bunnymen; classic fare from our late teens and early twenties. Oldies that, to us Gen X’ers at least, don’t feel old.

After my friend left, the channel drops “Head Like a Hole” by Nine Inch Nails.

I’m never ready for that.

Gourmet Tater Tots?

Some dude was whingeing about Half Liter BBQ on Yelp.

Who orders tater tots expecting freshly grated Yukon gold spuds artisanally hand rolled between silk cloths by Bavarian tater nuns?

It says “tater tots” right there on the menu, hoss. They’re tater tots.

(Secret Menu Dining ProTip: Half Liter has loaded spuds on the menu, so if you order a side of tots you can also ask for some sour cream on the side and…presto!…you have unlocked the hidden bowl of mini latkes.)

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Different Angles of View

Having recently discovered Jim Grey's "Down the Road" blog and nosed around in his archives, it's been interesting to see another local blogger's take on events here in my world.

I've groused several times about the giant mixed use apartment/office/retail buildings sprouting up in Broad Ripple Village Proper and changing its proper village-y character. He'd posted on the topic, with photos!

I remember posting about the demise of our local grocery chain, and he had thoughts on it, too.

In the more literal sense of "seeing your world through someone else's eyes", he's photographed a lot of the same things and places that have caught the attention of my lenses over the years. It's pretty neat!

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Challenging conditions...

The heavy overcast yesterday morning combined with the long lenses I was using meant that I was shooting with the ISO on the cameras bumped up to 800-1600 in order to keep shutter speeds reasonably fast.

This was especially important with the Nikon D3, because the old push-pull 80-200mm f/2.8 zoom lens lacked any stabilization. A rough rule of thumb is that to properly hand-hold a shot without noticeable blur, you want the denominator of the shutter speed to exceed the focal length in millimeters. In other words, faster than 1/50th at 50mm, 1/100th at a hundred, et cetera. 

Past about 135-150mm, it's best to err on the side of caution, and I tried to keep my shutter speeds at 1/250th or better with the Nikon, especially because I was hand-holding a 2.73 pound camera with another 2.6 pounds of glass hanging off the front end.

This meant I was shooting at f/2.8 to f/3.5 most of the time, which doesn't give you a lot of depth of field to work with and frankly the old screw-drive autofocus lens struggled to keep up. I missed a lot of shots and when you had a pack of runners, only the center few would be in crisp focus with everyone in front of and behind them all fuzzy.

I only got a couple really decent shots with it.

The other camera I brought was the 2.63 pound Canon EOS 1D Mark IV.

The 1.68 pound* 70-200mm f/4L IS lens on the Canon was stabilized and could run at slightly slower shutter speeds. Further, like all Canon EOS autofocus lenses, it uses a focusing motor built into the lens rather than relying on a motor in the camera body like the old AF Nikkor. In the case of the 70-200/4L, this is Canon's fast and nearly silent "USM" ultrasonic motor.

I got a lot more keepers with the Canon.

I had a pretty enjoyable time and posted a bunch of pics to my Facebook page if you want to see more.

*For those following along at home, that's ten pounds of gear hanging from straps around my neck, which got pretty fatiguing after an hour and a half, let me tell you.

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Pre-Race

I ducked out of the house early this morning to see if I could get some shots of the Monumental Marathon.

While the course didn't come as close to the house as that of the Drumstick Dash, it was fairly nearby. The runners came north up Washington Boulevard, turned east on 58th Street, and then back north again on College Avenue. 

So the corner of 58th and College, only a short hop away on the Broad Ripple SUV, was roughly the twelve-and-a-quarter mile mark of the race.

I got over there while they were still setting up...

It was a cool morning, about 55°F, heavily overcast with a good breeze out of the north. Good running weather.

Pretty soon, along came the lead motorcycle...

Followed by the frontrunner, well in front of the pack.

There was a pretty good clump of dudes behind him. But they were a ways back...

I have a bunch of pictures to sort through and process this afternoon...

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