Noped Out.

I was gonna go photograph the Monumental Marathon this morning but it was 34℉ out when I should have been leaving the house and it was eighty degrees just the other day.

I am not yet seasonally acclimated. At any rate, the Drumstick Dash is in just a few weeks, so I punted. By then I'll be a little more cold-tolerant.

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Jumping Hot Flash, It's a Gas, Gas, Gas!

It was pretty cool to get a bit of the barrel-cylinder gap flash on this shot, especially because I wasn't shooting in burst mode. I had the Canon EOS R5 & RF 70-200mm f/4L IS in single shot mode and was just pressing the shutter release when the vibes felt right.

This dude could really run that Ruger GP100.

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Flashback!

Jim Grey just posted about his experiences shooting an old (but new-to-him) Pentax ME 35mm SLR. He mentioned how small and light it is, and that's a fact. The Pentax ME and its successor, the ME Super, are so small and light that they were the main cameras we used when I worked at Sky-Shots back in '91.

Back before the days of RC drones and tiny high-res video cameras, this was the solution to get aerial photos up to two hundred feet from the ground.

Dangling from the bottom of the mini blimp was a film camera on a tilt-and-pan gimbal mount with a small CCTV camera affixed to the eyepiece and a servo to trip the shutter. A cable trailed from the blimp to the control console hung 'round the operator's neck on a padded yoke. The control panel had joysticks, a small black and white screen, and a shutter button.

This flyer was my first experiment in desktop publishing. I guess it was technically my first paid writing gig, too.

Here's 24 year old me with my boss's Pentax in my hands and my own Canon AE-1P over my shoulder, with a press pass doing photography at the 1992 First Union Grand Prix in Atlanta, watching some rookie cyclist named Lance Armstrong win his first big race.

Tab Clearing...

• Jim Grey has some beautiful color photos from downtown Columbus, Indiana and some neat B&W shots from a car show.


• Greg Ellifritz is thinking of starting a new series of articles on the historic gunfights that have shaped training over the years.


• Meta is hounding the author of Careless People. It might not go so well for them.

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Aircraft-Themed Phone Wallpaper Photos

A Sopwith Camel, a P-38 Lightning, and an SR-71 in vertical orientation, suitable for phone wallpapers...

Embiggenate and download to your heart's content (please for non-commercial use, obv...)

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The Only Two...

The Enola Gay was reassembled from storage and put on permanent display at the Udvar-Hazy museum in 2003.

When I visited in November of 2015, the way it was displayed made it nearly impossible for me to frame the entire aircraft in a photo from the floor. It's pretty crowded in there.

On the other hand, you can't help but come nose-to-nose with the only other aircraft to have dropped an atomic bomb in anger. Round the corner in the World War II gallery in the USAF Museum and Bockscar is right there up in your grille.

Lockheed Snouts!

Lockheed F-94A Starfire

The other day I finally did something I've been meaning to do since I first moved to Indianapolis almost twenty years ago.

I booked a room for two nights at a Holiday Inn Express on the east side of Dayton, Ohio. While it's only a little over two hours away, this allowed me to drive out there at a leisurely pace around noon on Tuesday, grab a late lunch, and check into the hotel so that the next morning I could get to the USAF museum about the time it opened, walk until my feet couldn't take any more walking, then go back to the hotel and drive home all nicely rested at a leisurely pace on Thursday morning.

Lockheed P-38L Lightning

When I went to Udvar-Hazy back in 2015, I was shooting a Nikon D200 with an 18-140mm f/3.5-5.6 consumer zoom lens, backed up with the Coolpix P7000. Relatively speaking, I had no idea what I was doing. This time I not only had better bodies and lenses, but more importantly I had eleven years more experience taking photos.

Now to sort through the images on the cards and see what I have.

These two images are straight-out-of-camera JPEGs shot with the Canon EOS R5 and RF 24-105mm f/4L IS zoom lens.

Tab Clearing...

• When you click that opt-out button on a website, have you really opted out? A new audit thinks not. That audit looked at web traffic associated with Microsoft, Meta, and Google and found they all failed to honor such requests.


• "How a Navy photographer snapped an iconic Artemis II astronaut photo" (As a fan of candid portraiture, that photo slaps.)


• The only ones qualified enough to shoot their partners.

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Snap Me, Maybe

Back in 2014 I wrote about the niche that small, pocketable cameras filled for me:

While bigger cameras like my old hand-me-down Coolpix 990 from Oleg or the newer Shower Pot SX500 have been supplanted by the DSLR for when I am Going Someplace To Take Pictures, and the really quite decent camera in the Galaxy SII suffices for I'm Someplace And, Hey!, There's A Picture!, there's still a niche for something to slip into a jacket or shirt pocket for I'm Going Someplace Where I Might Take Pictures But Maybe Not.

Therefore it was interesting to me to see someone else writing about reasoning their way through the same thought process.

A Sony NEX-3 next to an Olympus PEN E-P5, both slightly too big for the document pocket in my gun burkha.

Like suddenly running over an alligator in Nebraska.

Of all the days to not have a camera with me, it had to be the one when I bumped into this beauty. If I'm reading my decoder wheel right, this C1 'Vette is a 1960 model in Honduras Maroon.

I took a couple of regular snaps with my iPhone and then backed up far enough to use the "telephoto" lens for this shot, which is probably the best cell phone photo I've ever taken of a car.

You don't often see cars like this out on the road in the winter months north of the Ohio, but it was a freakishly warm and sunny February Monday and there'd been some rain to wash the salt off the road, so I understand the urge to get some wind in your hair.

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Elsewhere...

• 1969 Dodge Charger R/T


• Nikon Df

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Last Minute

With two-day shipping (free with Prime) there's still time for stocking stuffers.

• There's a cool multitool with a 1911 bushing wrench and other gun-specific tools.


• Or just a classic Victorinox SAK.


• And then there's this little manual Out-the-Front Kershaw.


• The Wedge XT from Streamlight is a popular little 500 lumen rechargeable light and it's on sale! 


• If someone wants to get into a fun kind of photography, the Instax Mini from Fujifilm is a lot of fun.

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Squirrel!

The upper image is pretty heavily cropped and is from much further away than the lower one. By keeping the big Canon EOS-1D Mark IV in front of my face, I was able to get fairly close to the base of the tree. And from there, the EF 70-200mm f/4L IS zoom lens did the rest. The lower photo is un-cropped and should embiggenate nicely. The 1.3x crop factor of the 16MP APS-H sensor in the 1D4 gave a field of view equivalent to a 260mm lens on a full-frame camera.

Elsewhere...

• Pistol bullet design for self-defense


• 1987 Porsche 911 Carrera 3.2 Cabriolet


• Tougher, Smaller, Cheaper: Pentax K-7

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Planning ahead prevents disappointment.

Slipping out of the house for lunch yesterday, I hopped on my bicycle with my Pentax K7 slung around my neck, hoping to get some car photos on an unusually warm autumn afternoon.

Glancing at the LCD screen on the camera's top panel as I turned it on, I noticed the dreaded "----" in the space where the "Shots Remaining" readout would be. Oops, that's right... I had the SD card from the K7 in the card reader on my desktop. D'oh!

However, because I've had this happen before, I was ready this time.

In my peregrinations about the neighborhood, I carry a little canvas tote that holds my iPad, an umbrella, a wind shell stuffed in a little pouch, a pint glass koozie... and waterproof little memory card holder that looks like a teeny Pelican case. Inside it I keep a couple CF cards, a few SD cards, and even a MicroSD just in case.

Problem averted!

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Mantid!

Reading on the porch the other evening, I happened to notice this big ol' Carolina mantis patiently waiting for its next meal to wander by.

I snapped a couple of cell phone pics, but then hurried inside and grabbed the E-M1X and 40-150mm f/2.8 zoom. Fortunately it was still chillin' on the railing when I came back out.

Elsewhere...

• The original lightweight normally-aspirated Toyota MR2 was such a hoot to drive.


• Of the five DSLRs I just finished comparing... the Canon EOS 40D, Pentax K20D, Sony a700, Olympus E-3, and Nikon D300 ...the D300 was the most expensive when new, which makes it the biggest bargain now.

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Tab Clearing...

• Jim Grey brought a classic film camera to a classic car show and got some classic shots.


• The blogging service Typepad will be going away after the 30th of this month. Mike at The Online Photographer will be decamping for his own site after a brief interregnum.


• My review of the KelTec PR57 is online.

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QotD: Let There Be Light Edition…

Mike Johnston really explained a complex topic in a simple, understandable nutshell here:

Here's a secret tip for making better photographs—look for great light.

You gotta get used to looking at light rather than at the thingy-ness of the world. It's not those things you're photographing—it's those things in that light. Light is ever-changing, and the same thing or scene will look completely different in different light. Great light helps make great photographs.

That's something of which I've always been dimly aware. but phrasing it like that really threw a switch in my head, almost like turning on a light, if you will...

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Writing Elsewhere...

• 1998 Honda Prelude


• A great big DSLR with a teeny little sensor.


• The evolution of lightweight handguns.

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