The Visual Record

Multiple frac jobs being run in the Permian of Texas - New Mexico. Not my photo, but have no info on source.

From St. Arnold's Beer Hall, Houston, Texas.

Artificial reefs and their creation. Great pictures of sunk and sinking stuff.

Netflix envelope art.

Geese on parade.

Last week's lunar eclipse and lightening on the water. Beautiful photograph.

More photography - very unusual and beautiful nature photography. I have seen Brocken Spectre from airplanes at least a couple of times. Very cool.

If product logos were honest.

Strange buildings.

Interesting lecture by paleontologist Jack Horner on dinosaur behavior, dinosaur DNA and making a dinochicken.

Sand sculpture competition.

More pictures from Chile's Puyehue-Cordon Caulle volcanic eruption. Ash and pumice galore.

Cakewrecks - I've linked to this site before, and it is still pretty funny.

Thanks to: @pickover, @laughingsquid, @paul_steele, @_Sue_Ross, Paul Hse, and others.

Mobius strip music box. A Mobius strip giant piece of candy (note the fabrication method.) And a Mobius strip library for Kazakhstan.

Balancing rocks.

Science in microgravity.

Photorealistic paintings - and FARK tread with its usual interesting comments and links. Especially check out this one and this link.

What a trillion dollars looks like.

Ten amazing DIY projects.

Photos from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal.............

A hermit crab in a glass shell.

Exploding refrigerators.

Windows did not shut down successfully - in front of 75 thousand people.

I have been sending the links I find interesting each week to a select group of friends, but thought that I would also start posting them here.

Enjoy!

No, I don't think I'll be dining there.

Normandy 1944 - Then and Now. An interesting collection of pictures showing locations in Normandy immediately after the 1944 invasion and at the present day from approximately the same perspective.

George Orwell's diary, presented as a blog. A personal perspective on the start of WWII.

Strange, and sometimes creepy, photo manipulations.

Power 'staches.

1965 IKEA Catalogue. This is from kottke.org, which often has interesting links. Sometimes, opinions with regards to fonts (man, I hate that word) can get nasty.

What's the word? Thunderbird! The history of the Gallo brothers. While we're at it, how about the classic Orson Welles Paul Masson commercials.

Energy Sprawl - Unintended consequences always dog 'do good' efforts. Technical and information dense, but worthwhile to at least read the abstract. It all has to do with energy density.

Last holiday season was spent with my wife's relatives in Cincinnati, Ohio. The weather was beautiful - one day we took an extended walk through the downtown parks, going across to Kentucky on one bridge (the one pictured at center left) and returning on another farther upstream. We ended up walking over 6 miles, much more than anyone expected. A great time for all involved.

Off on the side of the tarmac, the recently grounded BA Concord looks lonely. Taken through the plane window at London Heathrow on the return journey from Baku, late April 2005.

Maiden Tower in Old Town Baku - Probably a defense or signaling tower. Legend is that a maiden bethrowed to someone she did not love flung herself off the tower rather than go through with the marriage. A very imposing structure with unique construction indicating that it was built in phases. See link in post title (Wikipedia entry) for more information.


A statue at the foot of the Maiden Tower.



A shot of a mud volcano taken on assent from Baku. This was located to the north and west of the main city.

 


This was taken early in the morning on December 10th as the market near the town square in Delft was just setting up. Wish I could have stayed around, but we returned to Houston from Amsterdam that afternoon. 

Traveled to The Hauge in December and while there took the tram to Delft. The weather was cold and foggy, and frustrated much of the photography that I attempted. Did get a few shots that were OK. This was taken on December 10th using the Kodak digital camera.

OK - am going to get start updating this again. Have photos sets from 1) at 2 1/2 week trip to Azerbaijan in April, 2) a family trip to London, Scotland and Paris in June, 3) A trip to Azerbaijan in July, and 4) a trip to Milan in August. I also have numerous other photos from trips to Cameroon, Belgium, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, UK, Italy, Switzerland, Morocco, Australia and Malaysia, taken over the last ten years (and the US also.) Not only that, I have slides and photos for the UK and Swithzerand take in the early 1980's that I need to have digitized to preserve their quality (assuming any is left.) I think that my best bet to get online what I have digitally now; may be a good time to learn how to link Flickr albums (rather than Picaso) to the blog in order to have extended photo albums accessible form links here - maybe by way of thumbnails on the blog. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

A very dramatic Hittite relief. The craftsmanship is superb; a shame that the lower 2/3 has been overcarved with cuniform writing.

The weather was very cooperative during my stay in London. This was taken during the first weekend of February and as you can see, it was clear and bright.

From the South Bank, February 2005.

Hittite relief, Museum of Anatolian Civilization. Had the opportunity to visit this very fine museum in Ankara. The facility contained a very large number of paleolithic through Hittite and Assyrian artifacts. I will try to post more Hittite/Assyrian artifacts from both the Museum of Anatolian Civilization and the British Museum at a latter time. Link in title takes you to a website with more information on the museum.

View out the hotel window, Ankara, February 2005. The city was suprisingly modern, and growing very rapidly.

Early February, 2005.

A view of a (small) portion of Butchart Gardens in Victoria, BC.

Butchart Gardens - started 100 years ago in a quarry.

Butchart Gardens - over 1 million plantings.

A sailing ship in Victoria, BC, early August 2004.

Here is an image from Ruby Beach, Washington, from late July, 2004, taken nearby the stack in the previous image. I did not know that anenomes were common along the northwest coast, always assuming that they were tropical.

It has been a while, but I am back. I need to set up the laptop to post pictures (via Picasa.) More later, including some of the summer vacation pics previously promised, and some new pics from a recent trip to Turkey and the UK.

Washington State coast from late July 2004, - first time there, and....well.....! Note that just a few miles inshore the weather was great, not clouds or anything. We still had a great time there. I will post some tidal pool shots with starfish and anemones at a later time.

This also illustrates another issue I have had with the DX7630 - the greens appear to be under-represented (under saturated?). I am trying another setting (enchanced vs natural color) to see if that improves the situation. Will report later.

Galveston - Washington ....each has its advantages. The water in the northwest, surrounded by beautiful and dramatic scenery was too cold to go into even in late July. The water in Galveston in October was perfect.

I have been using a higher end consumer camera (Kodak DX7630) for the last few months, and I feel that the results are somewhat mixed. I have gotten a lot of very good images, but it seems to be somewhat of a shooting match to get them in marginal lighting situations.

I have been using the camera in 5.4 megapixels per image mode, even though it goes up to 6.1 megapixel per image. I suppose part of the reasoning for this it that I want to take as many pictures as I can on my storage card with suitable resolution, and I think that maybe 6.1 megapixels is perhaps overkill for a consumer camera (but I wanted that option anyway ;^{) ). Another concern is that the camera only supports JPEG (.jpg) images. There is not an option for "native" or "raw" format pictures, i.e. the compression is always lossy. I wish that I could save in .tiff or other non-lossy format, even if it took additional memory. Memory is cheap and getting cheaper all the time.

One other complaint- and this may be fairly generic to most digital cameras. It appears that only a small variation in background lighting causes a very large difference in the aperture/exposure setting. My 20 year old Canon AE-1 seems to do a much better (more consistent) job under low light conditions. Is this a common problem with modern digital cameras? I have also heard similar complaints about some of the Sony cameras.

A shrimp boat at work offshore. I took this using maximum digital zoom on the DX7630. The boat was probably working a couple of miles offshore; it appeared to be one of three or four active offshore of where we were today. Steadied the camera on a post set out to control erosion. Note the bird in the upper left - saw a lot of Kingfishers today, looks like maybe that was one.

A beach near Pirates Cove, Galveston Island, today. Almost perfect weather; October is great in Texas. (Kodak DX7630)

A tug on the Arkansas River, Toad Suck, Arkansas, Novermber, 2001. (Sony DCR-TRV17 in single image mode)

A photo taken June 1999 on a field trip in the Shetpe area of western Kazakhstan. Our group had climbed to the top of a chalk hill to have a look at the upper Cretaceous/Danian carbonates in the area. On the right side of the picture is a mesa like structure completely surrounded by a steep cliff. In earlier times a fort maintained for the protection of trade routes through the area was situated on the top of the mesa. The fort was only accessible by a stairway carved into the chalk cliff on the back side of the structure. At the base of the hill from where this picture was taken was a labyrinth like, dendritic, erosional network in the lower units of the chalk. This chalk unit is approximately the same age as the Dover chalk in the UK and Austin chalk in the US. I will be posting more pictures from this trip in the future. A very cool place to hike around and look at rocks. (Canon AE-1, scanned from print)

Now for something a little different. This is a cotton burr burner in Ropesville, Texas. I took this in early July while visiting my folks in the town near which I grew up. This is located next to a cotton gin and was used to dispose of the burrs (outer seed hulls) removed by the gin mills in the cotton beneficiation process. This structure is composed of stacked bricks stabilized by iron (steel?) bands and probably dates from the '50's, or earlier, when mechanized cotton harvesting was developing. (Kodak DX7630)

This may appear photoshopped, but I actually took it on July 26, 2004, from the Space Needle in Seattle. You should be able to see: downtown Seattle, a Sanyo Blimp, the Moon and Mt. Rainier. (Kodak DX7630)

At MSH, late July, 2004. (Kodak DX7630) 

Hello and welcome to my site. The picture above is from late July of this year during a family visit to Mt. St. Helens. Unfortunalty, not much was happening at that time, but a lot is going on now - for the first time in 18 years. For updates on what is happening now at MSH, check out this site.