Photos: Winter at Ijams

Despite a large dose of grumpiness today, I made myself get out while the weather was reasonably warm. So, I went to Ijams and got some photos, trying out my new ball-head for the Gorillapod. I think I like it for certain situations. Not quite sold on using it for a lot of macro stuff yet, though. It didn't help that I forgot my remote and that the ground was pretty wet (disinclining me to sprawl on the ground too much). Anyway, the first couple of photos from today.

This is some sort of winterized seed pod or something:


Another winterized plant flower-ish thing:


Tiny but bright fungus on a log:


One entire side of this log was covered with a shelf fungus. Here's a small part of it:


More photos to come, including some more fungus (of course), some cool water stuff, and a salamander!

Debugging

True or not, this is a pretty good tale.

Photos: Ross Marble Quarry 2

Some more photos:

Top of a large fungus:


FOREST SHARK!!!!!


Some barbed wire:



And of course more fungus:

Photos: Ross Marble Quarry

So, like a month ago I went out to explore the rest of the trails at the Ross Marble area at Ijams. The remaining trails (Amber and Hickory) are pretty different from the ones I visited before. They reminded me a lot of the UT Arboretum in Oak Ridge. Anyway, pictures:

SLUG!



Neat little cluster of leaves:

Must. Share.

The first 10 seconds, and then everything after 3:00 or so made me laugh. Lots.

Time lapse, take two.

Giving up on this for tonight.  Changes from previous include letting Photoshop autofix the color on all images (made the later images look less orange), changed the FPS to 25, and uploading to the youtubes instead of using the really tiny crappy blogger video.    I still need to remove a full obviously bad images, but I think that's about it.

First attempt at a timelapse video

Behold.  I am already working on a better, fixed version.  

Photos: ICE STORM OF THE CENTURY

OK, so it really wasn't that bad.  A good 2/3 of my pictures didn't turn out because I was handholding the camera, in the snow, with a giant zoom lens.  However, I few of them are decent.  These are them.  Those.  Whatever.

Some poor, ice-encapsulated branches:




Sliiightly blurry pine needles, more ice:


A couple of picture from the play area.   I like this, as they're a little different from what I normally take.  The green monkeybars seem especially cool to me for some reason.



This sucker was a good 8-10ft above me.  The picture was a little hard to take, as right about then, it started to rain again.


That's it.  Hope you enjoyed.

Some of **my** photos

Taken with the P&S, cause I was feeling too much of a weeny to subject the Nikon to sub-freezing temps today.  The operating temp. is supposedly only >32 deg F.  So, these are from a walk I just took along 3rd Creek Greenway.  It was something like 22 deg F while I was out there.  JPEGs straight from the camera.




Slippery hill up to the road:


Squirrels-eye view (needs the while balance figured out, too blue):


The tracks:


A blurry cardinal:


Some water:




And, lastly, me bundled up, trying out the new jacket.  While it was cold out there, the jacket functioned pretty well.  I need to investigate possibilities for shielding my face if I wanna go up into the mountains though.  Think I got a little wind-burned.

Spectacular photos

Of course, they're not mine :)

There's apparently a waterfall in Yosemite that looks like it's on fire, if you manage to catch it under perfect conditions.  Check out the photos.  Stunning.

Thanks to The Smoky Mountain Hiking Blog for the link.

More snow, because I can

Found some batteries....

My poor garden:




The cold tree:

OMGWTFBBQ ANOTHER BLIZZARD

Actually a reasonable amount of snow so far.  Bad quality pictures though - the Nikon is tied up trying to get a series for a timelapse, so these were taken with the point-and-shoot, which has a mostly-dead battery. Still, snow!

For all my TF2-loving friends

To make up for the lack of posts, I give you this video instead:

Dah blizzard!

OMG, LOOKIT THE SNOW!

Photos: Work stuffs

Some photos taken at work the other day:

Supercomputers as far as the eye can see:


Gaea, the Cray XT6 we run in the NCRC:


Just some wiring stuffs:


Reasonably good photo of some of the Lustre servers for Gaea:


What a compute blade on a Cray looks like:


So I actually think this is one of my better photos overall, I'm really pleased with how it came out.  This is the back one of the Spider scalable clusters:


That's all.

Blast from the past

Got lazy, so here's a picture from the St. Louis Zoo:

Photos: Ross Marble Quarry 3

Here are some of the photos from my first walk around the Ross Marble Quarry.  They're from the quarry area you reach at the end of the Imerys Trail.  It's a pretty big area, and has obviously been used pretty extensively by mountain bikers, even before being fixed up by the Ijams folks.

Quarry floor:


View up one of the smaller ramps along the quarry's edge:


Quarry's edge seen from a distance:


Some of the slightly scarier ramps:


Couple more ramps up the side:


Long trail on the quarry floor:


Smaller jumps on the quarry floor:


Undeveloped trail going into the work area:


This is the view from the top of the scarier downhills:


Another view from the top of the quarry wall:


Good overview of the trails: