Four-Eight-Four

TVRM 610 Valve Gear

Autumn and I took our first trip of the year to the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum this morning. They'd just started running their Saturday/Sunday schedule in the last few weeks, and it will be a few more weeks yet before they return to their normal schedule. I'd not planned on taking her there ... we were actually going to go to the park to play, but as I was getting her into the car, she heard a train in the distance, and suddenly wanted to "go see zug." Before we got to the end of the street, she wanted to go the the park again. I drove to the closest park, and as I was parking the car, she again wanted to "go see zug" ... so off we went again. By the time I got on DuPont Parkway, she wanted the park again, and as soon as I started heading for the park ... well, you guessed it. At that point I made an executive decision that we were going to the railroad musuem, and fortunately she was quite happy with that decision.

Today was a good day to be there ... I saw them run the old Southern GP30 for the first time, and I saw a few Conrail locos on the main line behind the museum. Best of all, Autumn decided that the old 4-6-2 Canadian National locomotive was "Mama's grosse dampflok." Not sure how we're going to go about taking possession of it yet, nor do I know where we'll park it. I bet it will freak out the neighbors, though.

I shot this photo of TVRM 610's valve gear just before they turned her around on the turntable in East Chattanooga. As with my last few photo outings, I shot everything today in black and white, using my yellow filter. I think this was easily my best capture of the day.

Dallas Bay Skypark

I took this photo this afternoon just at the Dallas Bay Skypark just north of Chattanooga. My brother had flown into town and we took my dad out to eat for his birthday. No, this isn't his plane, but I'm sure he wishes it was. The selective saturation was done via photoshop.com. It makes it pretty easy to do this. It works fairly well, I think, on this photo because the brown-green background looked pretty bad in color, but the red of the plane is pretty cool.

Playtime!

Another Playground Photo

Having a child is nice. It gives me an excuse to go to the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum more often, and it allows me to enjoy playgrounds again ('cause you know people would be creeped out by a thirty-something guy hanging out at a playground by himself). Plus ... I'm getting more comfortable with shooting people. So far I've learned the real trick is just to shoot a ton of shots, and then hide the 98% of them that are absolutely awful. :-)

Playground

Yup, another photo of Autumn at the playground.

January @ChattaMac Meeting (2 of 2)

Yes, I do still shoot in color! I have really been enjoying shooting in B&W recently, though ... so much so that I forgot to remove the yellow filter from my camera, and I shot a bunch of color shots at this meeting using it. D'oh!

January @ChattaMac Meeting (1 of 2)

I shot this one at a higher ISO setting, so it's a bit on the grainy side. I'm hoping with my new slave flash, I'll be able to take better pictures of meetings and the like without having to resort to using ISO400+.

Moving

I've been using WordPress a long time. Well, perhaps more accurately you could say I've been using WordPress to host a blog that I generally ignore. In any case, I've decided to move my blogging over to Posterous. It's nice, simple, seems to work well ... and best of all, I don't have to maintain yet another web app. Since I spend the majority of my time *writing* web apps, that's really attractive to me right now.

Thank goodness it's easier to make this move than moving from one house to another.

Rachel Photographing Autumn

This one is from our trip to the park two weeks ago. Rachel is using the old Kodak camera my parents gave me back in 2003 (I think). That is the camera that is responsible for me becoming a photo nut (again). It's a darn good camera too. If you look closely you can see that the grip is cracked, and it's scratched up pretty badly. It's been dropped down rocky embankments, dropped into water at least five times and more. Now that's what I call tough ...

Gone Fishin'

I'm especially amazed at what the force of the water has done to the latter on the bridge pier in the background.