Eclipse

In case you didn’t know, the “Top of the World” is actually in Manhattan, Kansas, not the Himalayas, not Nepal!  Don’t believe me? Google it… okay, I know, I know, almost every town with anything taller than a mole hill has a “top of the world”.  Anyway, this last Sunday was my first time to check out the “Top of the World”, because it was the best place in town to view the eclipse, and it was actually my first time to photograph one.  If you are like “what eclipse?”… uhm, there was one on Sunday, May 20, 2012.  It was pretty cool.  Didn’t get to see the “ring of fire“, but it was an eclipse.

Just in case you want to know.  I had the Pentax K-5 with the DA-L 55-300 mounted on a tripod, had the camera set to aperture priority.  I used the lowest ISO possible for the K-5 – ISO 80.  The aperture was f.19, the focal length 190mm, and the resulting shutter speed after applying -1EV was 1/45 sec. There you have it.

Behind Tuttle Creek Dam

When I go out to Tuttle Creek Lake, I’m usually on the other side of the dam where I can see the lake.  This time around I was at the park behind the dam and climbed up on to the rocky shelf.  It was cloudy and late in the afternoon, so the sun was low, but there was a slight breeze, so once in a while the sun would shine through the clouds and light up the dead grass, giving it this golden sheen.

Flying Car!

This post is a bit different.  My grandma sent me an email with a link to a video.  I watched and was blown away!  This is so cool!  Maybe you’ve seen it on the news.  I’d heard about it before, but this was the first time that I actually saw video footage and WOW! Amazing!  The guys who developed this, I assume spearheaded by Steve Saint (Check out the movie about his dad – End of the Spear), are awesome and God Bless them.  Their purpose in building this flying car is for missions – getting sick people to hospitals in the hard or impossible to get to areas of the world such as the jungles in South America.  Check out these videos.  Here’s a link to their website.

Passing on the Skills of the Trade

Early one morning at Lake Sebu, I was out taking photos.  As I was looking out over the lake, I saw this canoe moving along.  I kept watching it and saw that it was a father taking his son out on an early morning canoe ride.  They were going in circles around the water front of their bamboo house.  I thought it was just kind of cool, this close relationship between father and son.  They just kept paddling around and around, backing up, moving forward, maneuvering the canoe.

Well, this canoe was quite a ways from where I was sitting, on a hill over looking the lake, at least a couple hundred meters.  It was only until I blew the picture up on the computer that I noticed that the son also had a paddle.  What happened on the lake wasn’t just a close father and son moment, it was a father teaching son moment, passing on the skills of living life on the lake.  Awesome!  It reminds me of the verse…

Proverbs 22:6 “Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it.”

Locating-Transfering-Saving Aperture 3 Presets in OS X Lion

I recently setup a new mac mini running OS X Lion.  I installed Aperture 3 and updated it.  I was about to transfer my Aperture 3 import/export, etc presets from another computer running Snow Leopard when I noticed that the ~/Library/ folder in Lion is missing.  Aperture 3 presets are stored in “your home folder”/Library/Application Support/Aperture/.  After searching the web for answers, it turns out the Library folder is not missing, but is hidden by default.  I came across a post on OSX Daily (Check it out!) on how to show or access the Library folder under the “Home” folder.  Once the Library folder was unhidden, I just copied the contents of the Aperture folder from the other mac into the Aperture folder in OS X Lion. I did all this transferring with Aperture 3 closed.