Due to some technical camera issues, my photos of the various family Christmas events didn’t turn out very well. (I think my all-around lens has some focus issues.) However, when we went to my parents’ place in Kansas, I was able to get out on Christmas Night and shoot this star trails photo. The elder Daileys live out in the country well away from any serious city lights so the nights are quite dark. This barn sits less than a half-mile from my parents’ house. I tried this shot unsuccessfully once before. This time the idea was to take about 20 consecutive exposures of 4 minutes and combine them all in Photoshop. During the first exposure I used my little SB600 flash to pop some light on the barn. I set the pop at half-power, which turned out to be way too weak. I should’ve popped at full power two times, at least. And I should’ve popped on the little shed and tree directly in front of the camera. I had to bring the exposure on the barn way up in Photoshop to get it to show at all. I guess I’ll be going back to this spot with a more elaborate plan.

The fall foliage in Arkansas was spectacular this year. My efforts to get a great fall shot were marked by ineptitude. This was the best I came up with. This is the canyon through which Cedar Creek flows on Petit Jean Mountain.

I headed up to the Buffalo National River on Sunday to shoot some fall foliage. Gina elected to stay home and I couldn’t find anyone else who wanted to spend the day doing outdoorsy stuff with me. So I took off alone. The weather forecast earlier in the week called for cloudy with some rain maybe, which would be perfect for viewing and shooting the colorful leaves. It rained Saturday night and was still raining in Little Rock when I left the house at 6 a.m. but by the time I got to Conway the sky was clearing. When I hit Russellville the sky was clear and I knew that I was going to miss all the good light. By the time I got to the Buffalo, the sun was high and harsh. I had originally planned to do the Hawksbill Crag hike, but I bailed on that and decided to just climb to the top of Roark Bluff across from the Steele Creek campground. My photo suffers from the harsh light. You really need a cloudy day after a rain to really get the great colors that nature has painted across the bluff. This was the first time I’d hiked Roark Bluff. It’s dangerous up there. The photo-taking spot is on a little spit of rock that juts out from the main bluffline. It’s a sheer drop on either side. If you fall, you’re going to die.

With the bald skies I knew that if I wanted to get any photos I was going to have to do something different, like go somewhere where the sun wasn’t a factor. I headed over to the Villines farmstead just across the low-water bridge at Ponca to check out the old buildings. The farmstead dates to the 1850s and consists of a cabin and outbuildings that are being restored by the National Park Service. The neat thing is that you can go inside the buildings. Something about this doorknob caught my eye, but I didn’t realize what it was until I got home and looked at the photo. The faceplate is mounted upside down. Normally, the keyhole is below the doorknob. The cabin was built in two parts by two different settlers at two different times and the whole thing looked to be poorly constructed. The doorways and windows are crooked and the floor slopes oddly. I know age accounts for some of that, but age can’t explain doorknobs mounted upside down.

Playing around with some HDR on these interior shots.

The barn at the Villines farmstead. I found it interesting that a big power line now runs through the middle of the Villines property. There’s no way all the folks who lived there over the years, scrabbling a living and struggling with cutting and laying by wood to cook with and heat the place and and boil water to wash their clothes, could’ve imagined that life-saving electricity would one day be mere yards from their back door.

Then I slowly made my way over to Jasper, where I ate lunch with this pirate at the bar of the Ozark Cafe on the town square.

I spent the rest of the afternoon meandering around to the east and south and eventually went through Lurton in southeast Newton County where I came upon the Lurton Community Church. I didn’t get any decent fall foliage pics, but it seemed the leaf color hasn’t actually peaked, so I’ve still got a chance for this year.

This copse stands right along the path where I do my running in Two Rivers Park. It’s always pretty with the late afternoon sun and for three years I’ve been meaning to go out and shoot a photo. I finally got around to it over the weekend.

It’s Abby Monday. She’s about to lose a top tooth and starting to look a little snaggley, kinda like Jewel.

Gymnastics is the new activity at our house. And Gymkata is the best martial arts movie ever made.

(Two SB600s for the rim lights. One AB800 in an umbrella for the front fill. SB26 for the splash of blue on the poorly done background.)

The new bridge at Two Rivers Park. I thought black and white captured the moment so nicely.

Day 2 dawned miserable. Rainy and chilly. So we decided to get some indoor touristing out of the way. We hit the subway for the first time and rode the uptown C train from the 50 Street Station to the American Museum of Natural History. The subway stopped in the basement of the museum. In the lobby were probably 1,000 people in line for tickets. The museum probably loves cold and rainy weather. Also in the lobby was a super-tall skeleton of a barosaurus.

The coolest things in the museum, of course, are the dinosaur exhibits.

I told T. rex all about the front-pocket-wallet craze that’s sweeping America. He was impressed.

An allosaurus feeding on an apatosaurus.

Duckbilled dinos. Anyone who’s watched Dinosaur Train would recognize every dinosaur in the museum.

It took a couple of hours to make our way through the dinosaurs and the Hall of Mammals and Their Extinct Relatives and we were growing weary of the museum. The place is massive, like five Wal-Mart Supercenters stacked on top of each other. So we bolted.

We decided that despite the rain we didn’t want to undertake any more inside activities, so we went across the street into Central Park. The rain had slowed to a light drizzle as we wandered through the south end of the park. Gina stopped in a few places to model her beige rain jacket and baby blue backpack.

We made our way down to the section named Strawberry Fields in honor of John Lennon who was slain across the street at the Dakota apartments. The tan building in the background of the photo. From what I understand, the Imagine memorial is a big draw and is often covered with flowers and other hippie stuff. I guess the rain kept the crowds down the day we were there. Although enough people were around that I could never get a shot without people in it.

Just past the Imagine mosaic we spotted this hawk going to town on a bird he had killed. Several hawks call Central Park home and a lot of people follow their daily doings.

We wended our way down to the Mall and found it mostly deserted.

About halfway down the Mall this sax player blew romantic tunes to mostly no one. As we walked along it felt like the closing scene of a Sex And The City episode. We stopped at the Central Park souvenir store and got a couple things and then walked out the south end of the park onto Sixth Avenue.

New York is full of these electronics stores that sell everything from high-end digital cameras and lap-top computers to the cheesy I ♥ New York clothing items. They fill their windows with wonderful collages of color and texture … or something.

It turns out the iPhone is very handy in NYC. There are dozens of NYC specific apps, including ones where you put in where you are and where you want to go and it returns directions including what subway trains or buses to use. Little Rock has zero apps devoted to it. On our walk back from Central Park we were using the Starbucks app to find, you guessed it, a Starbucks. We’re standing on a street corner like a couple of rubes studying out iPhones and pointing up and down the street as we discuss which way we should go. We decided to head left and turned in that direction and Gina noticed a window full of people sitting and drinking from Starbucks cups. We looked up to see what this place was and it was the Starbucks we couldn’t figure out how to get to.

After getting a couple $4 coffees we headed down Sixth to Rockefeller Center where I failed to take one decent picture. It was getting close to dark so we headed back the hotel, which was three blocks away.

After such a long walk, we were hungry for some quality white-tablecloth-type dining. Gina got a us a reservation at Keen’s Steakhouse on West 36th Street, a 120-year-old restaurant with the largest churchwarden pipe collection in the world, they say. The ceilings and walls are lined with them. That’s where I got the Legendary Muttonchop™ you see above. It was very, very good. I ate the whole thing, which must have been about 2 lbs. Then I ate about a quarter of Gina’s filet mignon. The meat sweats hit me hard by the time I was done. We had a couple glasses of really good wine, too. I’m surprised I didn’t have a gout attack on the way out the door. We also set a new record in the Most Expensive Restaurant Visit category.

Entrance to Keen’s bar.

We took the subway to the restaurant but decided to walk back to the hotel, which was a little under a mile away. It gave us a chance to see Times Square yet again.

For years Gina agitated for a New York City vacation and this year, with my characteristic magnanimity, I decided to grant her wish. (Your B.S. detector should be screaming right now.) Several people expressed surprise that I would go to New York for a vacation. I guess because I’m usually a national park/driving cross country kind of guy. But NYC is one of those places everyone should see, right? Also I knew NYC would be a fantastic place to take photos, so I got pretty excited about going. The only time I’d been in the East Coast Megalopolis was way back in the summer after 8th grade when I went to Washington, D.C., to visit relatives for a few weeks.

I’m not big on flying. I realize rationally that flying is safer than driving and all that, but man wasn’t meant to fly. He was meant to drive 85 mph on an interstate. The last time I flew was in 1997 on business thing and it was a short flight from Little Rock to Dallas. This trip to NYC was going to involve real flying, you know, changing planes and layovers and security hassles. Even though I don’t like being in an airplane, I do like to look out the window and the passing terrain below. Unfortunately, most of the trip both going and coming was done over and through cloudy skies. I was hoping to get some interesting photos out the plane window, but most were really blah.

Much of the trip promised to be very novel to me and it was, like the international Coke™ I was served on the plane between Chicago and NYC. We flew into LaGuardia in Queens and we approached the city from the south out over the ocean and our windows were on the east side of the plane, so all we got to see from the air was Long Island. The plane finally swung around to land heading south and we got about two minutes of a view of the city from low altitude. So no pictures.

We hit the exit and jumped into a cab to take us to the Belvedere in mid-town Manhattan. The cab ride proved to be the first of several experiences that I’d never had before, but felt very familiar because of how heavily New York City features in popular entertainment. The cab ride should have been terrifying, but I totally knew the driver would have little command of English and drive like a bat out of hell through heavy traffic.

We checked into the hotel and this was the view from our 16th-floor window. We could see the reflections of the Times Square lights in the windows of the buildings across from us.

We immediately headed out for Times Square a couple blocks away. TS is, of course, amazing with all the giant video screens and flashing neon and hordes of tourists. But again, I’ve seen Times Square on TV dozens of times, including the whole New Years Eve thing. I had imagined it to be bigger than it is. In fact, one thing I hadn’t taken into account is that even though New York is this giant city with all the famous excesses, dimensions there seem physically small because there’s so little space in which to spread out. Yes, the buildings are tall and there’s no end to them, but the individual buildings have relatively small footprints and there’s no distance between anything. I’ve been in big cities, but the ones I’ve been to were in the south and west and mid-west, where space is not so precious and the buildings naturally demand more personal space. Manhattan is only 23 square miles with 1.8 million people. Dallas, with 1.2 million people, sprawls for 385 square miles. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that we could walk to a lot of the stuff we wanted to see on the island.

NYC seems to be really big on the Yankees. I saw several shop windows set up like this one, but no windows devoted to the Mets, Giants or Knicks.

We got into town just in time for an early spring cold snap. Good thing Gina brought her big red coat and scarf.

Times Square from inside the three-story M&M™ superstore.

Formerly a huge fan of American Idol, Gina was happy to see Sanjaya Malakar is making a go of it.

Did you catch the reference in the title to television personalities Moose and Zee? We thought we’d check out what life will be like when we hit 70, so Gina bought a puzzle and a card table.