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.
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.
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.
Sometimes Abby, Gina and I jump in the car and head off in some random direction. We ended up in Fordyce on Sunday. Fordyce’s only claim to fame that I know of is that Keith Richards was arrested there in 1975. When we got there we could’ve murdered someone on Main Street and gotten away with it because we were the only souls downtown. It was nice because no one was around to hassle us as we explored the ruins.
I got in some good brick-wall-shooting practice. I wonder why someone would label the burglar alarm in big red letters. It seems to me that you’d want to keep the location of the alarm under wraps so that a burglar wouldn’t destroy it before pillaging your building. Of course it’s about 20 feet up on the wall so maybe it’s safe up there.
Rex’s Liquor looked like a great place to score some Mad Dog 20/20.
Rex also has this great side entrance in case you don’t want anybody out on the street to see you going in.
Southern hospitality.
I did something to this photo I’ve never had the patience to do before successfully. A big guy wire from a phone pole extended from corner to corner totally marring the shot. I removed it using the magical content-aware-fill function in Photoshop CS5. I found an instructional video on on YouTube demonstrating how to do it.
Out behind the Dallas County Museum is a weird garden of signs with nuggets about the area’s history.
Fordyce is evidently proud of its high school sports teams, which have the redbug as the mascot. The redbug is more commonly known as the chigger, a most unpleasant parasite. (Note the sign in the previous picture explaining that Fordyce introduced the state to high school football.) This mural celebrating that first team is inside another building ruin that’s been cleaned up. Murals cover the walls on both sides with scenes of various high school sports, football through the years, basketball, baseball, track and golf. All the murals have the bizarre sea of chiggers rising from the bottom to suck the blood of the athletes.
My buddy Kurt and I hiked Indian Creek in the Buffalo National River a week ago. The creek is home to two waterfalls highlighted in the Tim Ernst Arkansas Waterfalls book: Copperhead Falls (seen above with Kurt posing) and Tunnel Cave Falls, formed by water exiting a cave. The trail begins at the campground at Kyle’s Landing and runs a little over two miles up into a box canyon. It’s a great hike. The park service doesn’t maintain the trail and it gets pretty rough in some places. I wouldn’t recommend it for the weak-ankled.
This was a weird hike photographically for me. I didn’t take many photos. For one thing, I did this hike a couple of years ago and shot a bunch of photos then. For another thing, I usually do these long hikes alone, which leaves me free to screw around and shoot photos that don’t end up being any good. Because I had a companion on this trip, I had other things to do, mainly flapping my gums with Kurt. For some reason I can’t seem to talk and take pictures at the same time. Kurt, however, had his camera out the whole time shooting me and the scenery and handing me his camera so I could shoot him and the scenery together. I didn’t mind. It’s more fun to have somebody along. Finally, Kurt asked me if I was going to take a photo of anything at all. So I snapped out of it and shot a bunch pictures of him in action.
This is my favorite one. Kurt emerging from the pit toilet at Kyle’s Landing with the sunset in the background.
The namesake cave for Tunnel Cave Falls is closed to explorers, but even if it wasn’t off-limits it appears a dicey proposition to enter it with it being 30 feet up a sheer bluff wall. No, I didn’t take a photo of the cave itself. I told you I didn’t do a very good job with the photography. The waterfall was dry, anyway.
I did manage to provide Kurt with a nice profile photo for his Facebook page.
It snowed again on Friday and I went out to Pinnacle Mountain to take some photos of it.
I finally got around to getting some pictures of Abby in her dancing togs.
Strobist: SB600 on floor fired through shoot-thru umbrella. SB600 in shoot-thru pointed down from above.
(Note: I know the vignette is too strong making the edges of the photo blend into the blog background, but I don’t feel like fixing it.)