I got so excited about MapFlickr that I made another map. This one shows all the photos in my Flickr account tagged with “Arkansas” and geocoded. If you click the little flags, you can see the picture taken there.
Click to see the map.
I found this site called MapFlickr that will make a map from your geotagged Flickr photos. I found it to be quite cool, so I made a map of all the waterfall photos I’ve uploaded to Flickr. Some of the pins aren’t exactly accurate. I’ve zoomed in on some of them and noticed some are a few hundred yards to a half-mile off. But that could’ve been my fault when I placed them on the map in Flickr.
Click to see the map.
My Dad and I made our second-annual day-before-the-end-of-daylight-savings-time-sunrise pilgrimage on Saturday. The first annual DBTEODSTP was so successful, we decided to do it again. This year we went to Petit Jean State Park and caught the sunrise from Stout’s Point near the gravesite of Petit Jean herself. Several photographers had already assembled by the time we got there. The sunrise wasn’t all that great photographically, but it was pretty neat to hang out up there with my Dad.
I didn’t have classes on Thursday, so Abby stayed home from school, too. We went out exploring just like in the old days when I was a full-on stay-at-home dad or STAHD. We headed down to the river market to see how the fish were getting along at the Witt Stephens Jr. Central Arkansas Nature Center.
If I never accomplish anything else in life I can always say that I was the first person at Cedar Falls in Petit Jean State Park on October 10, 2009. It rained heavily across the Ozarks and Central Arkansas on Thursday night and Friday, so I knew the waterfalls would be running for a few days. The trouble was that Saturday was supposed to dawn with clear skies, and bright sun is no good for waterfall pictures. You need the muted light of cloudy skies to get good photos. I figured if I got out there before the sun got very high, I could do some shooting before things got too bright. Problem number two was that I’d have to go somewhere close by if I was going to be there at sunrise. The only real waterfall close enough for me to get to that early is Cedar Falls. I got up at 5:30 a.m. and got to the trail head a little after 7. And as luck would have it, it stayed cloudy, dark and gloomy all day. The top photo is a panorama made from six blended and merged photos.
When did train cars become graffiti canvasses? I can remember when train cars had no graffiti at all and now there’s not a car on rails without the artwork. Some of it is interesting. Like this executioner I found on a car sitting on a siding near our summer home in Northwest Arkansas.
I found myself with a little free time Saturday and since I haven’t gotten a lot of chances to use my ultra-wide-angle lens, I went looking for something to shoot. I eventually ended up at the old bridge over the Maumelle River on an abandoned stretch of Arkansas Highway 300 in Pinnacle Mountain State Park. This bridge is popular with local photographers and rightly so. It’s old and rusty and corroded and interesting.
Arkansas has a split personality. High country and forest lie in the north and west and to the south and east it’s as flat as Kansas. Little Rock sits right on the dividing line. You can drive 30 minutes in one direction and climb a mountain; or drive 30 minutes in the opposite direction and see the curvature of the earth. On Saturday, Abby, Gina, Aunt Jodie and I loaded up and headed to the flat lands, where row-crop agriculture dominates.
On an earlier jaunt I had discovered a country road lined on either side with huge walnut trees that formed a leafy tunnel for a mile or so. We headed back there because I wanted to get a photo looking down the road in some nice afternoon light. That photo idea was a bust. It was still too early in the afternoon and the light was too harsh. We stopped near what looked like an old sharecropper shack to let Abby get out and play in the dirt. A man in a snazzy BMW showed up directly and told us we were on the end of his crop-duster landing strip and needed to move along. So we did.
Some pretty wicked thunderstorms have kicked up the last two days. Abby and I went out looking for some on Tuesday. We found this one booming across the river at Pinnacle Mountain State Park. Lightning was flashing but it’s impossible to hit the shutter button quick enough to catch it. On our drive home another one caught up with us and put on a light and sound show as we drove down Chenal Parkway. Click on the photos to fill the screen with scary storm goodness.
The UPS man dropped by on Tuesday in his magical brown truck and brought me a new photographic toy, an ultra-wide-angle lens. Right off the bat I gave Abby the wide-angle-lens-to-the-face treatment.
The lens is a Tokina AT-X Pro SD 11-16mm (IF) DX. I sold my Nikon D40 camera and couple of lenses back in April to fund the purchase of this baby. The damn thing is hard to get. It’s been out of stock at all the reasonable outlets for the last four months. Many of your more sketchy camera dealers have been offering it for $100 to $500 over the regular price, but I knew if I waited long enough I could get the non-gouging deal eventually. I could have gotten one mail order from Hong Kong, but that didn’t seem wise. I finally caught it in-stock at B&H Photo in New York last week. I guess I got my order in soon after their Web site was updated because they were out-of-stock the next day. The lens is supposed to be one of the best ultra-wide-angle lenses for the smaller sensor DSLRs, especially when you factor in the price compared to similar lenses offered by the major camera companies. But apparently the quality varies from copy to copy, which is apparently de rigueur for the off-brand manufacturers. I haven’t given mine the brick-wall test or anything, but it seems to work just fine.