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Happy Pumpkin Day.
October 31, 2007If i could dress up as anything today... I'd want to dress as Robert Goulet. But not the actual Robert Goulet... more likely, the Will Ferrell SNL version of Goulet. Classic comedy at it's best.
You can probably still find the clip on Youtube if you look hard enough. I won't post the link here because Saturday Night Live and NBC have been pretty hardcore at getting their show clips deleted from Youtube....the link might not work tomorrow.
Anywho.... there are a lot of folks here at work dressed up in costume, not something that works too well for the photographer though. I won't be sitting around the office all day long and I think it looks kinda unprofessional to be working out and about in costume.
Eat lots of candy folks...
Posted by Jason Palmer at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
WTD
With the holiday season approaching... I thought this was pretty funny.
Posted by Jason Palmer at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
A few air show photos
Sorry it took so long... but here are a few of my fave. photos from the Sheppard AFB Air Show from Oct. 20th.
I'd have posted them sooner... but I was in Fort Worth all last week for my sister April's wedding (more on that later).
Enjoy...
So, all together, between Friday and Saturday at the air show, I had more than 1,400 photos to go over. Granted, I deleted nearly 900 of them for various reasons (out of focus, not well composed, series of same plane doing same maneuver). I narrowed it down to about 40 shots for the web gallery slideshow.... but here are the 5 best if you ask me.
This is by far and away my fave. picture from the entire day. The Air Force "Heritage Flight" with an F-22 Raptor, P-47 Thunderbolt and the A-10 Thunderbolt II (or as I used to call it... the Warthog).
This was the finale of the entire day and just couldn't be more perfect if it tried in my opinion. The sunlight was perfect on the planes, their formation was good, and it pretty much gave me chills to see it in real life. I've seen several heritage flight passes before... but this was the very first with the F-22 that I've witnessed.
Second fave.... actually from Friday. This was the trip up in the C-130 with the SOCOM jump team. I managed to rig up a remote control camera (although I forgot to take pictures of the rig) with the supervision of the pilot. He asked me "Is that thing going to work?" To which I replied (thinking he meant the photos) "I hope so."
He was asking if the entire rig would stay put and not fall out of the back of the plane an to the ground.... 10,000 ft. below.
The setup was no different than your standard backboard remote camera for a basketball game (which I'd love to try this season at MSU)
Getting the settings right were easy, manual focus to a point where I thought they'd be, guess the settings for the exposure in my head. The rest of it is pretty much luck. I can't control how they jump or if I'll be able to see several of them at once. It's out of my hands. Turns out... I got pretty lucky.
This one was of the divers on Saturday. Several seconds after they jumped out of the back of the C-130, the plane banked sharply and just so happened to fly in the path of where I was shooting. Just one of those lucky type of shots. Just happened to have it framed well in the viewfinder, and got off maybe 3 shots before the plane was gone.
Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.
This is a cool shot.... I've never seen the water vapor trails on the wings of an F-117. I'm sure it's happened before, but I've never actually seen it or seen a photograph of it until now. I had no idea I had that shot until I got back to the office and went through them.
Planes doing stunts are a dime a dozen.... you have to get something really awesome to impress anybody that's seen them a lot. I like this shot mainly because of the visual lines that make it look like these planes are literally right on top of each other. It's an optical illusion, they were flying side-by-side... but the effect is still pretty cool.
You can see the rest of the air show photos online at the gallery page at our website. Enjoy...
Posted by Jason Palmer at 10:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Air ShowTastic
October 20, 2007In case you didn't go to the Air Show today at Sheppard AFB, shame on you.
Although an official count hasn't been released, I would have to guess there were more than 50,000+ out there.
It was awesome, and I'll post some photos later.
Posted by Jason Palmer at 6:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Free Falling
October 17, 2007So, looking forward to the air show this weekend out at Sheppard AFB, I've been offered a position on the C-130 that the SoCOM team is going to jump out of on Friday.
I'm going airborne above Wichita Falls. Sweet fancy moses.
Now, just to clear it up, I am not actually jumping out of the plane. I think. I hope.
Honestly, I have no idea why on earth people would willingly jump out of a perfectly good airplane. I mean, it makes sense to jump if the engines die or something. But they say that flying is the statistical safest way to travel.
'Course, that's on a cushy 747... this is the C-130 Hercules. Not exactly traveling in style. Now this isn't the first time I've been airborne over the area. It's happened a few time before.
The last time was back in June.
Jason Palmer/Times Record News
Brian Kissinger pilots a restored 1942 L4 Piper Cub over Wichita County Tuesday afternoon. Kissinger stopped at Wichita Valley Airport on a cross-country trip to raise at least $100,000 for brain tumor and cancer research. In 2003, Kissinger, 39, was an Air Force pilot stationed at Scott Air Base when he was diagnosed with a stage II oligodendroglioma brain tumor.
I was piloted around by an 80+ year old in another Piper Cub. We took off and flew on Kissingers' wing for about 20 minutes, moving in front, above, behind and a few other angles for me to get some wonderful photos. It was pretty awesome.
Heck, anytime I get to actually lift off the ground is a blast. The only thing I was missing was a pair of goggles and a leather helmet. I'd have been all set then.
The previous two times were back in 2004 and 2003. I haven't been able to find my pictures, but I will and I'll update the rest of the blog when I do.
I'm pumped about Friday, just hoping that I don't fall out of the plane.
Posted by Jason Palmer at 10:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Biting off more than I can chew
October 10, 2007So...as previously mentioned in the lizard blog... Lara Richards and I hit the road for a trip west last week.
We went from here to Vernon then on to Crowell. I think we stopped at about 8-9 places, stocking up on stories from the region for a while. That's just how we roll out there.
Well, all that work and driving and we both worked up an appetite. Not that there is a great variety of places to dine in little Crowell...but there is a staple.
The Feed Lot Cafe (not to be confused with the Feed Lot in Burk).
I decided to pass on the regular chicken fried steak... seeing as how it was lunch and I didn't want a really heavy meal slowing me down along the way.
I went for the CFS club sandwich. Sounded harmless enough right. Order a side of onion rings, and I should have been good to go for quite a while.
First off...their sweet tea was darn near perfect. And I'm a sweet tea connoisseur. Clearly, I make the best at home but there are a few places that have some dang good tea. This was one of them.
So, after a few minutes, the waitress brings out my plate.....this is what I saw.
Sweet fancy moses... I have never seen a "sandwich" that large in my life. I literally told Lara (who was cracking up) I had to go get a photo of this thing. I quickly realized that I didn't have anything else in the photo that gave it perspective.
So...I decided to put my own hand in it. Now, my fist is right beside the sandwich, no trick angles or anything....
I mean...that thing has to be a good 5+ inches tall. I was floored.... Lara is still laughing at me. So...I grabbed her cell phone, a Motorola RAZR for even more perspective.
After this... I decided it was time to tackle the monster. Or die trying. I'm lucky I didn't burst an aorta just swallowing a bite. I'm sure I took about 5 months off the end of my life. But good lord it was awesome.
Obviously...I couldn't even fit the dang thing in my mouth for a bite. I had to take a 2-part bite.
For the record, I finished about 1/2 of it. And the onion rings. And about 5 glasses of the sweet tea. But the sandwich... I had to have a box.
So...if you are ever in Crowell, do yourself a freaking service and stop in for a bite. But bring your A-game.
Mark it down as one of the very few meals I can't finish in one sitting.
Posted by Jason Palmer at 3:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
My lizard friend.
Found this little female collared lizard last week on my trip with Lara Richards to the great wild western frontier of Crowell.
She was nice enough to pose on a rock for me in the bright sunlight and strike a pose.
Posted by Jason Palmer at 12:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
WTD
October 5, 2007This made me laugh today
Posted by Jason Palmer at 3:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Sept. Blog Stats
October 3, 2007This is a little confusing...but check THIS out.
Blog Stats:
Jason - 2,305
Lara Richards - 1,597
Nick G - 1,342
Rest of the field - Below 500
:-)
Posted by Jason Palmer at 12:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Computer Nightmare
October 2, 2007This is the one thing that can happen that scares the heck out of computer users like myself.
A massive hard drive failure.
Just the mere mention of it strikes fear in the hearts of many....
Well, it happened to me last week.
First things first...being a professional photographer, I have a more elaborate system of backing up and saving all of my photos (something like 75,000 of them currently).
They were all safe and sound on an external hard drive... thankfully.
__________________________________
So...on Thursday last week, I was restarting my computer after I updated a driver or two. I was in the process of doing a couple of renovations to my 3-yr 9-mth old machine. I installed 2 gigabytes of RAM about half an hour earlier, and the old warhorse computer was flying along.
I had also just purchased a medium-range graphics card and new 400-watt power supply for my computer, but I had not got it in the mail as of yet (I actually got the package today from the UPS guy.
So anywho, after the reboot, I tried to launch Adobe Photoshop..... and I got this weird message saying something about it couldn't find a file to launch and it shut down Photoshop before it even got going.
"Strange" I thought. So I tried to launch Internet Explorer instead...and got the same kind of message. It couldn't find the files in the .exe to launch.
Okay...this isn't good.
After staring blankly at the screen trying to think through my rather limited knowledge of what might be happening...the computer shut down.
On it's own...and rather abruptly.
It came back to life, and almost got into Windows...and died again. But this time, I heard a noise I had never heard before come from my computer.
It kinda sounded like..... like the jet engine from the FedEx plane in the movie CastAway. You know, after the plane crashed into the ocean, and the jet engine in the water behind Tom Hanks is still spinning...but then explodes.
Yeah, a sound kinda like that came from my computer.
It didn't register at first what that sound could have been....but I unplugged everything from the back of the machine, and got ready to face the bad bad bad bad news that I probably knew was coming.
I packed up and headed to Best Buy, because I knew those Geek Squad folks would be able to more quickly diagnose and hopefully help. They opened the machine up (as I had done countless times before)...tried booting up the machine and the guy just kinda looked up at me and said...
"That sounds like a hard drive failure."
That may have well been the sound of a knife going into my heart. I asked him back "Are you sure?" He went and got his supervisor, who merely stuck her hand inside the machine by the hard drive and said "Yep, that thing is pretty much fried." It was blazing hot. They're not supposed to get that hot. I've heard stories about guys actually pulling their crashing hard drives in a freezer for about 15-20 minutes and having just enough time to pull a few files off before it totally fails.
They were going to charge be more than $100 for data recovery if they could pull anything off of the drive.... but I declined. I could try at home for free (I haven't yet, but will probably today or tomorrow).
With a dead hard drive, I was left with only a few decisions.
A: Get a new hard drive for the nearly 4-yr old machine. I still have the system restore disks, so I could get the machine back up and running....but it's still an old machine.
B: Get a new computer. I was planning on it after my tax refund check anyways...something with a new processor and built for speed and photo editing.
I chose the latter... and spent about $720 on a brand new CPU that is pretty much loaded for speed. It will be my main system for a while. But I have plans to replace the hard drive on the old machine eventually, and keep that one around as my Internet playing around computer.
I'd like to keep the new computer pretty much as a photo editing computer and maybe even keep it completely off the internet (unless I need to download updates and whatnot). That was the plan all along anyways... have 2 working machines for separate tasks.
I was lucky.... everything I really cared about (all of my photos) were "safe and sound" on an external hard drive. But even so, I'm a little freaked out. The small LED on the front of my 150 gigabyte external hard drive has worn out. It's been almost 3 years (Christmas 2005) and that has be a bit scared.
I'm probably going to ask for a new HD for Christmas....maybe, I don't know yet. But I decided to back the photos up yet again.... this time on the 400-gigabyte internal hard drive on the new computer.
So now...I have DVDs, external hard drive, and internal hard drive. I have about 70,000 photos in 3 locations. Just in case.
If I were you, I'd consider doing the same. At least back up the files you think are important.... any documents you keep on your computer.
Now...I just have to learn this Vista thing.
Posted by Jason Palmer at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)
