Category: Pictures

154/366: Parking Lot Sunset

Sunset over Niskayuna.

Early in this photo-a-day thing I tried to get in the habit of bringing the camera with me when I ran errands, to get pictures of random interesting stuff outside of the immediate neighborhood of our house. I fell out of that, though, when it was actually cold, because I didn’t like leaving the camera… Continue reading 154/366: Parking Lot Sunset

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153/366: Old School

Credit-card terminal at the Niskayuna Co-Op.

Here in the US, we’re slowly transitioning to the European system of chip-based credit cards (I got email at work saying that my new card there will actually be chip-and-PIN, wonder of wonders). This is not uniformly distributed yet, though, so about half of the retailers I deal with regularly want the chip, the other… Continue reading 153/366: Old School

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152/366: Fun With Motion Blur

Composite of a swinging yo-yo shot with different exposure times.

This one was a whole bunch of work for one smallish shot… So, in past rounds of “science-y things with my fancy camera,” I looked at the effect of ISO settings and apertures. This time out, I wanted to look at something moving, and the way that it blurs with increasing exposure time. My initial… Continue reading 152/366: Fun With Motion Blur

151/366: Half an Oak

The giant oak tree in our back yard, showing the aggressive pruning of branches that stick over the fence.

When Kate and I were looking for a house back in late 2002, one of the things that sold us on this place was the back yard. The lot is very deep, unusually so for this part of Niskayuna, so there’s a lot of space in the back yard, and it was pleasantly shaded by… Continue reading 151/366: Half an Oak

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142-150/366: On-Deadline Catchup

Clouds at sunrise, with the bus picking up the kid across the street.

I’ve been neglecting the photo-a-day thing for the last week-and-a-bit, but for a good reason: I had a deadline of, well, today, to finish a chapter I was asked to contribute to an academic book. And while I fully realize that actually hitting that deadline is not typical academic behavior, I have A Thing about… Continue reading 142-150/366: On-Deadline Catchup

141/366: Holes

View through the hole I cut through some pieces of particle board to use testing SteelyKid's balsa-wood structure for OM.

As mentioned last week, SteelyKid is doing Odyssey of the Mind this year, and her team has elected to build a balsa wood structure. The goal for these is to support the maximum possible weight, and the first step of the testing is to put a “crusher board” on top. This is a couple of… Continue reading 141/366: Holes

140/366: Dog and Volcano

SteelyKid's balloon dog, and The Pip's clay volcano.

When I arrived to pick SteelyKid up the other night, she and her friends were light-saber fighting with long balloons, which is fairly typical of that bunch. While I gathered her stuff up, though, she stopped and twisted her balloon into an animal shape: She got a “How to Make Balloon Animals” kit a few… Continue reading 140/366: Dog and Volcano

136/366: Gotta Fly

A bluejay taking off from the bird feeder outside our dining room window.

We have a couple of bird feeders near the house, one just outside the bay window in the front of the house, and the other on the side of the house right next to the dining room. (That one used to be farther out in the yard, where it functioned well as a means of… Continue reading 136/366: Gotta Fly

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134/366: BalsaKid

The first complete test structure from SteelyKid's Odyssey of the Mind team.

Back in the fall, a note came home with SteelyKid about an organizational meeting for an Odyssey of the Mind team for her elementary school. My father coached this for several years back in the 80’s, and one of my sister’s teams went to the World championships (held in Cole Field House at the University… Continue reading 134/366: BalsaKid