Forced Perspective

It's those trick pictures--you know the ones where you line things up just right so that little Jimmy is sitting in the goldfish bowl staring at the fish or the Chihuahua is bigger than the Great Dane. That's the theme Craver gave us this week.

So we went off to the Balloon Rally with the intent of creating some forced perspective shots.

They aren't as easy as you might think. Especially since the balloons move once you get your shot idea lined up. We  had quite a few fails.

 

And some close calls.

 

before we gave up and decided to go chase the balloons.

 

So I went back to the two trick shots from my archives.

 Alaska 2009 and Seattle 2008

 

I am still not sure which I will choose for the header. You can see what the other header challengers have chosen by clicking their links in my sidebar.

Railroad Crossing without Any Cars

...Can you spell that without any 'R's?

Tom gave us the header challenge theme of Railroad for this week.

 My local railroad pictures are not of riding on the trains but walking near the tracks, such as this foggy morning when I walked through town.

 It doesn't take a fog for the railroad crossings to pose some fascination, though.

 Some interesting angles. Did you realize how high those lights stand?

 We have had one major trip where the railroad was the main experience of the journey rather than just the mode of transportation. One does not set out on the Transiberian Railway to simply get from one place to another. The Transiberian Railway is an experience in itself. At every station there would be people gathered on the platform for a variety of reasons. Some are traveling.

 Some are selling goods to the passengers. This lady has fresh berries. One compartment mate hopped off the train at an early morning stop and brought us breakfast pastries. (His name was Slas and he looked like Arnold Schwarzenegger.) At one stop, we could have purchased chandeliers or stemware from workers from the local glassworks, who received part of their salaries in goods.

The Transiberian Railway stretches from Moscow to Vladivostok. We traveled about half of that way.

 We traveled by train while we were in the UK as well. Not quite as exotic, unless you might be looking for Platform 9 3/4 at Charing Cross Station.

 The awesome architecture looks like it is ready to swallow up the trains.

 They could be off to Hogwarts, but then, apparently I may have the wrong station, as Harry and his friends left from Kings Cross.

This notice board as we traveled from Wales to London was a bit distressing, though our own train was traveling and on time. I forget what the reason for the cancelled routes.

It was not as alarming as the experience in Novosibirsk, Russia, though. We were dropped off by taxi at the train station with no escort as we usually had when leaving or arriving at a city. We entered the station to look for our scheduled departure on the departure board (which we would have had to sound out in its Cyrillic letters) and found nothing but wires hanging out of the board. Trains were being announced. In Russian. Ours was late and no one spoke English. Our thirty words of Russian were not very helpful. It is one of the adventures of foreign travel.

 

I have chosen this image from our UK travel as my header. It just speaks that thousand words that a picture is worth. It was taken as we left Edinburgh.

 

The rest of the header challenge crew are linked in my sidebar. Visit them and check out their railroads.

By the way, "that" is spelled T-H-A-T whether you have any Rs available or not.

Finished

I am the one who came up with the theme "Finished" and now I am stuck trying to come up with a post and a header. What was I thinking.

At the time I was finished with a lot of work and was on the spot. I forgot it was my turn.

So I started thinking what might be finished.

I remembered crossing Hoover Dam and watching the construction of the bridge that now takes the pressure of traffic off the road there. (It once took us three hours to travel about twenty miles to cross from Arizona into Nevada.) Once the bridge was finished, we crossed the bridge and there was no place to stop for a picture.

So I thought again.

On another trip to the Southwest, we cheered on our son-in-law as he finished his Ironman race.

Here are some pictures from that day.


After a 2+ mile swim, the Ironman competitors bike 112 miles.

The bike segment is followed by a marathon run--26.1 miles.

It's a long day.

Wheelchair athletes also compete.

Here's Greg nearing the finish of his marathon run.

I wonder what the others finished this week on their headers. I will have to go take a look from the links in my sidebar when I finish posting myself. You can find them there, too.

Hike

I promised another shadow.

Taken with my phone when we attended Mass at Holy Apostles in Meridian Idaho while visiting our daughter.

Shadows

Quite some time ago we had the theme of shadows and I posted a picture of our church-cat--Shadow. Here he is again not letting the secretary work.

 

I've spent quite a bit of time at the church the last couple of weeks as we were gearing up for the start of our Religious Education program. We have 460 kids enrolled in classes, and keeping track of the kids, the parents*, the volunteers**, the supplies***, the curriculum materials**** the classrooms*****, and not forgetting Who it's all about *can be overwhelming. It will settle down next week when everyone has found themselves in the right class, the right day, the right routine.
           * Parent information and orientation meetings--five sessions
           ** Three are going on a pilgrimage to Rome and Assisi next week.
                One moved back to Mexico without my realizing it.
           ***Did you ever try to get 200 pencils sharpened at once?
           **** The bilingual Kindergarten materials came all in Spanish.
           *****Still one more room to shampoo after this week's classes are over.
           *Praise God from whom all blessings flow.

Errrrr. Hmmmmm. I didn't get out with my camera looking for shadows this week.

I did come home last night and found this:

Which is not a shadow, though I suppose that the reason we can see the craters is because of their shadows.

It reminded me, though, that if I looked back in my files a few months--now when was that? a quick Google search found me the dates of eclipses this year and led me to my April files where I found these:

Which I pieced together for this:

Let me make two observations. The full moon image at the top was taken with my new camera, which has a 50X optical zoom lens. The old Camera took the eclipse pictures--I thought at one time that 20X optical was amazing. Can't wait for the next eclipse to see if I can get even better images. It had better be clear on October 8 (lunar) and 23 (solar).

The pattern of the craters has rotated about 45º since April.

What shadows have my headbanger colleagues found? Their links are on my sidebar.

I have another shadow picture that I will post later this week if I remember to get it off my phone. It would not have worked for a header, as the proportions are wrong, but it, well, just wait and see what you think.