Sports Photos

I found out today that two of my sports photos made it into my campus news, for the upcoming issue. This is the first time I've ever had sports photos published. The photos were from the men's alumni lacrosse game, and although sports is not my usual subject area, it was fun just trying to get some good photos. It's more experience for me with taking action photos. This was also the first lacrosse game I had ever gone to.

Working My Camera Settings

Before moving on to more road trip posts, I thought I'd write a little bit about my photography class this semester. Some work for the class includes taking photos that will go with articles in the campus news. Other work involves practicing with the technical settings such as aperture, shutter speed and ISO. These are the areas that I needed to learn more about. Up until this photography class, I would take photos and concentrate on general composition.

This is one of the photos I took while practicing with the shutter speed settings on my camera. It's a view of I-95, looking southbound. A truck on the opposite side was pulled over for a while as I took a series of these photos.

What's interesting to me is that I've always wanted to try and get those streaked images of nighttime traffic. Something else I'd like to do with long exposures is to capture star trails. I think I'll get to that point sometime as I continue to learn more technical photography skills. For now, I know the triangle of settings that work together...aperture (for example, written out as f/5.6), shutter speed (1/250) and ISO (400).

Recent Photo Excursions

My Fall classes have kept me pretty busy lately, although all very interesting. However, I will write about and share images soon from two recent photo outings with different time period themes. I'll be posting on a local car show sponsored by a 50s diner, followed by a renaissance faire in New Jersey.

NYC Bound

The first week of classes has come to an end, although not without assignments to work on. So this will just be a short post for now.


Next week, there is a campus involvement fair which I look forward to attending so I can sign up for a few things. Beyond that, I am already signed up for a late-semester shopping trip to New York City. It cost only $10 to sign up and because this would be my first time visiting the Big Apple since my high school years, I thought, why not?


I can't wait for this trip and I hope to get some good photos of the city!

A Goal to Reach

We are thinking about another trip to the Outer Banks, possibly for next Summer, because of a personal goal in the family.


My Mom had two heart attacks at the end of June and through cardiac rehab, she has been doing much better. When I went with her to a cardiac rehab session, I noticed a photo hanging up on one wall. I was told that it was of a previous patient at the cardiac rehab center, and that the photo marked a goal he had reached.


In the photo, he was standing in the chilly environment at Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire. A few days before, I was watching something on the Weather Channel about the observatory and its surrounding climate. So I pointed the photo out to my Mom and told her about the conditions there, and then she suddenly had a goal in mind.


"I know," my Mom said, "my goal will be to climb to the top of the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse!" When we went to the Outer Banks in June 2004, neither her nor I climbed it even though it was open to do so.




I hope that we will be able to make the trip, because now it represents more than just going on vacation. If things work out and we find ourselves back in the Outer Banks, I plan to record our climb up the winding red stairs of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse on video. Then, I will capture some video of the view from the top. We should share the video with the cardiac rehab workers who helped my Mom during her sessions there.


One thing is for sure...they will be as glad as we will be if her goal becomes reality, just as the patient who reached his Mount Washington Observatory goal. It will be great to reach the top of the lighthouse, and in doing so, beating her heart scare.


It depends on a few other factors as to whether or not we can arrange the trip for next year. However, after what happened this Summer, being able to join other tourists to view the ocean from the top of the lighthouse will make for a very happy moment.




As time goes by, I'll update on here about the plans to help my Mom reach her goal at the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.

Smedley Park

My high school friends and I were originally going to have our 1st reunion at Rose Tree Park, but changed it to Smedley Park. It is located next to the Springfield Mall in the Delaware County area of Pennsylvania, not too far from Rose Tree.


Anyway, I thought I'd share a few photos of the scenery at Smedley in this post. One of my friends might do a full write-up on her blog page about the reunion itself. So I want to save that for her, and just post photos I took of our surroundings at the park.

I may go back to Smedley another time and take some more scenic photos of other areas there. The road into the park winds around past a few picnic areas until finally reaching a dead-end a few hundred feet beyond where the Blue Route sits overhead. At that point, it just curves around in a cul-de-sac so visitors can easily make their way back out.




And there is a snapshot of the Blue Route going overhead, which provided us with some extra shelter beyond the tarps we had set up. This is a view looking northward at the highway, which spans from Delaware County to the PA Turnpike.

NJ Shore Points Trip - Part 3

At this point of our NJ shore excursion, we were relaxing in the shade of the pavilion and umbrella-covered picnic tables. My mom, grandmother, aunt, cousins and I had cooled down from the boardwalk stroll in the hot sun. For a few hours we just talked and enjoyed our view of the ocean, maybe 100 yards between us and the waves.

I had hoped to get some photos of people surfing, but I'm not sure if that particular beach area was for hangin' 10. The boyfriend of one cousin said that the surfing is more in other spots along the NJ shore. So there were mostly some people on boogie boards and just generally keeping cool in the water while plenty of others relaxed on the sand.

What I like in the way of water sports is boating, although I have only rarely been out on boats in my life. I inherited the family interest, especially on my mom's side, in all things maritime - marinas, lighthouses and a variety of ocean-going vessels. So as I sat in the shade, I snapped photos of boats sailing along the shore and somewhat wishing to be out on one. Well, maybe sometime I'll go on one of those boat excursions for a sailor's view of lighthouses in NJ, DE or MD.

Gazing out to the horizon, I saw a large white ship but it was very faint due to all the humidity that day. This was the first glimpse, just to show how faint it looked from our view on the pavilion.

I thought it was a cruise ship at first as it came into better view, but it didn't have the numerous decks going up from the main deck. Below are the much improved views we eventually had of the distant ship.

This last photo of the ship is the closest zoom-in that my camera would allow. I think with just a little bit more, if not double, the zooming power would have revealed what name was on the side of the ship. Well, it was an interesting thing to see since it isn't every day we see such a large ship like that.

A while later, we decided to head back to the car and it was a much cooler walk this time around on the boardwalk. It was so much easier to enjoy the scenes in the cool breeze of the late afternoon. We watched some sea birds resting out on rocky jetties, and even two people trying to surf the waves. I never saw anyone actually get up on their surfboards, but it wasn't a good view to get photos of them either. They were far past the area where we had parked by an entrance to the boardwalk. So surfing photos will be on another trip to the NJ shore, but it was overall an enjoyable trip.