Yes, these first 3 pictures look almost like a few that I used a couple of weeks ago. Seeing that I was going to be in Altoona anyway, I went back to the Alto Tower and shot the morning Amtrak passenger train from a different perspective.
This is, in fact, a completely different engine leading this morning's commuter.
What I was trying to accomplish here was creating the feel of a 1940-50's style post card.
Not much can grow along abandoned railroad tracks.
In November 2007 I found this graffiti covered wall along an old railroad spur that fed several warehouses in the area. Over the last few years I've returned from time-to-time to see if there was any new work done. This last visit was disappointing to say the least. Where there once was talent being expressed it seems that anarchy or rebellion is the rule and now the city fathers want to step in and have this wall graffiti free.
If the leaves would have been on the trees back in November 2007 when I first saw this wall, I would have missed it altogether.
As you can see from the writing on the wall, as it were, the original tagger is not too happy with the kids that are trying to emulate his work.
This panel is more in line with the art that I started to show in 2007.
It will be interesting to see what happens here in the near future.
Now this, on the other hand, could never be confused with graffiti as art. There is a definite lack of talent here.
It's a window fan, from a unique perspective.
Chipping Sparrow.
Blooming weeks ahead of schedule, a Bleeding Heart makes its appearance in early April.
Downy Yellow Violet.
Daffodil growing along the walkway.
Looking for a little pollen, a bumble bee hovers outside of a daffodil.
Just so we know it's only April, we got a few periods of light snow one day this week.
In previous blog issues I've used pictures that were stitched together to form a panoramic photograph and they were pretty much easy to do if you had all of your ducks in a row.
Over the past weekend, I finally put together some pictures using a different technique. The photos may look like a time exposure, where the camera actually captures the action on one photo over the course of time. To create this series of photographs, I setup the camera on a tripod with a cable release so all the shots were exactly the same. The focus was also fixed for all the shots. I then took a photograph of the bird on the post, one of the bird in flight and one of them on the feeder. These three actions occur in about one second. I then cut and pasted the three photos together aligning the backgrounds. The result is what you see here. The photo is the same size as each of the originals. The yardsticks on the top and left hand side show that this area is about 36 x 24 inches.
I was always fascinated by how fast I could snap a picture of the woodpeckers once I realized that they were going to go from the 2x4 post on the left hand side of the picture to the suet feeder 29 inches away. In this case the bird has flow 19 inches before I was able to stop the action.
Less than a second has passed from the time the female red bellied woodpecker leaves the post on the left until she is on the feeder.
By cutting and pasting pictures shot from the same stable camera I can keep my new composition to its original size.
Still shooting within the 36x24 box I got this single shot of a male Red-Bellied Woodpecker chasing a female Downy Woodpecker off of the suet feeder.
For the second year in a row, a female Robin has decided to build her nest right outside of our bedroom window.
Video chat with our daughter.
We're a long way from our first computer in 1984.
