Day 3

Im pooped. That was a nearly 12 hour stretch but we made good time. I anticipated it to be 14. Drove from a small town in arkansas acros oklahoma to northern texas. We covered over 600 miles today. Poor apollo, he was a champ. He got tired of lying down and rode standing up for most of the last 6 hours. He's currently conked out on the bed. I don't blame him...my flat, bony ass is tired too.
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Ark. Was not what I expected...half farmland, half woods. Beautiful but reminded me of pa. Oklahoma, on the other hand, is a damn beautiful country. It wasn't flat at all, lots to see and enjoy. And texas definitely held its charm too. I found what looks like a mini grand canyon forming along the highway 40 (formerly the famous hwy 66). Give it a million years, it'll be just as majestic. Only in the last hour of drive did I get bored - then, it was reallly flat and full of farmlands.
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Tomorrow, I have an easy drive, so apollo and I are going to see the sights here in amarillo, stretch our legs and then head up to denver.

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Day 2

Today was a little longer drive...about 550 miles. Roughly 8 hours. I had planned on taking longer breaks, to explore areas along the way. But weather wasn't cooperative again, so I decided getting to motel was more important. Got here around 6 central time.
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Next time I do this, ill try to have more time. Several times today, I saw sites that looked interesting like the mammoth caves. Or the bucksnort town. Yes theres actually a town named that. I wonder how it got that name.
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Theres also diamond crater somewhere in, I think, arkansas.
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We had some nasty storms today. I had to pull over twice because it was raining so hard I couldn't see the road, let alone the other cars. Also, at one point, a semitruck on the opposite side of the highway hit a puddle of water that somehow flew over about 25 or 30 feet wide grassy median and hit my car. I saw it coming so it wasn't a surprise. Hot damn, that was impressive!

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P.S. Ignore the funky formatting.

I posted via email and it apparently needs me to write html coding for paragraphs, which I didn't realize.

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Day 1

I had a late start because I had to see an audiologist and he could only see me at 1 pm. So I got on road roughly about two and managed to get to my hotel by 9:30. We covered almost 500 miles today. Not too shabby but it doesn't hold a candle to the marathon road trips my family took from PA to I'LL when I was a youngster. About 14 hours.

Apollo was for the first half great! He slept most of it, which was perfect because for most of PA and MD, it was foggy, drizzly and very hilly. Factor in an oodles of semi trucks and having no distractions was good.

Around 5 or so, he "woke up" - about the time I usually get home from work - and started asking for potty breaks and literally panted down my neck while I ignored him.

I had moments where I was a little bored, but honestly they were far and few in between. I was mostly focused on driving, and when I could relax, I thought about random things like...

Is there a story behind "cheat lake" and "fairchance road"? (seen on one big green sign in a town somewhere in md or w.va.) is it a gambling thing? Or an affair?

And I also wondered what would posess a big-box store, namely home depot, to build a store in a tiny one-street town. How can that be profitable?

Finally got to the motel here and I have to admit, im very surprised by the quality. My ceiling is, I think, 14 or 16 feet overhead. The bed was actually turned down and has a pretty cover. Definitely not what I remember from few years ago. And definitely not what I expected for a motel on the outskirts of a tiny little town in kentucky.

One last thought...wow, so many stars! Light pollution here isn't bad. It was dark when I arrived so I can't say what I think of KY just yet. More on that tomorrow.

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Another photo and some news

Old photo. I took this, I believe, last spring. I didn't have photoshop at the time. The original was pretty interesting but I wanted to see how it'd look with faux HDR. It came out darker than I expected, but I like it. It's pretty soothing, which isn't an image normally associated with metro or train stations.

On personal note...Shit. In just three days, I'll be on the road, on my way to Colorado. I'm very excited, but at the same time, a bit nervous. For the first time in a long long time, my job future isn't certain. I plan to freelance - working a 9-to-5 gig isn't for me. Of course, freelancing brings several uncertainties with it. It's dependent on how well I network and being a salesperson, selling my service and myself. Which is my big weakness. But I'm determined to make it work. And if it doesn't, at least I can say I tried. I'd rather try and fail than not try at all and wonder for the rest of my life if I could've done it.

Sentimentalism aside. I must say I really...hate...packing. I'm going to try remember that so I don't fill my next home with clutter.

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Old gravestones should look old

I like the old timey look.

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In exactly one week...

at about this time (1 PM), I will be on road. Woohoo!

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Arlington Cemetery Redux

Sometimes when you take a photo, it's a perfectly good image, but it's lacking some oomph. Joie de vivre. Pizazz. That's where photoshop comes in handy.

A dreamy kind of look.
Vintage black and white
Harsh "high-pass"
Vintage sepia

All of these are interesting for different reasons. Everyone will have different preference for different styles. So, at this point, the hard decision of choosing one photo boils down to this: What message are you trying to convey? Or emotion you want to evoke? A dreamy, tranquil one? A time-encompassing one? Harshness of war/death/whatever? Solemnity?

If I had to produce a photo for a commercial purpose, my choice would be a lot easier, depending on the product or service we're selling. But for personal sales...I probably would choose the black and white one, because it's a type of image that would work on most people's walls.

What do ya'all think?

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Reruns

I'm actually moving to Colorado in about two weeks. I have to be out of the door on 31st, and will be officially on road on April 1st. No joking. That means I won't have a whole lot of time to blog between now and whenever I get settled in. So I'm going to post some reruns and postdate them so that new posts will continue in the next couple weeks.

Some of these photos might seem familiar if you're a long-time reader, but I'll try to tweak them, at very minimum, so they're a little different.

Here's the original shot of Apollo that I took before moving to this house. I'd say about a year ago, roughly. If memory serves, when I posted it here, I made it look like an old pointillism comic photo.
This time around, I decided to play with a fake HDR look. A HDR photo is a fairly new rage in photography although it's been around a long time. The advent of digital cameras just made this technique a lot easier to do. The "correct" way to take a HDR photo is to shoot a preferrably static image on a tripod (as to get identical images and not have any weird ghost issues in postproduction), then shoot it again at two or three stops in both negative and positive exposures. Then after you upload the photo, you can merge them to create either very horrible pictures or absolutely jaw-dropping photos.

I don't have the time to go out and do that right now, so I decided to fake it using photoshop.
After moving - or perhaps while moving, I'll work up some bad examples to show you an example of the ghostly overlaps and hopefully a good one or two, too. I'm taking my tripod, who knows, maybe I'll see something interesting.

Oh and...what's in photo #1 that's not in #2? Hint - I did not crop anything out.

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Pucker up baby!

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