Photos around Cape Archives

July 4, 2011November 24, 2011

How to Shoot Fireworks

It’s either the 4th of July or Cape is being invaded. The economy might be shaky, but you wouldn’t know it by the amount of money being blasted into the sky all around us.

I spent most of Monday in Cairo with a production company that is doing a documentary on the town. They had seen my photos of Cairo, wanted to use some of them and wanted to interview me roaming around town shooting more pictures. Nice folks. I’ll post some stuff later, but I don’t have time to do it tonight. This is the last Fourth of July photo I’m going to run until next year, I promise.

Photo tips for shooting fireworks

My fancy Nikon strobe needed new batteries and I was too lazy to go in the house to get new ones, so I put the Nikon D40 in full auto mode so it would use its built-in flash for this photo. The little flash did a pretty good job of lighting Mother. The color balance isn’t bad and the short blast of light stopped the action and produced a reasonably sharp photo.

DULL and sharp

And, that’s the problem. It’s DULL and sharp.

The photo at the top of page is technically flawed because I wasn’t using a flash that offered more controls, but it’s a good start. Here’s how I shot it and why.

I turned the dial from Full Auto to a Shutter Priority. I wanted the shutter to stay open for a longer time so it would capture the sparks, flames and streaks made while she was waving the No. 36 Morning Glory around in the air.
I set the shutter for five seconds. That was long enough to record the light trails, but not so long that Mother would go too blurry, so long as I
Allowed the flash to go off as soon as the shutter opened. That provided the light to illuminate her and it “froze” most of her movement. The Morning Glories gave enough light that you can see some slight ghosting around her hands.
I dropped the color saturation just a bit to take some of the redness out. With a little more work in Photoshop, the color balance could have been improved, but it’s been a long day with lots of walking in either rain or a under a hot sun..

She SAID it was an accident

I was standing in the front yard wearing a pair of sandals when Mother gave her Morning Glory a particularly vigorous shake, more like a whip. The flaming, sparking, cracking tip went flying off, aimed directly at my bare toes. Only quick reflexes and dance steps I never did before saved me from having toasty toes and a trip to the emergency room.

She says it was an accident, but I’m wondering if that’s not a subtle hint that it’s time for me to think about heading back to Florida.

July 3, 2011November 12, 2016

Thoughts of Flags and The 4th

After seeing the great job Bill Adams did with his license plate American Flag, Mother said she’d like to fly a flag in front of the house. We were always big on putting up flags on holidays, but the flag holder Dad was using in this photo was taken down when the house was covered with vinyl siding some years ago.

Mother swore that there was a flag holder on one of the walnut trees on the east side of the house, but I rooted around through the ivy (hopefully not the poison variety) growing on the tree and couldn’t find it. On the way back from learning about fly repelling in Jackson, I stopped at the Ace Hardware at the bottom of the hill for a new flag bracket. The screws that came with it were too short to go through the bracket and bark, so I had to scrounge some longer ones from the basement.

Mission accomplished.

Just about the time I shot the last screw in, Mother gave out a triumphant shout, “I KNEW that flag holder was here on the tree. I was right.” Indeed, she WAS right. The holder was right there on the tree where she said it would be. The only thing was that the tree had grown around it so much that you’d be lucky to stick a matchstick in it, let along a flag pole.

My First Grade Flag effort

I know there are some photos of me with a flag because it was my daily ritual to put the flag up first thing in the morning when I was kindergarten age. The first thing I ran across was this piece of artwork from my First Grade Scrapbook. Dad was working on a job in Kennett at this time, so he told me to save all my school papers and remember what I had done that week so he could put it in a scrapbook.

Here’s the scrapbook entry

Sept. 11, 1953 – We were allowed to draw or do what we wanted for awhile and I practiced on some addition and wrote the alphabet with a picture of a Flag in colors under my writing. Mrs. Kelpe is telling us a story on Pinky the Pig which she did not get to finish. We got a surprise today and it was a free ticket to get ice cream. The kids that had marks behind their name even got a ticket.

Note that I already understood the elements of a good story: food, scary mystery and explosive action. It was clear that I had a much better future in math and literature than art. If you don’t believe me, take a look at my sketch book from Ohio University’s Art 101, a required course for photo students.

July 3, 2011September 22, 2011

How to Repel Flies (Maybe)

Mother and I were cruising around Jackson scoping out yard sales and looking for something for me to shoot. Out on 34 west of town, we saw a sign on a small BBQ stand that said Fresh Strawberry Pie. We pulled in to sample it The joint doesn’t have a name out front, but Google Maps show it as Cook’s Bar-B-Q & Catering at 1931 West Jackson Blvd.

Right next to the order window was a note that said not to compare them with the guys at the north end of town. That would be Wib’s, a Steinhoff favorite for five generations. They implied that Cook’s actually puts meat on their sandwiches and that they are cheaper. Well, a challenge like that has to be checked out.

On the plus side, the sandwiches DID have a fair amount of meat on them and they were cheaper than Wib’s. On the con side, at least for me, the pork was shredded, not sliced, and it was “wet.” It had more the taste and feel of a Sloppy Joe than what I would call a good barbecue sandwich. The sauce was nowhere as good as Wib’s and the meat wasn’t as tasty as Hamburger Express in Cape. Barbecue is a highly personal choice, so some folks may prefer it.

The strawberry pie, on the other hand was excellent. Good crust and made with fresh strawberries.

Why are those bags of water hanging there?

But, that’s not the reason I’m writing this. When we looked up, we saw a Ziploc plastic bag, obviously freshly filled with water hanging over our heads. Inside the bag were several pennies. The bags were tacked to the overhang with heavy upholstery tacks. When our server slid open the screen-covered window to hand us our order, I said, “I bet I’m not the first person to ask this, but what’s with the plastic bags of water?”

Not wanting to engage in a lengthy conversation, she said, “It’s for the flies,” closing the window before I could observe, “Must be working, then. ‘Cause there’s plenty of them.”

While we were sitting at the outdoor table eating our pie and shooing off the occasional fly, a fellow walked by who elaborated on the bags. “They’re supposed to keep the flies away. It’s got something to do with the way the fly’s eyes work.”

When I mentioned that there still seemed to be a lot of the winged creatures flying around, he said that he had just put the bags up. The one over our heads was the first one to go up, he explained, and he said he could already see an improvement on our end of the seating area. I was going to take his word for it.

Mother was intrigued by the idea

Mother kept coming up with all of the places she could put up the bags and wondering if shiny pennies would work better than run-of-the-mill pocket pennies. Should you put them over the door to keep the flies out or do you put them on the inside to run them away? If you did both, would the ones entering and the ones exiting have head-on collisions, killing them all? Weighing all of the possibilities kept her occupied the rest of the afternoon.

I did a quick Google search and found that one of my favorite debunking sites, Snopes, had addressed this issue and found it —WHAT?!?!?—“Undetermined. ” You’ll have to read their conclusions for yourself. It’ll be good practice for you to know how to find them to check out your own hoax questions.

I should have shot them the first time

Anyway, after kicking myself for not taking a picture of the magic bags, Mother and I saddled up the pony and drove back over to Jackson. After standing around for several minutes waiting for someone to open the magic screened serving window so I could tell them what I was doing, I got tired of waiting, shot my photos and left. I didn’t REALLY need another piece of that strawberry pie. I DID ask another customer if she had heard of the concept and she said, “My mother has them hanging in her garage.”

We ended up at Mario’s Pasta House where our lasagna was good as always, served promptly by friendly and attentive wait staff. (I started to type “weight staff,” thinking, obviously, of the size of the portions.)

July 1, 2011November 24, 2011

Bill Adams’ American Flag

I overshot my street this morning and ended up going down Anna Street. About a third of the way down the hill, my eye was drawn to what I thought was a huge plastic flag hanging in front of 1733 Anna. I was almost halfway to the next house when I saw that it wasn’t plastic, it was an American Flag made out of red, white and blue license tags. I hit the brakes and the go-back lever so fast I may have left black marks. (Click on any photo to make it larger.)

Bill Adams and his wife were walking out to the car with keys in hand, but Bill was kind enough to chat with me. His wife must have known what a talker he is when he encounters another talker, so she went back inside the house where it was cool.

Found license plates on eBay

Bill, who said he isn’t really a license plate collector, started acquiring his tags on eBay around November 2010, and snagged his last plate toward the end of January of this year.

The cheapest tags were about a buck each; the most expensive was $55. “I could have gotten them cheaper if I had waited around, but I wanted to get the project done,” he said. Overall, the tags averaged about $7 to $10 each. His favorite tags are the ones with the state slogans on them. His least favorite are states like Delaware that have flat plate without embossed numbers and letters.

I think he said he had every state represented except Idaho, New Hampshire, Georgia and California.

Flag folds up for storage

After getting the plates, he spent a little time trying to figure out how to mount them. Instead of one large unit, he decided to string them together with Nylon ties so the whole contraption could be folded up into a storage container. The two support poles are made of two 2x4s joined together on each side and dropped into a 4×4 sleeve so they can be removed.

Bill is thinking about using the poles for other holidays, but he’s not sure if he’ll make the displays out of license plates. There are a lot of green and white tags, though, he said. Those would work out well for Christmas.

Riding the Mother Road

Bill just retired from a career as a postal carrier. “Retirement is great. For awhile, I thought I’d better make a list of things to do. That didn’t mean I had to KEEP the list; I could put off a task to the next day, change priorities…”

One thing on his list is for the couple to take a trip to see their daughters in Seattle. They’re going to fly this time, but Bill’s other obsession is to drive every inch of Route 66, the Mother Road. He’s managed follow it as far as the New Mexico-Texas border. “I’m not looking forward to Southern California and LA.” He admits, however that even big cities can have quiet moments. They hit Chicago on a winter Sunday morning and had the road almost to themselves.