Once again I've fallen far behind in my desire to be more active here.

 An older photograph that I had almost forgotten about:

 My grandparents in rural South Carolina had one of these when I was a little guy, but my memories of using it are not fond!

 I live about 10 minutes from the Lake Guntersville Dam on the Tennessee River and I usually visit it several times each week. The Tennessee River is a navigable waterway with a significant amount of barge traffic. Among the commodities transported are grain, coal, and sand. I'm sure there are many other products transported on the river, but these are the products that I know of. 

Before 9/11 you could drive right up to the lock and watch the barges pass through.That experience was always interesting especially because you could talk to the guys working on the barge and the tug as they worked. I miss those experiences since right after 9/11 the government put up fences around the lock.

 The tale is that when a cowboy's favorite horse died he would put a boot on a fence post. I don't know if that's a true story, or not, but it sounds good.

 A comma or an exclamation point would have added some clarity to this sign.

I stopped, took the photograph, and turned around and went back the way I came.

 A couple of weeks ago I photographed guests at a very nice outside wedding. These are the only photographs at a wedding that I have taken in several years, but I always enjoyed doing these events although I  only did about 6, or so, most years. 

Here is a quick grab shot I did of the bride and flower girl as they were heading to the ceremony.

 So, I've been derelict in posting to this blog in over 5 years. Well, last Friday was my last day at work and I'm now entering retirement which I have some very mixed feelings about. I've spent the past 27 years at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center with most of that time being spent as a photographer. Now it is time for me to dedicate some portion of my time to my own photography. 

Here is a photograph taken with my Panasonic Lumix G9 and the Panasonic Leica 12-60mm lens which I have been using almost exclusively for the past couple of years.

I will try to be more active in publishing my thoughts, along with some photographs, going forward.

First Photographs From The New Panasonic Lumix G7

I bought a new Panasonic Lumix G7 a couple of weeks ago and really haven't had a chance to take any interesting photographs with it 'til today. I found myself in town and visited Maple Hill Cemetery where I took a few photographs, but this is the only one that I found that I liked.

I've struggled a bit getting used to the controls and menu options on the Lumix after having been a longtime Nikon user, but I'm beginning to get the hang of everything. I learned long ago that all knowledge seems to reside on Youtube so I've been relying on videos to familiarize me with all of the controls.

I like the size and weight of the camera, but I really bought it for the 4K video option since the Lumix line is considered to be one of the best for video. I shot a short video today, but I haven't had a chance to edit it yet. As a longtime still photographer I find myself somewhat intimidated by video, but I'm getting more and more interested and I'm anxious to see how the 4K video from the Lumix integrates with the 4K video from the GoPro Hero5.

It's all a learning experience!

Changing Systems ::

I went to an Imac a few months ago for my desktop, but I had a HP laptop that I got probably about a year and a half ago. I've never been happy with the laptop although the specs were really nice other than the operating system. It had 16 gigs of ram so I thought it would be a pretty nice Photoshop and Dreamweaver machine, but it was running Windows 10 home and it was pretty crappy after having used Windows 7 pro for several years so I decided to upgrade to Windows 10 pro. That certainly didn't help and, in fact, seems to have made everything worse. I can't even get it to log on to the internet after the upgrade.

I did the only logical thing I could think of. I bought myself an Apple Macbook Pro. I really haven't had a chance to put it through its paces yet, but so far I've been very happy with it.

I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the HP laptop, but I'm thinking of taking it to the Geek Squad people at Best Buy although I'm not a big fan of Best Buy and letting them try to sort it out. After that I may keep it or possibly sell it. I've always felt that there are advantages to owning both Apple and PC, but I'm pretty down on Microsoft running PCs right now.

My NASA work computer is a Hp with 32 gigs of ram, dual zeon processors, and nice large hard drives and it works very well, but I'm told that this box costs somewhere in the $12K range. Definitely not in my budget for home use. It's still running Windows 7, but somewhere in the future I'll be forced to run Windows 10 on it and I'm seriously considering switching to an Apple Pro at that time.

Oh yeah, I'm also lusting after an Apple 12.7 inch Ipad Pro right now!

Fondling New Camera Gear ::

Something that really disturbs me these days is that there are very few camera stores left for photographers to check out and handle the latest and greatest cameras that are on the market these days. I lived for many years in Atlanta and one of the premiere photographic outlets in the city for many years was Showcase Photographics which closed shop last month due to all of the on-line competition from the huge N.Y. stores. This has been a huge problem for years, but the change has really accelerated in the past few years and Showcase just could not compete any more.

I bought my first view camera from Showcase back in the 1970s when it was located in an extremely small storefront on Cheshire Bridge Road. This was a long rail Calumet 4x5 with case and, as I recall, I spent $150 for this camera without a lens. I don't remember which lens I wound up getting, but this camera served me well for many years. Over the years Showcase morphed into a very large camera store a few blocks away featuring photographic supplies for everything from the latest in cameras, lenses, and darkroom equipment. Do you remember having a darkroom?

I've been considering buying one of the Panasonic Lumix cameras lately, but there is nowhere I can go to check out one without making a major trip. Locally I have one small camera store that primarily sells some used equipment along with the consumer Nikon and Canon cameras along with aftermarket lenses. I'm really surprised they're still in business.

One of my photographs in an on-line exhibition ::

This being Earth Day, I wanted to share a link to an Earth Day themed on-line exhibition with one of my photographs:

http://lenscratch.com/2017/04/the-2017-earth-day-exhibition-part-3/

Looking Forward To A Long Weekend ::

I don't know if I've ever posted here that I'm a staff photographer at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center and, beginning tomorrow and continuing through Saturday, we'll be shooting one of our largest and most important events of the year, the annual Exploration Rover Challenge races with high school and college competitors from all over the world. Here's a photo from last years race:

4 of us will shoot somewhere between 6k and 8k photographs over the 2 day event ending on Saturday evening around 7pm and we will all be utterly exhausted.

We will barely have a week of rest before the next event, the Student Launch Initiative, occurs in a huge cornfield north of Huntsville, Alabama. This is a one day event with high school and college teams launching rockets with the goal of reaching 1 mile in height with a rocket carrying a payload and gathering different telemetry information.

This is my favorite event of the year and pictured above is last year's team from Vanderbilt University from Nashville, Tennessee.

Both events will be streamed live on UStream and the links can be found on the NASA web site for each event.