This is the '95 Jeep Grand Cherokee that I bought for my crosscountry trip. I was planning on selling it when I got back East, but haven't done so for various reasons -- not the least being that when I drove my parents to my brother and sister-in-law's for Thanksgiving, just a week or so after arriving, my mom was bringing the turkey, but her transportation technique left a lot to be desired. I ended up with a turkey drippings all the way down between the back seat cushions. Ever try to sell a car that reeks of rancid turkey grease? "It's very clean, I've taken very good care of it -- honest!" Took me a year to figure out how to get rid of that smell. (The answer? Saturate the area with isopropyl rubbing alcohol, soaking it good to reach deeper than the grease. Blot up what you can from the surface -- it's a pretty good degreaser -- and let the rest evaporate.)
This shot has really been getting the clicks (no pun(s) intended!). Guess there must be a lot of kindred spirits out there!
Postscript: ended up driving this car for another 8 yr & ~35,000 mi. Still running when I sold it. Got a Prius. Feeling much less ecoguilt. :-)
Tags: odometer 99,999 100,000 miles mileage car SUV Jeep Grand Cherokee milestone milestones NJ New Jersey Perth Amboy M-tag milepost mileposts rollover
Can't take credit for most of those miles -- I bought the car with 98,000 on it. Taken with the 1280 x 960 camera on my old flip phone. Didn't come out too badly, considering. My husband gets credit for noticing it was about to roll over. I would've missed it completely.
Milestones I is from my last car: www.flickr.com/photos/anitagould/98690837
Tags: odometer miles mileage car Toyota Prius milestone milestones milepost mileposts Edison NJ New Jersey cell phone diptych composite 99,999 100,000
Left, my last car, taken in 2006. This was the '95 Jeep Grand Cherokee that I bought for my crosscountry trip. I was planning on selling it when I got back East, but that fell by the wayside for various reasons. Ended up driving it for another 8 yr & ~35,000 mi. Still running when I sold it.
Right, its replacement, a 2004 Prius. (I'm feeling much less ecoguilt.) Can't take credit for most of those miles -- 98,000 on it when I bought it. Taken with the 1280 x 960 camera on my old flip phone. Didn't come out too badly, considering. My husband gets credit for noticing it was about to roll over. I would've missed it completely.
Somehow the digital rollover doesn't seem nearly as satisfying as the analog, does it?
Tags: odometer miles mileage car Jeep Grand Cherokee Toyota Prius milestone milestones milepost mileposts NJ New Jersey diptych triptych composite 99,999 100,000 rollover
With some iron thrown in for variety. 'Twasn't so good for writing, but I thought it was kinda photogenic. Any chemists out there know what we're looking at? I'm guessing the blue is copper sulfate. Maybe the green is copper oxide & the red is iron oxide?
Tags: pen marker felt-tip macro corrosion oxide salt copper iron copper sulfate copper oxide iron oxide oxidation O-tag
Rick & I are engaged. Actually, it's been official since January, & we got the hardware to prove it over a month ago. But said hardware has proven damnably difficult to photograph, & hence I am submitting it to the Most Difficult group (see below). This is the 1st shot I've gotten that I'm at all happy with.
The ring was made by my cousin George Press, who is a jeweler in Livingston, NJ (highly recommended!). We are just thrilled with it. He got us a diamond with a near-perfect cut and a lot of fire. Every time we are in a restaurant lit by recessed spotlighting (or anyplace else with multiple point sources of light) we ooh and ah over the sparkling diamond.
But catching that fire on CCD was very difficult. First of all, I needed a venue with lots of overhead point sources of light. You can't really do a photo shoot in a restaurant (at least not if you expect your dinner companion to go through with the wedding.) I ended up taking this at a church where my chorus (Cantabile) was performing, during some downtime in between run-through and concert.
As usual, the camera didn't want to focus on the top of the diamond. I ended up using manual focus -- one of the few times I've been successful in getting the image sharp (well, on a workable percentage of the shots) using the LCD. Then there was the exposure. The dynamic range between the glints of color & the rest of the ring is so great that it was very hard getting any sort of reasonable exposure of the ring without washing all the color out of the glints. I would like to learn how to combine photos for HDR (high dynamic range) imaging. But then I would need to get 2 photos from exactly the same angle, and brings us to another problem: I don't have a tripod & couldn't find a way to rig the camera so it was resting on something pointing mostly downward (had to be downward for the diamond to catch the light from above, but offset a bit so that the camera didn't shadow the subject), so these were all handheld, & in the indoor lighting that was problematic. I tried going to a higher ISO, but even on ISO 50 (which this shot was taken on), this camera takes very grainy images (another thing I'm pretty unhappy with, in addition to the really crummy glass & a couple of infant-mortality hardware malfunctions). Actually, I would have preferred a shot against black velvet, but that reduced the lighting just too far. I tried just doing a manual exposure with the same parameters that worked on the white background, but it was way too underexposed -- I think a good bit of the light on the ring & diamond must be coming from reflected light off the white background.
Then there was the matter of actually catching the glints of color. It was sparkling like mad with the slightest movement, but actually catching it in the act from a single angle took a lot of trial & error.
Anyway, if anybody has any suggestions (including recommendations on HDR software -- I haven't done any research on that yet) or criticisms, let me know.
Tags: ring diamond diamond ring engagement ring round brilliant round brilliant roundbrilliantdiamond white gold jewelry gemstone macro