Category Archives: Miscellanious

Road Trip!

July 28, 2024Miscellanious, Ohio, OUTSIDE FLORIDA, TennesseeAntiques, black and white, Chattanooga, corn field, GIG, guitar, hay field, landscape, Nashville, panorama, Sauder Heritage Inn, Sauder Historic VillageEd Rosack

We just returned from a trip to Nashville Tennessee, Archbold Ohio and back. We spent 15 days on the road and saw family, friends, and many sights. I thought I’d offer you some photos along with a few words about our journey.

Chattanooga

We stopped in Chattanooga, TN and Kevin M. met us for lunch. Afterward, he offered to show us around Lookout Mountain (https://www.nps.gov/places/point-parklookoutmountain.htm). Lynn and I had heard of it but never been there.

Garrity’s Alabama Battery – Pointe Park on Lookout Mountain overlooking Chattanooga, elevation 2,392 feet

(More info: https://www.nps.gov/places/garritysbattery.htm?utm_source=place&utm_medium=website&utm_campaign=experience_more&utm_content=large)

New York Peace Memorial – on Lookout Mountain

(More info: https://www.nps.gov/places/point-park-tour-stop-7-new-york-peace-monument.htm)

Header image: another view of Chattanooga from Lookout Mountain.

Kevin also gave me a “new old” camera! It’s a Nikon D90 that I originally owned from 2008 – 2010 before I passed it on to him. It was his main camera for a while, but he no longer needs it and asked if I wanted it back. Yes! It’s still working and I plan to try it out (again) on my next photo outing. Thanks Kevin for the tour and the camera!!

Nashville

We stayed with MK in Nashville over the 4th of July. There was a lot of good food and some sightseeing too. She found a close by park with a view of the downtown skyline:

Nashville Skyline – from Love Circle Park, elevation 744 feet.

And after dinner one evening they dropped me off for a few minutes so I could make a few photos downtown:

Downtown Nashville, Broadway, near the river

We’d heard about the Gallery of Iconic Guitars (GIG: https://www.thegigatbelmont.com) and visiting it was one of the highlights of the trip. We got there early and had the place to ourselves!

Gallery of Iconic Guitars. The GIG at Belmont University in Nashville has dozens of historic instruments on display from a total of about 500 in the collection.

1887 Martin D-28. One of the oldest instruments on display at the GIG.

Ohio

Next, we headed up to Archbold Ohio. Although I didn’t make any photos there, one highlight on the drive was a stop at Sweetwater Music in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It’s quite a place and if you have any interest in music, you should visit if you get a chance.

We were in Archbold for the 2024 Pressing Iron and Trivet Collectors of America (PITCA) convention. There was a lot of buying, selling, presentations, and visiting with friends and fellow collectors.

2024 PITCA Convention: All set up for the auction (photo by Lynn Rosack, used with permission)

The convention was held at the Sauder Heritage Inn (https://saudervillage.org/stay/sauder-heritage-inn) and we had a nice rural view right behind our hotel room.

By the corn field.

There were many, many corn fields and almost as many hay fields in the area.

Hay harvest. A field outside of Archbold, Ohio

We spent time one afternoon at the Sauder Historic Village: (https://saudervillage.org/explore/historic-village). It’s Ohio’s largest historic village and shows local life from 1803 to 1928.

Through the covered bridge

Wood shop 1

Wood shop 2

1920s Main Street 1

1920s Main Street 2

And back home…

We drove home from Ohio along I-75. It’s a scenic route, but there aren’t many places to pull over for a photo. This one spot a bit north east of Chattanooga was the only safe overlook that we found.

Overlooking Owl Hollow; Stitched panorama from 4 RAW format iPhone frames.

It was a very nice trip, although we spent way too many hours in the car. Family, friends, sightseeing, food, convention, and more. A great time!

You can click on these photos to see higher resolution versions on Flickr.

Thanks for stopping by the blog. Stay positive, be kind, and take care of yourselves and each other. And if you can, make some photos on your road trip!

Memorial Day 2024

May 26, 2024Miscellanious, Opinionflag, Memorial Day, military, sunrise, Titusville, veterans memorial parkEd Rosack

Memorial Day is observed in the US on the last Monday of May. It’s set aside to remember, honor, thank, and mourn men and women who have lost their lives serving our country.

Decorating soldiers’ graves with flowers is an ancient custom. We’ve done this in the US since at least the Civil War and in 1971 it became an official federal holiday.

There are parades in many places across the country, and we also observe Memorial Day by visiting cemeteries and memorials. Some wear a red poppy in remembrance of the fallen, a tradition called out by the by Canadian physician Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae in the World War I poem “In Flanders Fields“. Our local veterans group does a very solemn and moving missing man table as well as a Memorial Day Ceremony.

The US Flag at half mast at Veterans Memorial Park in Titusville Florida.

Please join us tomorrow and take a few moments to remember service members who have perished in the line of duty and those they left behind. Heroes all.

You can see other Memorial Day related blog posts at this search link: https://edrosack.com/?s=Memorial+Day

Thanks for stopping by the blog. Stay positive, be kind, and take care of yourselves and each other.

Ian update

October 2, 2022INSIDE FLORIDA, Miscellanious, Uncategorizedhurricane, stormEd Rosack

Hurricane Ian was a slow moving, high wind storm when it came ashore last Wednesday. The news and photos from the Fort Meyers area are horrific. By the time it passed through Winter Springs Wednesday and Thursday it had weakened, but we still had ~40 MPH sustained winds and gusts much stronger than that.

There are tree limbs and some whole trees down in our neighborhood, and we have what looks like minor damage to one place on our roof. We lost power, water, and internet on Thursday but power and internet came back after a little over 24 hours. Water pressure is back too, but we’re under a boil water notice due to water main breaks.

Winter Springs recorded more than 15 inched of rain and there’s widespread flooding in the Orlando area. Fortunately, our home is up on a slight ridge, so the flooding is not too close. We do have a couple of the major roads through our neighborhood blocked due to flood damage. The city has said some areas will need to be rebuilt so it may take a while to reopen them.

Flooding along Winter Springs Blvd.

Lynn and I have ben very lucky. I hope all of you are doing well. And if you’ve been impacted by this storm I hope your recovery efforts are well underway. Stay positive, be kind, and take care of yourselves and each other.

Header image: Flooding along Mitchell Hammock Road in Oviedo, Florida has completely covered this sod field. Photo by Lynn Rosack, used with permission.

Silver Lining?

May 22, 2022MiscellaniouscloudsEd Rosack

There was a total lunar eclipse visible in Central Florida recently and several space launches too. Unfortunately, clouds hid all of those events here at our place so I couldn’t photograph them.

John Milton is thought to have coined the phrase “silver lining” in his 1634 poem Comus: A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle:

“Was I deceived, or did a sable cloud
Turn forth her silver lining on the night?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_lining_(idiom)

We use the expression to mean that even in a bad situation, there is always some good that can come out of it.

We’ve also had Swallow Tailed Kites circling around over our house. The last time I saw one, I rushed to grab a camera and hurried outside. By the time I was ready, the bird was gone. But there were some awesome clouds out that day.

The future’s a bit cloudy

So out of all those potential photo ops, I only made one photo that I like. I guess you could say the cloud itself is the silver lining.

Thanks for stopping by and reading my blog. Your visits, comments, and likes are always welcome and a big motivator for me. Stay positive, be kind, take care of yourselves and each other. And if there’s a silver lining, make a photo of it!

Merry Christmas!

December 24, 2021Miscellanious, Ponce InletChristmasEd Rosack

Just a short post this week to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas.

Santa passing through Ponce Inlet

I’m not planning to publish next weekend, so I’ll go ahead and wish you a prosperous and healthy new year now too!

Thank you so much for following my blog again this year. Please be kind, take care of yourselves and each other. And if you’re lucky enough to be be with family – enjoy your precious time together! See you soon in 2022!

Flowering and Finished

December 19, 2021Merritt Island NWR, MiscellaniousFlowersEd Rosack

I first posted this photo about a month ago:

Goldenrod in bloom

The Goldenrod was flowering then all around Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. But when I drove back near the same spots recently, it looked like this:

Dried Goldenrod

Although still pretty, that’s a drastic change in the span of a month. And soon even the dried blossoms will be gone.

If you see something interesting, make a photo. There’s no telling if it’ll look the same when you come by again (and make another photo).

Header Image: A small crop from a black & white version of the second photo.

Thanks for stopping by and reading my blog. Please be kind, take care of yourselves and each other – and if you can, make some photos – before things change!

Bird Sound Wizardry

August 8, 2021Merritt Island NWR, Miscellaniousbirding, Black Point Wildlife Drive, black-necked stilts, eastern kingbird, greater yellowlegs, Merlin Bird ID, RabbitEd Rosack

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C. Clarke

The wizards at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology have cast some potent spells with the latest update to their free Merlin Bird ID app.

I’ve had it on my iPhone for ages (it’s also available for Android). But I got used to the iBird app (http://ibird.com) and I normally open it for help with bird identification – so Merlin’s been sitting around idle. It wasn’t until last week that I heard about the new sound ID feature they added in June.

Sound ID records bird songs around you, analyzes them, and suggests IDs for what’s singing. You can compare the recording to other songs and calls for confirmation. It’s also a great way to learn bird calls. Hearing some, and then having the app tell you what they are in real time is great re-enforcement and helps you remember what you’ve heard. Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it?

I updated the app and tried it out yesterday on a trip over to MINWR. I simply held it out, watched the waveforms record and the results as they came up magically on my screen. Here’s a screenshot:

I used it several times and it found Black-necked Stilts, Red-winged Blackbirds, Least Sandpipers, Greater Yellowlegs, Eastern Kingbirds, Ospreys, and Mourning Doves. Most of them before I ever saw the birds. When the Eastern Kingbird ID popped up, I started looking for them and spotted this one perched briefly on a distant branch:

Eastern Kingbird

Since it told me Stilts and Yellowlegs were around, I could keep an eye out for them too.

Black-necked Stilt

Greater Yellowlegs

I was surprised by how sensitive the recordings are. It heard most all the calls that I did, and it seems accurate, at least in this short test.

There are 458 birds in the Sound ID list and more are promised. Cornell Labs has done some fine work with this. I think it’ll be very helpful to me in the future. If you’re at all interested in birds or birding, it belongs on your phone too! Did I mention that it’s free?

Header image: A pair of bunnies I also photographed yesterday. No, Merlin didn’t pull them out of a hat. That would’ve been very advanced technology! Full image at https://www.flickr.com/photos/edrosack/51363803209/in/dateposted-public/

Thanks for stopping by and reading my blog. Covid cases in Florida are still at an all time high. Be careful out there and please take care of yourselves and each other. And if you can, photograph (and ID) some birds!

One Year Later

March 21, 2021INSIDE FLORIDA, Miscellaniousblack and white, creek, Fern, flower, fountain, pool, tree, waterEd Rosack

Last March at the beginning of the pandemic, I wrote a post called “In the Neighborhood“. It was just a few photos I made as Lynn and I walked cautiously around near home while we tried to figure out the whole lockdown thing.

I don’t really have any profound thoughts I want to share about what we’ve been through since then. I’ll just say I’m extremely grateful we have smart scientists that created safe and effective vaccines in so short a time, and that they’re becoming available to more of us each day. Things seem to be veering back toward normal now.

Anyway, I thought this week I’d follow up with more neighborhood wandering, and post photos of things I noticed on the way. I’ll try to include tips and hints that you can use in your photograpy. This first image looks like an infrared photo, but it’s not. The bright white leaves are from the low morning sun lighting the tops of the trees.

All to myself

We have several varieties of flowering trees here in Central Florida. They only bloom for a short while in the spring so don’t wait too long if you want to photograph them. These lovely blooms are on what I think are Hong Kong Orchid trees, I find it hard to show the beauty with an image of the whole tree, so I moved in close. I like this frame with a single flower isolated against the sky.

Flower and sky

Slow shutter speeds are commonly used for images of moving water. But forcing your shutter as fast as possible is also worth trying. The details it can reveal make the water look like ice.

Frozen Splash

The early morning sun helps in this photo too. Its warm color on the Spanish Moss is a subtle contrast with the sky.

Branches and moss

Okay, a little fun here. I might have made a few small creative enhancements in Lightroom to bring out the hidden scarecrow face.

Knot a Scarecrow

New growth leaves are sometimes called fiddlehead ferns since they resemble the scroll on a fiddle. They’re hard to spot as you walk by.

Fern

More tiny, close wildflower blooms.

Blossom

The woods are very thick around this pool. It’s only a few feet from the sidewalk and looks like it’s been there for many years. I need to be more observant – I only just noticed it even though I’ve passed by it for years. It’s a three frame vertical stitched panorama.

Forest Pool

I crouched down and used the camera’s tilting LCD to frame these cypress knees against the lake in the background. This is a 7 frame focus stack. If you haven’t tried focus stacking, a web search will return lots of info.

Cypress Knees

This last one is also a focus stacked image of some blooms along a trail in Central Winds Park. (Edit: They’re Carolina Yellow-eyed Grass – thanks Dorothy C.)

Wildflowers.

So that’s some of what I saw on photo walks over the last week or so. I hope you enjoyed looking at them and I hope they give you some ideas to try. Thanks again for coming back and and reading my blog. Take care of yourselves and each other. And when you can – make some photos around your neighborhood!

Header image: Down low and close to Howell Creek in Winter Springs.

A Good Morning

March 7, 2021MiscellaniousIndian River, landscape, sunrise, TitusvilleEd Rosack

I hope you don’t mind a short post today. I’ve just recovered from a sore throat and laryngitis that I somehow caught in spite of all our pandemic precautions. It wasn’t serious and I’m feeling fine now, but I didn’t get a chance to go on any photo excursions last week.

Anyway, I made this image about a month ago in a favorite spot along the Indian River in Titusville.

It was a good morning

It’s on the western shore, just south of Veterans Memorial Park. The light was changing that morning and I managed to make several photos that I like. For this one, I exposed one frame for the foreground and bracketed three more for the sky. I adjusted them in Lightroom and merged all four manually in Photoshop.

Thanks for stopping by and reading my blog. Take care of yourselves and each other. And when you can – make some photos!

Happy Valentine’s Day

February 14, 2021Miscellaniousbrick, fence, Fern, ValentineEd Rosack

Years ago, Lynn brought a few ferns back from her mother’s home over in Bartow, Florida and transplanted them into our back garden. Since then, they’ve thrived, and a few usually even grow on our brick fence. We noticed last weekend that they’d arranged themselves into a very nice message appropriate for today’s holiday.

Ferns in a Valentine’s Day arrangement on our backyard fence.

I’m a bit unsure if they didn’t get the “E” done in time, or if maybe they were going for the colloquial “LUV”. Anyway, this isn’t photoshopped and unless there’s a stealth gardener we didn’t notice sneaking into our back yard, these ferns grew this way naturally. The odds of something like this happening spontaneously have to be vanishingly small. Maybe it’s more likely nature is trying to send us a message?

Peace and ‘Lov’ to all of you gentle readers. Thanks for stopping by my blog. Take care of yourselves and each other. And today, cherish your valentine!

Central Florida Photo Ops

What and where they are and how to photograph them.