Another dreary sunless day in Central Illinois.  We have had a lot of rain lately, combined with above freezing temperatures has lead to a lot of excess water in the area.  I decided to drive out to the Taylorville Lake dam and see if it was overflowing any water.  Well, it indeed was, and this is the most I have ever seen it.  On a typical summer day, this dam will be dry, and you can walk down in the overflow area.  The roaring sound alone from the water spilling over the dam was awesome.  It also made for some cool shots.  I used my 70-300 lens on my tripod with a remote shutter release for this shot.  I was pretty happy with how it came out and I only made a few minor tweaks to it in Picasa.  I’m looking forward to warmer/sunnier weather though.

“Cascade”

This week’s photo trip lead me to a cemetery, Oak Hill in Taylorville, Illinois to be specific.  I stopped at a couple different locations in the cemetery and shot a couple different things, but this specific mausoleum stood out.  The (what I assume were) once shiny copper doors are now a brilliant turquoise color, and fairly ornate when compared to the other mausoleums in the cemetery.  There was also an artificial rose placed on the handle of one of the doors (no I did not put it there), which really caught my eye.  It was very cool looking, and as I have said before I like old, run down, and aged things…  I don’t know why that stuff fascinates me, but it does.  The title of today’s image is the name on the mausoleum.

“Ricks”

Well, it’s that time of the season again where Microsoft pushes out a new service pack.  This time it is Service Pack 1 for Windows 7.  I have actually been running SP1 for a few weeks now (yay for developer’s releases) on 3 different machines, all with zero problems.  The install is smooth and the service pack didn’t cause any issues.

As with the service packs for Windows Vista, there is a command you can run for your command line that basically permanently installs the service pack files on your machine (by removing all of the backup files it makes during install).   I previously showed you how to do this for Vista SP1 and Vista SP2, so now it is 7 SP1’s turn.

Also, as with previous SP release, Microsoft has once again changed the command to make this happen.  I’m not sure why they always want to make you play guess-the-command, but I did the research for you, and here it is.  Run this at an Administrator command prompt:

dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded

It will take a few minutes to run and do its thing, but once it is finished you will get back around 1.3gb to 1.5gb of space.  Not bad for running 1 command at the command line!  Just remember, this command does make the service pack install permanent, so there is no reverting after this, but honestly, once you have booted a few times and everything works fine, there is really no reason to ever want to revert.

So go claim back your space!

Ok, this was a fun one.  Who doesn’t like star gazing, and moon gazing?  Just lay back and stare up at the sky.  It is Thursday evening (although this won’t post until Sunday as is my Photo 52 tradition), and it is a BEAUTIFUL evening out with crystal clear skies!  It is very unseasonable warm right now (in the 60’s during the day, and it was still in the high 50’s this evening).

Sure there are gazillions of pictures of the moon out there, many much better, but this one is MINE.  I got to use many of my camera toys tonight too, so that was some additional fun.  Had the camera on the tripod, with the remote shutter release, and my 300mm zoom lens with hood zoomed in as far as she’d go.  Tonight was practically full moon, so the moon was VERY bright (tomorrow night is 100% full moon).  This made it a bit easier to get a nice detailed shot as I was able to turn the ISO down to 100 and for this shot I used a 1/320th shutter speed.  After some cropping and a touch of sharpening in Picasa, I was pretty excited with my results!  The moon is over 220,000 miles away from Earth.  Let’s bring it a bit closer (you’re going to want to click this image to see the bigger size).

“Lunar”

It was a bright sunny day, but still pretty cold out (although not as bad as it has been, it got to 43 today).  My original destination today was a rock quarry in Nokomis, but on the way there we went by an abandoned house out the middle of nowhere practically.  I really like abandoned and run-down property, I’m not sure why but I always find it interesting.  To see what it is like now and imagine what it once was.  This house looked like it had been abandoned for many years.  The back door was missing and windows were broken.  The odd thing was though that there looks like a full closet of clothes hung up.  I wanted to go inside, but I could see from the missing back door that the floor had holes in it and there was a deep basement underneath that.  I love taking pictures, but I’m not about to get my self stuck in the basement of an abandoned house out in the middle of no where, so I limited my self to snapping photos outside.  I had many shots I liked, but I loved the long shadow in this picture and the haphazard way the power cable is just hanging off the side of the house.

“Disconnected”

Earlier this week, Nokia’s CEO came out and admitted something had to drastically change at Nokia, or they would basically be done…

“We poured gasoline on our own burning platform. I believe we have lacked accountability and leadership to align and direct the company through these disruptive times. We had a series of misses. We haven’t been delivering innovation fast enough. We’re not collaborating internally. Nokia, our platform is burning.” – Nokia CEO, Stephen Elop

Well, Stephen, the former head of Microsoft’s business division, revealed his master plan to reinvent Nokia… and his answer?  Windows Phone 7.

Seriously.  That’s his answer.  To move from one failing platform to another.  Excuse me while I catch my breath from laughing so hard and wipe the tears away from my face.  This is golden.

During Nokia’s presentation, he presented this ridiculously optimistic graphic, showing what Nokia thinks will happen to phone OS market share:

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I told you to expect snow because that was what was supposed to happen, and while a lot of places got a lot of snow, we didn’t get near the amount we were supposed to (thankfully).  Unfortunately what we did get was ice.  Ice on EVERYTHING.  Sure, my car may have been frozen in the driveway for 4 days… but it sure made for some cool pictures, and this one was my favorite.  I loved how the whole chain link fence was encapsulated in ice, even down to each individual link.

“Frozen”

My subject for this week’s photo is actually my best friend’s 2 year old daughter.  She was having her 2nd birthday party this weekend so we were at their house enjoying the food and cake with them.

I spent a lot of time deliberating on which photo to use this week and it wasn’t an easy choice, but not necessarily because I had a lot of options, but because none really jumped out at me and screamed pick me.  I shot a couple other things this weekend, but I wasn’t really happy with any of those photos, so I ended up going with this one.  I do like it because of the innocence portrayed.   What it would be like to be 2 years old again… your biggest worries when you were going to eat next and when your next nap is!

I am usually not a big fan of black-and-whiting photos, especially this one since she has beautiful bright blue eyes, but this shot had a busy background.  The shirts in the background were bright yellow and bright pink, and it was very distracting from the subject of the photo.  I feel like the black and white really brings the focus back to her and the innocent look on her face.

After finishing up month 1 of my photo 52 project, I have already realized this is going to be a bit more daunting project than I originally anticipated.  I have already had to push and force myself to get out and go shooting.  But, that is also WHY I wanted to do this project.  I wanted to get out and shoot, build some skills, and hopefully get some nice shots along the way.

We’re supposed to have a big snow storm hitting this coming week, so expect a snowy picture for next week!

“Innocence”