Picture Post, Sunday September 16, 2007

On Sunday August 26, I posted a few photos from a tour of Delta Airlines's facilities in Atlanta in 1989. I thought I would post a few more this Sunday.

I mentioned that week that Delta had the capability to create any part on any plane or engine that they needed, on-site in the Atlanta hangar complex.

This first photo coming up is related to that. For example, each of the many fan blades within a jet engine are individually made for that particular spot within that particular set of blades. Sounded crazy to me, but true; we saw men meticulously shaping and numbering jet engine fan blades.

Once fan blades, or any metal part is fashioned the way they want it to be, the items need to be cooked in ovens to temper. The working of metal causes weaknesses in the areas bent and hammered, and the cooking in the ovens allows the metal's molecules to realign into their strongest positions in relation to one another.

All of that is a lead-up to this first photo. Guess what it is? Wow! Y'all are SO SMART! Yes, it's an oven. (Pause for look at gratuitous oven photo.) On our tour, they filed the 8 or so of us into this big room where the temperature of the room was about 125 degrees F. Then the oven in the photo below started to open and all of us instinctively took a step back. I myself took two steps back. (I used to be TERRIFIED of ovens, and wouldn't even reach into our home oven to get something out until I was 18 or so.) When this door slid up and I saw those heating elements glowing orange like that I almost bolted from the room. I finally squashed the urge to flee in a screaming fit and remembered the camera around my neck and stepped in front of the rest of the group to take this photo. I took a total of two photos in this room, and this was the better of the two.They pulled that big kettle out onto the metal rails you see coming into the photo from the left. They said they had to let it cool a couple of days before they could even open the kettle, but they had another one from a few days before that they had just opened, and they had put stuff inside on the bottom, put a metal shelf above that, put in more items needing to be cooked, and then another shelf until the whole kettle was full.

They had four of these ovens in that room, and one other one was in operation that day. They said in busy times when they had to run all four ovens simultaneously, that sometimes Georgia Power would cal them and ask them to turn off one or more of them. They sucked so much current from the power system that on high demand days for the power company, they couldn't handle Delta running these ovens. They would operate them up to 2000 degrees F.

Anyway, it was scary and fascinating at the same time.


This next photo is of a jet engine being overhauled. Those two things on metal arms above and below the engine are part of the reverse thrust system that jet engines have. You know how loud the plane gets when you are on one that first touches down on landing? It's like the engines get really loud for several seconds? These big "flaps" open away from the engine as you see in this photo, and they actually come all the way around and behind the engine until their ends touch one another. Then the engines are revved really high like for takeoff, except that these flaps are now directing the engine's thrust up and down and slightly forward, which slows the plane down really quickly. That's what all the noise is when you first touch down, and why you're slung forward into your seat. It isn't that the engine actually can reverse it's thrust, it's just redirected forward against the momentum of the plane to help slow it down. Cool, huh?


This next photo is one of the pilot testing stations in one of the buildings across the street from Delta's main headquarters. It's away from the hangars but near the Atlanta airport. The lower part of the building houses all of the flight simulators for the various aircraft that Delta operates, while the upper floors has training and testing areas.In a mock up of a cockpit like in the photo is where pilots sit and are tested by FAA personnel. They simulate problems, normal flights, and whatnot to allow them to be observed and tested by the FAA to keep up their certifications.

This final photo is of the front end of the same old crop duster that I showed before. I put this photo here because you can see a bit of the room and the flight attendant's uniforms used throughout the years, models of all the different aircraft that Delta has used over the years, and on the walls you can see various incarnations of the Delta logo as it has been used over the years as well. Neat stuff to see. Looking at this photo is kind of like looking at old family Christmas photos; looking at all the other stuff in the room in the photos is just as fun as seeing our families at earlier times.As I said, I took this tour in the late 1980s and I still remember being in this room and thinking of how far powered flight had come in the then 85 years or so since Orville and Wilbur Wright had made their famous first successful flights.

If you like planes and jets, you should go see this old post of mine where I posted some photos of British Airways's Concorde on one of it's visits to DFW Airport in the late 1980s as well.

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Today on my other blog, I posted my first ever panoramic photo. I stitched together a series of nine or so photographs that I took of the beach yesterday. So the photo is super fresh.

Be sure and click on it to enlarge it.

Picture Post, Sunday August 26, 2007

Reaching back into ye olde 35mm slide files this week.

I consider Monroe, Louisiana to be my home town. Did y'all know that Monroe is where Delta Airlines was founded?

They started out as a crop dusting service that branched out into carrying mail and passengers in the late 1920s.

In the late 1980s I was part of a group of new-hires in Dallas that went to Atlanta to tour all of the hangar facilities and the pilot and flight attendant training areas.

It was very interesting, a total blast for me.

This first photo is one of their old crop dusters from the early years hanging in a museum of the company's history.

In the early and mid seventies, Delta briefly flew a few Boeing 747s in their fleet. They sold them all and for many years their biggest plane was the Lockheed l-1011. This is a model of Delta's 747s in the same Delta museum. Check out the hideous 1970s seat cover colorings!

We were told that Delta had the capability to recreate, on-site there in Atlanta, any part for any of their planes, with the exception of the tires, which are sent back to Goodyear to be retread. This is a work area for building new wing flaps; you can see one on the table closest to the camera.

This is our tour group in Delta's main hangar. At the time, this was the largest non-military plane hangar in the country. It would hold many of their biggest planes at one time to be worked on. What you see in the background is scaffolding built around the tail section of an L-1011 as it's readied to be repainted.

I'll try to scan a few more to show y'all later.

Picture Post, Sunday August 19, 2007

Younger Brother is doing OK. His facial surgery was pushed back from this past Thursday to this coming Tuesday, August, 21.

They are just going to repair his nose. To operate on and repair a broken cheek requires going into the head near the ear and working through the head forward to pushe the broken cheek back outward into place. It's apparently a horrible thing to have done, so since his is broken but isn't pressed back much, he's decided to not have the cheek worked on, and only get his nose rebuilt.

Thank all of you for you comments, thoughts, and prayers for him. I would also be grateful if y'all would continue to pray for him, the upcoming surgery and his recovery.

Number Two Daughter is having surgery this Wednesday and I would be thankful for y'all's prayers for her too. It's a surgery to correct a female problem, and it's supposed to be a pretty long surgery as well.

Thanks all!

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Since I haven't been out doing any photography lately, I don't really have any new stuff for y'all.

I'm posting a couple of before and after photos. Each of these took me a while to get into good shape. They weren't as bad as some, but had a zillion dust specks and things that had me enlarging them to massive size and working on them one tiny section at a time to clean up.

This first one makes me laugh even after seeing it many times over the years. Too bad my Photoshop skills don't extend to replacing the stupid looks on my, Big Sis's, and Big Brother's faces. (And dig Big Sis's home brew haircut!)



This next photo is one of me when I was four years old. That's my little stuffed dog that was my constant companion and sleeping buddy when I was a wee lad. This was a really small photo, and was blurry, grainy, and had the remains of scotch tape on it. I worked to clean it up as best I could, but finally got to the point where I figured I was coming up against the law of diminishing returns and stopped.


Visiting others will probably be spotty in the near future with Number Two Daughter's surgery and work, but I haven't forgotten y'all and I'll make the rounds as soon as I can.

Have a great Sunday.

Picture Post, Sunday August 5, 2007

It's All About Me

I was working on some photo scans last night. I found a few old prints of me, scanned them on the flatbed scanner, and spent a little time touching them up.

This one is me with my first two toofs. I was obviously proud of them, but if you notice on the left of the photo, I still needed Sainted Mother's hand to hold me up.

This next one, I'm a year or so older. Mama made our clothes when we were little, and in fact made a lot of my shirts until I was 12 or so. This was one she had made for me.

Here's proof I was once short. That's Big Sis with her hand on my head. Check out that six pack, baby!

Here I am again, in all of my diaperous glory. Obviously ready to hit the open road on my little push car there. I can't believe I was ever that little. Definitely a future junk food junkie hiding in that scrawny body.

This final one is me at the ripe old age of four. This is just after Christmas of 1966, because that's me with my Big Bruiser wrecker that I received that year. I was pumped to see that there was a picture of the truck, much less with me in there playing with it.

Well, that more of me than even I can stand, so I'll stop here.

With the computers unplugged and set aside for the painter for a few days, it really threw me off my blogging game. I still have tons of visiting and commenting to catch up on. I hope to be able to get back into the groove this week and will be paying everyone visits, OK?

Have a great Sunday.

Picture Post, Sunday July 29, 2007

I've never scuba dived, and I probably never will. But I can stand by the water of the Sebastian Inlet, about a 40 minute drive from our home, and see some nifty underwater life.

Thes first three photos, I was doing exactly that, standing there and looking a the neat stuff growing in there.

One problem, taking photos looking into the water from outside like this usually are robbed of color and contrast.

This first photo is pretty much how it came out of my camera. I punched up the contrast just a little and it helped "see through" some of the murkiness of the water. Interesting, but nothing to print, frame, and send to Sainted Mother, ya know?

This is the same photo as above, but I freely played with it in Photoshop Elements trying to create an interesting and more impacting photograph. I like the results a lot better than the top one.

This is almost a straight photo, but it had much better water and plant color, and I added a bit of simulated film grain, to make it appear as if I had used a high speed print or slide film to take the photo with. I liked this too, and it looks a bit old school, like some of my print and slide film scans, although it was taken on a digital camera.

There are basically two trains of thought on the upkeep of guitars. One is that the owner rubs and dings and intentionally wears off the finish of the guitar to give it that "rode hard and put away wet" look.

I'm not that kind of guy. I think that good workmanship on a guitar is beautiful, and I try to keep my guitars clean and avoid dings and dents. But that's just me. I enjoy just looking at the things, they're beautiful on their own.

When I get a new guitar (new to me, most of mine were bought used) I put something on the back of the guitar to help prevent belt buckle scratches and shirt button scratches. At crafts stores, you can usually find big sheets of thin plastic that is designed to stick to slick surfaces like windows via a static electricity like surface tension which adheres the sheet of plastic to the item. This works fine for guitars too, and I put a big American flag one on the backs of my guitars. No glues or anything, they can come right off, but will stick there not unlike how Saran Wrap sticks to itself.

This is one on the back of my Les Paul that I showed pics of earlier this week.


Hope y'all have a good Sunday.

Picture Post, Sunday July 22, 2007

This is what we call The Rosie Nose. Our red poodle, Rosie, loves to get under the covers and that's one of her ways of moping in the morning and shows her displeasure at our impending departures for work. I think it's cute though.

Lovely Wife and I were out and about one day and she decided to stop for a Tropical Smoothie smoothie. I saw these neon signs and stepped out of the car and took a couple of pictures. Lovely Wife said that inside all the workers were like, "Hey! What's that Dude doing with the camera?" and "Is he taking pictures of us?" in scared tones. Lovely Wife just waved 'em off. "Nah, that's just my husband and his camera. They're harmless."

I liked this one of the neon signs though.

These next two photos are of some air plants that grow all through several of our trees. We were told the trees are myrtle, but I have no idea what these guys are called. You can see the rust colored blossoms on them though. I thought that was kinda neat.


This is a couple of trimmed fronds on some plants in front of one of our public libraries. I did a nice black and white conversion of it and posted it on my photography blog a few weeks ago, but I liked the deep greens of the color one too, so that's what yer gittin'.

Picture Post, Sunday July 8, 2007

I put this photo of Lovely Wife's lighthouse on my photography blog a week or two ago, and thought I would put it here for those that for some strange reason read this blog but don't go to my photography blog. This feller is about 2ft tall and sits beside our pool and had a rechargeable battery that is recharged each day by the sun. A photosensitive cell sees when it starts to get dark and turns on the light in the tower of the lighthouse. It's not very bright but it is really pretty.

I sho-nuff need me one of these bumper stickers:

Stuck on the back of a sign at the beach:

A wooden giraffe, taken in the same store as last Sunday's totem poles:

This is a picture of the Melbourne Causeway, our closest route to the ocean, after I played with it some in Photoshop Elements 4.0. Hope y'all don't mind me getting all artsy-fartsy on ya. Thumbs up, or down?

Have a great Sunday folks!

Picture Post, Sunday July 1, 2007

Hey folks. This weeks picture post is fresh, fresh, fresh. I took all of these yesterday while Lovely Wife and I were out and about.

This first one was taken at a vegetable stand where Lovely Wife and I bought some fresh tomatoes for our Fourth of July hamburgers and a watermelon for dee-zert. These peppers were so colorful that I went back to the car to get my camera out. I didn't think I needed my camera while buying tomatoes, but I was wrong.

These next two were taken at Meg O'Malley's in the old downtown section of Melbourne, Florida, where Lovely Wife and I had lunch. We both had the St. Paddy's Pie (chicken pot pie) with cabbage and bread. Yummy.


These final two were taken outside of a consignment/antique store filled to overflowing with everything from furniture to comic books to old glassware like your great grandma had in her house. This toucan rocker and the carved wood were outside on the sidewalk to draw us in.


Have a great Sunday everyone!

Picture Post, Sunday May 13, 2007

This past Tuesday, I wrote a post about, and also included some photos of a Soviet made Zorki-4 camera I bought off ebay.

The seller said the camera worked fine, and she also had a perfect 100% positive feedback on over 200 transactions, so I took a chance, and hoped to get a decent working camera that I could play around with for cheap. When I received it (shipped from Ukraine), the camera seemed to be in great shape, so after checking out it's functionality, I loaded some film.

Todays pictures were on the first roll of 35mm print film that I put through this camera. Warning, I wasn't going for artistic merit in these. I was just pointing and firing away at different types of scenes and lighting to check it out at different settings. It was the first time for me to use Kodak UC 400 film, Ultra Color. The film was a bit too grainy, and the colors almost too intense, but overall, I was pleased with how good the camera performed.

This first one, I hooked up an old flash to the camera to check out the flash sychronization. It worked better than I had hoped, the old, early 60s flash and this late 60s camera. That's Angel on the left and Lilly on the right. They were both bummed because I was leaving for work, hence the last ditch, pitiful look to try to guilt trip me into staying home.
Some of Lovely Wife's flowers right outside our front door.This one is the gate to our back yard, on one side of the house. I wanted to get both shadow and bright sun.This one was taken at Ballard Park in Melbourne, Florida. This park is only about five minutes from where I work and I wandered around there the other day during my lunch period.This shot was as I was walking along the creek, following these two snowy egrets. They stayed a careful distance from me, but I like this shot anyway.This final one was on a different day last week at lunch. It's the Atlantic ocean, but it had become really overcast because of the tropical storm that was northeast of us.

Picture Post, Sunday April 22, 2007

Babystepper wrote a post a couple of days ago about a boy they know that was struck my lightning. He's ok, but it reminded me of this sign I photographed a week or so ago at Sebastian Inlet State Park. Sebastian inlet is the closest way from where we live to get boats out to the Atlantic Ocean. There's a really nifty park there and I went and walked around and saw this sign. (This is the wide view so y'all can see the beach and beautiful sky and water.)

Here's a better look at the sign; stuff like this intrigues me. Thankfully there wasn't much chance of lightning strikes that day.

This is Angel, one of our poodles. She's obsessed with chasing lizards, and was out showing me what a great hunter she is when I took this photo.

This is Angel, and Spike chillin' on top of my bass amplifier in our bedroom window. They love it when the weather is mild enough to have the windows open. This is their perch for watching, and barking at, the world. Spike and me are the only boys in the house. I love his "soul patch," that little tuft of white hair on his chin. He's pretty laid back like me; if he was any more so he wouldn't have a pulse.

I was testing out my new lens and when I walked back inside from the front yard, I stopped and took a photo inside the house, and kinda like it.