March 24-25

Written March 28

Dear Friends and Family,

So,  how did my big plan for a weekend of photography work out?  Coulda been better, but, as I learned later, it coulda been worse.

I started by checking out of the Lynchburg hotel well before sunrise.  I wanted to be up at "Natural Bridge" for the early morning sun.  Good for pictures, you see.  One of the benefits of jet lag, East-to-West, is waking up early, so I hit the road at 5:30 for the 45 minute drive.

On the road, the rain did nothing but get worse, the higher I went up into the mountains.  When I reached my goal, I had time to spare.  In fact, when I got to Natural Bridge it was dark, rainy, and completely discouraging.  No pictures except one fuzzy shot to prove I was here.  OK, what next?

I'd been to Roanoke before, and liked the little downtown and the extensive train museum, so that became my next goal.  After another hour of driving through the rain, I stopped in Roanoke for breakfast and a quick internet fix, thanks to Starbucks.  Things were not looking good. 

After my break, I went downtown to check out the farmer's market.  The problem here was that this is indeed a market for local farmers and, at this time of year, farmers have very little interesting to sell -- or to take pictures of.  Again, a single picture to prove I was there.

N. Bridge Mascot	Roanoke Market

So, what next?  It was still rainy, wet but not drowning anymore.  Maybe a drive down the Blue Ridge Parkway would be OK after all, so that's where I headed.  From here on, I'll let the pictures speak for me.

Parkway Entrance	Ominous Clouds	More Clouds

Despite the dark clouds, and the bare winter trees, the vistas from the road were attractive enough that I kept popping off the road to click some more.  My most ambitious shots were "pans", where I would stitch together shots later, in the "darkroom."  The following two panoramas were composed of six or eight individual photos, stitched together with an amazing piece of software called Hugin.  I like the technology and the pictures are OK enough to give some sense of what I was seeing. (The pictures that come up with a click are pretty detailed, but not nearly as detailed as the originals.  I can't wait to try this technique on more interesting horizons.)

Notice particularly, the lower edge of the clouds.  As the day wore on, these clouds went away, came back, got lighter, got darker.  I was concentrating on using them for picture backdrops, so I appreciated the variety, but the sunnier periods definitely were best.

Since I was up early, I decided to stop early.  I got off the Parkway at Fancy Gap, which is truthfully more gap than fancy.  Nonetheless, there was a selection of chain hotel-motels (does anyone call them that anymore?) and I landed in a pretty large room at the local Best Western.  Nowadays, the main attraction of a room is the wifi connection and here the service was mediocre, good enough to call home via Skype however.

While I was on the phone to Marianne, I commented on how dark it was, for 3:30 in the afternoon.  Those white, puffy clouds had definitely turned dark and sinister.  Pretty soon, it was raining heavily, and then came hail.  The rental car ended up with a coating of pea-sized ice balls.  After I hung up, I turned on the TV and was greeted with a tornado warning for the Tennessee county I was in.  Later, I listened to the news and damaging high winds and golf-ball sized hail had been reported up on the Blue Ridge Parkway, exactly where I had been hours before.  Glad I decided to quit early.

So, that was my Saturday.  All in all, an OK excursion.  The rainy, gray skies had parted enough for a few pictures, nothing wonderful, but enough to give me more practice with my camera and technology*.  I just hoped for better Sunday weather.

	Chester Inn, town's oldest commercial building (1779).	Taylor Home, oldest building (1788) and one-time home of future president Jackson	The abolitionist paper Emancipator was published here in the 1820s.	Cute little hotel.

I recently bought a GPS "tracker" so I could tag all my pictures with their location.  This little device, along with software and some work on the computer, will place latitude and longitude in the data for each picture.  (Digital pictures come with data nowadays, quite a bit of data.)
The cool part is that, with lat/long, the software will also look up on Google Maps the name of the town, state, and country.  This is a real time saver for finding things later.
Finally, a special technique for shooting panoramas.  You see, one of the problems when shooting six, or eight, or ten shots of a horizon, and then shooting another series of a very similar horizon, is knowing when one series starts and another stops.  Today, I tried out a "handy" technique I had read about: a shot of my hand between every series.  I know, it sounds simple enough, but it works.