Get Penguined

Yellowstone Day 0

JB — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 20:46:51 +0000

I’ll start this series of Yellowstone posts with our 0th day–the day of travel. We first arrived in Billings, MT by airplane. From there, we drove over many miles of flat, boring terrain. We finally found the foot of a mountain range about 60 miles out of Billings near a city called Red Lodge, which would be the last we would see of anything that could be called a city until we left Silver Gate 6 days later.

Outside of Red Lodge we began probably one of the most beautiful drives in the United States, Beartooth Pass. Certainly the most beautiful section of road I have ever been on. I am ashamed to say that I didn’t take any photos of this part of the journey, but I believe that it would have been impossible for any but the best photographers to truly capture the magnitude and beautiy of the views from our car.

Once we got to the top of the mountain range, the terrain was actually very flat, and even though it was August 1st, there were several patches of snow on the ground. Since we only get about half an inch of snow in Alabama each year, of course we got out to play in it. We couldn’t play for long, though, because we had a lot more ground to cover and night was fast approaching.

The next so called “city” we passed through after getting off the Beartooth Pass was Cooke City. When I heard the name, I was expecting a fairly small town, but a town nonetheless. Cooke City far exceeded my expectations though. It turns out that Cooke City consists of the highway that runs through town and about 15-20 homes (a generous estimate). However, once we reached our destination a few miles down the road in Silver Gate, Cooke City did indeed seem like a large city. We finally arrived at our destination, the Grizzly Lodge, well after dark.

Updates coming soon

JB — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 02:30:39 +0000

I know it has been a while since I blogged anything on here. I apologize, but I have some good stuff coming soon. I’ve finished my Yellowstone pictures and will be posting them soon. I’ve already uploaded the first day’s photos so as soon as they’re sorted through, they will be posted.

Yellowstone Preview

JB — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 03:58:02 +0000

So, I know it has been a long time since my last post. I’ve been up to several things like moving to a new apartment and hiking the backcountry of Yellowstone National Park. Some of my loyal readers have been begging me to upload my pictures from Yellowstone; so, I finally went through and skimmed a few off the top of the pile to edit and throw up here. Enjoy.

2008 KKPsi Officers’ Retreat

JB — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 03:06:56 +0000

This past weekend was the big yearly planning session for the officers of the Pi chapter of Kappa Kappa Psi at Auburn. Our retreat is basically where we lock ourselves in a somewhat secluded place and discuss business for the upcoming year. This year, we stayed at a cabin in the mountains of North Georgia. Between the discussions of meeting times and discretionary funds, we were able to have a little fun swimming, fishing and taking in the beautiful views.

Auburn in HDR

JB — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 03:34:41 +0000

I recently got Adobe Photoshop CS3 for all of my photo editing needs. One of the coolest features of CS3 is the ability to merge several images of the same subject with different exposures into one image to give definition to the highlights and the shadows of an image (called High Dynamic Range). Unfortunately, Photoshop doesn’t give too many options to easily change the compression of highlights and shadows so I bought Photomatix to solve that problem. To test it out I went around Auburn’s campus and snapped photos of various picturesque places at night. Here are the results:

*Note the images are very large and will take some time to download

My First Book

JB — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:23:54 +0000

I have finally finished it. After 3 years of wanting to get it done and about a week of hard work, I now have my first photo book in my hands. The subject, as you can see from the cover, is my trip to London back in the summer of 2005. I’ll post some pictures from the book in a later post.

Fireworks Safety Tip #1

JB — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 03:45:46 +0000

So shooting fireworks on Independance Day is without a doubt an American tradition, especially when theyre particularly explosive. However, as it turns out, it is not a good idea to put two large mortars on one small unstable platform. In today’s case, it almost blew up my parents, friends, and in fact did blow up the neighbors’ yard. So just don’t do it…ask Sarah.

Spore

JB — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 04:42:38 +0000

I’ve been watching the development of Spore a little bit lately and finally bought the creature creator. It’s not a terrible buy; for just $10, you get a fully functional program that is fun for a little while. It only takes a couple of minutes to learn to create a pretty weird looking creature. One of the coolest features is the ability to make videos and then upload them directly to YouTube. So i decided to make a strange creature (the object of the entire game) give it a few children and have them dance for YouTube and post it here for you.

Torch Cafe

JB — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 22:55:20 +0000

One of my biggest hobbies is photography, so my blog is probably going to end up with a lot of pictures on it. Anyway, when I was driving down the highway toward Tuskegee from Auburn, I saw this really cool abandoned diner on the side of the road. Well, weeks later I finally decided to go down there at sunset with some friends to take pictures of it. I’ve posted my favorites. A couple of them are edited more than just adjusting brightness and colors so I posted the originals as well.

Signs

JB — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 03:36:43 +0000

Apparently since my appearance in a certain YouTube video in Ireland I have become an official sign interpreter. So, I decided to practice my hobby by interpreting some signs for you. I found all of these signs in the Manual of Traffic Signs. More to come later.

Bacon Reduction Ahead

Beware, Wormhole Ahead

Messiah