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Archive for August, 2007

I was out at Margeuax Farms in Midway, Kentucky to shoot a crop sprayer. While I was waiting for the sprayer to be readied, I strolled through one of the barns to look at the horses. Each of the stalls held a horse that was worth five years of my annual earnings, some even more. As I got to the end of the barn, I turned around to see this guy taking a colt out for a bath. Photo shot with Nikon D70s DSLR.

I do this a lot:

I fly my virtual airliner across the night skies of America. This is the control panel of my Boeing 737-800. It’s my favorite plane. It’s the most common, most deployed airliner in the world. I have other planes which I use for different circumstances, but mostly I fly this one. It’s fairly demanding and forces you to handle it properly. If you try to land at 300 knots, you’ll run off the end of the runway.

Screen shot from the game, not a photo

Mostly, I fly to boring middle-American cities: Indianapolis, Nashville, Memphis, St. Louis, Chicago – much the way that real pilots do. Sometimes I’ll fly exotic places: Alaska and the Northwest Territory, or the islands of the Caribbean, but mostly, I hop from city to city in the Midwest. Often I fly at night so that there is nothing to see outside the windows; I am alone with my instruments, other virtual pilots and air traffic control. It feels like the sky is very busy, and I track the other planes with my radar. Right now I am crossing Alabama from Chattanooga, Tennessee, on my way to Louis B. Armstrong International in New Orleans. Atlanta just handed me off to Houston center air traffic control. New Orleans doesn’t actually control its own airspace; Houston does. I’m about 75 miles out from New Orleans at 22,000 feet. Houston will start bringing me down in a few minutes. Now, I’m flying alongside Lake Pontchartrain, that region that was so devastated by Hurricane Katrina.

I have been playing this game in some form since the mid-1980′s. It has migrated across a dozen computers, improving all the time. I don’t travel much in the real world — jobs and dogs make it difficult these days. In my virtual airliner, I can go anywhere, fly far away from the things that are bugging me. It’s a psychological release. I can fly until I’m ready to collapse from fatigue, then set down, turn off the machine and sleep — no risk, no commitment, nothing that I have to make decisions about. It’s better than sleeping pills. I’m sure that some would consider this crashingly boring, but you can’t be interesting and creative all the time.

I suppose that if I had my head on straight, I would be thankful that my life is stable enough that I can complain of boredom. That rationalization doesn’t help very much, though.

This is a ruined old country club outside of Florence, Colorado. I lived near there in the early 1980′s. While it looks older, I think its heyday was during Prohibition, and it probably did most of its service as a speakeasy. This place struck me as one of the most desolate vistas I had ever seen. If you could pan to the left, you would see Pike’s Peak, and the area is not as empty and desolate as this picture makes it look. This photo was shot with a Nikon FM on Kodak Panatomic film. Dinosaurs, sadly. I developed and printed the film myself. I was particularly pleased with this shot because the grays were tricky and I had to get the temperature and time of the developer just right to get the proper range of grays.

I have lived a lot of places, but Colorado is the one I regret leaving. I loved being there. I loved the mountains. But, I left and came back to Kentucky because it seemed to be the thing to do at the time, and it probably was. I love Kentucky too, but I miss Colorado.

This picture was shot in the early Eighties using real, old fashioned black and white film. I developed the negatives in the bathroom and printed the photo with what is now a pretty much obsolete enlarger. I used a yellow filter on the enlarger to increase the contrast to get the “graphic” look.