Archives 2011

While Springfield Illinois might not have a horribly exciting nightlife for people interested in those types of activities, Springfield does actually have a downtown.  I took this from the top of the Hilton.  I wished I would have brought my tripod again, but I was up there for a friend’s wedding reception, so I didn’t want to lug it around all night.  It still worked out ok though, even after my multiple captain and cokes.  I was able to basically lean up against the window and brace my self against it while I took some shots.  This one came out best, but it was still a tough choice picking this one over another similar angle I had taken earlier around sunset with a streak of bright orange sky in the background.  I ended up going with this one though because I liked the way the city was just glowing.

“Nightlife”

Springfield’s power plant is ran by City Water, Light, and Power, the largest municipally owned utility in Illinois.  The CWLP coal fired power plant sits at the edge of Lake Springfield, an artifical resevoir formed between 1931 and 1935 by building a dam across Sugar Creek.  The lake was created both as a water source for Springfield, and as a cooling lake for the CWLP power plant.

This is one of those iconic buildings that stands out to me from my childhood.  You can’t drive in or around Springfield with out noticing its massive steam stacks.  I probably thought they were cloud generating machines as a kid.  We also had a boat and would spend many summer days on Lake Springfield, with the power plant always in the background.

“CWLP”

Whew, it has been a crazy week!  For those that don’t know, I am getting married in 3 weeks.  We are having a beach sunset wedding in Fort Myers, Florida.  After the wedding, we will be out of the country for a week on a cruise.  I am very excited, and I still intend on taking photos for my Photo 52 Project, but they may not be posted right away (the main one would be the week we’ll be out of the country, as I won’t have any access to the internets).  This weekend we had our couples Wedding Shower, and the whole week has been crazy busy leading up to it.  I was walking around the hall snapping some photos while everyone was getting things ready, and this is my favorite.  This is my Mom, my Aunt Sue (the woman who introduced me to my Fiancée), and my Sister, all working hard getting the food ready to go before the Shower.  Heather and I are lucky to have such wonderful and amazing people in our lives that will help out and do what ever is needed of them for us, and while this picture is only of a few people, I speak for everyone in our family, and our close friends.  Thank you everyone for an awesome weekend!

“Preparations”

Another abandoned house?  Yup!  This was more of an abandoned mansion though.  There were many neat things about this house, and I would have loved to get closer to it, but there were signs that the property was still watched after.  There was a new chain link fence out front, plus alarm signs and stickers all over the place, and some other little signs that just didn’t make me feel comfortable walking up in to the yard and around it too much.  So I popped on the telephoto lens and shot from the fence for the most part.  I can only imagine how grand this house must have been when it was first built, but now is just crumbling apart.  There were signs that someone tried to restore it at one point, but I think they gave up on their efforts too.  This is a tower that looked like was part of a breakfast nook in the front corner of the house.  It was pretty cool looking with its copper roof and windows going around the top.  I would have loved to get a look inside this place too, and wish I knew more about the history of it, who built it, and what happened to them that the house is now mostly abandoned.

“Sanctuary”

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”