Category Archives: Excursion 15 (8/6/2013)

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February 2, 2014

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Excursion 15, Part 5 (Happy Trailers)

In which our intrepid hero uncovers a little Lost City…

My opinions about mobile homes and travel trailers is decidedly mixed.  While I like the idea of being a hermit crab, going around with your house on your back, taking all of your conveniences with you, I find that the practical reality is less than the ideal.   Because of little things like plumbing and electricity, you aren’t really free but still tethered to campgrounds, and having to deal with things like hooking up sewage, etc., does not appeal to my lazy nature.  Although I admit that they seem to be great for cooking meth in.

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Excursion 15, Part 4 (The Golden Hour)

In which our intrepid hero finds himself homeward bound as a long day winds down…

This blog is all about journeys and explorations.  Most visibly, it is about me exploring different parts of Ohio and recording what I see.  It is also about me exploring photography itself and trying to become a better photographer, despite my inherent limitations (such as considerable impatience).   I have been trying to educate myself on cameras, on photography, and, more recently, on post-processing and HDR.  From the vantage point of this writing, in early February 2014, some six months after these photographs were taken, I have seen improvement on my part and I hope there will be more.

Landscape photographers like to refer to the early morning or the time around sunset as “golden hours,” because the light is a soft, warm light that lends itself to attractive photographs, and because the dynamic range of light at those hours is close to what cameras can naturally reproduce.   An alien anthropologist who studied Earth only through its landscape photography might be forgiven for thinking that Earth was a planet of perpetual sunset.

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February 2, 2014

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Excursion 15, Part 3 (Sins of a City)

In which our intrepid hero explores a town under shadow…

One of the more prominent rust belt towns along the Ohio River is Steubenville.  Most Americans had never heard of this town until 2012.  That year, a horrifying news story emerged from Steubenville.  A group of high school students, including members of Steubenville High School’s vaunted football team, sexually assaulted a teenaged girl at a party.   Steubenville adults were nowhere to be seen, it seems, as groups of students drank heavily at various parties around town.  The victim, already drunk, left one party to go to another, accompanied by a handful of football players.  There she drank even more and became incapacitated.  After a while, the group left the party to go to a third, and then to someone’s home.  In the car, one of the assailants removed the victim’s shirt and sexually assaulted her, while others took pictures of the assault.  At the house, the assailants took off the rest of her clothes, then two of them sexually assaulted her again.  Once again, the whole incident was caught in pictures.

What followed was as shameful as the initial assault.

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January 26, 2014

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Excursion 15, Part 2 (The Ghosts of Steel)

In which our intrepid hero puts another notch on his Rust Belt…

When I was a young child, my parents took me to visit a ghost town, the old mining town of Mogollon (of Spanish origin, now pronounced muggy-own) in far west New Mexico in the Gila Mountains.  In the 1890s, Mogollon was a happening place, with thousands of residents who were involved, directly or indirectly, in the mining of gold and silver (the same mining that would give nearby Silver City its name).  However, by the 1920s, many of the mines had shut down and an exodus followed.  By 1930, its population was only around 200.   When the last nearby mine shut down in the 1950s, the remnants of its population blew away like dust.  When I visited the town, probably circa 1973 or so, it seemed to have been abandoned for a century.

That’s one type of ghost town.  But there’s another.

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January 26, 2014

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Excursion 15, Part 1 (Up the Old Ohio)

In which our intrepid hero travels up a lazy river…

Typically, in introductions to blog entries such as this one, I have tried to evoke personal memories of years long since gone, but recently, the only memories easily evocable have been dreams of only a few short months ago, those naïve times before I had ever heard of terms like “polar vortex.”  After several years of very mild winters, the winter of 2013-2014 has been a shock to my system I still have not quite gotten used to.  Although we’ve had years with more snow, in terms of pure coldness, this is the nastiest winter we’ve had here in Ohio in 20 years and I guess I was getting spoiled.  As I type, though, the temperature is around 11 degrees, it has been snowing, the wind is whipping outside my window, and the forecast is telling me that two days from now the high temperature will be below zero and the low somewhere around 15 below.  In times like these, I can look at photographs such as these from early August 2013 and almost feel the warmth coming from them.

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