Lori's Blog : Hazy Days('ee) ...

There is a lot to be said for keeping a pretty decent camera with you when you go out. My solution is to have a small 14.1 megapixel Nikon that lives in the leather backpack that is my purse.

Lately, I have been pulling it out to take a photo when I am out and about in the car.

The impressive part of the sentence above? I was actually 'out and about in the car' multiple times!

So ... we have fires here in Texas - some close and some not so much. I had not paid much attention to them nor read news on anything in a while - so was lacking in a big way as to what was / is going on.

But ...

Realizing that there were fires out there, and me headed over to the church to Activity Day for the girls at 7:00 in the evening (Wed night) - I decided there was a good chance for a drop dead gorgeous sunset - based solely on POLLUTION. Smoke in the air makes for good sunset photos ... what can I say?

Not drop dead anything ... but pretty:

The next morning I had my monthly drive to the doctor. I know! In the car two days in a row! And, actually, went out with friends to lunch the day before (but can't count it as driving because my friend came over and drug me out of the house for it) so PIN A STAR ON MY FOREHEAD!

Got driving and realized that the sunrise was going to be impressive - the fires were still raging.

I was not disappointed:

NOTE: I have noticed that all of the photos that follow appear much darker here where they are much smaller than they are when I am looking at them on my monitor. They are actually (the sunrise photos) rather beautiful and have a lot of detail which you cannot see here (I guess unless you double click on them to enlarge them ...). Had I known they were going to look so bad / boring / dark I would have used a much smaller number of them! I apologize in advance for abusing your eyes ...

Dark on the toll way, but I drive East and so I knew I would not miss the sunrise - I was glad I had a camera in the car!

Things started to pile up - not my favorite way to drive, but gave me a chance to actually LOOK AT THE CAMERA DISPLAY while taking a shot. I know I am crazy for taking photos while tootling down the road at 75 mph, but - hey - give me some credit - I DON'T take my eyes off the road!

This makes for a lot of photos that aren't good, not pointed at the right thing or out of focus - thus I take a TON of photos and generally end up with a few usable ones. Gary had it right when he watched me do this one day and realized that it was all in the challenge to get a good photo completely at random ...

The reason we were piling up, partly, was that the sun had started peeking:

The fact that it was rush hour was not enjoyable, but I was having a wonderful time just randomly snapping away until my fingers would cramp up from holding the camera so funny to try and have some semblance of 'straight' applied to my photos.

Yeah, I know, I have a TON of photos in here, but couldn't decide which ones to throw out - so I didn't. I also was using a 'Photoshop Plug-In' - a piece of 3rd party software that works inside of Photoshop. This was a fancy thing that has all sorts of enhancements for photos, and I know I am spoiled when I pull out this monster and start playing!

I accidentally hit the 'detail' bar right at the beginning (by zero) where the bar was originally sitting at the highest number - 256. To get more detail - for some reason - you drag the slider to the left - or closer to zero - which seems totally backwards to me ... but, there you go.

So - I hit the details slider and it took my photos 'details' to that point. A place I had never tried before. I am not a hacker - don't just try something to see what it will do. This is a weakness on my part since I fail to discover wonderful things totally at random.

Like the results of this one! Don't have a clue what this super expensive software thinks it is doing when trying to add more-detail-than-should-be-allowed - but I LOVE the results!

It was a little grainy due to trying its darnedest to sharpen the super-detailed photo, so I used my all time favorite part of this software. It 'softens' the photo by taking blotchy, choppy photos and gently painting them in. It makes things look wonderful!

I kept driving and shooting and watching the sun get higher and higher in the sky - all of a sudden - there it was! Transico Towers! Well, um, this is when I NOTICED IT. Apparently my camera noticed it well before this shot. And ... OK... it is not named that anymore, and maybe never was - but that is what I THINK it was named when we moved to Houston eons ago and I don't know the new name - so Transico Towers it is ... for this post. For those of you who don't know about it - it is a skyscraper that lives all alone out by the Galleria mall and is the first indication that Downtown is coming up soon!

I like him - sitting out there all by himself. He looks lonely ... but then again - HE GETS TO LIVE NEXT DOOR TO A MALL! How cool is that? (Please note the sarcasm in my voice ...)

And another 'Special Effects' photo editing - just not by accident this time:

These photos that I took yesterday (it took me an entire 24 hours to process them. OK, not the ENTIRE 24 hours, but quite a bit - so I am posting a day late) have changed my mind about something.

The area in the next few photos is the area I called 'Worlds Ugliest' or something like that in a previous post. I thought all the power lines and stuff looked all junky and just plain ugly. In these photos, though, I find them interesting, symmetric and add to the photos. Don't know why the 'about-face' on the area, but I'm not as bothered by it as I used to be. In fact, I sort of think these photos are ... pretty.

Here Transico Towers is a little less buried by wires, but this was about the first indication that maybe I was driving into some not-so-nice air ... (In the large size of all these photos you can see the smoke that has settled around Transico Towers and other areas. Here in the small photos, you don't see it as well.)

This photo was so close to the previous photo - I decided to play with it and used a plug in called 'Pixel Bender' to make this funky version:

And ... OK, OK ... it is the last time I do this:

Come on now ... this has to take some sort of 'Random Talent'! Got Transico Towers CENTERED between two power lines, the sun CENTERED behind a lamp AND a lovely glow coming off the cars AND the road in this photo! And ALL THIS WITHOUT LOOKING AT THE CAMERA! And, yes, of course the ... ahem ... 649 photos that I took on this round trip drive ... were not all that cool ...

A final goodbye to Transico Towers - NOT BURIED BEHIND POWER LINES! But - totally buried in a smoky haze.

It was at this point I started to smell the smoke and hoped it was not going to be all that bad ...

The sun seemed to get hazier and hazier - and everything looked like a fog was rolling in. A fog that was noxious to breathe ...

Up, up, up and over the freeway - gracefully curving (OK, not so graceful - the speed limit is 35 and you can feel the corner - WAAAY up high if you take it too fast) then lowering you down onto said freeway. It gracelessly dumps you unceremoniously into the merge lane. Your speed: 35mph, the other cars speed: 75mph - and you have no more than 50 YARDS to merge over or you will be in the 'Exit Only' lane and on your way back off the freeway and onto Chimney Rock ...

Which - luckily, is what I need to do. The haze, by now, was rather disturbing.

So many words for such an inconsequential drive to the doctor! What is wrong with me? I will give you a break, be quiet and let you take the loop all by yourself - it's dangerous, so pay attention to the road ...

The sun looked very funky, so while stopped at a light I zoomed in and took a shot:

On Chimney Rock things were hazy and smelling like smoke. I was not feeling all that well and wondered how we were all supposed to be breathing ... (When I got to Walgreens to fill my prescriptions after my appointment, a lady was asking the pharmacist where the masks were - probably what we were supposed to be doing to breathe)

Turned and took a final, parting shot of the 'Sun over Starbucks' out the passenger side window, then off to the doctor:

Oddly enough, it didn't smell like smoke inside the building - so the headache I was getting from it started to go away. I had started to get a little nervous about breathing air-that-I-can-see for long periods of time, thus rather relieved that it had gone away.

Came out after the appointment to find that a breeze must have blown in and taken most the smoke away! I was super relieved, having been uneasy driving in with it. Fire is something that scares me. And scares me a lot. On my 'Scaredy Cat Scale' - with the range: 0 - 10, 'Fire' would land squarely in the number '10' slot. I don't think I was always this way. I think after our house (with me in it) was hit by the tornado in 1998 and my subsequent 'Accidentally Setting The Family Room On Fire' incident, I have a 'healthier' fear of fire.

Now days I get rather panicky when I smell smoke - even if there is no danger to my person or my home. Logic seems to have nothing to do with it, like OH, SO MANY THINGS IN MY LIFE .... The 'panicky' starts to get old, and is draining when it does not let up over an extended period of time. So I was very grateful that this was happening downtown and not at my home.

On the way home I took a 'close up' of Transico Towers looking like a building!

And here is Chimney Rock and the trees that were so hazy in the photo on the way in ... all better now!

Was happy to be past my doctor appointment and out of the smoke. Just put it all behind me, forget about it and finish my morning chores. Calmed down a bit ...

I was driving home on auto-pilot and almost to my exit, not paying attention to things, when I stared paying attention to things and realized that I could smell something familiar ...