Photos from the underground

This past Saturday, my wife and I reserved a spot in the Laurel Caverns lower caving tour. This set of caverns goes about 45 stories deep and the majority of it is unlighted.  There is a good amount of climbing over and down rocks as well as some crawling.  The spaces can be very tight.  This was my first time doing something like this, and I had no idea what to expect.  It was amazing at how pitch black and quiet it is when you’re that far underground.  The mind starts to wander and think about what would happen if the flashlights failed.  Anyway, here are the pictures (all taken with an OMD E-M5).  The first is above the mountain, the next are far below it.

After the caving tour, my wife and I spent the night at the Summit Inn.  This hotel was built around 1902 and sits on top of a mountain overlooking the town of Hopwood.  In this day and age, finding places with this much character is tough.  The woodwork is beautiful and in the lobby sits a large stone fireplace with plenty of old wooden chairs around it.

A new portfolio section is up

After a very long time of using a 3rd party portfolio gallery program, I decided to write my own and try to get reacquainted with the front end side of web stuff. The old portfolio was JAlbum and worked pretty well, until they started to insert ads into the page. That finally pushed me over the edge into breaking out a text editor and hacking something together.  It has a modal image dialog for display, dynamic layout and you can use the arrow keys to switch images when the image dialog is on the screen.

I wanted something simple and quick and so far, I think I’ve achieved that. So far on my machine, it works well. I figure it’ll get tested by others and then I’ll find out eventually.. besides, I’ll borrow this guys motto…

If you see something that isn’t working correctly, fire an email and I’ll take a look.  It certainly isn’t done, as it needs some nice transition effects and other things, but I think it’s better than what was there before.  I even learned a few new things along the way…

An interesting bridge and a portrait

Today I just have a few things to show off.  Earlier, I was able to get out on a bike and get 20 miles in.  On the way, I stopped at a decommissioned railroad bridge over the Youghiogheny river that I’ve had my eye on for a while.  I first saw this bridge when I first started to date my wife.  We were tubing lazily down the river with friends and once we got to it, we got out of the river and onto the bridge to jump off.  This was the first time I’ve actually jumped from a bridge for a woman, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat.

Continue reading An interesting bridge and a portrait