Virginia Photo Blog | New Site Build: In-Progress | 49 0f 109 Original Posts Uploaded | 46 Color | 3 B&W
08/15/2019
An endless supply of artists keeps Beta Bridge freshly painted. It's usually good for a handful of new photos any day of the week. It only takes a couple
08/01/2019
In the last post, we saw the local band Mama Tried performing in a small nightclub. An on-camera strobe made color photos possible at low ISO. Without the strobe, the ISO maxed out at 12,800,
When was the last time your sister and brother-in-law were friends with the guitarist in the local band? Approximately never, until now. After a chance mention that Moma Tried was playing ...
07/01/2019
The beaches of Corolla, N.C., cover some 20 miles along the northern Outer Banks of Currituck County. About 5,000 vacation rental houses dot the landscape ...
06/15/2019
This post continues a previous series on shooting 500 keepers with the Zeiss Milvus 35 mm f/2.0. The idea was to set the lens to f/2.0 and keep photographing until I had 500 photos worth keeping ...
06/01/2019
By early June, The University is mostly vacant. Graduation is over, and The Lawn is recovering from the thousands of graduates and parents that paraded down the middle of it just weeks before ...
05/15/2019
It was late March when last I went down to look at the creek, but already there were sprigs of grass along the path. Winter was tough. There were lots of fallen trees ...
05/01/2019
Every now and then the creek floods and it's a muddy mess. If it's spring or summer, it looks like the Amazon. You might think that no one lives within a thousand miles ...
04/15/2019
The color photos of William Eggleston were something of an inspiration for the present website. His oeuvre of photographing the ordinary offered a rationale for documenting the world around me ...
04/01/2019
The Zeiss ZF.2 135 f/2.0 APO Sonnar is a superb lens. Often, there is a temptation to claim that a great photo is so good because of the lens, or maybe the camera ...
03/15/2019
Recently, in a blog post about reflections, the post featured a picture of skaters on the indoor downtown ice rink. Alas, the ice rink is no more ...
03/01/2019
Early morning light feels different than afternoon light. It's wake up light. It seems brighter, almost too bright. If you're not a morning person, you'll likely miss this kind of light ...
02/15/2019
The eye and the brain want something to look at, and sometimes a puzzle is just the thing. That's what reflections do - they give the brain a problem to solve ...
02/01/2019
In the previous game day football series, we last watched the Virginia Cavaliers from the hillside. Today, we see the game from a skybox. For the lucky few ...
01/15/2019
Take a camera, even at night. If you see some color, there is a photo to be had. Find a place to set the camera down, and you can have a sharp ...
01/01/2019
Sometimes the world paints a picture for you and all you have to do is frame it. The local YMCA in Orlando painted the picture, and all it took was a walk around ...
12/15/2018
This week is part two of the shooting at f/2.0 exercise. Many of the 500 keepers at f/2.0 could have been chosen for this post, but the ones chosen here provide an exercise ....
12/01/2018
Peter Karbe, expert Leica lens designer, says that Leica lenses are designed to be shot wide open. Karbe says:
11/15/2018
Halloween 2018 was a warm Fall day. The leaves were still mostly on the trees. Trick or Treating on The Lawn started at around 5 pm, and there was only about an hour of good light ...
11/01/2018
Halloween 2017 provided another beautiful Fall day for Trick or Treating on The Lawn. Revelers upped their game in 2017 with air costumes, Chinese dragons, dinosaurs ...
10/15/2018
Halloween 2016 was another crisp Fall day. The trees were halfway to winter. Leaves were piling up on The Lawn. Mostly, the tradition is the same every year. The kids make a ...
10/01/2018
On graduation morning, May 20, 2017, it was a perfect spring day. Students assembled on the north side of the Rotunda, while parents and family members filled The Lawn. Graduates made the traditional procession ...
It takes about a week. First, the ramps and fences go up. Then the bundles of folding chairs appear. The stage and video screens go up next. Finally, the chairs open in ordered rows. Security personel ...
09/01/2018
The Corner is a quarter mile of swag shops, greasy spoons, restaurants, and convenience stores along University Ave., roughly from about Chancellor street to the 14th street railroad bridge ...
08/15/2018
State and local officials prepared for the one year anniversary of the Antifa riot in Charlottesville by declaring a preemptive state of emergency for the weekend of August 11-12, 2018. The downtown pedestrian mall was fenced off ...
08/01/2018
The edges of downtown fray rather quickly. A few blocks off the downtown mall puts you in the working areas. There you'll find the side streets, back streets, back doors, back walls, small businesses, apartments, parking lots, restaurants ...
07/15/2018
This week, we finally make it to the top of Humpback Rocks. The climb takes you through dense woods and over slippery rocks. Near the top, three trolls and a sphinx guard the trail. Pick them out from a photo below ...
07/01/2018
The farm trail from the visitor center at Humpback Rocks leads to a meadow along the Blue Ridge Parkway. In the lede photo, the farm trail winds through the woods to the left of the parkway, and takes you to a gate in the split ...
Humpback Rocks is an outcropping of greenstone on the top of Humpback Mountain, which lies at milepost 5.8 on the Blue Ridge Parkway, just a few miles south of the I-64 overpass at Afton Mountain ...
06/01/2018
President James Madison, Father of the Constitution, built his home in Montpelier, Virginia. It's about 20 miles north of Jefferson's Monticello. Today, Madison's home is an historical and educational attraction ...
05/15/2018
Jefferson built with bricks, and, today, The University is almost entirely surfaced in brick. Jefferson used bricks for pavillions and Lawn rooms and serpentine walls. Sometimes, the walls need repair ...
In Charlottesville, it rained on the day of the solar eclipse, August 21, 2017. By the time the clouds parted over The Lawn, the eclipse was well under way. At this latitude, it was a partial eclipse ...
04/15/2018
There are two can’t miss shutter stops on I-95 between Virginia and Florida: South of the Border and any fireworks store. Pick one or the other, and, night or day, you'll find something to frame in vivid color ...
04/01/2018
New Smyrna Beach is a miles long stretch of prime north Florida ocean front real estate. As you come across the causeway to the beach, you land on Flagler Avenue, and at the end of Flagler Avenue, you end up at The Breakers Restaurant ...
03/15/2018
What do you do when you've got another 10 hours of sitting in a car on I-95 South? Naturally, you point the camera out the window. You don't even have to frame the shot, or focus it. Just shoot. See what you get ...
03/01/2018
We finish the game day football series with the view from the hillside. For the price of a seat in the upper deck, you can enter the gates and find a place on the hillside. You can watch the game from ground level, or high up on the hill ...
02/15/2018
We continue the game day football photos with the fan's view from the stands. Most games provide a sunny afternoon under blue skies. One or two night games per season offer a chilly evening under the lights ...
02/01/2018
College football comes in unique flavors. Big programs have big stadiums. Perennial powerhouses have fanatic fans. Virginia is somewhere in the middle. It has a unique and scenic stadium, and old school fans ...
01/15/2018
They come to The Lawn for Halloween - kids from around the city. The line funnels down the West Range, in front of the amphitheater, around the South Lawn, up the East Lawn, in front of the Rotunda, and then down the West Lawn ...
01/01/2018
The downtown pedestrian mall runs from 2nd street to 7th street. The Omni hotel anchors the west end, and the open air pavilion anchors the east end. There are 120 shops and 30 restaurants on the mall, as well as an indoor ice skating ring ...
12/15/2017
It was over before it started. If you had arrived at noon, the scheduled legal rally time, you'd have missed it. The riot began in the morning - August 12, 2017. Communists attacked the arriving speakers, the governor declared a state of emergency by 11:25 am ...
12/01/2017
Railroads run North-South and East-West through the city. Bridges and crossings dot the roads. You can walk across them, drive across them, over and under them. You can be close to the trains ...
Charlottesville’s recent turmoil began when city leaders started a campaign to take down the statue of Robert E. Lee. It was a calculated campaign designed to cause racial conflict in the city, though most locals still have not comprehended that reality ...
10/27/2017
The edges of town quickly give way to the countryside. This is where the land has memory. From downtown, five miles in any direction will put you on a country road. In some directions, it's no more than three miles. The interstate is only minutes from downtown, and once you're on the interstate, any exit will take you into the countryside ...
There is a student tradition, tolerated by the city, of painting the balustrades of the railroad bridge on Rugby Road. The bridge is known as Beta Bridge. The tradition is thought to have started in the 1960s. Graffiti artists bring their own paint. Someone keeps a storage bin at one end of the bridge ...
10/25/2017
We pick up this post at the end of the previous one, and continue with a walk around The Lawn in the spring of 2015. The lede photo is an afternoon shot of Pavillion X. Notice the sandstone tint to the columns and woodwork of Pavillion X ...
Prior to closing the Rotunda in May of 2014 for engineering upgrades and restoration, the dome was stripped for resurfacing in 2013. New copper cladding was put on to seal the dome, and this became known as the copper top Rotunda. The copper was left exposed ...
West Main street runs west to east for about a mile, from the railroad bridge at 14th street to the Residence Inn at the west end of the downtown mall. About halfway from either end, it crosses over the Amtrak rails. Restaurants dot the north side of the street, almost from end to end ...
10/22/2017
Thomas Jefferson’s university lies in the heart of central Virginia. It's the lifeblood of Charlottesville. Therefore, it is fitting to inaugurate the Virginia Photo Blog with an image of Jefferson’s iconic Rotunda. The Rotunda sits at the north end of The Lawn, and anchors the design of Jefferson’s academical village ...