Going to show that you never know what is going to produce the winning shots…
August 29, 2021, 6:30 PM
On Wednesday, August 25, Elyse and I got together with two friends of ours, Kyle and Pete, and we went up to the Ellicott City area, where we went on a hiking adventure. We hiked up through the remains of what was once part of St. Mary’s College, and which has since become part of Patapsco Valley State Park. The goal was to visit “Hell House”, which is the remains of a structure on the former campus. Elyse was most familiar with this area, so she led the way. The former campus contains the remains of a number of buildings, and we had a pretty fun time there overall. Getting to Hell House was a bit of a challenge, considering that the path is not necessarily obvious and required climbing some steep slopes, but in the end, we made it there.
The hike itself wasn’t too photogenic, but we did see a few things:
Continue reading…Categories: Friends, Howard County, Photography
Christmas in Baltimore…
December 29, 2019, 8:35 AM
So Christmas was pretty fun this year. On Christmas Eve, we had dinner with some of Elyse’s father’s relatives, and then on Christmas Day, we got together with some of Elyse’s mother’s relatives. This was my first holiday with my new, smaller stomach, and so I was still getting used to its new capacity, figuring out how much I should take, what will be tolerated, and so on. I believe that I overdid it by a tad on Christmas Eve, likely by eating foods that I wasn’t ready for yet, but I more or less nailed it on Christmas. When you have a gastric sleeve like I did, you have to chew everything really well, and also not drink and eat at the same time. Generally speaking, you have to give your stomach time to process the food that it just took in before resuming liquid intake. Also, if you put too much in at once, it will get rejected, either by getting sent through to the intestines, or it’s coming back up. But anyway…
After dinner on Christmas, Elyse and I went planespotting near BWI. We had discusssed doing this for some time, even before our planespotting adventure at National, and on this particular occasion, it just worked out. We were already in the Glen Burnie area, I had my real camera with me, and we had about an hour or so of daylight to play with. The location where you typically planespot for BWI is actually specially designated for that purpose: the Thomas A. Dixon, Jr. Aircraft Observation Area. It’s a very nice area that’s operated by Anne Arundel County, with a walking trail, playground equipment for the kids, and plenty of space to watch planes take off and land. On this particular day, planes were landing over the park, and so I got some landing photos. When it comes to planespotting at BWI, it can, for the most part, be summed up in one word: Southwest. BWI is a focus city for Southwest, and as such, sees more Southwest traffic than anything else, and that also means a lot of Boeing 737s.
Categories: Airplanes, Anne Arundel County, Baltimore, Christmas, Howard County, Weight loss
Returning to Scott’s house…
December 30, 2016, 11:29 PM
You know how it goes when you have like-minded friends. On December 28, Elyse and I got together with mutual friend Aaron Stone, and we took a field trip to the Baltimore area, revisiting various places of interest in order to show Aaron, including the Ames at Diamond Point Plaza and Scott’s house. The way that we planned the trip, since our main objectives were mostly dependent on having daylight, the plan was to spend a little time at Diamond Point, a little bit of time at H&H Outdoors (a military surplus store in Baltimore), and then have a large block of time at the Bauers’.
The Ames at Diamond Point was, for the most part, unchanged from our previous visit. We spotted a set of movable stairs near the front of the store that wasn’t there in our previous visits, but otherwise, it was the same:
Categories: Baltimore, Elyse, Friends, Howard County, Urban exploration, Vintage business
A few more thoughts about “Scott’s House”…
April 24, 2016, 8:05 PM
Today, I released the “Scott’s House” set in Photography, which covers the visit that Elyse and I made to the former home of Scott Alan Bauer back in March. While the photo set gave a somewhat dry presentation of what Elyse and I found in the house, the preparation of that set raised a lot of questions that I will likely never get answers to, mostly revolving around the mystery of what exactly happened to this family.
From what I could tell, the house, in its final form, was home to only one person: Scott Bauer himself. Only the master bedroom contained a bed, one bedroom had no furniture in it to speak of, and the third bedroom had clearly been converted to an office at some point. In the bedroom-turned-office, some of the paperwork made me think that this home, leading up to its abandonment in late 2002, was not as happy as it once was. One of the documents was a statement from Howard County social services regarding past due child support. So it would appear that a divorce had occurred, and things had not been going well since. Likewise, on an MVA notice, Bauer had insurance and emissions violations regarding his truck. Makes me wonder if he had major financial problems in his final years at the house.
In any case, what caused Bauer to ultimately abandon the house and all of his belongings, as well as what happened to him afterward, remains a mystery.
Categories: Howard County, Photography, Urban exploration
Exploring an abandoned house…
March 20, 2016, 7:21 PM
This past Thursday, Elyse and I explored an abandoned house in the Elkridge area of Howard County. This was my first “real” venture into urban exploration, and also the first “operational” photo shoot with the new Nikon SLR. I have had at least a casual interest in urban exploration for a long time, but never did a full-on exploration before. The closest things to urban exploration that I had done prior to this were visiting the buildings on Afton Mountain on several different occasions (but not penetrating them very much, if at all, on any of these occasions), and also that relatively brief visit to Lorton Reformatory last year. Elyse, on the other hand, has a good bit of experience over a number of years with urban exploration. So I was in good hands here. After all, Elyse clearly looked and acted like she knew what she was doing in Lorton, while I was more the clueless sidekick, as I didn’t know what I was doing, and was more or less unprepared for that one.
This time, I was ready. I had a headlamp like Elyse had at Lorton along with a few other flashlights, plus, remembering the strong smell of mold at Afton Mountain, I brought a respirator that I used to carry in my backpack to protests back in my activism days, but never used in that context. I also brought some rubber gloves so that I wouldn’t have to actually touch anything with my bare hands. I didn’t know what had been growing on anything at that house, so the gloves gave me more freedom to actually touch things that I wouldn’t otherwise be willing to do.
We had to do a short, but mostly uphill, hike to get to the house, and here it is:
Categories: Cameras, Elyse, Howard County, Photography, Urban exploration
I completely nerded out on Sunday, and it was awesome…
June 24, 2014, 10:21 PM
I went out on a miniature road trip on Sunday, and I had a blast, taking photos of anything that vaguely interested me. It was more or less spur of the moment, when you consider that for what ended up being a photography trip, I only had my cell phone, and then, I didn’t bring my spare battery along. Thus it was a bit of a continual battle to keep a sufficient charge on the phone with only the car charger, but somehow, I managed, and the results came out pretty well despite my leaving my real camera at home. The way this trip came about is that I wanted to go up to and explore Westminster, Maryland. I’ve been wanting to explore Westminster for a while, ever since my father took an overnight business trip to Westminster a few years ago and I didn’t find out about it until it was too late in the day to go up and visit, because Dad didn’t realize that Westminster was as close to me as it was. That sucked, because I would have totally gone up if I had known. I’ll gladly travel an hour or so on relatively short notice to hang out with family.
So early Sunday morning, I just decided to go up and see what there was. I like doing these sorts of trips, because it’s basically a scouting trip, seeing if there’s anything that I want to explore and photograph in more detail in the future. Getting to Westminster is pretty easy: turn onto Georgia Avenue (MD 97) and take it all the way to Westminster. Seriously, it’s that easy. I got to Westminster just as the sun was coming up. After a quick drive through the main commercial area along Route 140, I located the downtown area.
The downtown area in Westminster has what I consider an unusual feature: a single-track rail line for the Maryland Midland Railway running diagonally through the main intersection in downtown. Main Street goes one way, and Liberty Street and Railroad Avenue (both MD 27) go the other way, and the rail line runs diagonally across the intersection. I would have loved to have seen a train come through here while I was in the area, but unfortunately, I did not get to see that this time.