The Year in Review: The best collision of the year

Usually when I go to a crash scene it involves some kind of motor vehicle.  I got lucky this year and saw two pretty spectacular impacts outside of the roadway.

The annual Bloodless Bullfights at the Portuguese Hall concludes the Festa celebration and is one of the summer assignments I look forward to. One of the featured moments is watching several Forcados try to tackle a not so happy bull who has spent the last 20 minutes being stuck by a guy on horseback.  Yeah I always root for the bull to put a hurtin' on these guys.

The second collision is probably my favorite.  In the words of Chris Berman; "Back, back, back, back, back......it's gone"  The only thing that would have made this shot better would be the ball falling just out of reach but crashing into the fence is good enough for me.

The Year in Review: The last game

Tracy High bid farewell to the current Wayne Schneider Stadium and Peter B. Kyne Field as they will be demolished a new modern complex built in its place with construction slated to begin this summer.

All the history, the championships and memories are in the history books now.  The final game was played under the stadium's aging lights on the grass and mud that many a Bulldog player wore proudly on his uniform.

It was good to be there to watch the team take the field one last time,  a little piece of history for Tracy High.  Construction is scheduled to take one year and in 2013 I hope to be on the sideline as the Bulldogs take their home field once again.

The Year in Review: The cheesiest photo of the year

After a while all the high school graduation pictures start to look the same.  Kids in robes-people smiling-people cheering-etc.  it gets challenging to come up with something fresh or different.

At the Tracy High graduation this guy wanted something a little different than the traditional grip-and-grin diploma photo.  he decided to strike a pose with one of the school board members and I knew I had my shot for the day from the graduation ceremonies.

A life of its own

I was dog tired after my 21-hour day photographing the lunar eclipse and sunrise at the Isenberg Crane Reserve outside Lodi so I waited to post a short story and photos of the eclipse until Sunday night.  I wrote a brief story and uploaded eight pictures of the eclipse and put them on the website just after 9:30 p.m. on Sunday.
I checked the story before I went to bed and saw 1 comment and a handful of views on the web counter.

Arriving at work this morning I checked the website homepage and noticed something odd.  The eclipse story was at the top of the most viewed articles?  How could it get a couple thousand page views overnight I wondered.  Top stories usually have at least 4,000 page views or so and then I noticed the web counter on the eclipse story. Shortly after 10 a.m. the eclipse story I posted Sunday evening had already tallied 110, 218 page views.  WTF?!?

Now 4:30 Monday afternoon and that same story is at 111,527 page views.  Somehow the story made it the Google or Yahoo search engines and a query for "Lunar Eclipse" calls up my story and pictures as a result.  It's kind of weird how things take on a life of their own on the internet.  My photos and story have been bouncing around the globe and may have been viewed all across the country and other continents.

it just seems odd to me how a photo taken in a dark. chilly field outside Lodii is suddenly seen everywhere.  My photo made to to some science website where the photo was linked with images of the eclipse collected from San Francisco, Los Angeles,  Pheonix Arizona, Sidney Australia and Rikuzentakata Japan.  How does a photo from a wetlands near Lodi fit in to the global picture?

A Google images gallery even had some of my Snapshots blog pictures from the eclipse.  It is true once it is published on the web it takes a life of its own and can appear in the least likely place you might think.  The story now I guess is our most viewed web story ever, easily surpassing our Sandra Cantu coverage, and it did that in less than one day.  It will be interesting to see what the final tally for people viewing the story will be, I'm guessing it will come close to the 150,000 mark and then interest will die out.

Nice to know someone thought my pictures were worth seeing, I guess it made my cold wait in the morning mist worth it.  Funny thing I think the sunrise photos I took right after the eclipse were the best shots of the morning.  Maybe I will have to look and see if they are making their way across the globe too.

Rise and fall

I decided to make a solo trip out of town to try and capture the lunar eclipse scheduled for early Saturday morning as the moon set in the west.  Since I was going to be up already I decided to try for some sunrise art and decided to do my photography over at the Isenberg Crane Reserve outside Lodi.

All my prior trip to Isenberg have given some beautiful sunset and sunrise photo opportunities.  The only problem I might have would be fog from the wetlands or a low cloud deck either of which could obscure my view of the eclipse.  I arrived at Isenberg just after 5 a.m. and began to rig my camera.  All the eclipse photos were taken with my 300 mm lens and the 1.4 extender.  The lower the moon sank toward the horizon the more it dipped behind clouds.  Just after entering totality around 6 a.m. the moon disappeared for good in the morning mists.  I was able to capture some of the moon's eerie orange glow as it bathed in the Earth's shadow.

With the eclipse over I waited in the chilly morning air for daybreak.  Sandhill cranes cackled all around me as dawn began to illuminate the fog and clouds above the wetlands.  Clouds made for a pretty sunrise as the Sun's orb rose  in the cold gray sky.  Flights of thousands of cranes and other water birds circled above as the dawn broke.

I photographed the procession of cranes and other wetlands visitors as they left for their daily flights until about 7 a.m. and then chilled to the bone I headed for the nearest cup of coffee.

The next lunar eclipse for us is going to be in 2014 so I have some time to warm up and get ready.  Sunrise and sunsets at Isenberg are always spectacular and I look forward to a return trip for pictures of their colorful hues.