Almost everything changes with time… my hobbies, my possessions, even my appearance. There are some things that will never change… such as my family. We’ll grow, and eventually we’ll pass, but my wife and my kids will always be just that. Love to you all.

1/100 f/4.5

It turns out that for a small donation the folks in the gift shop will take you up in an old elevator to the top of the tower.  (The bottom of the tower can be seen to the left in my photo of the front of the cathedral.)  It was rather cold that day and I think the people from the shop thought I was a little crazy to be going up to the cold windy tower.  But then again, anyone lugging a full-sized DSLR around is probably at least a little crazy.  

Besides the still photos, I also did some playing around with a panorama app on my smartphone. These panoramas had proved to be kind of fun for me, so I did one out of each of the four windows of the tower.  It would have been really cool to have a full 360-degree panorama from the tower, but since I was shooting from inside the tower we’ll just have to use our imagination.

Many of my still photos from the trip can be found my England 2012 gallery.  There are lots of pictures, including time in Harrogate, York, Fountains Abbey, Reading, and London.  There are also a few panoramas that I saved as flat images in the gallery, and even a couple on which I attempted a perspective correction to make it look a little more normal.  Perhaps I’ll blog about those in a future post.  For today, here are the four views out the tower windows at Westminster Cathedral.

Click on the images below to start each panorama.  Once they load, I recommend using the full-screen button to view them large and then use the mouse to drag your way around each composite.  Enjoy!

One:

Two:

Three:

Four:

Cisco leaping the horse hurdles at Great Brook.

Lots of people were at Millennium Park the day I visited. Best I could hope for here would be a shot where no one person or group stand out from the background. I’ve seen this Cloud Gate sculpture photographed many times, so it was nice to be there to try my own hand at it.

People in the Cloud Gate area.

I often get asked to take photos of various knitting projects. This project was no exception. The shawl itself is beautiful, but I was even more delighted at how lovely this photo of it came out.

Did a wedding this spring and the cherry tree in the yard at the hall was in full bloom at the ceremony. This was where the family decided to have the group photos, for obvious reasons.

I was walking through the yard the other day and noticed that the cherry tree has blossomed. If I had planned it out I might have used a diffuser and/or a reflector, but for a drive-by shooting this came out quite nice.

It was getting pretty late by the time I got past the Lincoln Memorial. I turned back on my way to the next sight and was instantly impressed with how it looked from this angle with all the lights on surrounding it. Pretty impressive indeed.

A little more symmetrical than my usual style but I thought it was interesting nonetheless. These are the fountains of the World War II Memorial with the Washington Memorial in the background.