victims sacrifices riders, but to accommodate a four-person raft instead. As they said, this makes it wedgie-free, which is a good thing, because I’ve ridden the The Bomb Bay and Der Stuka in Wet ‘n Wild in Orlando, and at 23 meters that’s the outcome with the standard US guy’s waterwear – riders sit in the deceleration trough at the bottom and try to extract their swimsuit from their cheeks before standing up.
[By the way, companies need to stop using the retarded ‘n conjunction in product names – the apostrophe represents a missing letter, of which there’s two (and I can never remember where it’s supposed to go,) not to mention it looks incredibly ignorant.]
Now, here’s my dilemma. I like thrill rides – roller coasters, water parks, alpine slides, I-285 around Atlanta (okay, maybe not that last one) – but I almost never get to go. Because I have one friend that also likes them, and that person lives in Ohio. I have a friend that lives near Kansas City, but there’s no way in hell I could talk them into going, so even if I visited, I’d be attending on my own.
The Girlfriend doesn’t like waterparks or thrill rides. The Girlfriend’s Younger Sprog doesn’t like them either, and cannot swim (I tried pointing out that waterparks don’t actually require swimming ability, but no dice.) On this last trip to Savannah, I broached the subject anyway, seeing a waterpark on Jekyll Island – Our Female Host could probably be talked into going. But that would have left three people in our party of five just sitting around, since Our Male Host had no interest either, so it didn’t happen.
So, the last trip to an amusement park was six years ago I think, and I was robbed – Cedar Point in Ohio had recently introduced weight restrictions on many of their rides, and I was just past their limit apparently, so roughly half of the rides I wanted to go on were ruled out. This didn’t mean I got a break on the horrendous entrance fees though.
And the last time I was at a waterpark was ten years ago, when I was in my late thirties. Too old for that? Yeah, fuck off. My then-brother-in-law and I had time to spare, and because the weather was grey that day, attendance was thin and waiting almost nonexistent. Now, this actually presents a problem with waterparks, in that they run on gravity, which means you have to start up high – the better the ride, the higher the climb. When it’s crowded, you go up several stories in stairs slowly, a few steps at a time – but when it’s empty, you can go straight on up and jump into the water, to be back at the bottom in thirty seconds and ready to climb again. After a few rides you realize you’re getting exhausted.
This was at Wet AND Wild, and then-brother-in-law wouldn’t try either of the super slides mentioned above, the wussy bastard. So it was just me flossing the butt on the way down. These slides really are pretty cool, because they’re fairly steep and you achieve a nice velocity. Here’s the experience: you go over the top and accelerate quickly, told by the ride attendants to assume the mummy position (no, not walking around stiffly with your arms held straight out in front of you, but ankles crossed and arms folded over chest.) In moments, your feet are kicking up spray that’s preventing you from keeping your eyes open too far and you feel like you’re barely staying in the trough because you’re skipping off the water. Brief physics lesson here, because as I started typing this I realized it sounded wrong – both you and the water should be falling at the same rate, right? But no, because water tends to stick to surfaces a bit, and it tries to adhere to the stationary slide, so it goes down at a relatively leisurely rate, while you rocket past on your date with gravity. The slide gradually levels out, and then you hit the deeper deceleration trough at the bottom. Hit it just right, as I’ve done, and you really do skip off the water into the air, not by much, but enough to make you unlock your limbs in a reflexive attempt to brace for impact, which likely looks quite graceless. Then you hit the deeper water and plow to a stop, and if you’re big, you kick up a bow wave worthy of a log flume ride – this is, of course, when wedgie occurs. Once stopped, you try to figure out how to extract this without anyone knowing what you’re doing, even though it’s a lost cause.
Now, what the then-brother-in-law did try is a ride now gone, unfortunately, so I cannot provide the name. Take two chairs and connect them back to back, and suspend them with cables from an arm five or so meters overhead. In front of each chair affix a fire hose facing out, so they’re pointing in opposite directions. The goal is for both riders to alternate triggering their hose (leave it alone) and start the chairs swinging back and forth, timing it just right to drive the swing a bit further each time. Done correctly, you can get the thing pretty much vertical, pulling a full 180° arc – and I know this because at the top of each swing we were actually going weightless, the chair starting to pitch forward unsuspended from the chains for a moment. Since neither of us was particularly light we were quite proud of this accomplishment, and were also the last ones off the ride each time because we kept swinging long after the water was shut off. They never should have taken this ride out.
Weightlessness is one of those key things for many thrill rides, often called hang time. Rides that combine this with higher-G turns or spinning are the ones that induce the most sickness, because neither of these is something that we ever experience in our normal lives. And those are what people like me actually seek. I couldn’t tell you why this is such a rush – I can only speculate that it triggers a moment of panic in the system, the adrenaline surge of falling, and the after-effect of this, whatever it is, is pretty wild. For some, anyway – other people are mutations who find this disturbing. And if you go back up to that pic at the top and look, or check the linked article, you’ll see that the waterslide actually has a hill in the middle, meaning it induces some degree of hang time. That’s intriguing.
One ride in recent memory actually startled me, which of course made it rate highly in my book. The Power Tower at Cedar Point consists of a ring of chairs around the outside of a big column, and you can choose to get hurled into the air from a start at ground level, or you can slowly get drawn up to the top and then dropped. Or so I thought. You see, they don’t simply release the chairs and let them free fall – they propel the chairs downwards at a greater velocity than gravity. So abruptly the chair is attempting to leave you all alone at the top of the tower, having departed from under your ass rather callously. True enough, there’s a safety harness that pulls you down with the chair, so the sensation is for the barest fraction of a second, but that’s enough to trigger the panic response. In the next millisecond you feel stupid for it, and that’s the whole point.
By the way, hearing someone’s scream rapidly dwindle as they accelerate away from you really is hilarious, especially if they’re a big black guy. Call it racist if you’re stupid, but black men tend to have a certain timbre to their voices which makes the scream very rich, like hitting the high notes on an electric bass. Once you hear it you’ll lose the skepticism.
Anyway, it doesn’t look good for me checking out this new slide, but I’ll keep it in mind anyway. If you see a guy hitching in North Carolina next summer with a sign that says, “Verrückt,” that’ll be me. Though considering what that word means, it might be best not to assume anything.
The followup: I found one on eBay, would have been just over five bucks with shipping if I didn’t get into a stupid bidding war. The item is worth about two bucks, and six is the maximum I would pay for the damn thing (which, as I would come to find out, is less than half what Michaels wanted for it.) So while waiting for the bid close date to come along, I just made my own, from a brass pipe I had and a plastic cap. Works perfectly.
Now, let me introduce a few points. I am, among other things, a spider photographer, which means not only do I have close contact with them very frequently, I also seek them out, and look closely at any I might stumble across, and that’s nearly daily. There is not any experience of mine that I can point to as definitely a spider bite, though I am chewed up routinely by mosquitoes and other various parasites, not to mention encounters with bees, 
Anyway, I still think the frost image above could be better, and if I get out tomorrow morning early enough we’ll see if I can improve on it. I feel the same way about the picture at left, even though this was a re-shoot; I’d taken one the same time as the frost pic (well, not exactly the same time, a talent I haven’t yet mastered, but a few minutes later,) but the flower was in full sunlight and that was making the contrast too high to get the best results from. The petals were blown out to pure white in ‘normal’ exposures, and the rest became too dark when that was controlled for, so I did it again while using the softboxed flash. I’m pleased with the leaves in foreground and background – the flower really was poking up through the leaf litter – but the petals seem off. They’re not only a little too symmetrical, they’re closely matched with the green leaves behind, seeming more, I dunno, geometric than we’d expect. Maybe it’s just me. I do like the prominence of the curled petal, which is why I chose this position and angle.
This is what’s so hard about teaching composition, because countless different factors come into play for any image, and that’s just considering one style of shooting, of which everyone has their own. It’s easy to overwhelm new photographers with loads of compositional elements, and no way to define which should be used for any particular image or approach. Here, some dried pokeberries (genus Phytolacca) had produced an interesting effect with the shiny black seeds poking through the decrepit remains of the berries – somehow, the mockingbirds did not discover them this year. But, just using the posts on composition that I’ve made so far, how many different elements were actually used here?
It’s not just one image, either – I shot the same subject under a diffusing cloth to simulate light shade, in hazy conditions on another day (seen here,) and at night in completely controlled lighting. I used other portions of the plant or the lawn as backgrounds and even hung a few leaves from a wire close behind for the night shot (because the flash wasn’t going to 
In recognition (or defense) of the previous post, I’m much more used to expressing myself in this manner, letting nature take most of the credit. Anyone is free to ascribe their own words, feelings, or impressions to the images. Granted, it’s strictly visual, which might be considered lacking if someone didn’t have their own experiences with autumn, but in all other cases, our associative minds can take the visual input and conjure up the sounds, smells, and even temperatures that are cataloged right alongside.
Yet, nature has a pretty good grasp on things, and the mother who deposited these eggs was following a behavioral plan dictated by thousands of years of selection – unless, of course, something went wrong. Of 138 eggs (yes I counted them, but in the image where I could Photoshop a colored dot to hold my place,) four are visibly non-viable, and who knows how many more genetic defects might be present, or were present in the previous generation? It remains possible that the mother who laid these was a bit funny in the head. However, I’m betting that this is business as usual and these little wrigglies are well-equipped to deal with the conditions. The newborn is visible in this pic too, just right of center, so as you can imagine from that, following their progress once they leave the distinctive surrounds of the egg cluster would be next to impossible. While I might find larger caterpillars later on, there would be little chance of determining if they were these hatchlings or not, and even keeping a few in a terrarium would require finding the right food for them, which would be only a wild guess on my part. I’ll assume nature’s got a handle on it.
Crepuscular rays are the beams of light, typically from the sun, that emerge from a break in the clouds to throw a spotlight effect someplace – we can generally make them out because of the humidity and dust in the air being illuminated. My example seen here is almost the opposite, being a shadow thrown by the cloud blocking the sunlight, but essentially the same effect. Taken at sunrise, there needed to be several conditions in place to see this. The first is a high-altitude layer of clouds forming a screen across the sky. The second is the lower cumulus cloud, the puffy one in the image, which is hundreds or perhaps thousands of meters lower that the screen layer. And of course the sun had to be very low on the horizon so that its light would not only be thrown upwards against the underside of the screen layer, but also blocked by the puffy cloud.
