Revenki's photos

Near Pike's Peak. Notice the distortion in the trees to the left...oops. Taken at 10mm with a Sigma 10-20.

Near Pike's Peak.

Dead trees in an old burn zone near Pike's Peak.

Blades of grass in a patch of pebbly snow, near Pike's Peak.

A very, very small crop out of an otherwise useless shot of the Front Range near Mt. Evans, as seen from Park Meadows Mall south of Denver. Playing around with the new Sigma 10-20. I think it's going to take some getting used to. For one thing, this is poorly exposed despite being in automatic mode (too damned cold outside to monkey with the settings).

Looking west from Park Meadows Mall, south of Denver. Another not-so-hot experiment with the new Sigma 10-20. Like the other shot here, the exposure is out of whack, and the uncropped image shows some pincushion (still visible in the trees here in the lower left corner). Took some other (even less good) shots at longer focal lengths, and the distortion disappears pretty quickly as the lens moves away from 10.

Inside the Soyuz trainer at JSC.

Inside the Soyuz trainer at JSC. Sitting in the commander's seat, I decided I was about a foot too tall to ever be a cosmonaut.

One petal of a Russian-built APAS docking adapter.

An office tower (formerly Enron?) in downtown Houston.

Braaaaaaaaains!!! This was a work in progress, which I unfortunately neglected to photograph when complete. It's a chunk of Great Stuff insulating foam, sprayed in coils on a painter's dropcloth, and split while the foam was still rising with a piece of fishing line to form two lobes. The first attempt at painting it didn't quite take (as seen here, following a bath of ammonia to strip the shellac undercoat). But the second attempt was truly breathtaking -- a faintly greenish-gray undertone, with traces of arterial red and venous blue in the crenellations applied between several layers of clear shellac and finally overlaid with clear shellac mixed with a tiny amount of irridescent acrylic base. Glistening and not a little gruesome. It was a performance prop for a friend's kid. The completed item was mounted under a plastic display dome, with a number of wire "probes" attached to the crenellations, to form a "control unit". Regrettably, it was most likely destroyed in Katrina. Until I stumbled across this picture today, I hadn't thought to ask about it's status.

About every six months, a mouse will find its way into my house. They are usually met with all-out, scorched-earth chemical warfare, but as you can tell by the poison block he'd been gnawing on for the past week, this guy was some sort of mutant übermaus who not only ate the stuff but played with the block like a cat. The last straw was when he pushed it down the stairs in the middle of the night, and it banged against my bedroom door at 4:00am with a sound like a gunshot. The mouse had to die. And it just happens that even the poison-eating übermaus was no match for a clip trap and a little dab of margarine.

A row of Christmas candles on the fireplace. I bumped the overall gamma up a bit to bring out the mossy rock background, but the color is all natural.

Garland, lights, and the titular ornament, hanging above the fireplace.

North of Calumet, September 1996. The little arrow near the top shows the total snowfall from the previous winter (1995-1996), which at the time was the second-highest on record. Yes, that really is 31 feet of snow. Of course, the thermometer itself is a little misleading -- I am not, in fact, four and a half feet tall.

An afterthought souvenir I picked up on Wenceslas Square on the way out of Prague. And then nearly shattered in the Memphis airport when it fell out of my backpack while I was running to catch my connecting flight back. It wasn't the souvenir I meant to buy, but had a cool and kinda dangerous look to it. Plus, the cute Czech salesgirl was awfully persuasive. (And yes, I'm aware the depth of field is too shallow, but this one had the best refraction pattern.)

They're killers, they are.

After an hour or so of shoveling. After having already shoveled as much if not more snow off the deck a week earlier.