On blogging, course design, photography and training (Fairfax, 10/20/2015)

I am having a comfortable landing (I hope) just good, there were a lot of loose ends are being tied down, like in the closing of the year.  I have therefore not written much these past two months; I am way to busy for that.  Yes, consider this a good thing.  I just have too darn much to do or to look forward to.  Here are some of the things:

1. It is the end of the sailing season; if we are lucky we'll get a few more nice days in.  As a rule of thumb, we try to sail on black Friday (the Friday after Thanksgiving for you non-U.S.A. residents, when most of the people seem to go Christmas shopping) and that generally is my last one for the year, at least on our boat.
2. I am done with my class designs for this years' classes and now I have one and a half month of heavy teaching (and travel) to look forward to (the photo below was taken at 8 pm in a Starbucks in Fairfax while I was writing this blog).
3. I am starting to think about new classes: a photography class, a hydrology class and a class on soil amendments.  How is that for diversity?
4. I have got some other irons in the fire that I cannot write about (yet).
5. In addition the days are getting shorter (bring on Seasonal Affected Disorder or SAD, at least for some, but I think we all slow down when fall and winter rolls around)
6. Finally, one of my co-workers is pregnant, which is great, but it will probably mean a more intensive travel schedule for us next year.  If I was a mother of a new born I would not want to go on overnight trips without the kiddo, especially if I was breast feeding.

On the road again.  My evening coffee at Starbucks, waiting for my computer to start up.

So yes this blog may suffer somewhat.  But I will really try to keep it up with a few interesting items, maybe not about my travels throughout the state, but more about my job and research.  I do not want to make this a "dear diary," so don't worry.

If you write a blog your self you know that there are many pages behind a blog.  I can check how many people read my posts, broken down by post, by day, by week, month or even year.  I know how readers got to my blog: by accident, via another website, what search engine they used, even what browser they used, you name it.  I even know what country they come from (surprise, most of my readers come from the U.S.A., but Russians are running second, followed by Germans and the French).

A lot of bloggers are in it to make money.  Yes, I could allow Google or Amazon to put advertisement on my blog and every time you would click on an add, I would get maybe 5 cents or something like it.  There are even blog posts about boosting traffic to your site like this one: <click here>.  This is how some bloggers are hoping to strike it rich and this is why they create these outrageous blogs.  Who knows, I may eventually break down and allow adds on my site, in the hope that you the readers will make me rich!  We'll see.

As I mentioned before, I started this blog for myself; I wanted to get back to photography and get into writing.  My wife and I had so much experience working all over the world, we felt that those experiences needed to be documented, if not only for our daughter, for future generations.  Moreover, I feel I have so much more to give.

So yes! I am going to teach a photography course again.  The last one I taught was in 1977 while serving in the Dutch Army as the Installation's photographer.  It is fun doing research on photography, or at least slowly trying to get slides together on items such as ISO setting and photographic noise (yes there is such a thing; we used to call it grain when we worked in film).

I took a photograph with my cell phone of a book case in my office from a distance of 12 feet at three different ISO settings (Auto, 100 and 800).  As you can see the ISO 100 setting produced the least noise, the problem is the shutter speed (your lens has to stay open longer), and at low light the camera set at ISO 100 might be subject to movement/shaking of the camera/phone.

I know most of it, but now try to put it in a three hour class that is useful for stormwater inspectors.  Who knows, I may need to make it a six hour class.  We could do so much, even a practicum and have them go out and take pictures; although then I would need to limit the class size (we usually limit our class size to 40 but as a solo teacher I could not manage 40 in the field).  There are really so many photo tips and tricks I could teach them (and you on my blog; if you want to learn more, let me know and leave me a comment).

As I mentioned, I will also be teaching a class on hydrology and in a future post I will be writing a little bit about that.  I found some really neat stuff on some of the history of stormwater management, some of which has fascinated me since I was 18 and enjoyed observing in Yemen when I worked there in the mid 1980s.  Yet another subject dear to my heart.  Stay tuned!

Richmond (10/5/2015)

It's been an interesting weekend, and we in Virginia had it easy compared to the Carolina's.  Let me explain:

When I took the first picture on Wednesday September 30, the clouds were building and the weather outlook was for a lot of rain and a possible hurricane over the weekend.  Predictions were at the time that hurricane Joaquin was going to come right up (what we call) the main stem of the Chesapeake Bay as a category 1 or maybe even a 2 storm, and for us who lived through hurricane Isabel, we feared the worst.  I took this photo, in anticipation that it would look very different a week later.

A picture of the James River in Downtown Richmond from Brown's Island Park taken on 9/30/2015.

There was this European model out there that was sowing doubt in our mind.  In the past the European hurricane model had been the most reliable, so were were all somewhat skeptical about the initial dire predictions of the other models, and we did not really make many hurricane preparations.  From the look of it some people did, because when the I visited our local Lowe's on Friday after we were sure that the storm was going to pass us by, the return line with people returning unused generators (still in the box) was very long!

The next photograph I took on the 5th of October after the mountain region of Virginia received a lot of rain and you can see that the water is much muddier and that it has risen a lot.  There was a sandbar in front of one of the bridge pilings and that is now underwater; moreover the first section of the piling is almost completely submerged.  What a little rain in the watershed will do!  Actually the week before September 30, the mountainous region of Virginia received close to 8 inches of rain in 2 days (for my non-American readers that is 200 mm) and during the "hurricane weekend" or the weekend before the 5th we got another 2 to 3 inches (50 to 75 mm).  After a little lag time as they call it in hydrology (it takes a few days for all that water to flow down hill), we saw the water levels rise.

The James River on October 5, 2015.

As of the writing of this blog (10/8/2015) the water level in the river is back to the level of the first picture.  Again, this is nothing compared to what the people in South Carolina are going through.  My hearth goes out to them.  The climatological extremes seem to be getting more frequent, fires out west, floods in the east.  As predicted, global warming is slowly expressing itself isn't it?