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Ice Ice Baby

Just a follow up to my post yesterday on the First Night Festivities in State College. I went back down last night and took some more photos of the ice sculptures. Ice is a difficult subject to photograph. I tried three different approaches each of which has a unique perspective.

The daylight shots show the detail in the ice better than any of the others but just don’t capture the wet glistening look. The figures could be made out of plastic for all you can tell from the photos.

For the night shots, I tried taking photos both with the flash on and with it off. With the night shots, the ice takes on the transparent look that is missing from the daylight shots. The flash also gives you a nice glistening look that is missing from the other too approaches. Unfortunately, you lose some of the detail that you can see in the daylight shots. Also the flash overpowers much of the front lighting that the scene has and the result isn’t the same as it appears to the naked eye.

That leaves night shots without a flash. Of course that approach presents some exposure, focus, and camera shake challenges but they are overcomeable. Without the flash, you are able to see both the front and back light that is illuminating the scene. Unfortunately, I think the long exposures over accentuate the available light to the detriment of the subject itself. I think you lose too much detail in the subject (of course, it could just be that I wasn’t able to find the correct combination of lighting and exposure).

Here are some shots from yesterday that demonstrate what I am talking about.

First for completeness sake, yesterday I showed the preliminary ice sketch of the continental soldier, and I wanted to show you the finished product. Here’s yesterday’s daylight shot along with two photos from last night – first with, then without flash.

Here are some shots that really highlight the differences from the three approaches.
This sculpture is of Admiral Peary who is generally considered to be the first person to reach the North Pole (how appropriate for an ice sculpture).

This is probably my favorite shot from last night. It was taken with flash, and is just part of the Jeremy Rose/Afleet Alex sculpture.

I’ve update the online album by adding last nights photos. You can view both yesterday afternoon’s and last night’s photos by clicking here.

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And a Happy Birthday Dad!

For many years I would call Daddy at midnight to wish him a Happy Birthday as well as a Happy New Year. I eventually stopped once they moved to Chicago because I woke him a couple years in a row. I do still think of him (and Mommy) at midnight though. Wish I could call and wake them now.

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First Night State College

Like many communities around the country, State College likes to offer a family oriented alcohol free alternative to New Year’s Eve partying (personally I consider it a supplement to my alcohol based celebrating 🙂 ) called First Night State College. The centerpiece of the celebration is a bunch of ice sculptures throughout the town. This afternoon, I went out and took some photos of the ice carvers at work to give you a feel for some of the cool (no pun intended) stuff that they have.

Most of the main large sculptures are on Allen Street, in the very heart of downtown State College just across from the main entrance to the University. The town fathers have closed off a block of Allen Street to house the sculptures. At the head of the block stands this sculpture of William Penn.

This shot it taken from the other end of the street. The ice artist here is working on a sculpture of a continental soldier. If you click on the photo a couple of times, it will blow up in your browser and you can get a good look at the some of the other sculptures spread down the street all in various stages of completion (just for a historical reference, the five story building in the distance behind the sculptor is the Metzger building where Pat Daugherty and I lived from 1966 to 1968).

Here’s another shot of an ice guy working on a sculpture of jockey Jeremy Rose riding Kentucky Derby winner Afleet Alex. Jeremy is a local kid from nearby Bellefonte.

I’ve uploaded a bunch of shots of the dozen or so sculptures on Allen Street. Click here to see them.

I’ll be downtown tonight and will get some more shots of the sculptures. I expect that they will look quite unique in the night lighting.

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I’ve added a calendar

If you’ll look to the sidebar on the right, you’ll notice that I have added a calendar. You can move forward and backward a month or year at a time by clicking on the > and > and
At the moment that’s about all you can do, but in the future I plan on adding more function to it. Eventually, we should be able to use it to navigate to all posts made on a specific date simply by clicking on the appropriate date in the calendar. I will also probably find a way to highlight everyone’s birthday in the calendar too.

Hope it adds to the blog.

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A New Goody – "On This Day"

While doing research for the Upcoming Birthdays Countdown, I found a website called New Links, which had this post on how to add an “On This Day” function to your blog. The code to do so was fairly simple so I’ve decided to add it to our Blog.

What the code generates is a series of links to web resources (I’ve chosen to implement just the BBC, Wikipedia, Encyclopedia Britannica, NY Times, and the History Channel links) that publish historical information on what happened on any date in history. The links are located just after the dateline that appears before the lead post of the day (look just above the title of this post). Try clicking on any of the links above to see what historical events happened on December 23rd.

The links should be repopulated back through the archives so he should be able to check out dates on any of Legends of the Fall blog entries.

Have a go at it.

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Look to the right

Following up on Marilyn’s suggestion that we document everyone’s birthdates, I’ve now added a section to the sidebar on the right that has a countdown to everyone’s birthday. If you want to know what the exact date for someone is, simply click on the “Upcoming Birthday’s” title and you will be taken to the thread where everyone posted the birthdays of their immediate family members (sorry Shannon, I left your “family members” off the chart).

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End of year Penn State sports wrap-up

Just for sake of completeness, I thought I’d give everyone a final wrap-up (OK asemi-final wrap-up – we still have a bowl game left but that’s next year 🙂 ) of the PSU Fall sports scene. My hospitalization three weeks ago got in the way of my weekend posts and it turns out my superstitious fears were justified.

In case you don’t remember, Penn State’s five fall sports programs (football, women’s volleyball, field hockey, and men’s and women’s soccer) had gone through an unprecedented Big Ten season. The teams each won a Big Ten championship going a combined 49-1 with the sole loss being the football teams last second loss at Michigan. Each of the teams advanced to post season play (the football team is headed to the Orange Bowl while the other four squads all competed in NCAA tournaments.

As I reported earlier, the #8 ranked Field Hockey team was the first to taste defeat when they lost to #6 ranked American University. As I’ve also previously mentioned, UncleLar niece Natalie Berrena (shown here with me during our Santa Crawl) was named first team All-American.

The next team to fall by the wayside was the men’s soccer team. The guys won their first two NCAA matches to make it to the Sweet Sixteen but fell to Creighton in a 3-1 loss at home. That loss happened while I was in the hospital.

The women’s soccer team had more success. The made it to the College Cup, soccer’s equivalent of the Final Four, the weekend after I was hospitalized. Unfortunately, the way that the College Cup draw worked, #2 ranked Penn State had to meet #1 ranked Portland in the semifinals. Both Penn State and Portland were undefeated going into their semifinal match and the consensus opinion was that the victor of this game would probably take home the national championship. The two teams battled to a 0-0 first half tie. This was the first time all year that Portland had been held scoreless in the first half of their game. That defensive battle continued as both teams failed to score in the second half also. They continued play through two 10 minute sudden death overtimes, so after 110 minutes of soccer play neither team was able to eke out a goal. They meant that the winner would be determined by a shoot-out. Portland’s two time Hermann Trophy winner (soccer’s equivalent to the Heisman trophy) nailed the final kick of the shootout to give Portland the 4-3 shootout win. Because the game ended in a shootout, it will go into the record book as a tie. That means that Penn State becomes the first undefeated team in NCAA soccer history to not win the title. As expected Portland went on to claim the crown with a 4-0 victory over UCLA two days later.

Two weekends after my operation, the women’s volleyball team took on Tennessee in the NCAA Regional Semifinal. The regionals were being held on Penn State’s home court and the #2 ranked Nittany Lions were huge favorites to win at home and advanced to the Final Four. Unfortunately, one of Penn State’s star players, Christa Harmotta, had gone down with a season ending injury in Penn State’s last home regular season match and the loss showed. Tennessee pulled off a huge upset knocking off Penn State in four games (that made three staight weekends where one of our teams lost – all no doubt due to my failure to make my regular weekend blog post). The Lady Vols then went on to beat Missouri the next day and advanced to the Final Four.

Two of UncleLar’s volleyball buddies did receive post season honors however. Senior libero Kaleena Walters (also shown here in a Santa Crawl photo) was named B10 Ten Defensive Player of the Year and third team All-American.

Senior setter Sam Tortorello (of course in a Santa Crawl photo) was a unanimous pick as B10 Player of the Year and was also named a first team All-American.

Since the bowl game is scheduled for next year, i.e. January 3rd, I thought this would a good time to make a year end wrap up. As promissed, you won’t have to put up with all these sports reports in the future (of course, that’s partially because our basketball team sucks so much – we did beat New Hampshire (sorry Shannon) this week though).