By the way…I’ve probably pointed it out before, but I will again: did you know that Highway 1804 (on the Bismarck side of the river) is numbered for the Lewis & Clark expedition’s trip to the northwest? And did you also know that Highway 1806 (on the Mandan side of the river) is numbered for the expedition’s return?
There were some redeeming moments to the trip, however, such as the few minutes I spent on north 26th Street where it turns to gravel. That’s where this windmill stood, with some darkish clouds rolling in from the west. That’s where I got tonight’s photo. I did a run-n-gun kind of thing where I didn’t even get out of the truck. I simply rolled down the window, shot away, and moved along. Sometimes I can take an amazingly crisp handheld photo, even with one of the cheaper lenses in my arsenal. This was one of thoes days, too.
I was going to do some sort of sunset thing, but that really didn’t pan out. It’s rare that one can actually plan a photography outing, so we take what we can get. I also found some other neat stuff to photograph. Some I’ll have to go back for, but that’s why I keep a GPS stuck to my camera bag or clipped into the dash of the truck. When the opportunity arises, I’ll be there!
If you haven’t tried 26th Street all the way north, I highly recommend it. Have fun…it goes a LONG ways!
I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for sunset, and then time got away from me. This was one of my “old standby” locations, and I dashed to it just in time to capture the last bits of color from the waning sunset.
I just love old farmsteads, old wellheads, and old windmills. This weekend at the downtown street fair I ran into my junior high art teacher, Mr. Paukert, who I haven’t seen since 1982 or so. As it turns out, he has an eye for the same sort of North Dakota features, and was selling his work. I was glad to see him and to be reminded that I’m not the only one with a soft spot for the sights of North Dakota.
Little PJ is such a treasure. He was patient when I’d jump out of the truck for a quick photo. He held my finger while we drove, and smiled at all my funny faces. I’m so blessed to be his daddy!
There’s a lot of other neat stuff to see west of Mandan. I hope to post the photosin the near future.
This particular windmill sits along a little gravel road northeast of Bismarck, north of Sterling. We have so much to see just around Bismarck-Mandan that it’ll take a LONG time to exhaust the possibilities! But I’m trying…
I’ve said it repeatedly on this blog: I’m a novice when it comes to photography. I’m trying to learn, however, and that’s half the fun. There are a few things I’ve learned since the day I marched into Bob’s Photo and threw down for my trusty Canon digital camera:
1- Photography is all about the moment. Capturing a photo of something boring with technical perfection and artistic genius produces a perfectly boring photo.
2- As soon as you have more than one lens in your arsenal, you almost always have the wrong one on the camera at any given moment!
3- The only way to get a nice portfolio of decent pictures is to sink a pantload of time into chasing them.
There are others, but those simple truths should be sufficient for now. But let’s talk about another lesson: shutter speed. I decided to try for some different effects on this windmill, located in a field east of Bismarck:
By watching the meter in my viewfinder and adjusting accordingly, I was able to keep these photos consistent for exposure and color, only affecting the way the motion of the blades was captured.
One pitfall of a narrow aperture (high f-stop number) with a digital SLR camera is that it begins to reveal the inevitable dust on the camera’s sensor. I had to do a fair bit of spot removal to the last two photos as a result. Dust casts shadows on the sensor, but when the aperture is open wider, light gets around the dust. When the aperture starts to limit the light, the shadows get bigger and are seen by the sensor. That’s where Photoshop and a cleaning kit come in handy!
I hope you enjoyed this exercise. If you have any sort of camera that allows you manual control, and have a decent tripod, I encourage you to play around with this sort of thing. Learning photography is fun, and Bismarck-Mandan is full of interesting subject matter with which to expand your skills!
I stopped by my new favorite foreground object, this well. It stands in the middle of a wheat field, and I’m astonished that I ever even noticed it. I took some pics a while back in front of a solid red sky, but tonight there was a far more interesting backdrop.
After that it was back home to my family. I got to thinking about that well, and how amazing it was that I discovered it. It reminded me of John chapter 4, where Jesus is talking with the Samaritan woman at the well. He said, “But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.” It’s true: only Jesus satisfies. I spent years –well, decades, really– feeling spiritual about my snowboarding, feeling spiritual about my motorcycling…people can feel a spiritual bond to anything they choose, but none of them will satisfy. In the book of Acts, Peter said, “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.” I used to think that terms like “Born Again” and “saved” were part of a clever branding effort by evangelicals. Boy, was I shocked when I realized that Jesus declared that “Ye must be born again” !!!
It seems like a miracle that I discovered true Biblical salvation just like it seems miraculous that I could spot a lonely wellhead sticking out of a wheat field while sliding by at 60 miles per hour. Thankfully both miracles came to be. Now I have a far greater appreciation for the beauty of God’s creation, and especially for the part of it that falls within the parcel that we call North Dakota. Bismarck-Mandan…there’s no place I’d rather live!
I read in Prairie Business, a monthly regional magazine, that the only place in the USA which makes the blades for these things is in Grand Forks. LM Glasfiber is based in the Netherlands with their American facility here in North Dakota.
AC electric line current, by the way, works on a set frequency. Anything that generates power, whether it be a power plant, wind turbine, or hydroelectric generator, needs to be operating on the same frequency as the power grid. It also needs to be “in sync” with the oscillation of the power grid in order to be connected. If things get out of sync, the grid shuts down to protect itself. So how do you take a farm of 30+ wind turbines and synchronize them to the grid?
On many of the wind turbines you might see around North Dakota, the blade tips pivot to act as a speed brake of sorts. I believe the rotor pitch is also variable, so that the turbine spins at just the right speed to synchronize with the desired frequency. That’s a pretty low-tech way to do it, and requires a lot of mechanical measures to pull it off, so there’s another way…one I think is pretty innovative.
Instead of generating power and pumping it to the grid, while synchronizing to the grid mechanically, some turbines generate DC current and convert it to AC current before putting it into the line. They’re able to synchronize the power they generate electronically, without having to worry about moving parts and mechanical pitfalls. I’m told that the company which came up with this idea is a familiar one: the horrible Enron.
I’m just a layman, but that’s my primitive understanding of wind power in a nutshell. Feel free to correct me or clarify my explanation if you’re more knowledgable about such things. In the mean time, please enjoy the photo!
The crew on this trip include my friend Mike, the walking Encyclopedia Photographica, who’s on the mend from major back surgery. You can’t keep a good man down, and he’s the glue that holds this ragtag bunch together. He and I were able to dash down some gravel roads on Tuesday night in my truck, and hopped out a couple of times for some photos. It was the first time he’d walked uneven ground since his surgery, and it marks the new beginning of some awesome pictures! It’ll also mark the resumption of my photographic education. After all, I’m just a newbie at this…and learning is half the fun!
Out in the middle of nowhere, as usual, I noticed this well sticking out of the grass on a hill, not far from the road. Since I have a nice telephoto lens and do NOT have permission from the landowner, I shot from the road. As it turns out, I think that was the best angle anyway. I grabbed a lot of different shots as the sun progressed downward, including quite a few with the sun gone entirely. Even then, the warm glow of the sky was just right.
Mission accomplished; I went from central Bismarck to a previously unnoticed wellhead in a matter of a few minutes, got a ton of really nice photos, and was back home in time to snuggle my boy before tucking him in for the night. Now it’s off to shovel a bunch of Cap’n Crunch cereal into my head, challenge my wife to our favorite board game, and try to forget the fact that I’d just cleaned and wet-looked my tires before this little journey. Dust from a dirt road sticks to a freshly armor-alled tire like sprinkles to a donut. I guess we’ll redo that tomorrow. As I strive to learn this new photography hobby, I’m willing to pay the price sometimes.
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