bill.d's photostream  

Still two months of winter left, but someone has already given up on the snow. I took this while out on a walk during lunch.
I bumped up the color with Topaz Adjust 5.

This is something I don't often show people - our basement. It's a typical, unimproved "Michigan" basement. This is the furnace, the wonderful, gas burning dragon that sits in the basement and keeps our house warm. Well, tries to, anyway.

Yesterday my father-in-law and I replaced the condensate pump (the little thing on the floor). I asked him to help because he wired the house, this was hard-wired to the furnace, and I have a deathly fear of electricty.

But what does it do? Well, the central air unit has a humidifier built into it, which basically pours water into the furnace, which is distributed throughout the house. The surplus water goes to the pump, which pumps it to the drain, where the cats sit and watch it.

Without the humidifier the air gets very dry, and the cats crackle with static electricity. They've been crackling since the beginning of winter. The furnace guy said that it would be way cheaper for us to do it ourselves than to have him do it. The pump only cost $40 on Amazon, and no humans were harmed during its replacement.

And the cats no longer crackle.

9 images stacked and tonemapped in Photomatix. Don't look at the original size – you'll see all of our cobwebs!

Looking north up US 131. Asylum Lake is to the right, out of camera range; my office is to the left, behind the trees.

HDR from three hand-held images, autobracketed at +/- 2EV, merged and tonemapped in Photomatix. I used manual deghosting on the vehicles.

Though it looks much as I would expect nowhere to look, this is southwest Kalamazoo, looking south over US-131. It's about a ten minute walk from my chair at work. Based upon that, I think that we can push our office chairs and computers to our new location in about half an hour. All they have to do is give us the word to move.

HDR from three hand-held images, autobracketed at +/- 2EV, merged and tonemapped in Photomatix. I used manual deghosting on the vehicles.

Kim's grandmother's mother-of-pearl covered opera glasses photographed with an infrared filter. I need to start the human trials of this experiment soon....