Fall in Cooperstown NY, including the Baseball Hall of Fame

Baseball Hall of Fame Bench (not Johnny)Cooperstown New York is a cool little village and, as you probably know, the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame Museum. Here are a few fall color photographs of the Cooperstown area, including the lesser known back yard of the Hall of Fame.

We also have a shot of Lake Otsego, and the headwaters of the Susquehanna River. If you need high resolution photographs, just let us know, we have the very high res versions of these Cooperstown photographs, and many others available.

Fall Colors in Upstate New York

Flower with fall colors in upstate NY.Here are some high resolution nature photographs of fall colors from our backyard upstate, near Cooperstown, NY. These last few weekends are always busy ones at my brother-and-sister-in-law's restaurant, The Rose and Kettle, as the "leafers" are up in force to see the beautiful autumn colors, and that surprise bit of snow the other morning!

I have some more pictures to upload to this gallery, so be sure to come back in a few days (we recommend subscribing to our feed) to see if I can get around the technical problems with uploading.

Kauai Hawaii Pictures

The Hale Kilo I'a (House Where You Watch Fish) is a Kauai Hawaii beach house vacation rentalAs an internet marketer who helps my clients get higher search engine rankings, I manage to attract some pretty cool clients. One of them is the daughter of Academy Award Winning art director Tambi Larsen (see this earlier post for his art). She rents their former home on Kauai as a Hawaii beach house vacation rental.

Obviously, I'd prefer to go to Kauai, stay in the house, and take awesome pictures of the island myself. But these are trying times for us, so, I kept bugging Pamela to do it, and now she has! And, wow... seriously... Here's the gallery of her pictures of Kauai. Amazing.

While it's probably hard to take bad shots of a place like Kauai, I'm sure it's done all the time. Crappy camera, people too lazy to get out of the car, greasy fingerprints on the lens... All kinds of things can go wrong when you're trying to take pictures of some of the most beautiful scenery you've ever seen.

And then there are the times when you get it right. Pamela has probably taken hundreds of pictures of the ironwood tree that is in the yard, right next to the beach, just steps from the house. But it wasn't until she walked out there with her new camera, in just the right light, and took this picture that it all came together in a kind of perfection that, well... just look.

An Ironwood Tree between the beach and the yard of the Hale Kilo I'a Kauai Hawaii beach house vacation rental.

Click on through to the Kauai Hawaii picture gallery, or go to the Hawaii beach accommodations website, where you can download the full-size high resolution pictures of Kauai.

Rocking and Rolling through Ohio

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland OhioFrom Chicago it's a relatively short drive to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. Relatively, that is, if you've just hauled butt across the western half (plus) of the country... We were running out of money and patience, but we had to stop at the Hall of Fame. I mean, really... Janice Joplin's Porche! Handwritten lyrics of Beatles songs from John Lennon. Jimi Hendrix's report cards (I had to point out to Spencer what a good student he was).

They don't let you take your camera inside the museum sections of the building, but we did take all the pictures you're allowed to, and it is one cool building (architect: IM Pei).

Chicago Photography and the Quest for Deep Dish Pizza

Rooftop Graffitied Water Tower In ChicagoWe continued our cross country trip with gusto after leaving Mount Rushmore. Not that there wasn't much to see in South Dakota, Minnesota, or Wisconsin. We just had to make some time over that stretch. We did take some pictures, including some interesting ones for you graphics professionals out there of a wicked snow storm in the Dells of Wisconsin. I'll post those someday.

But for now, it's been a while since we had some down-side up style shots of urban areas, and Robin took some great photographs around the south side of Chicago, where we drove around for a while, waiting for our Pizza Nova Express Chicago-style deep dish pizza (which was awesome), and some shots of Lake Michigan from Calumet Park, where we ate the pizza and then hit the road for points east!

Next stop? The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland!

Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota

Mount Rushmore with the State Flags along the Walkway.When you've never been somewhere, your brain tries to construct an image of the place. I'd seen pictures of Mount Rushmore and the Crazy Horse Memorial before, but they were all close-ups. I filled in the blanks of the surrounding area with what I thought I knew about the central high-plains of America: that they were flat and rolling hills. I knew the two giant sculptures were in the Black Hills of SD, which I pictured as little craggy rock towers poking up out of the giant, flat prairie.

I couldn't have been more wrong. The day before we went to the monumnets, we stayed in Custer, SD.  Driving up into the north eastern corner of Wyoming (and regretting that we didn't have time to swing by Devil's Tower National Monumnet, where we wanted to hum the Close Encounters music), we were surprised by the beauty as we ascended into the Black Hills and the southwest corner of SD. These aren't hills! They're little mountains. The highway was picturesque. The little towns looked like post care representations of themselves. It was truly amazing. What a place.

And the monuments! It's hard for a mental image to get an idea how truly large these things are. Crazy Horse is a whole mountain! And in the museum of Mount Rushmore, pictures taken during the carving show a man is as tall as the pupil of an eye. These are truly monumental monuments!

Of course, there is controversy about Rushmore being created on sacred indian grounds, and that is enough to trigger some serious white man guilt in me. But the explosions are over, the result is there, it is a national monument to some white guys who did their best to help a young country survive in order to spread democracy and freedom. I'm sure those guys, including Crazy Horse, would be impressed with the president now. It's the 8 years prior that I'm not so sure about. Hopefully, I'll get to go back and visit the mountains while we have a president I could actually imagine seeing up there.

Landscape Photography of Bear Mountain Wyoming: More High Resolution Nature Photos

Bear Mountain Wyoming

After getting gas in Park City Utah, where we marveled at the size of the Olympic Ski Jump ramp (terrifying, really), it was too dark for any more pictures, we took some anyway, as you can see in the last post about Nevada and Utah. We spent the night in Rock Springs Wyoming, where we'd love to go back and explore some day, since the Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area is there.

We were headed for Mount Rushmore, so we turned north out of Rawlins, WY, up US 287. Out to our right was Bear Mountain, actually a range of mountains that stuck up out of the high plains with the kind of majesty that one expects from eastern Wyoming. We certainly understood the term "big sky country" which is, of course, a Montana term, but applied to the high plains of Wyoming very well. These high resolution nature pictures of Wyoming were taken by Robin, the master of hurry-up-and-take-that-picture-and-roll-up-that-window photography.

Our next stop? Mount Rushmore and the first snowfall of our trip!