Last night on 8/6/11 Lincoln experienced a damaging thunderstorm. The air has been full of humidity and there was lots of heat in the atmosphere so energy was abundant. The storm had tons of lighting, it knocked out power all over town and made it pretty unstable for the rest of town. One of the local TV stations took a direct hit (During the weather cast) and was offline for a little while. After the storm there were reports of lots of down trees, fences, etc. Nature repeated itself later that night with a second round.

The pictures below were all taken after the storm except the first one. The storm rolled through when the sun was starting to set so this created some great colors on the clouds. The bubble clouds are mammatus clouds. These were some of the most defined mammantus clouds I have seen recently.

I am always a little slow posting things to the blog but am much better about posting to the new G+ which I love. Follow me at http://Liquidretro.net/+

I heard about this event on Twitter and decided to go take a look. It would be good for my 356 photo project right? The quack-off is a duck race that is a fundraiser for the local volunteer fire department.  It has been going on for over 20 years. During this year the small town of Avoca Nebraska grows from 250 people to over 2000. Many local bars in Lincoln and other surrounding larger towns charter busses to take people to this small town and bring them home safe. Alcohol was a common theme along with the ducks so the bus to get people home safely was a wise idea.  Tailgating was happening all around town anywhere people could gather. Fires and BBQ’s were common.  The local bar served basic food and drinks for anyone who did not bring their own. While there were lots of little kids I would not really of called this a family event with all the drinking.  People of all ages were at the event but it was a majority of college aged kids.

The event worked like this racers registered a few hours before the race for $20.  They could use their own duck or “rent a duck” for a fee if they needed.  The racers were then organized into individual races (5 racers at a time). The winners advanced until a champion was crowned.  The race was held on a basketball court in the local park.  The last few days had been very warm so things were very muddy from the melting snow for the spectators. The weather was great for January in Nebraska. Sunny with a high of 35 F.

This was an experience to say the least.  It was nice to just walk on to the basketball court and take photos.  With a big lens and an attitude that you know what you’re doing gets you a long ways.  Everyone was nice and enjoying the event. Bleachers would of helped people not in the first few rows see.  There was even a marriage proposal from a young couple who had their first kiss at last year’s race. She said yes and then the couple won their race.  Below are a few photos from the event. You can see more on my Flickr page http://www.flickr.com/photos/eos_liquidretro/sets/72157625814754047/

The newly engaged couple wins.

Kind of sums up the quack-off

The Lincoln Zombie walk was this past weekend on 8-28-2010. This year was bigger than ever as over 1200 Zombies participated in taking over downtown Lincoln. The event was moved to be earlier in the month this year and it was a great success. The weather was fantastic with highs in the mid 80's compared to last year when I remember wearing my winter coat and gloves. The time was also moved to a little earlier which made photography much more enjoyable. The zombies were suppose to do the Thriller dance at the Union but at the last minute decided not to for an unknown reason. In the end everyone gathered outside of Pershing Center for a street dance. I met several Lincoln Flickr and Twitter people for a Flickr Walk and Tweetup. It was great fun. See the photos below.

See more photos on Flickr Page http://www.flickr.com/photos/eos_liquidretro/sets/72157624728841511/detail/

I have gotten very interested (With the help of an influential friend) in some of the older classic manual lenses, so I now have a SMC Pentax 55mm F2 Type K in Pentax mount and a Jupiter 9 85mm F1.8 M42 that I have been mounting on my 7D and I wanted to try them out so I went out with a friend and had some fun around town. The 85mm is hard to focus because it has such a small DOF and its goes through 2 converters to mount on my camera so its no perfectly tight. The lens is also a bit stiff, but optically its good. I need more practice. The Pentax is a great lens & I am getting the fever for more. Its very sharp and extremely mechanical. Great little lens. Thanks to my model Megan for the great job, I could not have done it without you.

Pentax 55mm

Pentax 55mm

Pentax 55mm

Pentax 55mm

Sigma 10-20mm

Jupiter 9 85mm

Jupiter 9 85mm

Jupiter 9 85mm

Canon 50mm F1.8

Canon 50mm F1.8

To see the full gallery Click http://liquidretro.net/photo/gallery3/Megan1/

Better late than never right? The city of Lincoln's annual firework display was postponed one day due to the large amount of rain on the morning of the 4th of July. The evening of the 5th was perfect weather wise. I met up with some of the #LNK tweeps out at Oak Lake Park to watch the display. It was a nice time and I got a few good photos that I will post here. This was my first time watching the fireworks at Oak Lake Park and it had its pros and cons. The space is better for the amount of people that come, parking was fairly easy and emptied pretty quickly. However the background they shoot the fireworks against has too many lights, and is pretty industrial. In that regard Homes Lake was better, and much closer to my home. Hopefully someday they will decide to move it back to Homes Lake.

I have a soft spot for sunsets of all types. I am not sure what it is, maybe the intense colors or cool clouds that often occur. Lincoln has a great sunset every once and a while, especially when storms are rolling in. Sunday May 30 2010 this exact thing was happening and I just happened to catch it out the corner of my eye. I grabbed the camera and went out on the deck and snapped a couple of photos. I then decided to drive to Holmes Lake. Unfortunately the lovely pink had disappeared from the sky and the clouds had rolled in more. I still got a couple of nice photos though.

More photos of the trip will be posted over the coming weeks. I am going to make a real effort to keep this blog updated. We will see how that goes.

Last night Lincoln received its first real big thunderstorm of the year. Parts of Northeastern Lancaster County were even in a tornado warning, but in south Lincoln we got just a sprinkle of rain and some impressive lighting. I went out on the back deck and took a few photos of the impressive clouds. The storm was a bit odd because it was spinning counter clockwise so the storm came from the southeast.I really like how the panoramic turned out.

It was really cool to watch all the photos people were posting to Twitter with the #LNK hash tag. You got minute by minute updates on the conditions around town with pictures. @MrWilson has created a cool website to follow the #LNK hashtag at http://inlnk.in/. Also anyone with a twitter account who wants to stay up to date with the weather should consider following these people/companies on twitter who announce current weather as well as any watches and warnings that are issued.

@LincolnNEAlerts is a neat service provided by SWAS Sever Weather Alert System that for most cities in the USA tweets hourly the weather conditions at the official weather station (In Lincoln its the airport). They also announce when watches and warnings are posted.

@NEZ066 is a twitter account that I believe is only for Lincoln, Nebraska that only posts the most up to date watches and warnings. It is very fast and almost instant from when the National Weather Service issues the statement.

So here are the few photos I took last night

As of right now it looks like we are going to get another round tonight!

Expect more blog posts this week I have some great ideas for future topics.

The Husker Nation sure is a dedicated crew. When you can get over 77,000 people to attend what can only be described as a glorified practice its a good day for a great game. All week the weather was forecast to be rainy for the game. Well the weather men were wrong! It rained before the game but cleared up perfectly for the game its self. The entire game was sunny and warm. You could not have asked for better weather.

I decided to bring my camera to the game because I had great seats (Thanks mom and dad). It has been a while since I had shot sports but considering I was in the sands I think I got some decent results.

Yesterday I was driving back to campus from Jones Coffee house where I helped photo club hang our exhibition (Photos coming soon). I noticed that the state capitol building had blue light shining on it from all 4 sides. I though this was cool so I stopped and snapped a few photos. These were taken hand held with my Fuji F30 P&S while leaning against as lamp post. Does anyone know why it was blue last night?

The pictures below are of the capitol during a evening when it is normally lit. I took these in the summer of 2007 I believe. They may have already been posted here but they are worthy of being posted again.

I recently joined my universities photo club and this week theme was "Great Plains" We were suppose to go out and take some pics then bring them to the meeting later in the week for comments. Because the weather the rest of the week is going to suck (Possible Snow ) I drove a short distance out of town last night and took a few photos. I was lucky enough to find a farmer who was still harvesting at sunset which was exactly what I was hoping for.