Photo Bomb: El Paso Air Show 2

Continued from Part 1.  More Amigo Airshow pictures from 1987. 

This was a pair of AV8B Harriers doing a vertical takeoff.  Let me tell you, you will not sneak up on anybody in one of these planes. These guys taking off was one of the loudest things I've ever heard.

 

Here's a NASA T-38 that astronauts fly.  There's someone doing some stunt flying in the background.  It was some kind of prop plane.

Here's the star of the show and F-117 Nighthawk.  This stealth plane was brand new technology then.  The rear of the plane was guarded and they didn't allow picture-taking of it.

Here's another view.  (I was probably taking a picture of the girl in the foreground too.)

Here's another T-38 and a large cargo plane in the background.  

Photo Bomb: El Paso Air Show 1

El Paso used to host the Amigo Airshow.  These pictures are from 1987.  I think it was held at Biggs Army Airfield.  There was a big crowd there that year and it was fun.  The airshow is long gone unfortunately.  

I was in a photography class in high school, and I took my new 35mm camera out to the show.  I had the pictures developed at a store since we only did black and white developing (and I didn't want to ruin the film).  I took the pictures to class to show the teacher and everyone.  I don't even think it was part of an assignment; I just wanted to show off the pictures.  One display I don't have any pictures of are of the Blue Angels.  I remember seeing them perform here once, but maybe it was a previous year where I wasn't taking pictures.  They were flying A-4 Skyhawks at the time.  One of them snuck up on the crowd and let off a roar while everyone was looking in the other direction.  They were demonstrating how quiet the planes could be on approach.  The crowd was a little jumpy after that.  

There was another time when the Golden Knights performed a skydiving routine.  That was pretty cool.  I do mean the Army parachute team, not the hockey team.  Pushing a hockey team out of a plane probably wouldn't have been as entertaining.  

That looks like an A-7 Corsair do a bombing demonstration, which I don't think involved any actual bombs.  Unfortunately, I can't remember anything else about the display.  

This is an A-10 Warthog on static display.  I was trying to photograph the planes at interesting angles.

Here's a B-52.  It is big.  I don't think they allowed tours inside of it.

Here's its radar-controlled tail gun.  

Here's an F-16.  Great dynamic lines on this plane.  I tried to make it look the plane was in motion with this picture.

Part 2.

Photo Bomb: El Paso Snowstorm 2

Continued from ***Part 1.***  These pictures continue on from the last series.  Another picture of the neighborhood.  

                                      

I love this picture.

Okay, then we got a bunch more snow.  I put these two pictures together so you can see the difference in the accumulation.

There's the front of my house.  It was still snowing when I took these pictures, as you can see.

That's 12 inches of snow.  This might have been the heaviest snow I've ever seen in this area.

Here's some pretty icicles on the shrubbery. 

Then we got a third round of snowfall.  This was a light dusting by comparison.  I went out and took a couple more pictures, including another pic of the lamppost.  

Photo Bomb: El Paso Snowstorm 1

Somewhere in the late 80's, El Paso got a bunch of snow.  I know people living at higher latitudes are yawning, but it was a big deal here in the desert southwest.  Getting significant snowfall in this area is fairly rare, but not totally out-of-bounds.  The city will often be shutdown for it, because we're not equipped lots of snow.   With the snow, I ran outside and took pictures with my nice new camera.  This might have happened around Christmas break at school.

Dangerous icicles.  I may have been endangering myself taking this picture.

View from my backyard.

Inside the tree.

Picture of my neighborhood.  It looks like a row of Christmas trees out front.

Isn't that all nice and scenic.  It's going to get a bit more interesting in ***Part 2.***

Photo Bomb: Old School

I took a couple of photography classes in school.  I had a nice 35mm camera, which my parents bought for me and absolutely never let me forget how much it cost.  They had some hope I might use the skill for a job someday.  Some much for that.  Now the camera is just a museum antique.  My parents were not happy with that investment.  

In high school, the dark room was an oversized closet and lacked a red light, so you had to load and unload your camera in darkness.  I lost several rolls of film having problems misloading film on to reels for developing.  I did the whole thing making prints with the chemicals: developer, stop bath, fixer.  I know this might be hard to believe for younger people, as well as people who only ever dropped film cartridges off at the drug store for processing.    

This first one is a Halloween picture of a friend striking a pose in costume.

I set the camera on automatic and timed a dunk on my Nerf Hoop.  To the left is my wipe board, where I tracked the comics I was collecting.

I also took a photography class in college, but that was mostly because I was getting my feet wet at community college before picking a major.  For a summer semester, I took this and an art appreciation class.  (Yes, really.)  I already posted a couple of photos of my baseball hats here.  The Tigers hat was my favorite.  Yes, it was inspired by Magnum P.I., but also the Tigers were good in the 80's.   The Orioles hat at the bottom my dad brought back from going to a game when he was on a business trip to Baltimore.

In that art appreciation class, there was a beautiful girl named Angelique.  The photography class first assignment was, surprise, to take some pictures.  During a break in art class, I brazenly went up to her and asked to take her picture.  She very generously obliged.  I never had a chance with her, but we were friendly for a while.

I turned in this picture for the assignment and mounted it on a matte board.  She also signed her name in my notebook, so I mounted that on the board as well.  Yeah, that is rather 80's hair and wardrobe with the rolled up jeans.

I should have posed these pictures better.  There's a dude laying out in the background behind her.

Sketch Dump: Comic Book Characters

 This one is a short post for a reason.

On the left is a detail from D&D painting of an elvish adventurer.  My sketch doesn't do it any justice.  Don't know about the girl on the right.

This is a sketch of an Adam Hughes' Gwen Stacy painting.  The original is, of course, awesome.  My sketch isn't too bad.  Proper inspiration makes all the difference.

This is a very old page from my original sketchbook.  This is from Mai the Psychic Girl.  I had to redraw over this for scanning, since it had worn out and was so light.  These are images from the last issue, I think.  Mai was easy to fall in love with.    

  

Finally, I think these are two sketches of Katchoo from Strangers in Paradise.  They look okay.

Is that it?  Is it over?  Is it?  Yes, I'm out of scanned sketch material right now.  Yay!  But, the bad news is that there will more.  Today, I just finished the last page of a 100-page sketchbook.  However, I'm going to post some photos next.  

I apologize for the frankly subpar sketches I've mostly been posting.  There were some good ones.  I should have limited my posting to just those.  Some of the marginal ones had sentimental value.  Now that they're scanned, I may toss them.  I also have to apologize for not identifying so many drawings.  Some of them I really didn't know, but it's harder to excuse that I made no effort to look them up.  This is mostly because I'm not doing this posting at home, where the original pictures would be.  

I got a bit depressed looking through my new finished sketchbook.  I was trying hard to do good sketches every time, but there's still a bunch of crap.  I did a lot of inked and colored sketches this time, but I'm still learning with those tools.  I did at least identify most of the sketches I was drawing, so I'll hopefully be able to identify everything next time.     

Sketch Dump: Random Personalities

I've obviously run out of titles and themed material.

The woman on the left was a TV sports commentator.  She worked on the track with off-road truck racing for a season and then disappeared.  The woman on the right is an actress.  She looked like Lucy Lawless, but wasn't.

The next two are of Callie Lewis, aka Luria Petrucci.  She hosted a popular tech video podcast in the early days of high-speed Internet, basically pre-Youtube.  Then came the breakup with her husband and some nastiness.  She started another show, but it was basically subscription-only.  Callie eventually disappeared online.  Now she's a consultant.  Is Callie a cautionary Internet tale?  Hard to say.    

This is Tilly, a fictional character I made up that I still haven't been able to write a good story for.

Straight out of an 80's issue of Newtype magazine from Japan, this is Miho Morikawa, an idol singer.  I don't know anything about her, except she's cute.

Lastly, here's another sketch of French TV anchor, Melissa Theuriau.  She's so much better looking in her pictures.