Until recently, I’ve always lived close enough to home to make a short drive and be there. For the last year that hasn’t been the case. So, this year, for the first time ever, I did something I promised myself I never would: I flew on a major holiday. Luckily, my wife and I both have frequent flier status, which made our overpriced trip bearable. And, at the end of the day, I was very happy to see my family and take part in Thanksgiving.

I didn’t actually take any pictures at our Thanksgiving get together. I just enjoyed it. I did however carry the camera around on a family trip to the River Walk in San Antonio with my parents and Adrian.

My parents sit for a spell on the river walk on the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Dinner at Las Canarias. Despite its name, this is a French Resteraunt, and an exceptional one at that.

The Passing of a Barge. The River Walk isn't just for walking. Tour and dinner barges run up and down it carrying tourists.

The Crowds. The river walk was quite crowded on the day after Thanksgiving. I didn't mind this time, which is out of character for me.

Tower Life Building. This building sits along one of the less heavily traveled sections of the river walk and it is much more interesting than the more modern all glass monstrosities.

We, thanks to good planning, live only a mile and a half from my wife’s office and a nice multi-use trail takes you the entire way.

Facing north, the sun lights up the fall colors.

Properly finding a lens’ nodal point is the best way to ensure that stitched panoramas can be easily assembled with no visual defects. The process of create a stitch panorama is simple. You take a series of images as you rotate the camera through an arc. This can be done hand held, using a tripod or using a tripod and an offset head or slider rail. After the images are captured, software such as Hugin is used assembled and blend them into a single panorama. This final stage is where problems begin to show up.

Hand Held Stitch Panorama of the US Capital Basement. Some visual defects are obvious even at reduced resolution.

Closeup of Misalignment

This misalignment results from parallax error, which is caused by the viewer shifting locations. This error can NOT be fixed in post processing. There is no way to align this image so something isn’t misaligned. In this case, the camera was hand held so my location moved quite a bit from shot to shot. In a shot like this, with many elements at different distances, parallax error was unavoidable without the use of a tripod and offset head that had been properly calibrated for the lens in question.

Every year the International Lindy Hop Championship is held in the Washington DC area and this year was no exception. Despite a horrible earthquake and a massive hurricane packing stiff breezes and light drizzle (at least in our area) the show went on and 700 plus hard core lindy hoppers from all over the world converged on the Westin in Alexandria, VA. The weekend started out on Thursday and didn’t let up until early in the morning on Monday. The competition included the normal range of events such as the Strictly Lindy, various levels of Jack and Jill, Show Case, Team and Cabare. This year’s competitions included a Classic Lindy division and a Junior division.

Annie performs an aerial during her showcase routine.

The Washington DC metro area has a great lindy hop scene. There is live music and multiple dance options just about every night of the week. Whether you like classic lindy, rock-a-billy and jitterbug, balboa, blues, or fusion, you can get a fix several times a week. However, some weeks are better than others and last weekend was one of the weekends at the better end of the scale. There wasn’t a large international event going on like ILHC coming up this weekend. No, this was just 2 of the main lindy hop organizations in town brining in big names for weekend dances…  just because.

The Liquorice Stick

A bull rider comes out of the gate at the Rodeo.

I grew up in a small town in Texas named Seguin. Every year in October the county held a fair and rodeo and every year I would go to the midway for my birthday. It has been a few years (well, quite a few) since I’ve been to a small town fair and rodeo.  When we decided to go to the Loudoun county fair I wasn’t expecting the that type of experience. Loudoun county is only an hour from our apartment and my (all be it limited) experience with things an hour from DC is that they are overrun by city dwellers (like myself) trying to escape the city.

Now that I’ve moved to the DC metro, I’ve been trying to go dancing as much as possible to make new friends and meet people here. One of my favorite nights of dancing is Tuesday nights at the Jam Cellar. The dance is cheap ($6), the crowd is great and the floor is awesome. It is a little tough some times being in the middle of the week and in DC and the drive is always “interesting”. This week, it was about 90 degrees, but I (and everyone else) soldiered on and as always, it was a fun night.

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A little over a year ago I accompanied Adrian to a conference in Beunos Aires, Argentina. We managed to squeeze (and I mean squeeze!) in a quick side trip to Iguazu’ on the border with Brazil. The falls at Iguazu’ are the second largest in the world behind Victoria Falls in Africa and they are spectacular. The expense and loss of sleep this trip cost us was well worth it.

The edge of Iguazu' falls.

To visit the falls, we flew into Beunos Aires via Ezeiza airport and then had to transfer via taxi to Aeroparque Jorge Newbery about 30 minutes away. We had a short layover and were on the last flight of the day to Iguazu’ so there was some question of whether we would make it. We did, partially thanks to the refreshingly non-TSA-insane security. It was nice to enjoy a flight instead of being treated like a convicted criminal as we are in the US.

The entire area seemed like a lost world, especially our first overcast and rainy day.

Iguazu’ is more than just falls. It is a national park and wild life refuge. There are 100s of colorful birds, including the Tucan Grande and parrots all around the park as well a monkeys and coati. I’ll post some of those images later this week.