I have photographed the northern lights…
5 minute read
October 14, 2024, 6:47 PM
On Thursday, October 10, Elyse and I went up to Washington County in order to photograph the aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, which were visible at our latitude due to a geomagnetic storm. We had a good time, photographing from High Rock, as well as the intersection of Route 64 and 418 in Ringgold. None of this was new territory to us, as we had been to these locations plenty of times, and if you’ve followed the website over the years, you will be quite familiar with these locations, as I photographed High Rock in 2015, and photographed at that intersection in 2020. Elyse brought her phone, and I brought the works, taking not only my phone, but also my tripod, my DSLR, and even a drone.
Driving up from our house in Montgomery Village, it was a very dark ride through Frederick and out to High Rock. We questioned whether or not we would see anything, because we certainly didn’t see anything all the way up. Everything looked perfectly normal. Arriving at High Rock, I still couldn’t see anything, but we saw a small crowd gathered up on the rock to see the lights. So I went up there, I set up my tripod, and I started photographing with my DSLR. This is what I got:
Continue reading…Categories: Maryland, Nature, Photography, Waynesboro (PA)
A weekend loop trip…
22 minute read
June 12, 2024, 8:24 AM
From May 30 to June 1, I took a trip down to the Hampton Roads area in Virginia. Hampton Roads is by no means an unfamiliar place, even though I don’t get to go there nearly as much as I would otherwise like, but the way I got down there was a bit unconventional. Instead of going down the west side of the Beltway to I-95 in Springfield heading towards Richmond and then hanging a left on I-64 to go through New Kent, Williamsburg, and the like to get to my hotel in Newport News, I instead went down the east side of the Beltway to New Carrollton, where I got on Route 50 and took that over the Bay Bridge and then continued as far as Salisbury, where I made a right turn at US 13 to head down into Virginia towards the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel. From there, I headed through Norfolk, through the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, through Hampton, and finally to my hotel in Newport News. I was also doing this trip completely unsupervised, as Elyse was going to a bus event up in Hershey that same weekend.
I made a few stops along the way, mostly to do some photography with the drone. My first stop was at a large park on the east side of the Bay Bridge, where I was planning to get some shots of the bridge itself:
Categories: Friends, Hampton Roads, Maryland, Photography, Roads, Today's Special
A trip across South Jersey…
16 minute read
April 27, 2024, 9:41 AM
On April 4-5, I went on a solo trip up to New Jersey. It was a trip that I had been looking for a time to do and one that Elyse had no interest in. April 4-5 was where it fit in my schedule, so I planned it out and went. That said, I was certainly crossing my fingers and anything else that I could cross that the weather would hold out. The forecast for my travel dates would be mostly cloudy and rainy, with a possibility for some breaks in the cloud cover and precipitation. I wanted a very productive overnight trip where I came back with a nice, big photo take, and not a trip that got rained out and ended up being a scouting-future-locations kind of trip. That’s the thing about overnight trips and such: they’re planned and booked in advance, so the weather can be a bit of a roll of the dice. Sometimes you win, and sometimes you don’t.
The plan was to go up to New Jersey via I-95 (i.e. my usual route) and then go across South Jersey on the first day, ending up in Egg Harbor Township for the night. Then I was going to go down to Cape May and take the ferry across to Delaware on the second day, returning home via US 50. Elyse and I tend to call this sort of trip profile a “loop trip”, since we are more or less constantly covering new ground, and doing almost no backtracking. These sorts of trips are fun when they work out, since it eliminates the return-trip blahs, where it’s clear that the fun is largely over, and we’re just retracing our steps back home. On a loop trip, almost no road is traveled on twice.
This one was a little unusual in that I had a doctor’s appointment at the hospital in Olney first thing, so I attended to that and then left straight from the hospital. However, the ride up didn’t exactly inspire confidence in my ability to have the productive trip that I wanted, since it was raining more or less the entire way up to New Jersey. My first planned photo stop was the Church Landing Fishing Spot in Pennsville Township, where I planned to try some different angles of the Delaware Memorial Bridge with the drone, but due to bad weather, I skipped it. I’m not worried about it, though, because we visited this area once before in 2022, and I don’t expect that it’s going anywhere any time soon, i.e. I can do that on a future visit. Fortunately, the rain stopped not long after I got into New Jersey, though the cloud cover would persist for most of the day.
Categories: Delaware, Family, New Jersey, Ocean City, Photography, Ships, Travel
No, I do not have to get anyone’s permission for that…
11 minute read
March 30, 2024, 1:35 PM
It has always amused me about how often people play the permission-of-the-subject card with me. Usually, it comes from someone who is a bit salty about coverage of their activities that may portray them in a negative light. However, recently, someone played this card on a post that I made on Schumin Web‘s Facebook page in regards to a wildfire in Virginia that I recently photographed with my drone. The post was about a photo that depicted a house burning to the ground that I am planning to run as part of a Journal entry about a weekend trip that Elyse and I had recently made:
Categories: High school, Middle school, Montgomery Village, Photography, Schumin Web meta, Social media
How’s that for gratitude…
11 minute read
March 19, 2024, 9:23 AM
Some people, I just don’t understand. I had been involved in a Facebook group called “You know you’re from Gaithersburg, Maryland if”. The group’s purpose was to share nostalgic content about Gaithersburg, Maryland, which is the town right next to Montgomery Village, where I live. However, the group had extremely lax moderation, and by “extremely lax”, I mean “none”, as there was no one keeping an eye on things to make sure that good posts were getting through and off-topic or spam posts were being removed. As a result, most of the group’s content consisted of advertisements for moving companies, air duct cleaning, gutter replacement, furniture cleaning, carpet cleaning, and car detailing. In other words, it was spam city. The only reason that I stayed in the group was to maybe get a piece of historic Gaithersburg content. After all, I was in the group in the first place because I was interested in getting a bit of local history from the perspective of locals. I’ve only been familiar with Gaithersburg since 2007, and have only lived in the Gaithersburg area since 2017. So as far local history goes, I’ve only been around to witness a small slice of it. I rely on other people to provide the rest.
Then one day this past December, while Elyse and I were out having lunch, I got a notification from Facebook saying that they wanted to promote me to admin of this group because the group had no active admins. In other words, what I had suspected was true: the existing group admins had taken a permanent lunch break, so Facebook picked someone from amongst the membership to run the group. I just had to tap “accept” on my phone, and they handed me the keys to the castle. All of a sudden, I was in charge of a group in which I had been a somewhat passive participant for several years.
Categories: Gaithersburg, Social media, Some people
Fire at the quarry…
4 minute read
March 14, 2024, 8:38 PM
Sometimes, you just have to be at the right place at the right time. I had a doctor’s appointment today near Shady Grove Adventist Hospital, but before I left, Elyse gave me a heads-up that there was a fire at the Aggregate Industries quarry off of Piney Meetinghouse Road. Funny thing about this: I discovered that quarry about a month ago on Maps, and added it to my photo list, which I jokingly refer to as “the place where photo ideas go to die” because of how infrequently I cross things off of it. So this worked out nicely, because I already knew exactly where the location was, and I would already be nearby. So I threw the drone in the back of the car and made plans to check out the quarry after my appointment. As I approached Interstate 270, the smoke became quite evident, with a large plume of smoke visible in the distance. After the appointment, I headed over, and found a safe place to fly that was out of the way, but where I could still see everything that I needed to see in order to fly safely.
Being a working fire situation, I kept my distance. I did not want to interfere with the firefighting efforts in any way, and truth be told, I didn’t want to be noticed at all. I just wanted to get in, get my shots, and then get out. I knew the kind of stuff that I would capture and how I would fly if I was flying under normal conditions, but this was not that, and so I adjusted accordingly.
According to news sources, the fire involved two liquid asphalt tanks, one tank containing used motor oil, and various other miscellaneous equipment owned by the F.O. Day Bituminous Company, which has facilities on the site. Due to its being an oil fire, they couldn’t use water on the flames, so they had to get a foam unit to come out from Dulles Airport to help extinguish the fire. The fire was completely out by the evening. Fortunately, everyone on site was safely evacuated, and no one was hurt. There was also no danger to the public or the surrounding area, and a fire department spokesman likened the smoke to a bad air quality day. So at the end of the day, it was only property damage, i.e. nothing that money can’t fix.
Categories: DC area local news, Montgomery County, Photography
Some spherical images of a dead mall…
6 minute read
February 12, 2024, 11:10 AM
Do you remember when Elyse and I visited Owings Mills Mall back in 2015? I wrote about it in the second part of the “Everything Else” photo set, but what I didn’t show you, mainly because I lacked the capability to display it properly at the time, was that I also shot some spherical photos of the place. I was glad that I did, too, because the management would close the interior of the mall less than two weeks after our visit, and the mall was demolished about a year later in preparation for redevelopment. The property now contains an outdoor shopping center called Mill Station, and from everything that I can tell, the center is now thriving. I suppose that tells you that the mall itself was the problem, and that the area is, in fact, a good location for retail – just not that retail, apparently. It’s also spurred additional development beyond the old mall property, so clearly, things are going well there.
So as far as the spherical panorama images go, when we were exploring the mall, I used the Google camera app, which could shoot spherical panoramas, and took eight photo spheres of the place. You start in one spot, and then it tells you how to move the camera in order to image the entire thing. The result is essentially a single Google Street View image of wherever you are standing. I first learned how to do this in August 2014, and I did it on and off for about a year. I eventually lost interest in the photo spheres, after Google discontinued the Panoramio service and rolled it all into Google Maps. As is typical when Google rolls an existing service into another, much functionality was lost, and Panoramio’s going into Maps was no exception. The way that they wanted you to shoot photo spheres after that was with a separate Street View app, and it would more or less upload directly to Google Street View, and wouldn’t save as an image file of mine. So that was a bit of a deal-breaker for me. As far as this website goes, I couldn’t get the images to display properly on here natively, and really didn’t want to have any additional plugins for the site just to power a single Journal entry. Then I recently discovered that Flickr will embed these things on third party websites, such as this one, and we were in business.
Categories: Baltimore County, Photography, Retail
Yes, we are back in the air again…
6 minute read
December 2, 2023, 11:27 PM
You may recall that when I wrote in this space about my recent trip to Chicago, I described how my DJI Air 2S drone went to a watery grave in Lake Michigan following a forced landing due to battery depletion while I was flying in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, taking my entire day’s worth of photos down with it. The good news is that I am now whole once again. I got a new DJI Air 3 drone, which, among other features, sports twice as much fly time per battery than the Air 2S, and then I also activated the flyaway coverage that I had with the Air 2S and got a new one of those, too. So all in all, I’m in good shape. I have new equipment that is faster and more powerful than my previous equipment, plus I also have some pretty solid equipment as a backup drone.
That also means that the Mini probably won’t see much action anymore. The thing about the DJI Mavic Mini is that it’s not a bad drone, but it’s not a great drone, either. It lacks collision sensors, so it’s not going to stop you from plowing headlong into an object. It’s also fairly slow-moving and gets kicked around in the wind a bit. It also uses wi-fi as a transmission protocol, and as such, it’s prone to interference. And now being the third one on the totem pole, it’s probably not going to see much use. I will use the Air 3 as my primary drone, and the Air 2S will be the drone that Elyse will use as well as my backup. So it’s like this exchange in the third episode of Roseanne:
Darlene: Mom, if Becky has a heart attack, I’m in charge, right?
Roseanne: Right!
DJ: Mom, if Darlene has a heart attack, I’m in charge.
Roseanne: Right, DJ! If both your sisters are dead, you’re in charge.
Categories: Cameras, Montgomery Village
Playing with the AI image generator…
22 minute read
October 27, 2023, 10:02 AM
Recently, a friend of mine posted some computer generated images from the Bing Image Creator, which uses the DALL-E system as its base. I enjoyed their posts, so I decided to take it for a spin myself with subjects that were more relevant to me. My first idea was to have it generate me. The way I saw it, ChatGPT kinda sorta knew who I was, so it seemed reasonable to see if Bing Image Creator could perform similarly.
The first prompt that I gave it was “Ben Schumin in Washington, DC” and this is what it produced:
Categories: Afton Mountain, Artificial intelligence, Baltimore, Fire alarms, Honda HR-V (2018), JMU, Kia Soul, Mercury Sable, Stuarts Draft, Today's Special, Toyota Previa, Washington DC, WMATA
Smoke blankets the city…
3 minute read
July 4, 2023, 10:02 PM
Funny how things work out. The smoke from Canadian wildfires that blanketed the eastern US in a thick layer of haze in early June was not a good thing to have happen for any number of reasons, but putting on my photographer hat for a moment, I was kind of kicking myself for not getting out in it and photographing the haze like I meant it. All I got were a few phone shots taken from the car, going southbound on I-95 while heading home after taking Elyse to Ramblewood, a campground up in Darlington, on June 8 for an event:
The view at the northern interchange between I-95 and the Baltimore Beltway.
I am once again in a Honda HR-V…
10 minute read
March 24, 2023, 6:33 PM
All I have to say is, thank goodness. Five and a half months after my original Honda HR-V was totaled in an accident, and on the 27th anniversary of this website’s founding, I am at last back in an HR-V. It was a much longer journey than anyone expected, but we got there. The thing about buying a new car right now is that because of a semiconductor shortage, the demand for cars far outstrips the supply, and most new cars are already spoken for before they’re even manufactured. As such, right now, you can’t just buy a new car off of the lot and then drive it home. Rather, you’ve got to get into the queue, and your car will be built and delivered in a few months’ time.
The biggest take-home for me in the whole process was learning a lot about how cars get to dealerships. Going into this, I thought that the customer ordered the car that they wanted, the dealership placed that order with the manufacturer, and then the manufacturer would build it and ship it to the dealership, where the customer would be waiting. Turns out that’s not how it works. How it actually works is that the manufacturer makes whatever they want, and then they allocate a certain number of cars to each dealership. Then the dealerships either sell those cars themselves, or trade them amongst each other to meet customer needs. I suspect that my lack of understanding of how this worked led to some delay, as I inadvertently sent my contact at Shockley Honda on a wild goose chase with a very specific request that made it harder to get me a car.
But before I got to that point, I had to make sure that another HR-V was what I wanted for my next car. That wasn’t as straightforward as one might think, because Honda had redesigned the HR-V for 2023. Therefore, it wouldn’t be the same HR-V as I had just lost. The HR-V had gotten a platform change, now sharing a platform with the Civic rather than the Fit. It was also a bigger vehicle than it used to be. On October 10, a day or so after the accident, after getting my new glasses and speaking with many different people from the insurance company, I was heading home after dropping Elyse off with a friend for a little while. My route took me past Herson’s Honda in Rockville, and I glanced over at the lot to see what they had. To my surprise, there was a 2023 HR-V sitting on their lot. Time to act: I busted a move across a couple of lanes of traffic to get in there to see about taking that HR-V for a test drive. I talked to the salesman, and he showed me everything on it, and we took it for a spin around Rockville, over various kinds of roads so that I could get a good feel for how it handled. It all felt very familiar. In other words, while it may have looked different and it had a lot of fancy new features, it was still an HR-V under all of that. Then the next day, I took Elyse with me to the dealership and we gave it another test drive. Funny thing was that neither the second salesman nor Elyse noticed that I never set the mirrors, the seat, or anything when I got into it. I just jumped in and we were off, because it was all still set for me from the day before. That second test drive validated my findings from the first drive, and I also asked a few questions that I had forgotten to ask the day before. So it was settled: my next car would be another HR-V. And in what felt like a surprising move, I went with the EX-L trim, i.e. the top-tier version. Reason was that on the 2023 models, EX-L was the only trim that had a moon roof. The sport trim didn’t have a moon roof anymore.
Categories: Frederick, Honda HR-V (2023)
A letter to a bad driver…
6 minute read
January 12, 2023, 9:22 AM
One thing that I did not expect to come from the accident that claimed my HR-V was how much it has really bothered me, more than three months down the road. When I had the fire in the Soul, by the time three months had passed, I was in the HR-V and going along being awesome. The HR-V would take its first big road trip, an overnight trip to Centralia, Pennsylvania, a little more than three months after the Soul’s demise. In other words, I got over it quickly. I suppose it’s because the Soul perished in a fire, and it happened without any direct human intervention, i.e. no human’s actions directly triggered the failure that led to the fire, even though the root cause was shoddy workmanship during the warranty replacement of the engine.
In the case of the HR-V’s demise, the root cause was traceable to one person: Jose Rosalio Abrego Mena. He failed to stop for a red signal, and despite my best efforts to avoid a collision, there just wasn’t enough room to stop to avoid a collision, and his Nissan Pathfinder struck my HR-V on the left side, roughly on the A-pillar. I came out of it pretty well despite everything, walking away from the accident with only minor injuries. However, I feel like it may have left some lasting mental effects on me. I still get a little jumpy when I see the headlights of a vehicle approaching from a cross street at night, though this has reduced somewhat with time. I also can’t seem to get the whole incident out of my head, as my time in the train, which often helps me to organize my thoughts, has been a place to dwell on the accident, even though I played no part in causing it. I keep thinking about how I got knocked out by the airbags. I keep thinking about how the other driver ran after the accident, and how no charges that I could find were ever filed against the other driver (though I did turn up some old charges for trespassing and fishing without a license). I think about if there was anything more that I could have done to avoid a collision, such as a hard turn of the wheel, though I admit that once the other driver ran the light, a collision was probably inevitable (but that doesn’t stop me from thinking about it). The accident also made me consider my own mortality, as I think about how easily this collision could have killed me right then and there, and how lucky I was to be able to walk away from it largely unscathed. In short, I have not gotten over this one by any means, and I desperately wish that I could, but I just can’t seem to stop thinking about it and put it behind me. I hope that I didn’t end up with a case of PTSD over this, but I’m worried that I might.
Categories: Gaithersburg, Honda HR-V (2018)
The taming of the stroad?
15 minute read
December 1, 2022, 10:00 AM
About three weeks after the accident that claimed my HR-V, I read on The MoCo Show about another accident that occurred on the same stretch of road at Russell Avenue, a block away from where my accident happened, that looked very similar to mine. Additionally, I remember an accident that occurred at the same intersection as mine in May 2020 that Elyse and I encountered while we were out and called in to 911. Taken together, it tells me that Montgomery Village Avenue (MD 124) between Interstate 270 and Midcounty Highway is a poorly designed road that probably needs to be rethought and redesigned in order to increase safety along that stretch.
For those not familiar, Montgomery Village Avenue, along with quite a number of other roads in Montgomery County, is what is often referred to as a “stroad“. Wikipedia defines a stroad as “a type of thoroughfare that is a mix between a street and a road”, and the word itself is a combination of the words “street” and “road”. Basically, it’s a road that wants to function as a local city street and as a major highway all at once, and often fails at both roles. These roads are typically designed for relatively high speeds, but their functioning as a city street with pedestrians and so many private accesses means that the posted speed limits are typically well below the road’s design speed. Do you remember that Journal entry that I wrote in 2013 about people who were getting run over at bus stops in Montgomery County? All of the streets in question were stroads. Georgia Avenue in particular is the textbook definition of a stroad, being a six-lane divided highway with private access, including single-family residential, directly off of the main road from Silver Spring to all the way to Olney. The speed limit for much of that road is 35 mph from Silver Spring to Leisure World, with a posted speed of 25 mph through Wheaton. I speak from experience from ten years’ time living just off of Georgia Avenue that it is very difficult to maintain that speed limit when traffic is moving well, and I often found myself exceeding the speed limit without realizing it and then having to slow down once I do notice. That’s because the road is designed for much higher speeds than traffic is actually allowed to go, and people tend to drive in a way that befits the road design, especially during off hours. They say that if you can speed on a road and not realize it, and not feel that your higher-than-allowed speed is actually dangerous, then the speed limit is too low for the design of the road. In other words, the usual go-to argument of, “LoWeR aLl ThE sPeEd LiMiTs!” is a major non-starter for me, if because the speed limit was already too low for the design of the road, and people weren’t following it anyway, what’s the point of lowering it further? They weren’t following it when it was 35, so what makes you think that they’re going to follow it at 25? I also find the way that people are so quick to blame drivers 100% for accidents to be problematic, because the design of the road can also be a legitimate contributing factor to accidents, such as roads that are designed for much higher speeds than anyone probably ought to drive. It’s kind of like how the “no u-turn” sign is often a symptom of poor road design, because with a better-designed road, you wouldn’t need signage that disallows obvious and mostly reasonable moves to get around the poor road design.
Categories: Driving, Gaithersburg, Montgomery Village, Roads
May the HR-V rest in peace…
13 minute read
October 20, 2022, 8:32 AM
In the early morning on October 9, I was involved in a car accident on the way home from work. At the intersection of Montgomery Village Avenue and Christopher Avenue/Lost Knife Road in Gaithersburg, the driver of a red Nissan Pathfinder on Christopher Avenue ran a red light at what appeared to be full speed as I was going through the intersection, and despite my slamming on the brakes, there just wasn’t enough space to stop in order to avoid a collision. As a result, my car got T-boned on the left side on the front fender and the driver’s door, with enough force to deploy the side curtain airbags and knock my car about 150 feet before it came to rest next to a curb.
After the impact, I remember that I was sitting in the car and noticed that the airbags had gone off, and also noticed that the windshield was shatered at the bottom left. Then I remember hearing a male voice telling me that I needed to get out of the car. I quickly realized that would probably be a good idea, because considering that the car had just gone through a pretty hard collision, for all I knew, it might be on fire. I tried to open my door, but I couldn’t get it open, so I ended up climbing out through the passenger side door. I was quite shaken, I was bleeding above my left eye, my left knee felt sore like it had been scraped, and I wasn’t wearing my glasses anymore for some reason, but nonetheless, I had managed to walk away from it. Then I saw the person who had been telling me that I needed to get out of the car. It was a gentleman wearing black eye makeup (kind of like what the band Kiss does) from an event that he had been at earlier who was also an EMT, and who had witnessed the entire thing. He also quickly told me that the accident was absolutely not my fault, which I appreciated hearing. There was also a woman present who had witnessed the accident, who also agreed that I was not at fault. One of them must have also called 911, because I certainly didn’t, but the police and EMS were there pretty quickly.
When EMS arrived, they quickly took care of me, wrapping some gauze around my head for the bleeding, and taking my blood pressure. Yes, they took my blood pressure. I’m standing on the side of the road next to my now-wrecked car, visibly shaking from the accident, and then the guy tells me that my blood pressure is “kind of high”, coming in at 172/116. I did not need to be told that. I’m usually pretty nice, but I just shot back, in a pretty sarcastic tone, “Gee, I wonder why.” He removed the blood pressure cuff from my arm and went away. Yeah, I just survived a pretty major car accident, got hit by an airbag, had to crawl out the other side of my car, was bleeding from my head, had no glasses, and was shaking. My blood pressure is high? No kidding. I would have been more surprised if it was 120/80 right then rather than some astronomical amount. I refused transport, feeling that it was unnecessary. Then the cops got my information, and took my statement. I also let Elyse know what had happened, and she quickly got an Uber to take her to the scene.
Categories: Driving, Gaithersburg, Honda HR-V (2018), Montgomery Village, Scion xB
A question about what is okay to critique…
3 minute read
September 19, 2022, 12:04 PM
This is something that happened back in November of last year, and it’s something that I still question because it leaves something unsettled that I had previously considered to not be a question at all. My understanding was, when it comes to a person’s appearance, the only things that are okay to to critique are hair and clothing, because those are choices that the person made, and that they can readily change. That comes with a lot of caveats, though. You don’t critique things about hair if it’s something that they can’t change, like baldness, though anything that they can still change is fair game. Likewise, with clothing, you wouldn’t criticize the fashion choices of someone who clearly can’t afford anything else.
So, with that said, here’s why I ask. Last year, I was off on Black Friday, and Elyse had planned an adventure for us on that day. She planned a shopping adventure that day, and she wanted to go out and check out the “doorbuster” events. Me, having spent four Christmases working in retail, I wanted nothing to do with any of it and would have preferred to just sleep in and work on the website or Flickr, but I wouldn’t have gotten a moment of peace if I stayed home – so out I went. We chose to go to Annapolis so that I would have something to do, with the idea of my going out to Sandy Point State Park to fly the drone over the water while Elyse shopped. Unfortunately, however, when I got to the park, I judged the wind to be far too strong to fly, so the drone never even came out of its carrier. After sitting in the car for a while feeling annoyed about the circumstances, having driven out to the bay for nothing, I headed back to the mall, feeling somewhat defeated, and met back up with Elyse and joined her on her shopping adventure, because nothing was going up into the sky other than my frustration.
Categories: Annapolis, Retail, Social media