Snapshot of Silence

In flight, a picture taken from a CG-4 Glider being towed by a C-47.

The curly cable around the tow cable is a communication wire.

Life in the Desert: British Armor

AEC Mk I armored car equipped with a 2-pound gun in the Western desert, 20 September 1942


For some acclimatising to the desert was a rough uncomfortable affair. But many men had been in the desert for a long time and had adjusted to the conditions. For these men there were weeks and months of uninterrupted routine living in the most basic conditions. Here one of the principal pleasures was tea – “tea greasy with evaporated milk and powdered with dust” that was considered an “elixir”. Peter Roach, who had left the Merchant Marine as a volunteer for the Royal Tank Regiment, describes a typical day in his life at this time. Only at the back of his mind was the thought that they would soon be going into action: I washed every day with a pint mug part full. First I washed my teeth, spitting the water back into the mug. Then I shaved, washed my face, and dipping a slimy flannel into the sludge washed myself down.” Clothes we normally washed in our old friend and comforter petrol, which reduced the drudgery, dried almost instantly and also killed any vermin which might be traveling with you. … Our life was quite elemental, ordered, simple and mentally numbing. We rose shortly before the sun, rolled our bedding and strapped it on the back of the tank, warmed the engine and tuned the radio. Then out with the fire tin, in with the petrol, brew tin filled with water, and we stood round shivering slightly in the cool air waiting for the sun to come up over the horizon, watching the reddening sky, waiting for the full flood of light before we could light up. The air was crystal clear and cold, our wadi etched with a dark-rimmed silhouette. Other tanks stood out stark in the morning light; other figures stood around their tins. Then over the horizon flooded a warm yellow glow, eating up the shadows, swallowing the tight-drawn outlines. Fires burst forth, lost in the rapidly intensifying light; the tin boiled and we stood around gulping scalding hot tea, fresh and taut and blissful. By the time breakfast was cooking it was hot. Porridge made from crushed biscuit and some form of sweetening, bacon and beans, hard biscuit and gooey sweet jam or marmalade; butter was non-existent and the margarine was nearly always liquid. By then the world was reduced to a glaring shadeless heat and we settled to a pleasant day of nothing. …. After lunch we repaired into our tank, covered the hatch with an old mosquito net, killed all the flies and prepared to re-read Dingo’s copies of an old local papers from Nelson in Lancashire. Then we dozed until the oven in which we squatted began to cool. The sun ran down its course, the flies went, we donned our shirts and the supply trucks arrived with food, water and stores – perhaps there was mail. We ate our bully stew in comradely groups. In the cool of the evening we gathered round the tank and made one last brew on a petrol stove, tuned the wireless to the BBC and then relaxed into a silent self-supporting family. We unrolled the bedding from the back of the tank, spread it on a tarpaulin beside the tank, took off our boots and socks and crawled into blissful warm blankets, to lie there watching the stars and listening contentedly to occasional firing up at the sharp end, to the drone of aircraft and the occasional crump of shell or mortar. Then we slept. Source: WW2today.

Staff officers examine a newly arrived Sherman tank sitting on a Scammell Pioneer tank transporter, 15 September 1942

Tank crews receiving instruction on the Grant tank, 9 September 1942

A Stuart tank is silhouetted against the setting sun as its commander scans the horizon, 6 September 1942

From One to a Million

In front of the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans, Louisiana, a 1915 one horsepower buggy is seen traveling the same road as the 32 million horsepower Saturn 1 booster did 50 years later.

Too few, Too late

A German A7V tank on a train car. They came too late in the war to make a difference, and they didn't work very well anyway. Their main problems were that they couldn't get clearance over very big bumps or obstacles (rocks, downed tree trunks, etc) and they had a very hard time crossing trenches.

Mix and Match

The vehicle in the foreground is a command Tiger (P) to be issued yo a heavy Panzerjaeger unit, the vehicle behind seems to be a Panther with a Panzer VI turret.

This is a Panzer IV chassis with a hull-mounted Russian 76.2mm gun

Our Beautiful Planet

South Western United States

Northern Canada

Iceland

Cascada del Rio, Ecuador

Canada

Saxony, Germany

Behind the Lens

Don't look at this photo and just look at the people in it. Think of the person behind the camera. Think of the split second he took the picture. Think of the racket of the gunfire in his ears. Think of the terror he must have been experiencing, armed with only a camera. Think about what was going through his head.

Why was this man here?

What were his motivations?

Why come to this jungle to take photographs of an unpopular war?

Why brave death for it? Was it for men like this?

Was it for the rush?

Or was it to show the world what war is really like?

Memories

As we get older, the years pass unnoticed. Yesterday it was 2011, a few days before it was 2010, a month or two before that we were in elementary school. Time passes so quickly. Memories slowly fade and only seem to come back when we are reminded of them. Should we hold on to them with dear life or should we let them go and move on to making new ones? In the end it won't matter. Regardless of what

option we choose, we will still finding ourselves wishing to go back. To go back in time, to see the friends we had, to talk to the people we'd always wished we'd talked to, to do something we hadn't done, to change one little thing here or there. But there is no going back. So live life to the fullest, let your memories be plentiful.

Caffeine High

Austrian daredevil, Felix Baumgartner, plans to leap from 120,000 feet above the Earth on October 8, in a jump that would break the sound barrier and become the world's highest-ever skydive.

Companies like Red Bull are responsible for pushing the limits on what humans can do. Space X, Virgin Galactic and Planetary Resources are just a few others out of many. These are people who want to propel humans forward to a new high. They want to break records, they want to go where we've never gone before.

Preface to Infinity

I find it amazing how humans have lived our entire history on this tiny little rock we call Earth. We've created so much , we've learned so much, we've done so much........but this is only the beginning. This, in comparison to what humanity could and will become, is just the first few paragraphs in the front of a very long history book. We think we've come so far, but we should look ahead and see where we're going. The rest of the universe is out there waiting for us, the rest of history.

All we have to do is go.

Magnetosphere Majesty

The Northern Lights (Aurora Borealis) as seen from Norway.

They are caused by charged particles coming off of the sun hitting Earth's magnetic field and then traveling along the field lines and interacting with the atmosphere. Lights like this also happen in the southern hemisphere.

They have been sources of mystery and legend for thousands of years. It's amazing how I can explain what causes them in a single sentence.

Launch

I'm glad NASA's shuttle program has shut down. This will allow for the private industry to start expanding space travel. It will push us into the future.

Green

A diver swimming beneath ice that is several meters thick. This is during broad daylight, the ice turns the light this color.

Footprints

Mirror

Let's move forward. Let's not turn our heads backwards. Let the wind, let the waves, let the light carry us forward. Let's look at that image of what we once were disappear slowly into the mirror, and let's look to where we are going.

Looking Back on Bad Decisions

We view the past in a much different light than we view the present. We see our mistakes easier. We look back and we see that maybe we were be real bad guys.

The United States fought and funded a war in the name of democracy and freedom, and in the process we supported a dictatorship that ended up taking the lives of thousands of civilians. We lied, we cheated, we stole, we blamed other people.

Maybe we should think twice before doing something like that again.

Oh wait, we already have.

In the photo: South Vietnamese troops, with American gear and weapons, dropped off in a combat zone by American helicopters.

Italian Military Videos - Documentaries and Propaganda

Gebirgsjäger Gewehr

This is a German G33/40. You may think it looks similar to a Kar98, but it isn't. It isn't even German, it's Czech. It was manufactured by the Czechs for the Germans for use as a carbine for their mountain troops, or Gerbirgsjäger. This one is something very special though, having a ZF41 low-power, long eye relief scope over the rear sight.

You can see another modification that isn't on the Kar98, the extra plate near the butt of the rifle. It was used as a climbing aid.

The very short barrel can be seen very well here, along with the extended butt plate.

A close up of the German made ZF41 scope.

Pioneering the Future, One Shot at a Time

This is the 8mm Lebel cartridge, the first small bore, smokeless charged round to be adopted in the world. It was first used in the Lebel M1886 rifle.

The Lebel M1886. It had an 8-round tubular magazine.

Stepping It Up

It's dangerous. It's expensive. It's seemingly pointless.

It's also the future.

We can't go from where we are right now to flying through the universe at a thousand times the speed of light, we have to take steps. We'll get there soon though. I'm glad to be living in this time. This is the beginning. This is when humanity wakes up and starts exploring the stars. This is when we take the first leaps.

We've already started crawling.

Let's learn to walk.

Studying the Past and the Future

"Our solar system is approximately ten light hours across. Some people don't understand why I love astronomy as much as I do; I don't understand why they don't."

Secretly Short Sighted

This is the Italian Perino machine gun. It was created in the early 1900s by an Italian army officer. It had two features that were fairly revolutionary: 1) it was strip fed, but the strips were held in the box on the left of the gun, so the assistant gunner could keep feeding the gun without having to change any belts. 2) the cartridges, once fired, were put back on the strip and then the whole thing was spit out of the gun. These two things made the gun very ahead of its time and it could have been incredibly successful.

However, instead of running it in trials in competition with other machine guns, the Italians kept it totally secret. It wasn't ready in time to be adopted for WWI, and therefore never saw the light (and its rightful place was taken by the less-than-stellar FIAT-Revelli M1914).

Lorry, My Valentine

This time, the deception is British. This is a Valentine infantry tank, dressed up as a truck, on the back of a tank hauler being carried across the desert. There was quite a bit of deception used in North Africa. The tricks ranged from cavalry made of palm trees to cardboard tanks, and from camouflage netting to fake oil pipelines.

And obviously lorry tanks.

The Lucky Few

Most photographers will tell you this; you'll take a thousand photographs, and only like two. And, most of the time it's true, especially when using real film. I shoot mostly color out of an old Olympus 35mm camera that belonged to my mother in college (in the late 1970s), and these are a few of my favorite photos from my trip to Hawaii in July and a recent plane trip with a friend.

This is some type of flower after a small shower in Waimea Valley on Oahu.

Another photo from Waimea Valley. The area in this photo, and in the next one, is a preserved area that includes ruins of an old native Hawaiian settlement.

One thing I love doing with photographs is putting something in the fore ground out of focus with the background in focus. I love how it draws attention to the background (or vice-versa, the fore ground).

The rocks around where the village was. I attempted to do the same effect as the last photo with the background in focus, but there wasn't enough stuff in the fore ground to put out of focus to make it work very well. I still like the photo though.

This is right below Diamond Head crater, facing south west. I love this one because of the colors of the ocean. I love how they turned out in the photo.

This and the next are a series I took on a hill near Makapu'u light house on the southern shore of Oahu. Again, I was trying to do my favorite effect in this photo, but unfortunately I got too much of the fore ground in the photo for it to look its greatest. However, even with the big fore ground, I still prefer it over the other photo.

Another that I love because of the colors. The land and the water, combined with the mist in the distance, is amazingly beautiful.

The co-pilot's view of a Diamond DA-20. This was taken on the taxiway while my friend (who just got his pilot's license) was doing some last minute stuff before takeoff. Even with the little red splotch on the bottom left, I love this photo. In fact, I think it may be one of my favorites out of all that I've taken. I love the contrast of the dash and the gauges with the out-of-focus field.

Like I said, these are the lucky few that I really liked, there are many more sitting on my computer.