Category: Photos

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Florida Photos USA

Photo of the Week: Indian River fruit at Crystal River, Florida

                Bags of oranges and grapefruit, Crystal River fruit stand, Florida (Scarborough photo)

Normally the Photo of the Week would be up on Wednesday, but we’re slipping a little this week as we battle a (nice-to-have) tidal wave of work.

I took this photo in Crystal River, Florida, about 75 miles north of Tampa/St. Petersburg near the western coast of the state.  I’ve talked about Florida’s manatees, pre-Columbian mounds and sugar plantations this week (and it’s the height of Florida citrus season) so here’s a juicy shot from a roadside fruit and produce stand.

“Indian River fruit” is just a moniker attached to fruits, usually citrus, harvested within a certain distance from the Indian River in central Florida.

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Asia Photos

Photo of the Week: Harbin, China

Harbin Ice and Snow Festival, China (courtesy silverlinedwinnebago on flickr's Creative Commons)

(photo courtesy silverlinedwinnebago at flickr’s Creative Commons.)

“In the bleak midwinter” there are plenty of cool things to do, like the Ice and Snow Festival in Harbin, China.

It’s an entire town built of ice, and illuminated at night. Amazing.

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Photos

Photo of the Week: Chicago Botanic Garden in winter

             The Chicago Botanic Garden in winter (courtesy Semper AC/DC at flickr's Creative Commons)

My article on great botanical gardens for kids is now online at education.com, so I thought I’d feature a photo from one of the gardens I mentioned, in Chicago with a fresh blanket of snow.

The article also discusses gardens in Brooklyn, St. Louis, Atlanta and Huntington CA.

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Blog Photos

Photo of the Week: Fishy San Francisco Christmas

The San Francisco Bay Area is second only to Hong Kong as a place I’d love to live….if I could afford it. 🙂

Fisherman’s Wharf is basically a tourist spot today, not a gritty fishing boat area, but kids like the many shops and attractions nearby, including the Pier 39 sea lions and Ghirardelli Square.

Here’s a nice seasonal photo of the famous Fisherman’s Wharf sign, all dressed up for the holidays.  Have you left your heart in San Francisco?

                                      San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf, dressed up for Christmas (courtesy pbo31 at flickr's Creative Commons)

Technorati tags: travel, family travel, San Francisco California, Fisherman’s Wharf, Christmas

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Photos USA Video Posts

Video of the week: the original Little House in Kansas

I’ve posted previously about my stop in Independence, Kansas in summer 2007 to visit the Laura Ingalls Wilder “Little House on the Prairie,” which was reconstructed on its original site using traditional materials and layout.

As I played with my disposable video camera and finally reviewed its contents, I found that I’d made some clips when I visited the Ingalls home with my daughter.

After some minor wrestling with Microsoft’s Movie Maker on my laptop, this is what we saw on the prairie (although it was too dark to film the interior, I can assure you that the one-room house had a couple of beds, a table and chairs and a few cooking items, and that was it for amenities.)

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Blog Photos

Photo of the week: Chile Pepper Christmas

                 Chile pepper decorations at the Sichler farm stand, Albuquerque, New Mexico (Scarborough photo)

This is a colorful group of chile pepper decorations for fall and the holiday season, sold at the Sichler Farms produce stand in Albuquerque, New Mexico (820 San Mateo NE, 2 blocks south of Lomas. (505) 255-3338.

The produce stand is open daily August through October, and when I visited this past October, they were roasting chiles in big tumbling barrel roasters in the parking lot, and it smelled divine. 

It’s a typical fall scent in this part of New Mexico; grab some freshly-roasted peppers if you’re ever in town during the season. 

Technorati tags: travel, family travel, Albuquerque, New Mexico, chile peppers

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Blog Photos USA Video Posts

Video of the week: Colonial Williamsburg

Earlier this year we took a family press trip to Virginia’s “Historic Triangle” (Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown and Yorktown) and our tourguides gave us a disposable digital video camera to play with.

The CVS disposable costs about US$30 and then another US$12-13 to develop, but it did motivate me to film without my usual over-analyzing and artistic angst. Once I show you the good clips from it, I’m going to start using the video mode on my Kodak digital camera, for better video quality.

I’ve never had a video camera, so I made all of the usual newbie mistakes: panning/moving the camera too fast so that the resulting video induces vomiting, simply forgetting that I had the thing in my purse, and then not getting around to getting the clips off of the camera and onto my computer.

With great fanfare, I’d like to announce that in addition to filming a little video clip of me with a laptop camera, I actually drove over to my local CVS pharmacy yesterday and got the contents of the camera onto a DVD. I popped the DVD into my laptop and voila — a whole lot of “OMG, I forgot I filmed that!”

So, here is my first attempt at doing a little travel video work for Family Travel’s Photo/Video of the Week — it’s a short narrated clip from July 2007, taken on Duke of Gloucester Street in front of the King’s Arms Tavern in Colonial Williamsburg.

(1/12/08 – The original video seems to have somehow disappeared, so here is a link to it on YouTube in case it drops out again….)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uAza9uCLKM