Robert Pence

It's an imposing building. I look forward to a time when the development of that part of Toldeo can regain some momentum. Those old-school coal-fired municipal steam plants were not a pretty sight when they were operating. Emission control standards and management of coal dust were not what they are now.

I thought I posted a response - sort of - but maybe I forgot to click the "Post" button. Sometimes I do that. I can't answer your question directly, but a Google search or a browse through the classifieds section of a photography magazine might help. If you do find a source (and not all of them are in big cities), figure the total estimated cost of your project and decide whether you might be better off buying a film scanner that will be there whenever you come up with something to do. The price/performance ratio for scanners has improved a lot over the past several years from what it used to be. Drum scans done by competent operators usually are really expensive, and if you're going for the highest-attainable resolution the file sizes can get very large. If you have to send the work out of town, don't forget shipping costs. When turning your precious originals over to someone else, there's always the chance that they could be lost in transit or in the shop, too, or your images could be pirated by an employee. For archiving, reproducing, or publishing prints almost any flatbed scanner with 1200dpi or higher, from a reputable manufacturer, should be satisfactory; print reproduction seldom requires more than 300dpi resolution, which gives considerable room for enlargement. The resolution of commercially-processed prints and snapshots isn't often so high as to justify scan resolution above 1200dpi. In recent years, prosumer-level film scanners makers have come out with gear that very closely approaches the quality of scans attainable from drum scanners Nikon makes some very good film scanners for transparencies and negatives; I own one that does an outstanding job on negatives up to medium format (120/220 roll film). I had 4000dpi drum scan of a 120 negative that had cost more than $25, and when I got the Nikon 9000ED I re-scanned it at the same resolution. Blown up at 100% side-by-side on screen, I couldn't tell the difference between the two scans. The hitch is that four or five years ago the Nikon scanner cost almost $2,000, and I think that the market for film scanners has become sufficiently competitive that Nikon probably will drop out of it before too much longer. They haven't released new drivers for their film scanners in several years, and have never published 64-bit drivers for them. The salvation there is that Vuescan, a very good third-party outfit, does publish those missing drivers. Epson has several models of flatbed scanners that will accomodate both photos and negatives/transparencies, at varying resolutions. Two models, the V700 (~$600) and V750-M ($~850) can go up to 6400dpi optical resolution with sufficiently wide dynamic range to capture highlight and shadow detail well. Both models provide support Digital ICE utilities included in the software; those utilities provide dust and scratch removal, grain management, restoration of faded colors, and recovery of shadow detail that can be important sometimes in working with old Kodachrome slides or underexposed images. The primary justification for the V750-M's higher price is that its lens system incorporates higher quality optical glass for more exact reproduction of color and capture of finest detail. Continuing to babble - Perhaps you already know this, but just in case, a 2400dpi scan of a 35mm neg or slide will yield a respectable print up to 8x10. There's a handy piece of software called Perfect Resize (formerly Genuine Fractals), from onOne Software that uses a better resizing algorithm than Photoshop's bicubic. With it, you can enlarge an image more without loss of image quality than in Photoshop. It works standalone, or as a Photoshop plugin. The standard edition costs $159.95 from the publisher's web site.

Click here to see the web site and photos of ongoing construction of an amazing privately-funded railroad-history project being built in Ohio by Jerry Joe Jacobson, former owner of Ohio Central Railroad.

Wonderful city, great photos! As a transit geek, I appreciate your emphasis on the street-rail infrastructure and the synergy between biking and mass transit. In many respects Portland is what many American cities would aspire to be, if their policymakers only knew.

Here's my first experiment with HDR. I’ve had a few projects on the back burner that I thought would work better with HDR processing, but didn’t get around to trying it until last night. Built in 1929, Beverly Shores (west of Michigan City) is the last working survivor of the Spanish-styled stations built in the 1920s along the Samuel Insull-owned electric interurban lines. When built, it incorporated a ticket office, waiting room, and residence for the station manager. It was in severe disrepair and pending demolition when restoration was undertaken in 1998. Beverly Shores is now a flag stop for both eastbound and westbound South Shore electric commuter trains. I’ve tried in the past to get a good photo of the neon sign atop the station and always had problems because of the contrast between bright lighting and surrounding shadows. On May 12 of this year I went there at dusk and shot five bracketed exposures and saved them in Camera RAW. I hoped to capture the details of tall grass and shrubbery surrounding the station without overexposing the neon and blowing out the colors and detail. I wanted to catch a little of the sky, too, because a storm was brewing. A couple of minutes after I shot the photos, a brief splatter of large raindrops arrived accompanied by a blast of cold wind. That was followed after a short pause by a lake squall with leaf-ripping winds and torrential rain. My camera and I safely made it to shelter reasonably dry.

Interesting shots. Living in the midwest where there's lots of land for developers to sprawl into, I got a jolt from seeing a Wal-Mart downtown. I know that the company has implemented a strategy of creating smaller-footprint stores so that they can gp into urban areas, but that's the first one I remember seeing.

Beautiful photos and a fascinating place!

Not being all that familiar with Cleveland -- is there a neighborhood association or business owners' group, any kind of active civic group in the area? In many places they can bring attention to problems like that one and sometimes they can get pressure applied to the property owner or management company to take action.

I take the use of "gay" in that context as disparaging, and I take exception to it. Perhaps you haven't been around here long enough to be aware that a considerable number of long-time active forumers are openly gay, including some among the admin/moderator ranks. You get a pass on it this time.

Amazing place!

C-Dawg - Sweet colors! DJ Orion - Pennsylvania has some of the most awesome thunderstorms. You're really missing some photographic opportunities.

Beautiful. Your photos make me homesick for Cleveland, and I never even lived there!

Who said anything about the street? I said Findlay Market. That would be like you riding your bike through the Westside Market. I agree on that issue. People who try to ride their bikes through busy, congested pedestrian areas are morons. They should at least dismount and walk their bikes, or better, lock them at the entrance and walk. Same applies at many festivals.

Sound advice. Twenty year olds aren't cute to make them objects of desire. They're cute to keep their parents from killing them because they won't get a job, start paying their own bills, and move out of the house.

You don't have to grow up. When I was about twelve, I observed the dour demeanor and absence of fun-loving behavior in my parents and the other adults they associated with, and resolved to never grow up. The march of time may have dragged my body along with it, but mentally and emotionally I'm still twelve! :-P

This discussion reminded me of my teenage years. I was skinny as a rail, pushing six feet and barely making 120 pounds. I couldn't gain weight despite eating almost anything that couldn't outrun me. My grandmother was a marvel in the kitchen, and she kept telling me I shouldn't be so skinny. "Eat! Eat!" she'd admonish as she plied me with warm-from-the-oven homemade pecan rolls, yeast-raised German coffee cakes, and apple dumplings topped with vanilla ice cream. I was a willing - no, eager - victim to her efforts to fatten me up. In my late twenties I started to gain, and by age 50 I had hit 170. Now I'm past that phase, and hanging steady at 130 or thereabouts. Time and its close companion, arthritis, have taken their toll on my height, though, and shrunk me to the shy side of 5'10".

I've had similar experiences when someone, either from cyberspace or the terrestrial environment, asked a question related to one of my areas of (obsessive) interest and/or derived from one of my photos. In situations where I've had reason to believe the person had a serious interest and planned to make constructive use of the information, sometimes I've spent hours digging out all the details in places where other people might not know to look, and uploading or printing photos that I thought might be useful. I've sent the info via email or postal mail, sometimes paying a few dollars for postage, but I might as well have put the info into a bottle, walked across the street, and tossed it into the Saint Marys River for all the response I've gotten. There's no acknowledgement of receipt, let alone any thanks or description of how my work was helpful. On the other side of the employment search-issue, I once spent almost an entire year searching for a good full-time job with benefits after being job eliminated when my employer went on the rocks. Several interviews went well, including some that resulted in second interviews, but none of those employers ever contacted me to let me know that I hadn't been selected for whatever reason. Even when I attempted to contact them to ask about my status, none ever returned a call. Professionalism and common courtesy should work both ways.

Evening eastbound South Shore train #15 approaches Portage/Ogden Dunes (JN) station on time at 18:21 CST, Monday, June 20, 2011. http://urbanindiana.com/in_south_shore/20110620-7754.jpg

The point-and-shoot has served you well.

I took accordion lessons from about age 10 until after high school, thoroughly affirming my status as a dork long before urban internet sites came along. I started out with a teacher/music store owner in Berne, Indiana, a Swiss-heritage community, who could put on a dazzling performance with both Italian (keys on the right, buttons on the left) and Swiss (buttons on both sides) accordions. I could only hope to rip out a polka the way my last teacher could. He was a rather dissipated middle-aged guy whose constant output of cigarette smoke maintained a haze in the tiny rented studio in the basement of a downtown Fort Wayne music store. His fingers danced on the keyboard as though they were having the time of their lives. I haven't played in at least forty years. Square dancing probably was one of my favorite activities at the annual week-long 4-H camp in my early teens. It was a great leveling factor in the jock-oriented culture where I grew up, a non-competitive activity where the rest of us could participate and have fun.

Extraordinarily fine job with the scenery! The vegetation and buildings look quite authentic.

Hmm ... dating horror stories, dating horror stories ... I've been seeing the same girl for almost a year now. It might even become a very long-term commitment. <Shudder.> I hate it when a fling deteriorates into a relationship!

I'll second that. WD Mybook external drives are tough. A couple of mine have suffered the same mishaps you described, and come out unscathed. The internal versions work well in external enclosures as well. My favorite among those is the Rocketfish enclosure; it includes card-reader slots for SD and compact-flash cards, and connected to a USB 3.0 port on the computer it supports USB 3.0. The ruggedness applies to WD internal drives, too. For internal RAID installations the WD RE (Enterprise class) hard drives seem to be bulletproof, and although they're more expensive than the Caviar series, the price differential isn't all that great, percentage-wise. I became less impressed with Seagate after they acquired Maxtor in 2006. Prior to that I think they were highly reliable, but they must have assimilated Maxtor's philosophy regarding (non-)reliability. I lost much of a summer's RAW files in 2006 when a Maxtor drive died, and then I discovered that the backups I'd made on a cheap-ass Lite-On DVD burner were unreadable on other DVD drives. By that time I'd already given away the computer with that DVD burner, and the recipient had trashed the DVD burner after he discovered the problem. Regarding internal RAID implementation, there's a function called TLER (Time-Limited-Error-Recovery) that limits the error-recovery time on a disk in a RAID error from exceeding the controller's error-recovery time limit and causing the drive to be marked degraded and removed from the RAID. At one time, WD Caviar drives had this feature and it could be switched "on" for RAID implementation or "off" for standalone use via a utility called WDTLER.exe that was downloadable from Western Digital. In more recent versions, the Caviar drives no longer have TLER available, and RE (Enterprise) drives have it perrmanently enabled. RE drives are suitable only for RAID use, and Caviar drives are suitable only for standalone use. Bear this in mind when building a system or adding functionality. I learned it the hard way with my recent new build. More about WD and TLER at Wikipedia here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time-Limited_Error_Recovery You might be just what some big, ugly bruiser is looking for in a girlfriend -- don't pass up your chance for happiness! Sex offender status, at least for getting on a registry, comes from an offense involving rape and/or force/violence. In sex with a minor or child-molesting those are implicit. Public indecency, lewdness, indecent exposure might get your name in the newspaper but it probably won't get you locked up unless you make a habit of it. If it did, my youngest brother would already be on a registry or still in jail.

I use IE8, and I've never had a problem with quotes. I don't have anything substantive to offer for a solution, but have you tried clicking the Compatibility button? It's the broken-page icon at the top of the browser page, just to the right of the URL box.

It'll be a shame to see it bulldozed, as it's obviously been kept secure from vandals and except for a few spots, appears largely intact and in good condition.