Last of the Leftovers!

These are the last of the leftovers from our recent Midwest trip - don't think I can wring out any more posts of the nearly 700 pictures I took in those 3 weeks...  But these shots are cool enough they need to be on the blog!

First up are a couple pictures taken a day or two into my trip - I stopped in Clinton, IA to have an early dinner with my schoolmate Jeff.  I was on my way to join the RAGBRAI group in Cedar Rapids, and Clinton, right on the Iowa side of the Mississippi (and where I was born!) was a nice stopping point for the 3.5 hour drive.  After dinner at a burger joint, we noticed there was a car show in the adjacent parking lot.  While I admire restored cars from decades ago, I'm not a car guy, but I like the photo ops that present themselves.  At left is a hood ornament from a '55 Chevy Bel Air.  While it looks to be a jet plane to me, a Google search calls it a bird, and while birds generally lack vertical stabilizers, what appears to be a windscreen can be a stylized bird head...  You can form your own opinion!

And while I don't go out of my way usually to capture a 3D stereo view, the curves of some cars scream for its use.  Here is a view of a '66 Corvette, which I do remember making my heart go pitter-pat back in the day.  This is a cross-eyed view - cross your eyes slightly to observe the right picture with your left eye, and vice-versa.  You will then see a center picture that reveals depth to your brain.  It is easier to do it with the thumbnails, then you can click the image for the full-resolution view.

One of my walks in the prairie section of the local forest preserve, I was looking for targets to shoot and saw a plant just covered in lil' red aphids!  This is the only plant I saw them on, and there were likely hundreds on the otherwise healthy-looking plant.  While there were few adults (with the wings at left), there was a variety of sizes in various stages of growth, as shown at right.  They all looked so curious doing headstands with proboscis buried in the stem!  These are taken with the macro at just about the closest I can get!

On our last weekend there, we were slow to leave the pizza joint where we had dined with relatives and were once again visiting with classmate Jeff.  It was nearing sunset and I happened to look up and saw the most remarkable sky.  While not particularly clear or cloudy, the range in tone just caught my eye and I squeezed off a couple frames, one of them shown here.  For some reason, we don't see many cumulus clouds like this in the desert southwest, and it stands out to me.

Well, that just about concludes the coverage of our Summer Midwest trip.  I hope you enjoyed the pics as much as I did taking and presenting them!