Split

Shadows at a Quincy Mine boiler house. Catching up on some old posts.

Michigan E Shaft

Yes, I'm alive! I've moved to Minnesota (relevant for this post) and am settling in. More posts on the way, I promise...

The Minesota Mine (yes, spelled that way) was one of the first wildly rich copper mines in the Copper Country. It closed, in the words of the copper handbook, largely due to management unwilling to invest the necessary money in keeping it going. It was reborn as the Michigan Mine, on a much grander scale.

When it began to play out (again), they expanded and drove new shafts, including the "E" shaft. Its fortress-like ruins still sit atop a short bluff, with its collapsing shaft recently re-capped. I have no clue what happened to these ruins to cause them to fall apart this way -- it's very unusual, even in the ruin-ridden Copper Country.

Birch shadow

A young tree's shadow on a long-established birch.

Conduit

Conduits entering the Quincy #8 (Mesnard)'s small modern hoist house.

Portage Ice

Ice in the Portage on a "summery" evening.

Automating time-lapse photos with gphoto

Important update, December 2023: This post is quite old and hasn't been updated in more than 10 years. It might or might not be useful or accurate. I've moved to using a camera with a built-in intervalometer.

My article on installing and using gphoto introduced a great piece of software which lets you use a computer to control your camera. The purpose of this article is to show you how I used gphoto to automatically adjust the shutter speed in this time-lapse video of the sun setting behind the Portage Lake Lift Bridge.

Wavy Window

There's this urban legend that glass is actually a liquid. Then again, some people say that old glass was just fundamentally wavy. Either way, this old window looks out into the courtyard at Kloster Irsee, Germany.