Team Spirit: Exposure.Detroit Ann Arbor Exhibit

Posted on by Michigan in Pictures

Team Spirit

Team Spirit, photo by A2 Cathy.

Cathy says that Michigan means enjoying school sports. She’s one of many members of the Exposure.Detroit group on Flickr who are offering their photos for consideration in the juried June 6, 2008 Exposure.Detroit Exhibition in Ann Arbor.

The show will be held at Sweetwaters in Ann Arbor and hangs through July (and the Ann Arbor Art Fair). All you have to do to have a shot at the show is click over to Exposure.Detroit and follow the instructions (which basically boil down to “post a photo that shows what Michigan means to you”)! Even if you don’t want to be in the show, you will want to see all the different things that Michigan means to folks!

flame on

Posted on by Michigan in Pictures

flame on

flame on, photo by jenny murray.

This is part of Jenny’s ttv (through the viewfinder) set (slideshow).

Hope your weekend is as exciting as this mailbox … I’m pretty sure that if you get a tattoo or paint your face like this, it will be!

Michigan March Madness: Crisler Arena at the University of Michigan

Posted on by farlane

Gophers at Crisler Arena by B Cohen

Gophers at Crisler Arena, photo by B Cohen

Crisler Arena at the University of Michigan hosts men’s basketball, women’s basketball, men’s gymnastics and women’s gymnastics. It opened in 1967, was named for Fritz Crisler, legendary UM football coach and athletic director and designed by Dan Dworsky. Wikipedia’s page on Crisler Arena says that is is often called “The House that Cazzie Built,” a reference to superstar Cazzie Russell. Russell led UM to Big Ten titles ’64-66 and his popularity caused the team’s fanbase to outgrow Yost Fieldhouse. The arena seats almost 14,000 and you can read more about it at the Crisler Arena page at MGOBLUE.com.

Wikipedia’s entry for the University of Michigan Wolverines men’s basketball says:

The Wolverines have won 12 Big Ten regular-season conference titles, as well as the inaugural Big Ten Tournament in 1998, which it later forfeited due to NCAA violations. The team has appeared in the NCAA Final Four on six occasions (1964, 1965, 1976, 1989, 1992* and 1993*) and won the national championship in 1989 under Steve Fisher. The program later forfeited its 1992 and 1993 Final Four appearances due to NCAA violations. Other notable players who played for Michigan include Daniel Horton, Bernard Robinson, Gary Grant, Terry Mills, Glen Rice, Jalen Rose, Rumeal Robinson, Jamal Crawford, Juwan Howard, Chris Webber, Cazzie Russell, and Mark Hughes. (I’ll  add Robert Traylor, Rudy Tomjanovich and Phil Hubbard to that list)

More items of interest for you include a biggee-sized view from up high, this photoset titled Paging the Fab Five and a couple of photos of Crisler Arena from the Bentley Historical Library.

More Michpics Michigan March Madness!

Ice Jigsaw

Posted on by Michigan in Pictures

Ice Jigsaw

Ice Jigsaw, photo by baklein62.

Ice on the Huron river, Ann Arbor.

Anatomy of a Sun Dog

Posted on by Michigan in Pictures

EDITOR’S NOTE: SEPTEMBER 22, 2012: Greetings from the future, people of January 2008! I think that this is the first post that I’ve ever re-done. The photos here were really cool but they were removed from Flickr. I probably would have waited for winter but as today’s post about rainbows refers here, I figured I’d do it now! Also, this post is in the new science category that I created today. If you have suggestions for other posts from Michigan in Pictures to be included, post a comment on them!

bluffsundogcaron-vi

bluffsundogcaron-vi, photo by MILapse

Sundogs, Parhelia, Mock Suns on the fantastic website Atmospheric optics says:

Sundogs, parhelia, are formed by plate crystals high in the cirrus clouds that occur world-wide. In cold climates the plates can also be in ground level as diamond dust.

The plates drift and float gently downwards with their large hexagonal faces almost horizontal. Rays that eventually contribute their glint to a sundog enter a side face and leave through another inclined 60° to the first. The two refractions deviate the ray by 22° or more depending on the ray’s initial angle of incidence when it enters the crystal. The condition where the internal ray crossing the crystal is parallel to an adjacent face gives the minimum deviation of about 22°.

Red light is refracted less strongly than blue and the inner, sunward, edges of sundogs are therefore red hued.

Rays passing through plates crystals in other ways form a variety of halos.

Head over to Atmospheric Optics for more about sundogs & other halos and definitely don’t miss their staggering sundog & moondog photo gallery. Also see sun dogs on Wikipedia.

Check this photo from the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore on black and see a couple more shots of the sundog in Mr Jay’s Summer Vacation 08 slideshow.

More science on Michigan in Pictures!

The January Thaw

Posted on by Michigan in Pictures

fogland

fogland, photo by Boston Wolverine.

Sam says that Sunday’s warmup caused very thick, very low, very persistent fog.

All across the state we’ve seen a remarkable warming, pretty much erasing snow in southern Michigan and severely diminishing snow cover in the northern parts. Regarding the phenomenon of the “January Thaw”, the Weather Doctor writes:

The January Thaw, which usually occurs during the third week of January across the Great Lakes/St Lawrence Valley, New England and the Maritime Provinces, holds a place in North American weather lore nearly as prominent as Autumn’s Indian Summer. And as far as I can determine, it is unique to this continent…

The January Thaw, according to the 1954 Glossary of Meteorology published by the American Meteorological Society, is:

“A period of mild weather, popularly supposed to recur each year in late January in New England and other parts of the northeastern United States….Statistical tests show a high probability that it is a real singularity.”

A singularity is a meteorological condition that tends to occur on or near a specific calendar date more frequently than chance would indicate. Read more from The Weather Doctor Almanac and also see the entry for thaw (and January thaw) from Wikipedia.

The Road Ahead

Posted on by Michigan in Pictures

The Road Ahead

Holga: The Road Ahead, photo by Matt Callow.

In addition to being the perfect time to pull a pillow over one’s head and sleep in, the first morning of the New Year is also a great time to look forward, to hope, dream and lay plans.

I could probably write a small novel on my hopes, dreams and plans for Michigan in Pictures. I could plan in 2008 to finish the Michigan Shoreline Tour that is currently stalled at Kirk Park south of Grand Haven. I could say that I hope to do more profiles of photographers or that I’d like to hold some sort of event, but an alert reader might point out that I said that a year ago. I could even dream that somehow the feelings of love and confidence for Michigan and its people that I see expressed every day by the photos and visitors to Michigan in Pictures would replace the cloud of gloom that seems to hang over our state.

In the end, however, I think it may be enough to say that my sincerest wish is that I get to keep working with all of you because I really, really love it.

When he took this photo last March, Matt wrote that he had recently learned he would be an Artists in Residence for the Glen Arbor Art Association in summer of 2007. Here is a slideshow of Matt’s 2007 Artist in Residency in the Sleeping Bear Dunes (thumbnails).

Happy New Year everyone!

Winter sparkles

Posted on by Michigan in Pictures

Untitled, photo by jenny murray.

Jenny writes that beautiful, frosty mornings when everything sparkles in the winter are a reason she couldn’t ever live in a warm state.

Afield

Posted on by Michigan in Pictures

Afield

Afield, photo by Voxphoto.

Ross writes:

…In the LeFurge woods preserve. This is one of Matt’s pinhole stomping grounds, and I have to give him all the credit for bodily dragging me to this spot, saying “there’s a better view from over this way… “

Untitled. Unplugged. Unknown.

Posted on by Michigan in Pictures

Untitled, photo by jenny murray.

Jenny says that this photo was taken using a yellow filter (an actual one, not Photoshop).

I say that I apologize on the behalf of Charter for the lateness of today’s post. My office is quite tidy after the 8 hour outage though!

No word on what the pilot says.

Ken Rockwell has some interesting things to say about the use of filters, yellow and otherwise. Here’s a little excerpt:

The more you learn about photography the more you’ll also learn that artificial filters and manipulation are required to make a natural looking image. Ansel Adams realized that human perception and the photographic processes are quite different. Therefore one needs to use a lot of filtration, manipulation and burning and dodging to compensate for the human eye and brain’s image processing to create an image on paper that looks natural. (You can read this in his books.) This is why most snapshots don’t look like the original scene. Artificial processes and image manipulation are needed to make a photograph look natural.

Armchair photographers like to play a stupid game that prohibits anything creative and requires they just play forensic photographers blindly Xeroxing nature without filters. I only judge people on the final image, not the process.

Something to consider for sure.