Still Water

Frog-strangling rains have moved into East Tennessee - I'm not kidding, many county school districts are closed today because of severe flooding, but the rain should be leaving us later today. So I'm continuing my Ijams series, showing you a sunnier day a few weeks ago, when I admired the deep, deep blue-green water of Mead's Quarry at Ijams Nature Center. Yesterday, you saw it from the bluff behind red berries. Today, we're at ground level.

The stillness of the water is eerie. Occasionally I'll hear a rock plonk into the water from the limestone bluff, or I'll hear a roiling bubbling of gases charge up to the surface, perhaps from a junked auto still resting deep and drowned and unreachable at the bottom of the quarry. Boating and swimming aren't allowed, so nothing but waterfowl will glide across the surface.

Winter Berries

The Tharpe Trace trail follows the bluff around Mead's Quarry. It's a strenuous hike, but it's one of my favorites. The drowned marble quarry and surrounding property, an abandoned repository for junk and a popular site for criminal activity for many years, was purchased a few years ago by Ijams Nature Center. While the footprint of industry remains, nature is reclaiming its own. And of course, I've taken some interesting shots of this in-between-land that I'll post later.

Stealthsphere

The Sunsphere peeks over the concrete wall of the top floor of the Locust Avenue parking garage. Maybe this shows the stealth of architecture. Or maybe it shows that I'm very short.

Pointilism

If Georges Seurat was alive and painting in Knoxville, do you think he would've put brush to canvas for the spraying fountain in the middle of the lake at Victor Ashe Park? We'll never know, so here's my photographic interpretation, with apologies to the Neo-Impressionists.

1/2 Morgan

I don't explain 'em, I just show 'em: cryptic message on the railroad tracks in the Old City.

Orangina

This orange sky greeted me as I rolled into the parking lot at work early one morning in November. You can also see the Smoky Mountains in silhouette peeking over the treeline.
Now go peek at some other fabulous skies at Sky Watch.

Theme Day: Best of 2008

Well, "best" is such a relative term. As a beginner to photography, I count on the Laws of Large Numbers of Photos to grant me one or two Really Good Photos over the span of many months. So I'm picking my August 15th entry of Clefhenge, an arty-farty closeup of some downtown public art in which I also got to howl at the moon.

But my personal "best" in my mind is the whole enchilada of this project from day one, my love song to Knoxville (see "howl at the moon", above), good photos and bad ones, and the narrative that I duct-tape to the bottom of each photo, the sum of my personal experience in this quirky Southern city.

Happy New Year!