Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Battle Road Trail Walk

Last weekend Holly and I braved the 35°C weather, and drove to the Minute Man National Historical Park for their Battle Road Trail Walk—a three and a half hour walk covering almost 7 km of the Battle Road trail.

Naturally, I brought my camera. Unfortunately, because of the terrible heat, I didn’t take all that many photos. Of the ones I did take, I think only five are worth sharing. I am including them all in this post, but you can check out the gallery for the photo metadata.

The walk began at Meriam’s Corner, where on April 19, 1775 the locals attacked the British column returning from Concord and drove them all the way back to Boston. This is the beginning of “Battle Road”.

This is Nathan Meriam’s house—standing right next to where the attack began.

Despite the heat, we were only two of about 35! We were shocked to see that most people decided to show up to a 7 km walk in 35°C heat with barely 500 ml of water per person. (We knew better and brought a little over 4 liters for the two of us. And we had a stash of sports drinks in the car.) We were surprised nobody passed out along the way…or at least we did not notice anyone passing out :)

Here is park ranger Jim Hollister, our guide for the walk, mid-sentence near Hardy’s Hill. (I know, not the most flattering of photos.)

Hartwell Tavern is a little past the half-way point of the walk. The whole group took a break here so I had a few minutes to kill—and I did that with photography!

First of all, the tavern itself:

And an 8-shot panorama of the tavern and some of the walk participants. (38 MB full size panorama)

And the last photo from the trip is the Captain William Smith house (in Wikipedia article: Lincoln, MA).

As I said earlier, I did not take that many photos. I will try to do better in the future. :)

Wannalancit Mill

As you may or may not know, Nexenta has a small office in Massachusetts, and so I end up in Wikipedia article: Lowell a couple of times a week. Lowell is a decent size city with a history of textile production. As a result, the city is peppered with old mills, most of which have been converted to office and apartment buildings and a couple serve as museums.

The Wannalancit mill is one of the mills that ended up turning into an office building. (It is connected to the adjacent Suffolk mill so I often forget that technically they are separate buildings. You’ve been warned.)

The thing that makes this mill more interesting is that the National Park Service maintains an operational water turbine in the basement. The turbine turns a large flywheel (I am guessing it is about 5 m in diameter).

The turbine itself is in the “basement” along with other goodies. The basement is not very well lit, but the D750 performed quite well even at ISO 5000–8000.

The turbine is geared to the flywheel.

Finally, here is the turbine (inside the red-brown metal object in the background) and the governor (green machine in the foreground) controlling the amount of water entering the turbine and therefore the amount of energy getting stored in the flywheel.

The park service shows up in the mornings to “turn-on” the turbine.

A close-up of the governor:

The table on the left was used for repairing of the 2 cm thick leather belts. I got the impression that the four section cabinet housed containers of oil used to lubricate various parts around the mill.

There are more than three times as many photos in the full gallery. Enjoy!

Trains

The other day I took a slightly longer lunch break and headed over to the National Streetcar Museum in Lowell, Massachusetts. Unfortunately, they were closed that day so instead I used the parked steam locomotive there as my photography subject. For more photos, check out the full gallery.

I took two panoramas. They are not perfect since I was hand holding the camera. The smaller one is made up of seven shots (15 MB full image for you pixel-peepers).

The larger panorama is made up of twelve images. (34 MB full image)

The D750 has a feature called live view—it lets me use the tilting screen on the back to compose my shot. This is very useful for otherwise awkward to compose shots. (Instead of having to crawl on the ground to see through the viewfinder, one can use the screen!) The very important thing to note about live view is that if you take a still image while in live view (by pressing the shutter all the way) the resulting image will have a 16:9 aspect ratio instead of the standard 3:2. To get a 3:2 image, one has to compose in live view, then turn off live view, and take the shot as always.

I am hoping to come back one day soon and see what the museum has to offer for my photography appetite.

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