Articles

crabtree falls, nc
My photo of Crabtree Falls, off of the Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. This is a Nikon D100 photo.

A complaint often made about photographs is that it “doesn’t look real.” That’s a mistake: believing that photography captures a scene “as it was.” It doesn’t because it can’t.

No camera captures reality as the eyes see it. No camera ever has. No camera ever will. From the moment light passes through glass and strikes a recording medium, reality undergoes a transformation—a beautiful, necessary betrayal that photographers have spent nearly two centuries learning to exploit rather than lament.

This isn’t a flaw to be corrected. It’s what makes photography an art form. Understanding how cameras deceive us is the first step toward using that deception intentionally.

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Jim Lovell in the Apollo era.
Photo: NASA

Captain James A. “Jim” Lovell Jr., the NASA astronaut who commanded the the Apollo 13 mission and became a symbol of courage and ingenuity, died Thursday at the age of 97 in Lake Forest, Illinois. Lovell’s death was confirmed by family members.

Born March 25, 1928, in Cleveland, Ohio, Lovell logged more than 700 hours in space over four missions. His calm under pressure during Apollo 13—immortalized by the phrase “Houston, we’ve had a problem”—cemented his place in history. Lovell was, as one former NASA engineer told us, “a cool customer.”

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SpaceX, NASA and the Crew 11 astronauts beat the clouds and rain showers and launched before summer showers washed over Kennedy Space Center today, but just barely. With dark skies and rain rapidly advancing from the south, liftoff of SpaceX’s 18th crewed flight was at 11:43 AM ET from venerable Launch Complex 39A. Crew 11’s four astronauts are now on their way to the International Space Station after today’s launch, with an expected arrival time at the orbital outpost around 3 AM ET tomorrow, August 2.

Gravity Turn: After Max-Q and now in its supersonic flight phase, Falcon 9 enters another gear, leaving the contrail it just made behind quickly. The cloud is from the rocket, not the storms it was escaping on August 1, 2025.
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Tempus fugit, a lot of clocks say: “time is fleeting.” For a facility as established and enduring as Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, it might seem like forever since the first rocket launched from here. Time has flown and so have thousands of rockets and missiles from America’s premier spaceport. Truth is, CCSFS has been open “only” 75 years, but it continues to have a bright future not only today but also for the long-term future.

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Liftoff of Mercury-Redstone 3, with Alan Shepard aboard, May 5, 1961. Photo: NASA
Liftoff of Mercury-Redstone 3, with Alan Shepard aboard, May 5, 1961. Photo: NASA

Note: article was originally published by the author at Talk of Titusville.

Sixty-four years ago, the United States launched its first human being aboard a rocket. It was a tense time politically, and space flight was the new political football of the Cold War. The country’s pride had been injured by the Soviet Union’s accomplishing space feats before the US, but that day — May 5, 1961 — it was a day that restored pride and confidence in America’s capabilities as a nation. And it all happened here, of course, on the Space Coast.

Given that newspapers were leading source of coverage at that time, here’s a look at how one local writer covered the story.

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