The Daily Render

A Digital Scrapbook for the Past, Present, and Future

Chemtrails Over DC
|| 2/15/2011 || 3:14 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

Photograph of exhaust or chemtrails over the Washington, DC skyline

Although planes cannot fly directly over DC, those planes that fly around DC still have their exhaust lines float over the city. I took this photograph because I thought it was interesting the way the lines cut up the sky.

YouTube Videos & Photograph From Last Weekend’s Historic Snowball Fight In Dupont Circle
|| 2/10/2010 || 2:19 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

The video above contains four short video clips I recorded from my Canon SD750 on February 6th, 2010 in & around Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. The video clips show the what the snowball fight looked like when I arrived, a dance party, a fallen tree on New Hampshire Avenue, and an SUV pulling a snowboarder. The camera is rather beat up and there is a noticeable dark spot on camera lens– sorry!

This is my favorite video of the snowball fight. It was filmed from a building overlooking Dupont Cirlce:

At least there were no guns.

The Snow-Covered Washington, DC Area Is Today’s MODIS Satellite Image of the Day
|| 12/22/2009 || 7:18 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

Satellite: Aqua
Date Acquired: 12/20/2009
Resolutions: 250m (reduced)
Bands Used: 1,4,3
Credit: Jesse Allen, NASA’s Earth Observatory

I was looking for satellite images of last weekend’s blizzard and found that today’s MODIS Satellite Image of the Day just so happens to be of the Washington, DC area. MODIS (or Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) is a key instrument aboard the Terra (EOS AM) and Aqua (EOS PM) satellites that documents changes on the surface of the earth. Terra’s orbit around the Earth is timed so that it passes from north to south across the equator in the morning, while Aqua passes south to north over the equator in the afternoon. Terra MODIS and Aqua MODIS are viewing the entire Earth’s surface every 1 to 2 days, acquiring data in 36 spectral bands, or groups of wavelengths that are used for numerous scientific purposes. You can view these satellite images in real-time and see exactly what has happened on the surface of the earth within the last 48 hours.

Darkness by George Gordon Byron (1816)
|| 11/25/2009 || 1:42 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

Darkness is a poem written by Lord Byron in July of 1816. That summer was known as the Year Without a Summer, because Mount Tambora had erupted in the Dutch East Indies the previous year, casting enough ash in to the atmosphere to partially block out the sun and cause abnormal weather across the world. Its interesting to think that this type of volcanic eruption can and probably will happen again some day in the future. How will the governments across the world deal with this type of immediate climate change? What about a Year Without a Winter?

The Triumph of Death by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1562)

Darkness by Lord Byron

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space,
Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth
Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;
Morn came and went -and came, and brought no day,
And men forgot their passions in the dread
Of this their desolation; and all hearts
Were chilled into a selfish prayer for light;
And they did live by watchfires -and the thrones,
The palaces of crowned kings -the huts,
The habitations of all things which dwell,
Were burnt for beacons; cities were consumed,
And men were gathered round their blazing homes
To look once more into each other’s face;
Happy were those which dwelt within the eye
Of the volcanoes, and their mountain-torch;
A fearful hope was all the world contained;
Forests were set on fire -but hour by hour
They fell and faded -and the crackling trunks
Extinguished with a crash -and all was black.
The brows of men by the despairing light
Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits
The flashes fell upon them: some lay down
And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest
Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smiled;
And others hurried to and fro, and fed
Their funeral piles with fuel, and looked up
With mad disquietude on the dull sky,
The pall of a past world; and then again
With curses cast them down upon the dust,
And gnashed their teeth and howled; the wild birds shrieked,
And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,
And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes
Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawled
And twined themselves among the multitude,
Hissing, but stingless -they were slain for food;
And War, which for a moment was no more,
Did glut himself again; -a meal was bought
With blood, and each sate sullenly apart
Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;
All earth was but one thought -and that was death,
Immediate and inglorious; and the pang
Of famine fed upon all entrails -men
Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;
The meagre by the meagre were devoured,
Even dogs assailed their masters, all save one,
And he was faithful to a corse, and kept
The birds and beasts and famished men at bay,
Till hunger clung them, or the drooping dead
Lured their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,
But with a piteous and perpetual moan,
And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand
Which answered not with a caress -he died.
The crowd was famished by degrees; but two
Of an enormous city did survive,
And they were enemies: they met beside
The dying embers of an altar-place
Where had been heaped a mass of holy things
For an unholy usage: they raked up,
And shivering scraped with their cold skeleton hands
The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath
Blew for a little life, and made a flame
Which was a mockery; then they lifted up
Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld
Each other’s aspects -saw, and shrieked, and died –
Even of their mutual hideousness they died,
Unknowing who he was upon whose brow
Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,
The populous and the powerful was a lump,
Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless –
A lump of death -a chaos of hard clay.
The rivers, lakes, and ocean all stood still,
And nothing stirred within their silent depths;
Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,
And their masts fell down piecemeal; as they dropped
They slept on the abyss without a surge –
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The Moon, their mistress, had expired before;
The winds were withered in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perished! Darkness had no need
Of aid from them -She was the Universe!

Urban Rainbow #2
|| 7/27/2009 || 7:11 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

Today’s rainbow was taken about an hour ago from my back deck. If you look closely, you can see the start of a second rainbow in the upper left-hand corner. Like the previous rainbow photograph, I did some minor color correction to bring out the colors of the rainbow.

Related Rainbows:

Urban Rainbow #1
|| 7/24/2009 || 6:33 pm || + Render A Comment || ||

I am starting a new series and posting photographs of rainbows that I happen to spot. Today’s rainbow was taken yesterday from my back deck after a rather hard downpour. I did some minor color correction to bring out the colors of the rainbow.

Photos from a frozen Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park
|| 12/28/2008 || 3:31 pm || Comments Off on Photos from a frozen Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park || ||

A photo of myself at Bear Lake with Longs Peak in the background

After driving up a snow covered road, we arrived at a snowy Bear Lake, which is at 9,475 feet above sea level at the base of the continental divide. We put on extra warm clothing and went for a walk around (and across) the lake. When we were leaving I went up to a ranger and asked how thick the ice was. To my surprise he said it was about 3 feet thick. The only disappointment of this visit was that the clouds never receded back over the divide and I was never able to see the tops of any of the mountains.

Below are more photographs from the lake:

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A cap cloud on the continental divide
|| || 2:49 pm || Comments Off on A cap cloud on the continental divide || ||

As we drove to Bear Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park, I took these photographs of the cap cloud covering the continental divide.

The continental divide has always fascinated me as one of the most important geologic features in North America because it hydrologically splits up the continent into different watershed basins. Standing from the top of the continental divide in the summertime I’ve seen firsthand how the divide influences the weather on both sides of the divide. Looking West from the top of the divide you see a lush green forest and when you look off to the East you see a dry desert environment. This is due to the way the easterly moving clouds can be too heavy preventing them from being able to rise over the 12,000+ foot mountain range. They crash into the divide, release their moisture on the West side, rise up, then continue eastward over the divide. But sometimes they stick around the mountains and are called cap clouds.

It should be noted that there is a place in Glacier National Park in Montana called Triple Divide Peak, where water ultimately flows to the Arctic, Pacific, and the Atlantic oceans. When I was younger and visiting Glacier National Park I was not aware of this peak, but when I visit the park again, I’d like to climb it.

24 on 14th – One Long Day on 14th by Graeme King
|| 5/22/2008 || 12:28 pm || Comments Off on 24 on 14th – One Long Day on 14th by Graeme King || ||

On April 19th, 2008 I met Graeme King near the Black Cat nightclub after he had just started his 24 hours on 14th Street project. His goal was to take pictures of people for 24 hours and exhibit the photographs at his Artomatic exhibit space.

I had just finished the VJ setup upstairs in the main room of the Black Cat and was about to head home to change clothes before the evening. Although I didn’t blog about it at the time, that evening I VJed alongside DJ Rekha from New York City. DJ Rehka is a London-born musician who DJs her own blend of contemporary bhangra hip-hop fusion and has been credited with pioneering bhangra music in North America. Her first album, DJ Rekha Presents Basement Bhangra, was released in October 2007 on Koch Records, fuses the South Asian genre of bhangra music with international hip-hop and drum beats. It was quite a lot of fun! Click here to download an MP3 from her CD.

Graeme’s photograph of me is unique because he caught me wearing an article of clothing that has been blogged about and even written about in the Washington Post. Look at the sidebar photograph to see another view of the shirt (the photograph was taken nearly one year earlier). Although you can only see the top of the graphic in Graeme’s photograph, it features the close-up detail from Ball of Destruction, which is a map I created in September of 2005 that features a woman textured by aerial photography of the area around White House holding a globe of Hurricane Katrina with a devastated New Orleans in the background.

For the show I wore a shirt that I had recently ordered from France that says “Jeux de mains, Jeux de vilains” which is definitely not something that says Bhangra, but I didn’t know I’d be VJing when I was getting ready for the night. The phrase literally translates to “Hand Games, Evil Hands,” but the proverb has multiple different meanings. From what I understand, the phrase was first was coined during the French Revolution by rich nobles who played Jeu de paume (the precursor to tennis) with rackets & gloves while the poor (the villains according to the nobility) played with their bare hands. Now it’s a traditional proverb adults use when children are playing too rough. It also has a sexual connotation, but I’ll let you figure that out yourself.

Enough about the clothing, check out Graeme’s time-lapse video of his Artomatic installation. His exhibit space is on the south end of the 6th floor. The picture of me above is featured about 27 seconds into the video:

Ball of Destruction
|| 9/29/2005 || 9:00 pm || 1 Comment Rendered || ||

: rendered at 12,000 X 8,000 :
Ball of Destruction by Nikolas Schiller

Ball of Destruction

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Nikolas Schiller is a second-class American citizen living in America's last colony, Washington, DC. This blog is my on-line repository of what I have created or found on-line since May of 2004. If you have any questions or comments, please contact: