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Normandy sand up close.
These photos are of sand from the beaches at Normandy: Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno, and Sword. I and five other engineers had to travel to Paris, France in 1998 on business for Federal Express. (It's the only time in my life I left the lower '48 and had to have a passport.) We we flew there on a Sunday and returned the next Saturday. The "business" was finished by Thursday and I and another engineer, both of us WWII buffs, decided to take the rental car and tour the Normandy battle sites on Friday. I decided to get samples of sand from each of the five beaches and grabbed some hotel stationary envelopes from my room in which to put the samples. We had a blast and didn't return until dark, and I even walked on the famous Pegasus bridge that was taken by British paratroopers. We visited all the WWII sites and several small "museums" for tourists in the area. We also visited the battlefield cemeteries which will humble anyone who visits them. They have a solemn beauty that cannot be described. I took sand samples from each of the five invasion beaches, with the intent to eventually make a little decorative "memorial" for a shelf with the nations' flags and little bottles of sand, etc.
I brought the sand samples back and put them somewhere and forgot all about them. Then, around 2016 while looking for some obscure something among all the crap in my garage, I rediscovered the envelopes. They were labeled and had the "Paris Hilton" (the hotel) logo on them and I was elated, as I had forgotten all about them. By then I was heavy into macro photography and decided to make some focus-stacked images of them and just hang them as prints on my wall, where they reside today. I still have the sand samples, too.
They are taken at magnifications varying from 9x to 12x, approximately. The Normandy sands seem to have "personality", to me. Red, white, and orange grains predominate but mixed with the occasional blues and greens makes the unmagnified sand appear a dull brown. But a closer look reveals what the grains are really like if we were small creatures crawling around on them.
My little tribute to the brave soldiers of "the greatest generation."
The samples.
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Utah Beach
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Omaha Beach
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Gold Beach
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Juno Beach
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Sword Beach
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Is this your second model storage facility Jan?
Humiliating... but at least they were safe.
Humiliating... but at least they were safe.
Old Ironsides' personal tug. That's got to be a plum assignment.
Old Ironsides' personal tug. That's got to be a plum assignment.
Private owned and out for a day fishing with a good sundeck up top.
Lessee...in 1948 my home county endured one of the harshest winters on record.View attachment 585179
Bathing suit models are shown listening to the radio on the beach in 1948.
Source: Bettmann Archive
Where is that?I imagine that we wouldn't realise that night had passed and it's being morning the next day, discussing everything WWI and WWII etc., in a place like this....who's running the BBQ?
Topic #1....inline or radial, which has the best sound?
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