View allAll Photos Tagged floridaattraction
Howard Solomon's 1990's project. The Boat on the Moat is a 60ft replica of a 16th century Portuguese Galleon to serve as the castles restaurant. After Solomon finished building the boat he built a lighthouse to handle the overflow. Four generations of Solomons have lived in the castle. Howard Solomon passed away in 2016, but the family still run the restaurant and the Florida attraction. The food is delicious by the way!
Happy Fence Friday and have a blessed weekend!
© Theofani All Rights Reserved. No usage allowed including copying or sharing without written permission.
In any way I wasn't imagining this image to be so colorful when I ran it through my HDR software. The colors were originally present, but dull. It was a dark shadowy pix and just a little tone mapping shows what it really looks like. It was a long exposure shot, sunrise at Fernadina Beach just north of Jacksonville. One of the most beautiful Islands in Florida.
Finally caught some clouds, but nothing great! I will say, some of our sunsets really are colorful! Not too many places to photograph them except this near by marsh & lake.
Hope you all have a glorious and romantic weekend!
Thank you so much for your visit and support!
Fort Pickins, Pensacola, Florida. I just couldn't resist posting one more of the fort. It has so many wonderful doors and angles, this room has lots of moss on the walls to add to it's interest.
© Theofani All Rights Reserved. No usage allowed including copying or sharing without written permission.
Another perspective and story to a historic hotel in St. Petersburg
A photograph showing some tourists going up to the top of the Mount Everest exhibit at Disney's Animal Kingdom in Orlando, Florida
I was debating whether I should add this. Much longer exposure but that bridge kept vibrating the one I was on. Some minor blur, I guess you can call it art. I used a wide angle on that one, even though my 50mm lens could of been an option if I were to stitch them together. © Theofani All Rights Reserved. No usage allowed including copying or sharing without written permission.
A photograph taken, looking straight UP, at the ceiling the main atrium of the wonderful Hyatt Regency Hotel in Orlando, Florida. What a great Hotel.
Animal Kingdom's main theme near the center of the park. Tree of Life features 325 carvings of existing and extinct animal species on its trunk and surrounding roots. Its engineered from a refitted oil platform and its based on the natural forms of baobob trees. Its leaves are made out of kynar. courtesy: wikipedia
Female western lowland gorilla gazing down at her 2-month old baby in Disney's Animal Kingdom.
I love gorillas . . . I never get enough of seeing these wonderfully expressive creatures. This female was sitting on the other side of the glass with her funny little baby, touching the baby and tending to the baby just as tenderly as any human mother -- perhaps even moreso. The baby's name is Lilly.
Spent the day with Orlando residents, Susan and Bill -- proving my belief that friends made on Flickr are naturally friends face-to-face. We had a wonderful time with them today. Tomorrow, we are off to Hollywood Studios.
Best viewed at larger sizes. A night time HDR rendition of the "Spaceship Earth" at Disney's Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida.
Let's stay on the Haunted Mansion ride again tonight...'Yay'!
I posted a shot last night (see below) as you leave the graveyard within the HM, this is the next scene that follows that previous scene. This one is JUST as equally as tough to capture because you are only in front of these ghosts for a second before your Doom Buggy is turning away from them. BTW...no ride stoppage on this either. The only time it stopped for me was while I was in front of the pictures on the wall. Sigh.
***If you look close/large, you can see just how sharp I captured this with the ghost on the right. ;-)
***I would like to thank EVERYONE who has commented, and especially those that also love to shoot on these dark rides. You ALL inspire me to push myself to try to capture these scenes the best that I can, and to push my post work in bringing them to light. Thanks!
The ruins of the Everglades Gatorland roadside tourist attraction in South Bay, FL. Unfortunately, this structure has been torn down since this photograph.
Hudson beach, continuously from my previous photo I uploaded earlier, I spun my tripod looking NW and this the view with seaside bars and restaurants.
© Theofani All Rights Reserved. No usage allowed including copying or sharing without written permission.
Just an update and artistic take on one of my favorite images.
I hope you enjoy it. Thanks for looking!
Comments/Critique welcome!
A time-lapse of the amazing New Year's Eve fireworks display at the Magic Kingdom. Can't think of a better way to ring in the New Year!
View full screen on the homepage at www.alligatoroutpost.com.
For more visit mark-andrew-thomas.pixels.com/featured/magic-kingdom-fire....
A photograph of the intricate, beautifully colored celing in the Chinese Pavilion at Disney's Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida
Tampa Bay Times Forum and Marriott Hotel in Tampa
© Theofani All Rights Reserved. No usage allowed including copying or sharing without written permission.
A photograph of some beautiful work by a "skywriter" plane above Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida on a very cool, clear day. You can see the skywriter started with the "J" on the left and it's just starting to deteriorate. His last letter, the "S" on the right is still very much intact. What a perfect job !!!! It's unusual for a skywritten message to stay this intact for so long.
A night time photograph of the fountain at Disney Epcot's "The World of Immagination". The fountain is lit up in colors at night !!!!!!
A photograph of a Cuttlefish taken at Disney's Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida - Seen in "The Living Seas" exhibit. Read all about him at www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Cuttlefish
It's hard to take a flash shot into a glass fish tank - usually the reflections from the glass ruin the picture.
Sunset time on a beautiful evening on the beach
© Theofani All Rights Reserved. No usage allowed including copying or sharing without written permission.
Beautiful little skyline, made my rounds again in the city and the new addition of lights under the bridges
© Theofani All Rights Reserved. No usage allowed including copying or sharing without written permission.
A photograph of downtown St. Petersburg, Florida taken from the "Pier Attraction" and touched with HDR processing. The "Pier" has shops, a restaurant, an Aquarium, and even a rooftop restaurant. A fun Day !!!. Taken with a 14mm lens.
Read all about it at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_Pier
A photograph of the ouside of the "Mexican Exhibit" at Disney's Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida. Slightly processed with Photoshop and HDR. WoW at larger sizes.
A photograph of the lighthouse at the entrance to SeaWorld in Orlando, Florida. Photograph taken as an intense summer storm approaches.
Fort Lauderdale is a city in the U.S. state of Florida, 25 miles (40 km) north of Miami. It is the county seat of Broward County. As of the 2019 census, the city has an estimated population of 182,437. Fort Lauderdale is a principal city of the Miami metropolitan area, which was home to an estimated 6,198,782 people in 2018.
The city is a popular tourist destination, with an average year-round temperature of 75.5 °F (24.2 °C) and 3,000 hours of sunshine per year. Greater Fort Lauderdale which takes in all of Broward County hosted 12 million visitors in 2012, including 2.8 million international visitors. The city and county in 2012 collected $43.9 million from the 5% hotel tax it charges, after hotels in the area recorded an occupancy rate for the year of 72.7 percent and an average daily rate of $114.48. The district has 561 hotels and motels comprising nearly 35,000 rooms. Forty six cruise ships sailed from Port Everglades in 2012. Greater Fort Lauderdale has over 4,000 restaurants, 63 golf courses, 12 shopping malls, 16 museums, 132 nightclubs, 278 parkland campsites, and 100 marinas housing 45,000 resident yachts.
Fort Lauderdale is named after a series of forts built by the United States during the Second Seminole War. The forts took their name from Major William Lauderdale (1782–1838), younger brother of Lieutenant Colonel James Lauderdale. William Lauderdale was the commander of the detachment of soldiers who built the first fort. However, development of the city did not begin until 50 years after the forts were abandoned at the end of the conflict. Three forts named "Fort Lauderdale" were constructed; the first was at the fork of the New River, the second at Tarpon Bend on the New River between the Colee Hammock and Rio Vista neighborhoods, and the third near the site of the Bahia Mar Marina.
The area in which the city of Fort Lauderdale would later be founded was inhabited for more than two thousand years by the Tequesta Indians. Contact with Spanish explorers in the 16th century proved disastrous for the Tequesta, as the Europeans unwittingly brought with them diseases, such as smallpox, to which the native populations possessed no resistance. For the Tequesta, disease, coupled with continuing conflict with their Calusa neighbors, contributed greatly to their decline over the next two centuries. By 1763, there were only a few Tequesta left in Florida, and most of them were evacuated to Cuba when the Spanish ceded Florida to the British in 1763, under the terms of the Treaty of Paris (1763), which ended the Seven Years' War. Although control of the area changed between Spain, the United Kingdom, the United States, and the Confederate States of America, it remained largely undeveloped until the 20th century.
The Fort Lauderdale area was known as the "New River Settlement" before the 20th century. In the 1830s there were approximately 70 settlers living along the New River. William Cooley, the local Justice of the Peace, was a farmer and wrecker, who traded with the Seminole Indians. On January 6, 1836, while Cooley was leading an attempt to salvage a wrecked ship, a band of Seminoles attacked his farm, killing his wife and children, and the children's tutor. The other farms in the settlement were not attacked, but all the white residents in the area abandoned the settlement, fleeing first to the Cape Florida Lighthouse on Key Biscayne, and then to Key West.
The first United States stockade named Fort Lauderdale was built in 1838, and subsequently was a site of fighting during the Second Seminole War. The fort was abandoned in 1842, after the end of the war, and the area remained virtually unpopulated until the 1890s. It was not until Frank Stranahan arrived in the area in 1893 to operate a ferry across the New River, and the Florida East Coast Railroad's completion of a route through the area in 1896, that any organized development began. The city was incorporated in 1911, and in 1915 was designated the county seat of newly formed Broward County.
Fort Lauderdale's first major development began in the 1920s, during the Florida land boom of the 1920s. The 1926 Miami Hurricane and the Great Depression of the 1930s caused a great deal of economic dislocation. In July 1935, an African-American man named Rubin Stacy was accused of robbing a white woman at knife point. He was arrested and being transported to a Miami jail when police were run off the road by a mob. A group of 100 white men proceeded to hang Stacy from a tree near the scene of his alleged robbery. His body was riddled with some twenty bullets. The murder was subsequently used by the press in Nazi Germany to discredit US critiques of its own persecution of Jews, Communists, and Catholics.
When World War II began, Fort Lauderdale became a major US base, with a Naval Air Station to train pilots, radar operators, and fire control, operators. A Coast Guard base at Port Everglades was also established.
On July 4, 1961, African Americans started a series of protests, wade-ins, at beaches that were off-limits to them, to protest "the failure of the county to build a road to the Negro beach". On July 11, 1962, a verdict by Ted Cabot went against the city's policy of racial segregation of public beaches.
Today, Fort Lauderdale is a major yachting center, one of the nation's largest tourist destinations, and the center of a metropolitan division with 1.8 million people.
Credit for the data above is given to the following website:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Lauderdale,_Florida
© All Rights Reserved - you may not use this image in any form without my prior permission.
A photograph of a beautiful Dolphin at Seaworld in Orlando, Florida, being petted by an admiring park visitor.
A photograph of a Strobilanthes (Persian Shield) Plant with amazing purple Variegated leaves at the Leu Gardens in Orlando Florida. The Picture was Slightly touched with HDR tone mapping.
WHAT IS NOW A MUCH-LOVED attraction called Monkey Island was once a little more like a monkey detention center.
The island itself wasn’t always an island. It started out as an easily-missed rock outcropping that took out the bottom of boats on a fairly regular basis. A developer named G.A. “Furgy” Furgason finally decided to take action, and instructed crew members busy at a nearby location to “throw some dirt” on the rock pile to keep boaters from bottoming out. The crew were a little over-enthusiastic, and when Furgason returned from a business trip in Africa, where a small, hardly noticeable outcropping used to be there was now what could only be described as a small island.
Always the optimist, the developer threw a lighthouse and a few trees onto the new island and went back to more pressing business, primarily the new wildlife attraction (now Homosassa Wildlife State Park) he was building a little way up the stream. The attraction was to include all sorts of exotic plants and wild animals, including a small group of monkeys brought into the country by polio researcher Dr. John Hamlet. Their use as research animals exhausted, they were to retire to the wildlife park as attractions.
It’s fairly common knowledge that monkeys and their hijinks can be amusing, but they are clearly also a giant pain in the ass—and these particular monkeys were exceptional escape artists and a special sort of obnoxious. After several run-ins with tourists that included swiping candy from children, breaking into cars, and taking bites out of trusting, food offering hands, Furgy was up to his ears in monkey business and repeatedly stated he wished he could send the little hooligans to Alcatraz. Then, it dawned on him. He had a monkey-sized Alcatraz right there in his grasp-the tiny island with the wee little lighthouse, the perfect getaway for the monkeys to live in peace, observed by visitors who could enjoy them without becoming victims of their mischief. The three spider monkeys and two squirrel monkeys were shipped off to their new monkey jail, which of course then earned a name and became an official plot of land—Monkey Island.
After some trial and error, (trees originally planted had to be replaced with some that were a little less delicious to the monkeys, huts built to act as homes needed to be rebuilt a little more durable) peace between man and beast finally settled across Homosassa, and 40 years later, the surviving monkeys (and some new additions!) still live and play freely on the island while delighted tourists observe from a safe distance.
Credit for the data above is given to the following websites:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosassa,_Florida
www.discovercrystalriverfl.com/cities/homosassa/
www.atlasobscura.com/places/monkey-island-of-homosassa
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_County,_Florida
Atlantic Ocean and its rough pleasant waves which millions of visitors come to Florida to witness what nature has to offer
© Theofani All Rights Reserved. No usage allowed including copying or sharing without written permission.
"Explore Image" I Thank You for your comments #353
Considering the sunset was really behind me in the west, somehow with a little help of photoshop, it mesmerized me how a little contrast and highlights can bring any light from behind the clouds!! Note: Sun rises from this beach looking towards the atlantic ocean.
© Theofani All Rights Reserved. No usage allowed including copying or sharing without written permission.
WHAT IS NOW A MUCH-LOVED attraction called Monkey Island was once a little more like a monkey detention center.
The island itself wasn’t always an island. It started out as an easily-missed rock outcropping that took out the bottom of boats on a fairly regular basis. A developer named G.A. “Furgy” Furgason finally decided to take action, and instructed crew members busy at a nearby location to “throw some dirt” on the rock pile to keep boaters from bottoming out. The crew were a little over-enthusiastic, and when Furgason returned from a business trip in Africa, where a small, hardly noticeable outcropping used to be there was now what could only be described as a small island.
Always the optimist, the developer threw a lighthouse and a few trees onto the new island and went back to more pressing business, primarily the new wildlife attraction (now Homosassa Wildlife State Park) he was building a little way up the stream. The attraction was to include all sorts of exotic plants and wild animals, including a small group of monkeys brought into the country by polio researcher Dr. John Hamlet. Their use as research animals exhausted, they were to retire to the wildlife park as attractions.
It’s fairly common knowledge that monkeys and their hijinks can be amusing, but they are clearly also a giant pain in the ass—and these particular monkeys were exceptional escape artists and a special sort of obnoxious. After several run-ins with tourists that included swiping candy from children, breaking into cars, and taking bites out of trusting, food offering hands, Furgy was up to his ears in monkey business and repeatedly stated he wished he could send the little hooligans to Alcatraz. Then, it dawned on him. He had a monkey-sized Alcatraz right there in his grasp-the tiny island with the wee little lighthouse, the perfect getaway for the monkeys to live in peace, observed by visitors who could enjoy them without becoming victims of their mischief. The three spider monkeys and two squirrel monkeys were shipped off to their new monkey jail, which of course then earned a name and became an official plot of land—Monkey Island.
After some trial and error, (trees originally planted had to be replaced with some that were a little less delicious to the monkeys, huts built to act as homes needed to be rebuilt a little more durable) peace between man and beast finally settled across Homosassa, and 40 years later, the surviving monkeys (and some new additions!) still live and play freely on the island while delighted tourists observe from a safe distance.
Credit for the data above is given to the following websites:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homosassa,_Florida
www.discovercrystalriverfl.com/cities/homosassa/
www.atlasobscura.com/places/monkey-island-of-homosassa
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_County,_Florida