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I finished my classes at 10:30 AM yesterday, and it wasn't raining, so I hopped in the car, gassed 'er up, and moseyed on out to Gros Morne National Park, home of the Tablelands, which are geologically interesting and very beautiful and not featured in any of these pictures because I didn't go up that way. They're worth googling, though.

( Mountains and rocks and water and sky. )

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( More pics, since LJ is being fussy. )

Nitpicking

I'm curious about something. The physics assignment I'm working on has the following passage:

"The x-component motion diagram is what you would get if you shined a spotlight down on the particle as it moved and recorded the motion of its shadow."

I thought "shined" was a passive-voice thing. "My shoes were shined," for instance. Surely here it should be "shone"?

I'm noticing "shined" used like this a lot recently, and it irks me every time. Is it accepted American usage? For that matter, is it correct usage everywhere and I've been wrong for 23 years? If so, can you point me at a style guide? (It's not that I don't trust someone who says they say it all the time, it's just that I don't trust that it's not dialect or an error so common it passes for correct like "should of".)

Mostly, I want to know if I should continue to be grammatically irked, or if it's something I'll need to get used to like dropped "u"s in words and meters with "er" instead of "re".

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I'm Posty Patty today. (As opposed to Chatty Cathy. Ha. See what I did there?)

I've been looking at the photography of Ansel Adams, recently. I've always liked it, but for the past few months I've been trying to work out what his choices were, see how he set up the pictures. I'm not very knowledgeable about technical details like ISO and f-stop, but framing and making use of the light that's already present is something I've been working on.

Today, for a lark, I looked him up on Wikipedia. He died a mere six days before I was born.

I'm not sure why, but I find that fairly cool.

(No, I do not believe in reincarnation. But if I did, it would be neat. Ha.)