Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

These are untouched negative scans, I haven't had time to do any work in Photoshop on 'em yet. My next purchase for that camera will be a red filter and a polarizer! Somewhere I have a 77mm polarizer, I think, but I'm not sure where it is right now...

#1


#2


#3


#4

I was discussing low light photography with motodraconis and mentioned that I had purchased a pair of iPhone 13 Minis for my wife and I over the holidays. Here is an example that I took with said phone about five minutes ago.



(clicken to embiggen)

The white poodle is the geezer of the family, Dante. He's 12 or 13 years old. Charlie is the black poodle in the middle, and Rupert is the Blue Tick Coon Hound. As you can see, they lead a tough life.

This was taken by the phone's "wide camera": 26mm f1.6 at 1/11th of a second ISO 640, no flash and no lights turned on - completely available light. It's a 12 megapixel image with zero post-processing outside of the camera.

Because of the camera's internal post-processing, that image appears a minimum of 1-2 stops brighter than it actually appears in the bedroom.

I REALLY want to take this phone out and do some night shots and see what it does!

(with my wife's pointing directions) She could pick it out in the twilight sky. I could maybe see it, I'm not 100% sure.






Sadly, these are the first two photos that I've posted this year! Well, in terms of creative photography.

We went to a pullout that should have had a good angle, but it had 8-10 cars, and the first person that I saw - before we got out of my wife's car - was not wearing a mask. So I said 'let's just go to the observatory.'

She relented and we went to the observatory.

We couldn't go inside the control room to visit until after sundown - visitors are no longer allowed except under extraordinary circumstances, and spouses are no longer extraordinary. So we went up on to one of the small telescope catwalks, and the angle was great! Excellent elevation to avoid trees and other obstacles. I took a number of shots, including bracketing to try HDR, but that didn't work: with 5-20 second exposures, there was too much star streak for automated HDR to be viable. I might work with it some more, but I like the results of these.

I tried another angle, trying to get one of the telescope domes into the shot, but it just wasn't viable. Maybe another night. I'd also like to try my 6D and see if I can get some less noisy shots with its better sensor.

They're kind of noisy, they were shot at an ISO of 6400, 10 seconds at f7.1 with a Canon SL1 using a remote control as a trigger. The lens is a Canon 75-300 zoom at 75mm. Minimal Photoshop post-processing.

This is actually a bit of a Where's Waldo photo - I didn't realize until a couple of months ago that my blue tick hound, Rupert, is in this photo! That pleased me tremendously. You might want to click to embiggen to see where he's hiding.



There are times when I go too shallow on depth of field, but I think this one is OK.

Both photos are good examples of what a polarizer can bring to the party. Of course, with digital photography, you have to use a circular polarizer which can be a tad more expensive.

I was wanting to show these to a certain Romanian friend on DW, and found I had not uploaded them to my web site! Well, I have since remedied that situation.

A storm hit dropping frozen crap all day, amounting to about 3-4" of accumulation. I shot this at the trestle overlook, white stuff all over the ground, mostly gropple (or Graupel, if you want to be meteorologically correct - soft hail pellets), and I needed a better jacket, but it was bearable. The temperature 24 hours later is now just below 50 with bright blue skies with puffy clouds, so the front yard is much more brown than white.

This five-image HDR photo is a lot more brown than I expected - I didn't play with the toning with this one. Down in Alamogordo it was just rainy. I do like the layering, I'm always happy when the lighting produces a layering effect.

As always, clicken to embiggen.

This was the cake that I made for the potluck Friday night. It came out great, with a minor problem. I was able to get a bag of Meyer lemons, and I love the subtle lemon flavor they give, and by including the zest you have these occasional texture/flavor bombs. Russet wants a stronger flavor, we'll see what I do the next time I make it. Next time I'm going to try halving the recipe and making it in 6" forms.

My main problem was I overbaked it a bit. I have three 9" pans, one is shiny but the other two are dark. And dark pans bake faster. So it was a little over done. So I need to be a little more diligent the next time I bake one. I had to make four adjustments for altitude, but that wasn't difficult: I have a book called Pie In The Sky by Susan Purdy, I found a similar recipe for a standard flour/sugar/butter cake and took her adjustments for a 9,000' cake and the cake rose perfectly.

The chipotle chicken did not survive the potluck, even though I failed to bring the taco shells and didn't bring tomatoes, and the chili was very well received. I had a quart or so left over that we're enjoying, it'll last another day or so, I think I'll do some Frito Pie tonight, I've got lots of shredded cheddar cheese.

Best part of the potluck (aside from some excellent rolled chicken enchiladas): found three young people interested in gaming! Excellent chance I might even be able to get an RPG campaign going as they all work at the solar telescope!


Cake recipe under the cut
( Read more... )

And the Wikipedia entry.

The whole clock, though to be honest the Wikipedia photo is better:



Whoever shot the Wikipedia photo had much better alignment. Our tour group arrived much too close to noon and getting anywhere near the clock wasn't easy. At least my photo gives you a better sense of scale.

The clock, also called the Orloj, was first put in place in 1410! It is the oldest astronomical clock in the world that still works. The lower dial is really a astrological dial though, it shows the calendar in the first quarter or so of Scorpio. The photo was shot on the 26th of June 2015 if you care to check. Let's face it, a scientific understanding of astronomy in 1410 just wasn't that strong - this clock was built almost 200 years before the birth of Galileo who is considered the father of modern astronomy - most astronomy in the 1400s was geocentric, heliocentrism didn't really take off until CopperknickersCopernicus, who was born some 50 years or more after this clock was built.

Closeups and more wordiness from me under the cut. And as always, clicken to embiggen.
( Read more... )

I'm not saying they're my best, as what you think are my best and what I think may be two different things. Plus, you can't see all of the photos that I shot last year! You're welcome to peruse what I posted, but not all of these that are under this cut _have_ been posted, so there!

If you're a glutton for punishment, here's all of my entries tagged with photos:
https://thewayne.dreamwidth.org/tag/photographs

A total of eight photos from last year with five additional honorable mentions: they weren't shot last year, but I did process them last year and I think they're more than good enough to include. And one of the eight I took with a borrowed camera!

Surprisingly, there are no panoramic/stitched photos, and only two HDRs! Of course, I did shoot a lot of sunsets, so I'll lead off with one of those.

But it's under the cut. And as usual, you can click on any of the images to embiggen them. Both of my cameras are 20 megapixel, so they can get pretty darn embiggened!
( Read more... )

I went to the observatory so I knew exactly where the moon would be in the sky. First, two result photos. As always, click to embiggen.







Both photos are full-frame, uncropped. The only Photoshop work was to use levels to darken the midtones a bit and curves to darken the contrast a little. No sharpening. And, of course, convert to JPEG which does all sorts of little twitchy things by itself. Maybe I should have converted them to PNGs.

There is a visible size difference of the moon between the two images. The first is taken with my Canon Eos SL1 with a 75-300 image stabilized zoom at 300mm. it's an 18 megapixel camera. With the SL1's APS-C sensor, it multiplies the focal length by 1.6, turning the 300mm into an effective 480mm. The second image is taken with my Lumix ZS-70 at an effective optical lens focal length of 780mm, no digital zoom.

There's a few problems. First, the autofocus of the Lumix in conditions like this is is terrible compared to the Canon's. And the manual focus in low light absolutely SUUUUUCKS. That being said, it did OK. The Lumix was set on a tripod, and that's a problem because the moon is always moving and there's no way I'm going to be able to track it on a tripod - it's just not possible. If I had a telescope with motorized tracking, that would be different. But I don't. I'm tempted to set up one camera on a tripod in the dome of the 3.5 meter, and I might, I'm undecided on that.

And that introduces a second problem - exposure. As I mentioned in the preceding paragraph, the Lumix was on a tripod. The Canon - handheld. The moon - and this is a supermoon and is thus closer and brighter - is surprisingly bright. Believe it or not, these shots were taken at an ISO of 400 with a 1/2000th of a second shutter speed! I can hand-hold most exposures, but when the moon is in or near totality, it will be a problem as the moon will be darker and will require more exposure, I'll probably have to revert to the tripod.

Problem 2A - The height of the moon over the horizon. The moon is going to be awfully bloody high! My tripod cannot directly tilt that high. I have to employ two tricks to make it work so, tricks that I do not recommend to the casual photographer - I've been doing this for decades and I'm uncomfortable doing it myself! I have a right-angle eyepiece adapter that works with my 6D, I'm not certain it has adapters that'll work with my SL1.

Problem 2B - Can I find an exposure mode that'll work with a camera that I set up on the telescope level that will adapt when the moon enters/exits totality? Look at those two images. The moon occupies very little of the frame. Any auto-exposure mode won't cope well under those conditions, but will it if I dial in 3 or 4 f-stops of under-exposure? I'm not sure, I should have tested it tonight.

Problem 3 - It's going to be awfully effing cold! Doing these test shots, I couldn't wear gloves and operate the controls on the Lumix. The buttons are small, and the tripod was tilted waaay back to point upwards. Even with the LCD touchscreen tilted back, I had to take my gloves off to try to use it, which was an exercise in futility.

I might be able to wear a medium thickness glove on my left hand and a light glove on my right with the SL1. But the temperature was just below freezing, and when I went into the control room, the wind was giving me an effective wind chill of 17-20f. My clothing was good enough, but my hands were freezing!

Now, this is my first rodeo - I've never photographed a lunar eclipse before. I knew that I didn't really have the right equipment for it: I need a much longer telephoto. Sigma now has a 60-600 zoom: that would fit my needs, and assuming it's good - and Sigma does make good glass - I could see investing $2,000 in something like that - eventually. But I also need a telescope with tracking. That's several hundred dollars. And I need to rig up an external power supply for whichever camera I'm going to use, which is a hundred or so for an external battery grip, then modifying it so that I can run a cable to external rechargeable batteries. And I might have to create a heating system: most cameras don't like to operate in below freezing temperatures, I know the display in my Lumix goes nuts when the air temperature gets into the 20s.


I will get photos of the eclipse. I won't get an awesome photo series, but it will be a learning experience. Hopefully I won't get frostbite or pneumonia. ;-) And eventually I'll get a paying job, get some money saved up and some equipment purchased. The good thing is that I've been planning to get the battery grips and external batteries to pursue my star streak photography experiments, which illness prevented me from doing anything with last summer.

That's the nice thing about camera equipment: yes, some of the pieces are expensive, but it's rare that after getting it that you only use it for one thing. It's a pretty solid long-term investment, and the lenses last a long time and can be used (usually!) with future generations of the same family of camera bodies.


(Except there's this one thing that I REALLY want to do. It's slightly silly, and it would cost about $300, and I don't know if it'd be worth it, but I REALLY want to do it! You see, digital cameras are VERY sensitive to infrared. So sensitive, in fact, that they have a high-pass filter to block the IR and pass the higher, optical frequencies that we see to the imaging chip. I gave my dad my first DSLR, an original Canon Digital Rebel, 6 megapixels, that's kind of worthless as it's grossly superseded in performance, and he isn't using it, so I'm planning on taking it back. There's this camera shop that, for about $300, they'll take the camera apart, remove the high-pass filter, and re-focus and put it back together, making it a strictly IR camera. The results are very interesting! Here's two communities on LJ devoted to it, the former mostly Russian and fairly active, the latter hasn't had a post since 2013.)

I remember going out during snow storms with a broom to try to clear the dish and the transponder. No more! Of course, the internet connection could drop, but I have over 600 DVDs and Bluerays, plus more on my iMac. And there's always books.



As usual, clicken to embiggen.

We've got a pretty big storm hitting us, dumping a consistent inch or more per hour since midnight or so last night.

A couple more under the cut.
( Read more... )