Category Archives: Photography

December 16, 2022 · 22:44

No Context For You – December 16th

Established facts and fundamental truths:

  1. I take a LOT of pictures
  2. I love to travel
  3. I REALLY take a LOT of pictures when traveling!

The trip to San Antonio last week was no different. However, one thing surprised me. All of the photos and videos I took, 100% of them, were using my iPhone.

I had the two DSLRs with me, one with a normal 18-35mm zoom lens, one with the telephoto 75-300mm zoom lens. (I left the light bucket 11-16mm wide angle lens at home because as much as I love it, it weighs about two pounds.) I had my great little Sony palm-sized video camera.

Not one of them got used for a single picture. It was all the iPhone 13 Pro Max.

There’s no doubt in my mind that in the future I’ll continue to take along my “good” cameras when travelling, especially if I’m expecting to take a lot of “serious” pictures or videos. In 2024, for example, I’ll be going to view the next “Great American” solar eclipse. There’s no question I’ll take every camera I have for that. And even just on a trip to someplace new, like a possible trip to Memphis early in 2023, I’m sure on the ground and seeing the city for the first time I’ll be using the better quality equipment.

But a simple tip for a family gathering, where I’m more focused on the event and the family than on the photography? That newer iPhone is pretty sweet for keeping it simple, yet still being able to easily get some great results.

It’s been said that the best camera is the one in your hand when you see something you want to photograph. It’s work to carry around a backpack of cameras and be switching between them, where it takes two seconds to whip out that phone and be recording.

It was an interesting revelation.

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Filed under Photography, Travel

December 15, 2022 · 23:33

Christmas Lights 2022 – Professional Work

Six Flags Fiesta Texas did a great job of lighting up the park for the holidays.

I made sure to pay attention to how they did it, and noted some of the clever hooks and fasterners they used.

They’ve got a LOT of lights up, which I obviously approve of!

It seemed like every tree was wrapped in very bright, colorful LEDs, every building roof line outlined in bigger lights.

A wonderful job!

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Photography, Travel

December 14, 2022 · 23:44

I See The Cookie Monster

Flying back on Monday, over New Mexico, near sunset, snow covered landscape and I see this odd formation near the bottom of the picture.

A crater of some sort, with two large hills or mounds near the top, sorta looks like big eyes with a gaping mouth…

See the source imageMaybe it’s just me.

Tracking the location down, I think this is part of the Chain of Craters Wilderness Study Area  at 34.727060, -108.356174. I do wonder what made all of those craters. Probably volcanic, I’m guessing?

That one still looks like our blue, googly-eyed friend.

Or a wedding ring, maybe.

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Filed under Photography, Travel

December 13, 2022 · 23:28

After A Few Days Off

The problem with taking a four-day weekend, especially at an incredibly busy time of year, is that you’ve got to come back to work.

Mind you, I truly enjoy my job, what I do, and in particular, who I work with. (That’s not even bullshit!) But I also get to live in the real world, where there is stress and a limited number of hours in the day and my body isn’t 100% sure what day of the week it is or what time zone I’m in.

So enjoy this picture from the Christmas tree lighting at Six Flags Fiesta Texas. With a few fireworks.

I need some sleep.

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Fireworks, Photography, Travel

December 12, 2022 · 23:25

Between Cloud Layers Over West Texas

The family had gathered in San Antonio for a celebration of The Son’s impending retirement from the Air Force after twenty years of service. It was wonderful to spend time with all of the kids together – that doesn’t happen so often any more.

Today was “travel back home” day. It was foggy, gray, and gloomy on the ground in San Antonio, but once we climbed above that lower layer of clouds, it was spectacular!

(And no, we don’t have four suns. We have one sun and a bunch of internal reflections with probably some reflections off of the multiple panes of window glass on the aircraft.)

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Filed under Photography, Travel, Weather

December 11, 2022 · 21:30

Poor Life Decisions Were Made

On the one hand – YOLO!

On the other hand – you’re HOW old? That  first drop is HOW high? There are HOW many loops?

Those cars do WHAT? You spin HOW MANY TIMES?

Yes, you did this a lot when you were forty years younger. You’re no longer forty years younger.

Please, for the love of god, use some common sense!

Yeah, right. Have we actually ever met?

YOLO!!!

Suffice it to say, poor life choices were made.

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Filed under Family, Photography, Travel

December 10, 2022 · 16:22

Christmas Lights – Crowds & Coasters

Unseasonably warm, bright lights, nice crowds, ill-advised life decisions that made perfect sense forty years ago…

Fun times!

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Filed under Christmas Lights, Panorama, Photography

December 9, 2022 · 21:38

Ice Crystals

I found these on the window today.

We don’t get much ice in Los Angeles, but this window was at 37,000 feet, which helps.

 

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Filed under Flying, Photography

December 7, 2022 · 21:13

Occultation

Big goings on in the heavens tonight as the Moon moved in front of Mars and hid it for about an hour, and event known as an “occultation.”

(Was Mars hiding, or was the Moon blocking it? Who’s to blame? What was happening on Mars during that hour that the Martians didn’t want us to know about from Curiosity? Inquiring minds…)

I didn’t have the time to spare to pull out the big telescope and get it set up, but that didn’t stop me from taking time to watch and pull my camera and a video camera and a couple of tripods out. There are some truly spectacular pictures and videos out there from some of the big observatories (see Griffith Observatory, for example), but these are my “fast & dirty” results.

Before we get into the sequences, a note about basic physics and optics. The short version: the full Moon is 3.75 gazillion times brighter than Mars. So trying to take pictures that show the Moon, you need a very short exposure, in this case, 1/4000 second, the shortest exposure my 17-year-old Canon DSLR can do.

But then you can just barely see Mars. To show Mars clearly, you need a much longer exposure (1/160 second) which leaves the Moon as a white, featureless blob, looking more like the Sun.

Somewhere in the middle, if you’re lucky, there is a picture that gives you some bright, washed out detail on the Moon while also still showing the planet 50,000,000 miles away.

First, screen captures from the video camera. It has a great 20x optical zoom, but the resolution is quite a bit less than the DVR or any commercial quality video camera. Still, given five minutes of setup, these aren’t bad. These are small, low-resolution files, but they make a nice progression.

Prior to the occultation, with Mars to the lower left of the Moon, at about the “seven o’clock position”:

I was having some real problems with the tripod malfunctioning, so I’m amazed that I caught this at all! These captures are all about 30 seconds apart.

About an hour later, coming back out at about the “two o’clock position”:

These photos are about a minute apart.

Secondly, with the big camera, I didn’t get much worth sharing when Mars disappeared, but when it was reappearing I did much better (remember to click on the photos to see them full sized!):

Meanwhile, through binoculars, this was an amazing sight! I hope you got a chance to see it for yourself!

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography

December 6, 2022 · 20:14

Sunset – December 06th

Another busy, busy, busy day. Another quick stroll outside to catch some air and another of those little moments that are just wonderful if you let yourself observe and not be too jaded or blase.

The atmosphere’s still a little unstable a couple of days after a cold front brought in three days of light rain. Granted, again, as always, a multi-year drought has us grateful for the rain. But now it’s a bit cool and damp with a small chance of scattered showers for the rest of the week.

Good.

It leads to some nice cloud buildups in the late afternoon after we get some convective activity. At sunset there were a lot of larger cloud cells off toward Ventura and the ocean, so most of the clouds here were dark and grey. But this one little finger of clouds stuck out into the last pink rays of the setting sun. Just to remind us that it was there.

Sweet!

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Filed under Photography, Sunsets