Category Archives: Photography

August 31, 2023 · 22:53

Past Labor Day Travels – August 31st

Some years the World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) is held outside of North America. In those cases, because like it or not, the majority of fans who attend Worldcons come from the US and Canada, there’s a second convention, the North American Science Fiction Convention, or NASFiC, somewhere in North America. For example, this year the Worldcon is in China, so the NASFiC was in Winnipeg. Both Worldcon and NASFiC are run by the World Science Fiction Society (WSFS). NASFiCs tend to be smaller in terms of attendance than Worldcons and they don’t give out Hugo Awards or other awards – they’re Worldcons’ baby sibling for those who can’t afford the time and/or the money to travel overseas.

In 2005 the Worldcon was in Glasgow (where it’s going to be again in 2024, we really hope to be there this time) and the NASFiC was in Seattle. We took a family trip to Seattle in August, but NASFiC was in July, so we missed it.

In 2006 the Worldcon was in Los Angeles (easy! right?) and I was there for about a half hour, literally. The family attended, but I was in the middle of my MBA at Pepperdine University and couldn’t afford the time even if it was just down the freeway. I’m told that I was also suffering from a severe case of shingles, but I have absolutely no memory of it. Which means it must have been really bad, so thank goodness my brain short circuited and didn’t retain those memories!

In 2007 the Worldcon was in Japan, so we were back off to NASFiC. It was held in Colinsville, IL, a small suburb of St. Louis. Normally we might have skipped it, but our son was stationed at Scott Air Force Base just a few miles away, so we got to kill several birds with one stone by attending.

I don’t remember the convention as being anything spectacular, but some of the sightseeing was. I remember fondly my visits to Hannibal, MO as a kid and I’ve always been a huge fan of Mark Twain and his works. It was great to take the family there.

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Filed under Fandom, Photography, Science Fiction, Travel

August 30, 2023 · 23:05

Orange Super Blue Moon Rising

We interrupt our traipsing through past Worldcon trips to bring you today’s “Blue Supermoon” rising!

You couldn’t possibly have missed all of the hype. But the short (and factual) description is that tonight the Moon was full (happens every 29.5 days, more or less), it was a tiny percentage closer to Earth than average (its orbit is an ellipse, not a circle, so sometimes it’s a bit closer, sometimes it’s a bit farther away, perfectly normal and routine) which means it was a tiny percentage brighter than average, and it was the second full moon in a calendar month (which happens on average every couple of years because our calendar is weird and irregular and lumpy), and tonight all three of those things happened more or less simultaneously. The press had a field day.

First of all, the camera (and hidden image processing software) in the iPhone 13 doesn’t quite know what to do with an bright orange super blue Moon on a dark-ish, dusk-ish background. It does its best.

The good news is that it did better this time on focusing on the Moon instead of the telephone pole and trees. Not great, mind you, but better.

The good camera (Canon Rebel XT DSLR with a 300mm Tamron lens) is lousy in full auto mode being even older and more computationally primitive than the iPhone. But put it in manual mode and shoot a series of pictures with varying exposures and manually focusing, then something in that series is going to get close.

This is a LOT like what it looked like in terms of color and contrast. And yes, just coming up through the turbulent, hot, pea soup atmosphere over downtown Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley it does look that distorted and misshapen.

As it gets up a bit and we’re not viewing it through quite so much icky atmosphere, the Moon rounds up and starts to get bright. Like really, really bright.

Which confuses the crap out of the camera, which sees all of that black and wants to do a 1/2 or 3/4 second exposure. Knowing (a little bit) better, I overrode it for a 1/250 second exposure. Still too bright! Should have gone for 1/1000 second. Or shorter.

The iPhone never gets over that and constantly overexposes the scene. But it does a decent job of catching the city spread out down below.

Now that it’s way up overhead, even a 1/1000 second exposure would be way, way too long. I don’t think my older (13 years? 15 years?) DSLR will do an exposure short enough to show detail on any full moon, not just a super duper blue Moon. Not without going to some sort of neutral density filter to cut down on the light.

Regolith is reflective as all get out, especially for just vacuum cured grey dust and pulverized rock!

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Space

August 29, 2023 · 23:42

Past Labor Day Travels – August 29th

The family trip to the 2004 Worldcon was memorable for some good reasons but also for a handful of lousy ones.

Worldcon was in Boston, a city I dearly love visiting, having spent a lot of time there when I was in high school in Vermont. Prior to going to Worldcon we stopped in Vermont and saw family, which was great.

In between there was a trip to Montreal, which was fine right up until the moment when we came back to our rental car, found the windows smashed out and my briefcase and our luggage gone, and had to deal with the French-Canadian authorities and rental car folks to get a replacement car. Not the greatest first impression with the family for Montreal. (For what it’s worth, Worldcon was in Montreal five years later, in 2009, and we were back and had a great time.)

This bridge, the Leonard P. Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge, familiar to anyone who’s driven through Boston, is infamous in our family. We’ve driven across it over, and over, and over, and over, back and forth, trying to get from downtown to Logan International Airport. “But Paul, I’m very familiar with Boston and you don’t go over that bridge when going from downtown to Logan,” you’re saying.

I know!

Thus, the problem.

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Filed under Fandom, Photography, Travel

August 28, 2023 · 22:33

Past Labor Day Travels – August 28th

Favorite author John Scalzi had a nice post on his website today about his first science fiction convention, twenty years ago today.

As I was recollecting yesterday, Labor Day weekend has quite often been our family vacation weekend at Worldcon, and it turns out we were at that convention in Toronto as well.

In addition to just traveling for the convention, we also go for ballgames, amusement parks, and other touristy activities. If you go to Toronto and get down by the ballpark, look up!

You never can tell who might be heckling you.

While Mr. Scalzi was reminscing on twenty years, I started thinking about my first convention. It was fifteen years earlier than… No, wait, it was twenty-five years earlier?

That can’t be right! I’m not THAT freakin’ old! That would be forty-five years ago. 2023 minus 1978 is … forty-five years.

Shazzbott!

At least three years later I had a better camera.

 

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Filed under Fandom, Photography, Travel

August 27, 2023 · 23:28

Past Labor Day Travels – August 27th

The end of August. Labor Day weekend approaching in the US. So often that has meant getting ready to head off to WorldCon. Not this year.

Back in the day, the Worldcon trip was the annual family vacation. And when the whole family traveled, it wasn’t just for the convention. There were amusement parks and other tourist attractions to see.

And way, way back in the day, the digital cameras were far more primitive and the file resolutions were much smaller.

640×480 pixels? Really? Pretty sure my watch does about an order of magnitude better these days.

(Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, for the Chicago Worldcon in 2000.)

 

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Filed under Photography, Travel

August 26, 2023 · 23:31

Camo Bunny

We are in the middle of a desert, after all.

Following last weekend’s big storm, this guy’s been out there soaking up sun.

Which sounds like a perfectly good way to see the neighborhood from the air as one of those hawks takes you off to be fed to their chicks, but I’m not a rabbit, so what do I know?

I did notice in the most zoomed pictures that there’s a grey bump of some sort on its neck. It almost looks like a stud or something on a collar, but these bunnies are wild. It must be some sort of wart or boil? Maybe that’s why the hawks leave it alone? It might be diseased or tainted?

My wildlife knowledge is barely at Boy Scout levels, and I haven’t been a Boy Scout for about 53 years.

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Filed under Critters, Photography

August 25, 2023 · 23:15

Camo Lizard

“How are the lizards doing?” I hear you saying. (Well, the voices that I’m hearing in my head are saying something – maybe that’s it, maybe it’s not.) “We haven’t seen them in a while.”

True. One thing I note this year is that it’s been a year or so since I’ve seen them hiding under the card in the driveway. For a couple of years there were often certain lizards who would hid in the shade under the car while still being on that hot concrete. But not this year.

One of the lizards I’ve seen regularly in the back yard this summer is this little dude who is very well camouflaged! Can you even see it in this picture?

There it is! It really blends in.

I spotted it because it ran across the dirt and then froze as I got near. The motion gave it away. If it had just stayed still I would probably have walked right by and not have seen it.

Then it started doing this open mouth pose. Panting because it was trapped in the sun while I was standing there? Or going into a threat mode to scare me off and show me how tough it is?

Could go either way!

 

 

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Filed under Critters, Photography

August 22, 2023 · 23:38

No Context For You – August 22nd

When attacking a problem it’s important to be able to judge when you’re in way over your head and need to call for help.

It’s a skill that I’m working on. I tend to wait way too long. Maybe this will help me learn.

Calling for help was almost an accident today, triggered by me doing something stupid that made me think the problem had suddenly gotten much, MUCH worse. It hadn’t and I soon realized that, but I also realized that I had run out of ideas on the original problem. Since help had been called for by that time, so be it. Let the experts do their work and hope that they didn’t find it was something simple that I had completely overlooked.

It wasn’t. Instead they found a Sarlacc living under the house.

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Filed under Castle Willett, Paul, Photography

August 21, 2023 · 23:41

Skyscapes – August 21st

The emergency alerts on the phone for being in a flash flood watch zone went off three times last night. Tough night. There was flooding out in Ventura County, but nothing near here. Better safe than sorry, I guess.

What’s responsible for the weirdness for the rest of the day? Who knows? The weird sleep detritus? Leftover ions from the hurricane? Leftover aftershocks from the earthquake? Mercury in retrograde?

 

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Filed under Photography, Weather

August 19, 2023 · 23:12

The Approaching Storm

The clouds were starting to roll in by sunrise this morning, and it’s been mostly cloudy all day.

Just around sunset, enough clouds broke up to let some amazingly golden rays through.

The storm track has continued to shift a bit to the east, so while we’re still under an official Flood Watch and a Tropical Storm warning, we’re now expecting about 24 hours (roughly noon tomorrow to noon on Monday) of high (but not hurricane force!) winds and a decent amount (3″-ish, probably on the higher side) of rain over that time.

We won’t flood, we’re on top of the hill, but it’s possible there could be some local flash flooding. But we’re not going anywhere, so that shouldn’t be an issue. The biggest threat that I see might be a power outage, but spoiled freezer and refrigerator contents are the worst consequences of that.

Inland in the deserts? Flash flooding is a huge possibility. Places like Death Valley could get more rain in twelve hours tomorrow than they normally get in three years. Flash floods in the past have taken out bridges over dry riverbeds on the interstates heading toward Arizona and Nevada, so that’s a concern. Lots of folks are stuck living near burn areas from brush fires, and with these kinds of rain mudslides are a possibility and they could cause significant damage. Storm surge could cause serious coastal flooding and damage along the coast and out on Catalina Island.

In short, it’s a BIG area and I don’t expect too many issues HERE, but Hilary is a major, powerful, HUGE storm and elsewhere in SoCal it could get really nasty. Let’s hope that it doesn’t.

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Filed under Photography, Sunsets, Weather