Total Eclipse 2017

Like many of you, I travelled into the path of totality to view the August 2017 North American eclipse. We’ve all heard plenty about it, so I won’t go on and on. However, I’ve tried to describe the event and always seem to fall short. The pictures and videos that so many across the country have taken help, but their was more to the experience. The corona was more brilliant. The atmosphere was more gauzy. And, the feeling of awe simply cannot be conveyed.

I viewed the eclipse through a pair of regular eclipse glasses as well as some 20×60 binoculars fitted with filters.

I shot a timelapse with my Canon 6d and a 50mm lens and no filter. I shot photos with my Canon Rebel t3i and a 300mm lens with a solar filter, except during totality and a minute or so after (with live view, not looking through the viewfinder).

Here are the images I managed to capture.

This is a composite of various shots taken with the 300mm lens in sequence. The top row were shot with a solar filter and the bottom without.

This is the time lapse.

 

Here is the corona. You can see a little chromatic aberration caused by the lens. Unlike some of the shots that include some direct light from the sun’s surface and therefore create flaring effects through the lens, the patterns of light seen here appeared to be inherent to the corona.

 

This one I’ve over exposed slightly to show detail on the outer edges of the corona.

 

This one I digitally enhanced to show a little more detail of the patterns in the corona. The quality of the image suffers for it, though.

 

Here is the “diamond ring” the suns surface peaking out is what creates this effect. It was so much brighter that even with maximum shutter and aperture stopped all the way down it was still blown out in a largish area. On the other hand using the solar filter at this stage would only show a tiny blip of surface with no corona or diamond ring. I think having an ND filter on hand for this shot would have improved it. But, that would be just another thing to be fiddling with while you missed the experience 🙂

 

Here, you can see the faint ring and emerging crescent shape as the surface of the sun poked out more. Again, that crescent area was so bright that it is blown out. in reality the crescent at this stage was awfully thin.

 

This one is exposed to show something like what was visible through eclipse viewing glasses.

 

Here I’ve cropped in on the last image I took before totality. If I had removed my filter prior to this shot it would have shown the “pearl necklace” effect. I did not. It was my first total eclipse. You can see how the light is interrupted by irregularities in the moons surface.

Despite the traffic and travel, the experience was completely worth it. If I manage to make it to another I think I’ll try to be prepared to capture more of the images I like, while having even more time to enjoy the event.

As Hen Gathereth

I recently finished another painting commissioned as a gift for the client’s spouse. It is based on the scriptural quotation “how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings…”

The process was the same pretty standard thing I’ve described before. A few interesting things though:

1. I ended up combining 10 different photos to get a single reference image—chickens are not good at following modeling direction, so 4 of the 10 photos were just different parts of the main chicken that I had to composite the get the pose we needed.
2. Chicken faces look like scary dinosaurs. You can see between the last progress and the final that I altered the chickens face to make it slightly less scary.
3. Ipads do not record reliably accurate color in their photos (I imagine this is true for most mobile devices). All the progress photos were taken on my ipad. Though I did do a little glazing that softened some of the colors, that doesn’t account for the huge difference color-wise between the photo of the final, which was matched to the original, and the last progress shot.

Colorado Part 1: Rocky Mountain High

John Denver sang about a rocky mountain high. Of course there are always nitwits who hear the word “high” in a song from the 70’s and dismiss it as a drug thing. These days Colorado has plenty who are willing to hop on that train. But, anyone who’s bothered to spend a little time away from it all, and I don’t mean on a crowded beach or a ski resort where you use the wifi in the lodge, will understand a little of John was talking about—The wonder of the earth and sky. A place where the air really is clean (and thin) and you can see the clouds of stars that are up there, not just the few pinpricks you get back home.

I returned recently from a vacation in Colorado. We spent 12 days at 10 or 11 thousand feet in a log cabin that my grandparents built. It is in the mountains between Pitkin and Tincup and is the type of place where you get your water from a spring, your heat from a wood-stove and when you need to use the facilities you make a short trek to the outhouse.

I have enough photos from this trip that I’ll have to break it into a few parts. Part 1 will try to give a feel for the nature of the area.

They’re called the Rocky Mountains, but the rockiness becomes much more distinct the higher you get. The shot above is right around the timberline looking up to the ridge that tops the mountain on which the cabin is located. Below is a stream on the same mountain but at the cabin’s elevation.

This one is from Cumberland Pass. My first photo in this post is taken looking up the other side of that ridge in the distance. Below is a 360 degree panoramic from on top of that ridge. I put the panoramic together from 25 full resolution portrait orientation shots. It might be overkill knowing that most people will only see it on this blog in web resolution and when iPhones can do a cute little panoramic with a lot less work. But, there is just something nice about knowing I could print it 8 ft long at 300 dpi without even scaling it up 🙂

Here is a little fox who came sneaking around sometimes to see if we had any leftover food. He was cautious, but not afraid. I had to make some squeaking noises just to get him to hold still and look at me while I snapped this.

In addition to hiking and exploring, I spent some time throwing my tomahawk. I’ve created and uploaded a little video of that for your viewing pleasure. Hope you enjoy, I also hope it makes people think twice about breaking into my house 🙂

Of course while at cumberland pass I also had to take a “selfie”, made possible only by the little fish eye attachment that screws onto my lens. Cute huh?

Last are some pretty little alpine ponds fed by springs from, you guessed it, that ridge featured in all my other photos.

I think what John Denver is saying in that song is that reconnecting with the earth and the beauty that is out there gives you a kind of high that no chemical can. Just make sure to stay hydrated or you could end up with a splitting headache more akin to some kind of Rocky Mountain Hangover.

 

Sunset At the Lake

I was about to write a little rant about HDR photography, but I’ve decided to save it until I have some images with which to illustrate my points. There are plenty of “good”, “bad” and “why?” HDR images to be found online. But, I figure I might be taken more seriously if I prove I can produce some of each myself. So for today, I’ll just be sharing a few shots from an evening by the lake.

My parents are bird watchers, I am more of a landscape and cloud watcher. Naturally when they invited me on a walk by the lake with them, they looked at birds and I tried to get photos of mountains, dirt and whatever else was around. I did find myself framing some shots and wishing an interesting subject would plop down in them. Alas, nobody sailed by in a boat, walked up in their hipster garb or trotted past on a horse. Even the seagulls kept their distance 🙂

I ended up with some plain old landscapes, a few shots of myself and an abandoned tire.  The one above is actually a composite of two exposures of the same frame. Basically I’m just simulating a graduated neutral density filter to get detail on the shore without blowing out the sky. It’s the only shot to which I’ve really done any editing. Everything else is pretty much as shot, with the exception of bringing up the shadows  just a titch on me and the tire. I don’t really believe in making things artificially vibrant or saturated etc. Stay tuned in the future for my HDR rant 😉 I was actually a little surprised by how naturally blue the water seemed at that angle and in contrast to the sky. I guess I am just used to looking down at it from the benches at which vantage it usually looks brownish, greyish or at best light blueish.

I hope you’ll all forgive the lens flares—though, what do you expect when we are pointed right at the sun?

I also took a few panoramic sequences. This one below is the only that I’ve stitched so far. Photoshop’s photomerge tool is helpful, but I often find myself fixing things or doing big chunks manually when merging more than 4 or five images. Photoshop can also lose track of things if there are areas of busy detail or which lack distinctive landmarks. I could have achieved this one in two shots with a wider lens, but there is something about knowing that I could make an enormous print at full resolution which appeals to me (even though I’ve never had a reason to do it). Go ahead and click on this one to get more of the panoramic goodness 🙂 It’s been scaled way down for the web, but should still be fun.

Black and White Photos

I carry my camera with me fairly often even if I don’t have plans to shoot anything. It seems like it always turns out to be those times when I don’t have it that I see something of which I really want to get a picture.

It happened like that the other day. I was on my way home from an appointment, when I saw some beautiful interaction between light, clouds and mountain peaks. Luckily, I wasn’t far from home. So, I rushed there grabbed my stuff and jumped back in the car. I missed some of what I saw on my way home, but I still got some pleasing shots.

Interestingly, despite the pretty red light that bathed Timpanogos and Baldy, I convinced myself to go black and white with these—Maybe I’m just wishing I could be Ansel Adams. Hope you enjoy.

Quail Painting

My sister-in-law expressed interest recently in having some small quail paintings commissioned. So, when I had a little extra time and a square of toned canvas left over from another project, I thought I would do a little quail.

There isn’t a whole lot to say about it. It is a California Quail—the kind that we have running around here in Utah. the canvas is an 8″ square and it’s painted in oil.

I suppose it might be interesting to note that a general rule in oil painting is fat on lean—you thin the first layers and build it up thicker on top. Thinned oils will be difficult or impossible to lay down on unthinned paint unless it is already dry. Which is why I follow that rule until my last layer. I often like to let everything dry for a couple days and then come back and do some glazing with an oil liquin mixture (usually burnt sienna, my favorite pigment). Below is an in progress shot, before I did any glazing or added any of the environment.

 

The Land of Enchantment

New Mexico: The Land of Enchantment. My parents are from Los Alamos, so during my life, I’ve spent a lot of hours driving down to visit my grandparents in New Mexico. Honestly as a kid, I decided there were large swathes of that state that were rather less than enchanting. I think back then I had the idea that enchanting things had a lot of moss growing on them or were formerly inhabited by knights or trolls etc. I was kind of into medieval stuff more than Anasazi  or Pueblo stuff. Back then, the main appeal of Los Alamos was the lab’s connection to WWII and the atom bomb. I was happy to imagine soldiers in Willys Jeeps patrolling the canyons to make sure the Manhattan Project stayed secret. But beyond that, it seemed too dry and too sunny to be enchanting.

Then I grew up. I’m not sure if my capacity to recognize beauty increased or developed the same as my ability to appreciate the taste of bell peppers, or if I just happened to look outside in the morning instead of watching cartoons. I recently made another trip with my family to visit grandparents and I decided to take some photos trying to capture “The Land of Enchantment”.

This was taken off the highway North of Espanola when mist from the river was still clinging to the valley.

These two are in a canyon between a couple of Los Alamos’ mesa fingers—also in the morning while the light was still low and sweet.

This is the valley South of Georgia O’keeffe’s Ghost Ranch home. I always wondered why she would move from New York to somewhere dry and kind of desolate. But I guess this is why, it makes you feel free. It’s also not always so desolate as it seems.

The cliffs above are North of the Ghost Ranch.

I’ll admit this arch is not in New Mexico, it is South of Moab Utah. Still pretty cool—red rock and all, but definitely not as enchanting, is it? 🙂

First Snow, Canyon and Creek

We had the year’s first snow in the valley last week. Of course, as soon as I saw it was coming down, I had to grab my camera, jump in the car and head for a trail to hike. I picked Grove Creek because it is close and has both nice views and a running creek. Here’s what I came back with:

I took these two of the creek on my way down. I tried a couple shots of the water on my way up, but I think I was impatient and the light was different because it was still snowing. So, I tried again later, this time bothering to set up my tripod and take a some care. As you might expect, the shots with a little care came out much better.

This one below was taken on my way up the canyon and is actually stitched from about 15 shots. I had my 18-55 and could have just taken a wide angle, but I used the 50mm instead and the resulting 3 columns of 5 shots came together nicely and produced an image with pretty amazing resolution compared with what a single wide angle shot would have given me. Not that I really need it, I’ve shrunk it down to the same size as all my others for the blog 😉

Along the way, I started thinking about how I didn’t get a lot of photos during leaf changing season, so I took one of this fallen oak leaf to make sure I didn’t miss representing the late fall flavor.

Whenever the wind blew, it pushed the low clouds from the valley right up the canyon. I wish I could have adequately captured the experience. It was like something from a fantasy novel. I’d be hiking along with crisp views of the canyon below, when suddenly a thick mass of writhing mist would barrel up the canyon twisting around rocks and trees. Then before I could get my lens cap off I was engulfed and couldn’t see past 10 ft in front of me. This happened several times. Both the path above and the tree below were taken when the wind in the valley lulled and the mist began to thin and dissipate. It usually cleared completely before the cycle started over.

I also tried to do a little time lapse while up there. I didn’t bring any sort of interval timer or controller with me, so I did it manually. I have to admit that 35 min of standing in the snow,counting to five and releasing the shutter over and over got a little dreary, but my best photos usually aren’t the ones I take out the back window in my pajamas.

Hope you enjoy.

Caerphilly Castle

Nothing says British history like castles. The word originally meant a fortress or stronghold, though Disney has managed to make in synonymous with a medievalish looking palace. That isn’t totally their fault, though. Nor is it totally inaccurate. Castles were definitely inhabited by rich people. But not because they liked a grand facade of wealth. Rather, they liked to be safe from their enemy’s soldiers. Caerphilly castle is just such an example. It was built by a nobleman who’s family was intent on subjugating and dominating the surrounding area. Having a castle meant he could be relatively safe from attack, while having a base from which to deploy his men and maintain control. Being safe from attack wasn’t just theoretical either. In 1294 the Welsh, unhappy about being taxed and repressed, rose up. Morgan ap Maredudd led a force that attacked Caerphilly. Half the town was burned, but they couldn’t take the castle—in which our nobleman Gilbert de Clare was cozy and safe.

In its day, Caerphilly castle was quite revolutionary. It had extra-fortified gatehouses on concentric defenses including artificial lakes and moats. It even had a semi-fortified island where the townspeople could come during a conflict. Just because it was a fortress didn’t mean the noble family shouldn’t live in style—so, their interior accommodations were rather lavish.

Hundreds of years of decay, shifting soil and possibly some intentional blasting during the English Civil War, while rendering it a little less grand, have given it the patina of age and authenticity that sparks your imagination. Yet, enough restoration has been done to guide your imagination in the right direction. Our visit was accompanied by cloud and rain—it seemed only appropriate.

The windows in this restored section of the castle show that accommodations for the noble family weren’t so bad as the shabby arrow loops on the exterior walls might suggest.

Once upon a time, the water defenses may have repelled attackers. But they certainly aren’t repelling a variety of waterfowl.

 

Sunset Time Lapse

A while back, I posted a little time lapse of the blood moon eclipse. That was my first attempt at time lapse, and ever since I have been itching to do one of a sunset. I missed some beautiful opportunities last week when a series of storms delivered amazing cloudscapes. So, when the sky started to look interesting this week, I had to rush home to get my equipment ready. Nothing gets my heart pounding like the idea that I might miss a good opportunity. Whether it is an amazing patch of orange light on a snowcapped peak, or a dwindling supply of tasty food—I get greedy. Having missed my chance with the previous ones, when this opportunity presented itself, I cancelled my plans and got to work.

Location for my setup was limited to the length of my extension cord. I messed up my remote jack earlier this summer so my only reliable control option is tethering my camera to a laptop and using Canon’s EOS Utility. Set up on the roof of a horse stall overlooking Utah Valley and shooting at 5 second intervals for about an hour, this is what I got:

Well, that is mostly what I got. I actually got 38 frames with birds, bugs and helicopters in them. Since no bird takes more than five seconds to cross the frame, they would just pop up like blips giving it an old-timey dusty projector reel kind of feel. Not what I was going for. So, I photoshopped out the birds. 38 frames to fix seems like a lot, but out of 560, I’m counting my blessings.

Here is my camera set up on top of the horse stall. The laptop is up there too on the other side of the peak. Normally it is kind of nice to use a laptop instead of an interval timer because the EOS Utility provides an onscreen preview of each shot. That was useless in this case though, because once I started shooting I had to climb down to avoid wobbling the roof.

Here are a few shots I took on the days when I wish I could have done a time lapse last week.