Experiments in Photography

Ok, so I got around to posting some of my photos, including the series of shots I did for the Lunar Eclipse.




Here are some Motion related photos, some long exposure shots of the MARTA underground in Atlanta, and some experimental shots trying to depict motion with long exposure and lighting. These are non-edited shots, all done with a single long exposure. There are also some shots of the clydesdales at the Puyallup Fair.

The Moon - is glowing red!

We had a great opportunity this morning on the west coast of the US to see a Lunar Eclipse. After my wife woke me up, at 3am, I went out to the park across fom my house and took a couple of photos.

This was much more challenging than I had thought.

With the darkness, I had to manually focus the camera (oh heavens...).

The lens I was using was my canon 28-200mm zoom. I did a quick check with a digital zoom after taking a test shot, and found it was still out of focus. When I manually focussed at the farthest distance, I had to back it off a little to get it into focus. That took a little time since I had to basically take a shot and digitial zoom in to see if I was in focus or not.

Long time lapse shots (30 seconds) clearly show the rotation of the earth. I had to drop my exposure to the 3.2 second range, and even then you could see it when zooming in on the stars nearby.

I was really impressed with how NoiseNinja helped with this as well...

Winery shots

Our local photography group the photonuts, had an outing at a local winery. I showed up late and was relegated to walking around outside, but still managed to get a couple of interesting shots.

I was very frustrated by that darn bird however, he only flew when there was something between him and me.

Date and time formats -- (Rant)

Why is it that in this age of computers people still insist on such varied date and time formats?

It seems the best format should be YYYY-MM-DD for a date. The beauty is that it is unambiguous, and it sorts well. The year is the most significant part for crying out loud, so it should go first. Just like a number, right?

Dashes should be used because they go fine in file names. Most operating systems don't allow a '/' in a filename so the '-' makes the most sense here.

One of my pet peves is when people name files with a date stamp that places the day, or month before the year. It just doesn't make any sense.