Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

December 19, 2006

Light

Filed under: Photography — cec @ 9:54 pm

Some mornings I should just plan to be late for work. This morning was probably one of them. While driving in, I kept getting distracted by how beautiful everything looked. No, I wasn’t high, it’s just that the light was so gorgeous that the most mundane, and even ugly, objects looked beautiful.

Perhaps I should explain. When you’re interested in photography, you quickly learn that it’s all about light. The amount, the color, the quality, the reaction of your film to it – it’s all about light. The ISO number for your film is all about light, go from ISO 50 to ISO 100 and you half the amount of light you need to make an image (aka, you can use a faster shutter or smaller aperture). Open your lens up one stop, e.g., from f/11 to f/8 and you’ve just doubled the amount of light reaching the film (f-stops go up by the square root of 2, but they related to the ration of lens diameter to focal length so the area of the lens doubles). Change the speed of the shutter and you affect how much light reaches the film. By working all of the doubles and halves, you can attempt to achieve the effect you want given the limits of the light you have. For example, when I shoot water, I often want a slow shutter speed which necessitates a small lens aperture. But sometimes when there is too much light, even the smallest aperture won’t get you a slow enough shutter.

Beyond the technical aspects of recording the light, the light itself has qualities. Mid-day sun is usually awful. The angle of the sun means that it passes through a minimum of atmosphere and very bright and harsh. Beyond that, the light during most days is bluish. You usually don’t notice this for the same reason your office florescent lights don’t look green – your eyes have a white balance algorithm that makes my digital camera blush. Your eyes adjust and present a normal looking image to the brain.

But this morning, the light was special. This morning we had a front come through, so there were clouds in the west and above us while the sun was rising in the east. No blue reflected from the sky. Plenty of atmosphere for the sun to travel through. A nice dark gray sky as background to all objects. The result was gorgeous, golden light. I could have sat for hours watching it on the trees, the grass, the ugly warehouses downtown. Everything it touched lit up.

You can get a similar effect when the sun sets as a front moves out. Clouds in the east, low sun in the west. The colors are slightly different, there is more red (see the picture below), but it’s still beautiful. Even on days when I don’t have a camera with me, it’s enough just to enjoy the light.

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December 17, 2006

New books

Filed under: Personal,Photography,Social,Technical — cec @ 5:56 pm

I had a chance last week to read a few books, all of which I would recommend in some fashion or another:

National Geographic’s “The Ultimate Field Guide to Photography” This is a very good, basic field guide to photography. It covers a huge range of subjects and, not surprisingly, has some beautiful photographs. The book covers both film and digital photography, editing, archiving, composition, and has a great inspirational chapter describing Robert Clark’s photographic travelogue using only the camera in a cell phone. My only complaint about the book is that it covers too many topics, but not much in depth. It’s a great book for a beginner, but there wasn’t too much I hadn’t seen already.

“Peopleware” by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. This is apparently a classic on productivity in an IT environment. It was written in 1987 and then revised in 1999. The book is an incredible look at projects, teams and what makes them successful. DeMarco and Lister worked in the software development industry, but their insights are applicable to any IT field. They start by describing IT and other knowledge based environments and how these are different than classical manufacturing environments, noting that we need to manage IT workers differently than we would in other environments. The remaining chapters are organized into parts: The Office Environment on how the environment affects productivity (hint: cubicles are not the way to go); The Right People on the need for good (and different people), how to cultivate them, and keep them (given the high costs of turnover); Growing Productive Teams which discusses how to get good people to jell into even better teams (unfortunately, there aren’t good ways to encourage this – other than to avoid killing teams); It’s Supposed To Be Fun to Work Here whose topic you can figure out. The last part is the update for 1999 – Son of Peopleware. In that last part, the authors note that they stand by everything they wrote 12 years ago, they reinforce certain topics and provide suggestions to implement some of their original ideas.

This really is a great book on management in IT and it actually quantitatively confirms many of my personal feelings about management. My plan at this point is to re-read it while taking notes. There are things in here that I think we need to address in my current job – keeping in mind that even the authors think that you can only tackle one of the problems.

“The Myth of a Christian Nation” by Gregory Boyd. A while back, I wrote about the separation of church and state. In that post, I briefly mentioned that such separation was good for religions. Gregory Boyd takes this much further and discusses how keeping religion out of politics is good theology. While he never uses the phrase “separation of church and state,” as a pastor, he presents an extremely compelling case for it. The book came out of a series of sermons Boyd gave in the run-up to the 2004 election. He and other pastors at his church were under significant pressure to promote certain candidates and positions. After he gave the sermons titled, “the Cross and the Sword,” about 1,000 people (20%) left his congregation.

The book and the sermons dealt with two kingdoms, that of the cross and of the sword. The kingdom of the sword represents nations and political entities. That of the cross represents the community of Christians and what they are called to do, which is primarily service to others (as demonstrated by Jesus in the gospels). Boyd goes on to describe how the early church emphasized that conflating political power with Christianity was idolatry. This changed in the 4th century when the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity after winning an important battle. Since then, the church has often tried to grow through political power.

Boyd then describes current efforts to “take America back for God,” and proceeds to destroy the myth that the United States was ever founded as a Christian nation. He goes through the litany of beliefs from those whom state this and systematically refutes them. For example, he points out that the preamble to the Declaration of Independence is more indicative of deists and followers of the enlightenment (which the founders were) than it is of Christian thought.

Finally, Boyd goes through a number of very difficult, current questions and discusses the, in his mind, appropriate kingdom of the cross perspective. Not surprisingly, the answer is never to legislate away that which you don’t think is moral or Christlike.

All in all, a very important perspective on the importance of the separation of church and state. I highly recommend it.

December 12, 2006

2007 Yellowstone Calendar

Filed under: Personal,Photography — cec @ 6:53 pm

For the past few years, I’ve put together a calendar using pictures I took in Yellowstone. In 2004 (for the 2005 calendar), I was very excited about the project and used only photos I took that year. Last year, I had to raid prior years (it wasn’t the best Yellowstone trip for pictures). This year I think I can pull enough decent pictures from our 2006 trip.

The pictures I’m going to use for the 2007 calendar are posted here. I need to crop a couple of the bird pictures, but the rest should be okay.

Now I just wish I had started earlier. 🙂

December 10, 2006

pictures from the new camera

Filed under: Photography — cec @ 9:16 pm

I haven’t posted any pictures from the new camera yet – mostly because they’ve been throw away shots where I’ve tried to get a sense of the new camera. But here are a handful. Only the picture of Luke (the snake) is full sized (3872 x 2592), the rest have been reduced.  Oh, and the red bellied woodpecker was taken using my 300mm lens with the doubler and the 1.5x magnifying factor of the digital.  He was probably 30 feet up in the tree, so I’m not too unhappy with the shot – now I need to get a shot of the pair of pileated woodpeckers that hang out in the back yard.
dsc_0181_m.JPG dsc_0155_m.JPG dsc_0104_m.JPG dsc_0094_m.JPG

hrm, having issues uploading the full sized image, let’s try this:

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December 7, 2006

going digital

Filed under: Photography — cec @ 12:10 pm

Okay, I’m taking the plunge. A Nikon D80 with 18-135mm lens and 8 GB worth of SDHC cards arrived on my doorstep yesterday. The D80 body was a Christmas present from K’s parents! I used extra birthday money to get the memory and the lens kit.

I’ve got a number of reasons for going digital.  There’s finally enough resolution in an affordable camera. The D80 is a 10.2 megapixel camera. That’s about 1/2 as much as I can pull off of a slide using a 4k dpi scanner, but about twice what I usually do scan – good compromise. The SLR body will use (almost) all of my current lenses. I tend to take more nature photography images than other types, the D80 gives you a 1.5X increase in focal length as compared to my film cameras. Last night I tested it with a doubler and a 300mm lens. That took me out to 600mm of glass, plus the 1.5X factor – 900mm equivalent in something I can hike with! The ISO adjustment means that even the 2 f-stop loss of light from using the doubler is manageable.

Initial impressions – wow! Beautiful, large, sharp, vivid images. Light weight camera. VERY responsive. Nice ability to bracket shots. Great control over the color balance. One gripe, my SB-28 flash will not work in TTL mode, only automatic and manual (as an aside, TTL as an acronym is too overloaded: through the lens, transistor-transistor logic, time to live, etc.).

I’ll still bring my F5 and some film with me to Yellowstone next year. Just not as much film and probably only Velvia 50 for landscape shots.

November 21, 2006

Still need to finish the snake cage

Filed under: Personal,Photography,Wildlife Rehab — cec @ 10:51 am

The snake’s been in the cage for a few months, but I’ve held off posting pictures until I finished the last little bit – the frames around the window.  But as pointed out in this comment, it would be good to get some pictures with Luke in his cage.  So, hopefully I’ll finish up the frames this week, while I’m away from the office, but in the meantime, here are some pictures:

img_1947_m.JPG   img_1977_m.JPG

The other thing I need to do to finish this is to work on the temperature problem.  With the large vents (that I plan to shrink up a bit with plexiglass) and the big front, it loses heat faster than the small heaters we’ve put in there will add it.  I think the next plan is to put in some track lighting along the back and then I can add several of the low heat lamps (that won’t burn the snake if he touches them).

September 4, 2006

the promised baby rat, er, squirrel pictures

Filed under: Personal,Photography,Wildlife Rehab — cec @ 1:53 pm

img_1953_m.jpgfood coma – from 4 hours ago
img_1954_m.jpgfeeding
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Oh, and one very sad dog – feeling left out because he doesn’t get to play with the squirrels. Darwin, say “cheese”
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August 17, 2006

Friday, er, Thursday Snake Blogging

Filed under: Personal,Photography,Wildlife Rehab — cec @ 9:39 pm

img_1936_m.jpgTook the day off and spent most of it working on the snake terrarium. Watching him pace (hmm, that doesn’t seem like the right word for a snake) his cage today made me particularly sad and motivated me to get about 95% finished. He could actually move in now – the only things missing are the decorative frames around the side vents. Overall, I’m pretty happy with the terrarium. There are a number of things that I would do differently next time, but some things will definitely stay the same. For example, I used plexiglass for the front which made the whole thing significantly lighter. The plexiglass was about $20 more expensive but definitely worth it. And here’s the (near) finished terrarium. Next time I post about this, we’ll be completely done and have the snake moved in.

img_1931.jpgIn other snake news, K caught a picture of an eastern hog nose in its red phase in our front yard last week. S/he’s an absolutely beautiful snake. In case you can’t quite tell from the picture, the snake is extremely red at the front and it gradually fades to yeallow at the tail. Your science tidbit for the day: the eastern hog nose eats the occassional small mammal, but is particularly well adapted to eating frogs and toads. As you can imagine, the amphibians don’t like being eaten and have a tendency to inflate to prevent a snake from swallowing them. The eastern hog nose has its fangs in the upper back of its mouth. These fangs are used to paralyze and “deflate” a swollen frog to enable swallowing. The eastern hog nose apparently also plays dead if it can’t drive off predators. When it plays dead, it goes limp and sticks its tongue out – which, IIRC, is how I played dead when I was five.

August 8, 2006

Vacation pictures

Filed under: Personal,Photography — cec @ 6:55 pm

The vacation pictures checklist from earlier:

  1. Get 22 rolls of slide film back from the developer [Check – received mid June]
  2. Put 800 slides into transparancy holders so they are easy to look at on the light box [Check – took two nights]
  3. Go through 800 slides to determine which are worth scanning [Check – took another two days]
  4. Scan 120 or so “good” slides [Check – finished tonight after three nights of scanning]
  5. Color correct the images in the GIMP [done]
  6. Remove dust from scans because my slide scanner doesn’t have an infrared channel [done]
  7. Upload the results and put ’em online [finished today]

Everything is done! Pictures online finally. For the record, I’m not thrilled with them. My biggest complaint is that there aren’t really any good animal shots. This is different from prior years. I blame oversleeping.

August 3, 2006

High dynamic range photography

Filed under: Photography,Technical — cec @ 10:59 pm

Okay, now I’m just embarassed. I just heard about high dynamic range (HDR) photography from a NY Times article. I plead that it’s mostly just a trick and, hey, I primarily shoot slide film anyway.

So for others who haven’t heard of HDR photography, it’s a technical work around for one of the more difficult photographic problems – the problem of the dynamic range of film vs that of the eye. In a nutshell, the human eye has an enormous dynamic range. It can distinguish between two different very bright shades while simultaneously distinguishing between two very dark shades. It’s dynamic range, IIRC, is somewhere around 10. On the other hand, slide film and prints from print film have a dynamic range of 5, maybe 6. That doesn’t sound like much difference, except that this is a logarithmic scale.

This leads to the photography problem. The gorgeous scene that you photographed may not show up in your image unless the scene has a small dynamic range. Enter HDR. With HDR, you take multiple exposures. This ensures that you have a “good” exposure for each part of the scene. You then algorithmically combine the images to produce a meta-image which is well exposed across the entire scene.

The biggest problem I see with these images is that they wind up looking like Thomas Kincaid paintings. That said, I’ll probably play with this technique soon using CinePaint (a fork of the GIMP).

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