A Delicate Early Morning Mist

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Photo #266: Early Morning MistLocation Taken: Just north of St. Louis, on the Illinois River.
Time Taken: November 2012

There’s something magical about early morning river mist. Add in a beautiful sunrise and a nice backdrop of trees, and it gets really pretty really fast.

I wonder when games will get their graphics to this level?

There’s all the hype about high definition graphics and fancy shaders, but we’re nowhere near being able to render a delicate morning mist. Makes me really look forward to what we’ll be able to do in twenty years. I mean, it’s been less than twenty years since we first started really using polygons in games, and now we’ve got tons of them making really pretty scenes.

Water is getting pretty good these days, but mist and especially realistic lighting still is missing something. For the lighting, it’s refractive color that’s the primary missing thing, but hey, figuring out what color the light bouncing off of one object onto another one should be is TOUGH, especially if you need to render a large scene with tens of thousands of possible refractive areas.

Still, I hear people crowing about their amazing graphics and I start twitching at how many white reflective areas they’re showing on the models. There’s not much that reflects white out there. Even the sun, which IS white (really, it is, you just think of it as yellow because it’s too bright to look at when it’s not obscured by the atmosphere like at sunset, and the cultural standard is yellow). reflects with more than just white light. You can see the orange-red edge to the reflection in the water in this photo.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go play some games.

  

Daylilies hanging out in the daylight

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Photo #265: DayliliesLocation Taken: Readfield, Wisconsin
Time Taken: June 2012

Not much to say about these. Just some pretty daylilies hanging out in the sun next to a bright white shed.

Pretty, aren’t they?

There’s lots of types of daylilies, you know? This is the type I see the most, without any of the fancy schmancy extra floofiness that have been added to some varieties. Just a simple intense color and petals that curve elegantly.

And a nice mix of opened flowers and unopened ones. I like the mix. Adds variety in shape to the flower patch. And it means you get daylilies blooming for longer, since there’s new ones to show off when the first batch fade. It all works out.

And the unopened flowers have such interesting patterns and colors. There’s the green from the bud stage mixing with the color that the petals become. In this case it’s the bright red, so it’s a really interesting mix of colors. And a great shape too.

  

Usually “Blades” and “Gently” don’t go together…

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Photo #264: Wind FarmLocation Taken: Eastern Washington
Time Taken: October 2012

I love it every time I come across a wind power farm.

Just tower after tower, spread across the land, the blades turning gently in the wind.

It’s also surprisingly impressive at night. You’d think it wouldn’t be, something about the, you know, lack of light. But each tower has a red light on top, blinking gently to warn airplanes that there’s a tall thing there. And the red light gently illuminates the turning blades in beautiful patterns.

And I used the word gently a bit too much there, I think. Ah well, such is life.

Most places don’t have the right conditions for wind farms. But in certain spots, the wind is strong and constant. Tops of mountains, wide plains, that sort of thing. And often the wind farms are in areas where other types of farm do well, amusingly enough. In this case, it’s cattle farms. But I have heard that a bunch of farmers are making extra money renting out the edges of their fields to wind power companies, if they’re lucky enough to live in the right spots for such things. But then, that’s just hearsay, so I don’t know if it’s true.

Still, I love seeing the wind farm towers, their blades turning gently-

Darn it, I really am overusing that word!

  

A Most Delicious Campsite

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Location Taken: Yellowstone National Park
Time Taken: October 2012

Yeah. That’s an elk.

That’s not a feed-pit it’s eating grass out of, by the way. That’s the edge of the gravel-filled box they set up to make flat areas for tents at particularly hilly campgrounds.

Specifically the one that I’d spent the night camping on.

I hadn’t picked my campsite for its deliciousness, but apparently it was quite high.

This was early in the morning, about twenty minutes after I’d finished packing up my tent at the longest. I’d just come back from the bathrooms to see an elk walking around the campground.

There are warning signs all over the National Park about avoiding the wild animals. Especially the larger ones, like, say, elk. So I stood there and waited until it wandered a bit further away from the path. And right towards my campsite, but hey, can’t have everything.

I was able to take a circuitous route cutting through an unoccupied campsite to get to my camera and get some photos, at least.

And then the next elk showed up, and another, and another. I got some fifty or so photos of elk wandering through the campground. I was probably a bit closer than the warning signs would have preferred to the elk at a few points (though nowhere near close enough for them to notice me), but that’s more because the elk started flanking me than because I did anything like move…

  

The Ruins by the River

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Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: August 2010

There are ruins by the river.

They’re remnants of the old Savage Mill, the parts that weren’t converted into the modern upscale shopping center and artist studios it is today.

There’s a series of crumbling stone walls along the river all the way up to the top of the local waterfalls, the remains of the old aqueduct that fed the waterwheels that powered the textile mill.

And down by the river, there’s a half-collapsed brick building that used to hold said waterwheel.

Since it was designed for such a specific purpose, there was no way to convert it for other uses that wouldn’t involve practically rebuilding it. So it was abandoned, now just an interesting feature to spot when walking along the river.

Oh, and a favorite subject of some of the local artists who work in the Mill. Nothing quite like only having to walk a hundred yards from your studio to reach some interesting ruins to paint.

It’s very difficult to get to these days, as it’s at the bottom of a steep hill in the only spot flat enough to put a building right next to the river. You either have to risk life and limb climbing up and down the hill, or you have to wade across the river, which is fairly fast at this particular spot. And that doesn’t even count all the underbrush that’s grown up around it.

It’s holding up well for being abandoned for at least fifty years. Without regular maintenance, buildings crumble fast. Who knows when more of the wall will join the pile of bricks at the bottom. Perhaps tomorrow, perhaps not for another decade or more. But at some point, it will all be gone.