I guess freezing in place worked for this bird – I’m not looking right at him, after all…

Posted on by

Location Taken: Arcadia, Michigan
Time Taken: December 2007

I love it when bird pose for me. They do it fairly often, especially when there’s a bird-feeder around.

It’s because of their tendency to freeze when they notice movement, such as me pulling out my camera. It’s a solid defense mechanism. It helps keep them from being noticed right when something is surveying the trees for birdy dinner.

This freezing doesn’t last long, though. I usually only have time for a shot or two.

And sometimes, well, I didn’t quite get the focus right.

I use manual focus, you see. I actually adjust it to about the right spot using the little analog stick that comes on my camera. It’s one of the features I looked for when I was camera shopping, since it allows much better control over the focus for the close-up shots I love doing.

It does take longer than just letting the auto-focus work, though. And if I guess the distance just enough wrong, well, this sort of shot happens. And on the small display screen of my camera, it looks just fine. This leads me to some brilliant compositions, with perfect color, and the pine needles getting the focus. Which lead to me creating this “almost” category, since they’re still good enough that I didn’t want to give up on them.

It really is still such a nice shot…

  

Perhaps it’s too faded. Or maybe it’s too strong. At least it’s not too blue anymore…

Posted on by

Location Taken: Savage, Maryland
Time Taken: March 2012

I have a whole lot of photos that need a bit of retouching for one reason or another. The vast majority is for one simple reason: I forgot to change settings on my camera.

You see, my camera has a set of color settings. I can set it to “warm” to shift the colors towards the yellows and “cool” to shift it towards the blues. I use the “cool” setting when I do any indoor photography. Most indoor lights don’t produce the full spectrum, instead focusing on the yellow tones. It’s simpler to do, and our human eyes adjust easily. My camera doesn’t adjust, so I have to do so automatically.

The problem comes after that. I occasionally forget to shift it back to the normal setting.

This means a whole series of photos turn out a bit bluer than they should. And it usually takes me a bit to notice. I’ve done it twice now, each time taking some thirty or forty photos before I realize that the reason they don’t quite have the right zest is that I goofed. I’m aware of the problem now, and am more diligent about it, but that doesn’t change the fact that I have eighty or so photos that need some help.

And there are some good ones in there, too, so I’m not going to abandon them entirely.

This photo is one of them. Just a simple tulip from the garden. I only did one thing to the photo to shift it from a piece with a gray-blue cast over it to this. I tried Photoshop’s Auto Color feature. One click and it brightened right up.

I’m not sure it’s quite right, but I’ve always had trouble telling if the color balance is right. I had to do it a lot when I was taking film photography classes, and most of mine didn’t turn out perfect. So I usually leave the color balance where it is on my digital photos, not touching them up at all. And I’m trying the automatic features because my attempts at doing it manually weren’t fully working.

My eyes adjust too much, you see. They quickly get used to the odd coloration and accept it as normal. It’s why I took so many photos in the wrong setting in the first place.

And it’s why I’m not entirely certain this looks quite right. What do you think?

  

Hmm, a Blizzard you say? Perfect time for a Drive!

Posted on by

Location Taken: Rest stop on I-75 in Eastern Michigan
Time Taken: January 2011

In case you hadn’t noticed already, I love snow. And rain, and fog, and all sorts of “bad” weather.

I even love it in cases others wouldn’t.

Like while driving. I love driving in the snow and rain. Even the heavy stuff, where visibility drops like a rock. I do drive slower then, though not as slow as those people creeping along at 10 miles per hour. That’s because, unlike them, I can still see well enough to drive at a decent speed. And I also know how to drive in potentially risky situations.

That’s one of the oddest places my artistic training has come in handy. I’m really good at spotting subtle details and quickly analyzing them. Such as the subtle detail of where the lane markings are under half an inch of water, or even half an inch of snow (well, there I more analyze the flatness and usage patterns of the road, but still). I also have really good night vision. I often say I can see in the dark, and that’s only half exaggeration. I can feel my way around in the dark, and if there’s even a little light, my eyes can adjust to that level. I don’t bother turning on lights when I need to take a bathroom break in the middle of the night, despite the fact that it’s a narrow convoluted path to it that included many places to stub a toe.

I’ve also gotten a lot of practice driving in rain, snow, and darkness. In fact, I volunteer for it, since I prefer driving when there’s not a burning day orb sucking away my energy and irradiating my skin. I know how to tell when the snow or rain is causing friction problems, and how to deal with it when it is. I certainly know things that should be no-brainers, like not driving through any water that’s a foot deep or so. I don’t even like driving through water I can’t see the bottom of. There’s an increasing chance of the road being damaged the higher the water goes, and cars can float off in a foot of water if they’ve got a low enough bed.

  

A Frothy Situation

Posted on by

Location Taken: North Sydney, Nova Scotia
Time Taken: July 2012

FROTH!

Large ferries, like the one that goes between the tip of Nova Scotia and the southwestern corner of Newfoundland in Canada, take a long time to get going. It does make a certain amount of sense. This is a seven-hour journey, one way. This ferry, the Atlantic Vision, carries nearly 1000 passengers and 500 cars or trucks. It’s got ten levels, including car garages, cabins, and a floor purely for eating and relaxing on the trip. It’s also got to carry all the fuel needed for this trip, which is a very very large amount, thousands of tons, if not tens-of-thousands. This all adds up to a very large amount of weight, which means a lot of force is needed to get it going.

The engines started up around half an hour before the ferry left. At first there was only a small patch of disturbed water, but it kept growing and growing as time went by. It was fascinating watching the water first turn green as the underwater froth hit it, then white. The wave patterns were flattened and tossed around into a fabulous chaos.

The Arctic Red jellyfish weren’t too happy about it, though. The gulls loved it, as it brought the jellies and other critters closer to their seeking beaks. By the time the ship got moving, there were at least 20 gulls in sight, flying and diving and enjoying the feast.

The jellyfish, on the other hand, just floated there, tossed around by the whims of the currents.

I just stood their and watched it all, fascinated.

  

A Book a Day Keeps the Doctor Away – guess I need to start reading faster…

Posted on by

Time Taken: July 2012

I’ve been an avid reader for a very long time.

I suppose you can include even my earliest years. My parents read to me a lot, and I loved it. I would ask them to read book after book, some of them over and over and over again. I’m not sure if they burned our copy of Poky Little Puppy or not, but I know they were sore tempted to. After they got sick and tired of reading me children’s books, they switched to their books. Mainly, comic books. Specifically, Elfquest. If you’ve read that series (and if you haven’t, it’s available to read online at that link), you’ll see that it does contain some concepts that would cause certain moral guardians to squawk, but then, my parents had no problem telling their kids that hey, sex and violence exists. It’s nothing over the top, and there’s a very solid and very good story that really does require things like babies being born and wars happening to work.

I suspect that early exposure to decent storytelling is what hooked me on reading.

It’s certainly what caused me to teach myself how to read.

My parent’s main problem with teaching me to read was not the actual teaching (which, admittedly, they were doing just by reading me stories and letting me follow along with the text and pictures), but getting me to admit I’d cracked the code. One of the stories they tell repeatedly was one time when Mom brought me and my sister to visit Dad at his office. I was looking around puzzled, and finally asked, “What does ra-di-o mean?” I’d seen it on the door of another office. They quickly put together two and two (or ra-di-o, if you prefer) and said “Wait, you can read?!”. To which I promptly started denying the fact. I was afraid if I admitted I could read on my own, they’d let me take over the nightly readings and stop spending that time with me. I was five at the time, after all, and just barely at that. They did keep reading to me for a bit longer, until my reading skills and independence grew to the point where I was quite happy to delve into the collection for myself.

My parents have a large book collection, containing hundreds of books. Mostly science fiction and fantasy, but with some non-fiction thrown in there. My current taste in books is, well, science fiction and fantasy plus a big heap of non-fiction. I sense a correlation. I do read a slightly different flavor of non-fiction (more geology, less math and music), and have a slightly different taste in authors, but that’s standard. I still like many of the same authors as my parents.

The photo above is of my own personal collection. Well, more like a third of it. There’s the bottom half of that bookshelf, plus another shelf half-full of larger books. I don’t have as many books as my parents do, but then, I’m younger and have yet to get a steady income. I do much of my reading out of the library. My parents used the library a lot when I was younger, though now Dad makes enough to just buy the books and support the authors. Mom also has an e-book reader that she uses heavily. I haven’t gotten one yet. The library’s still good enough for me. And I’ve only read about a third of my parent’s collection at best. Partly that’s because it’s got a lot of mid-1900’s hard science fiction, which isn’t entirely to my taste, but still, that’s a lot of potential books for me to read.

Currently I’m reading a new book Dad picked up, David Brin’s Existence, which is so far quite good and full of interesting ideas, and I’m only on page 37 out of 553. I’m also about an eighth of the way through re-reading John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World, a fascinating compilation of several shorter books he wrote over 20 years on various geologic topics. Definitely worth picking up if you want a solid look at geology written in a way that won’t crush your head with too much jargon. I might get back to it when I’m done with Existence, or I might go back to the series I was reading before that, Eric Flint’s 1632 series (or Ring of Fire, or 163x or whatever the proper name for the series is. “1632” is the title of the first book in it.) Dad’s got the first few in the series, but has yet to buy some of the later ones, so I’ve been reading them out of the library. And I’ve still got a few to go.