Rainbows all across the Sky

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Location Taken: Black Hills, South Dakota
Time Taken: June 2010

Double rainbow!

Actually, it was a triple rainbow for a little, though the third was too faint to photograph properly, and we were driving at that time so I couldn’t exactly get a long-exposure photo that would have shown it properly.

The double rainbow, though, started while we were still at a gas station for fueling of the car and the family (they had a Subway, and it was a tasty sandwich). There was a large storm brewing to the south and the sun was coming in just right for a magnificent rainbow. It lasted a long time, too, sticking with us for about half an hour as we drove on, fading only when the sun set. The light was coming in low and red below the clouds that filled the sky above us.

The storm hit not too long after sunset, pouring down hard and heavy. We’d been planning on camping at the Badlands National Park that night, but that plan was quickly scrapped (and not at all because it was already after dark, we can set up tents in the dark – and did, this trip). We pulled off at the town of Wall, South Dakota. We tried the first hotel we came to, but enough other travelers had pulled off due to the rain that they were full up. No Vacancy signs let us deep into town to a tiny motel, and there we spent the night. At that point there was an inch of standing water on the ground, so we were quite happy we didn’t have to spend the night in a tent – or in the car.

It was a glorious storm, though. Just the sort I really like watching. Especially with the rainbows.

  

Under a Blood Red Moon

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Time Drawn: October 2004

I’m really pulling out the old artwork here. This was made mere months after I started using Photoshop to create art at all. This was drawn quickly with a mouse, too. It would be six or so years before I got a tablet, and another year or two before I became comfortable with Photoshop. I’m still using the same version of Photoshop as I had then, though, Photoshop 7 (and that was from a friend with a legal license to put it on multiple computers). I haven’t had enough money to upgrade, what with new versions costing near $1000 and my old one still doing most of what I want. Still, as edition after edition of Photoshop Creative Suite comes out (PS 7 was before they even started the Creative Suite stuff, by the way), the uber-nifty features are really adding up. I’m too honest to steal it, so I’ll have to wait until I start making some actual money in order to get it. I have heard it’s one of the most pirated pieces of software out there, what with its extremely high price and the rather high demand for it amongst the young-and-broke. When I’m having to work on other machines, I work with GIMP, the best open source art program, even though it is still more irritating to use than the decade-old PS 7.

But that is not why I brought out this piece. I mean, it’s my “Random” day, not an “Artwork” day. This means, of course, I was inspired to talk about something else.

Let’s talk astronomy.

A few nights ago, I went out late at night with the other people here to see something unusual. The International Space Station was passing overhead. We went out a few minutes early, and then were out standing in the field, peering at the southeast treeline, looking for a bright dot that moved. I was the first to spot it as it rose over the trees. It wasn’t too bright at that point, easily outshone by the stars around it. It was moving quickly though, and was halfway up the southeastern sky by the time the last of our group finally spotted it. It was growing brighter and more distinct as it came closer to being above our heads. It was a bright white + shape at the highest point, too far away for any more detail to show, but close enough that it was no longer a dot.

The rest of the group headed in after it passed above us, tired and ready for bed. I stayed to watch it as it flew towards the horizon, fading once again into an indistinct dot in the night sky. It was oddly bittersweet when it finally dropped out of sight behind the trees to the northwest.

I’ve got a fondness for nighttime astronomical events. Lunar eclipses are my favorite. I’ve seen four or five of them over the years. The one that inspired the art above was the second one, and was even a full one. Seeing the dark red moon shining brightly over the trees of the Lutheran collage I attended was inspiring, and I drew a connection between certain prophecies in the Bible and the blood-red moon above. Even if I did the standard misspelling of adding the “s” to Revelation. I may have gone to a Lutheran collage but I’ve never been too firm of a Christian, and what I learned there in the religion classes I took (many for the fun of it) lead me more towards true agnosticism than Christianity. Ah well, such is life.

Still, there is something about the blood red moon of a lunar eclipse that really draws me in. I can see why it scared people in the past, for the same sorts of reasons solar eclipses did. Something very odd happens to a major source of light, either the sun or the full moon. (Lunar eclipses only occur during full moons. If you can’t figure out why, you really need to take an astronomy class). Solar eclipses are much more notable since they’re so rare and more people are awake and active during the event. But lunar eclipses have that odd red-orange color that reminds so many of blood (it’s not really a blood color, it’s too orange for that) that really gets the prophets going. They’re a lot more common, too, since the Earth has a much larger shadow for the moon to hide in than the moon does for the Earth to hide in.

For many years my purse was a homemade bag with the image of a lunar eclipse on the front. The concept keeps resonating with who I am. It’s that whole looking into the fearful unknown thing, probably. I’m quite fond of studying disasters and things that could wipe me out with less care than we give to killing an ant. It’s mainly because I’d rather know and be able to identify danger and prepare for it properly instead of hide my head in the sand and hope it goes away. I’m all about preparation, maybe because I have the reflexes of a dead slug. Seriously. Did you ever do the reflex test where someone held a ruler between your fingers at the 0 mark and randomly dropped it, so you’d see how fast you were able to grab it? I would occasionally let all 12 inches of the ruler fall through my fingers before my reflexes fully kicked in. Yeah. At least I can program my reflexes in advance, telling them “when this moves, just close the fingers, don’t wait for input from the brain”. That gets them closer to more standard human levels. Still, this requires me to have a clue what’s coming. Which means I need to know as much as I can about a situation to be able to predict what will happen.

I’m not a prophet, after all, even if I’m as fond of lunar eclipse imagery as they are.

  

Out on a Jaunt

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Time Drawn: Fall 2006

It’s been about six years since I drew this, and I still like the attitude in this piece. There’s just been a classic western shoot-out, complete with tables used for cover and even someone still draped over a table, and this oddly-dressed fellow has poured himself a drink and is posing.

You can probably see a bunch of my influences in this piece. The odd clothes, especially the large number of completely unneccessary belts, is straight from Final Fantasy games (though, I should point out, nowhere near a direct copy). The western setting is from the anime shows that were big when I was most into anime; Cowboy Bebop and Trigun, mainly. The framing technique is from comics (again, not a direct copy). The overuse of wood grain and textures, though, is all me. I love doing fine details, perhaps overly so.

These sorts of things are actually common influences for artists of my generation, and even more for those a bit younger than me. I got into anime before it was mainstream (don’t worry, not a hipster), when it wasn’t on any television stations and you could only find the VHS tapes at dealers rooms at conventions and comic shops that stocked videos. It was interesting to see them hit the stores in larger and larger numbers, then transitioning to DVD, and now, well, the DVD store I used to visit closed a while back and I haven’t bothered finding a video store since then. Hulu and Crunchyroll are serving me just fine, now.

Now, pretty much everyone knows what anime is, though far too many Americans probably still think it’s a cartoon and thus for kids. The Adult Swim content on Cartoon Network helped that, at least, though it looks like they got rid of the anime in their late night stuff, so they may have ended that at some point. I rarely watched it anyway. At least I found it better than most of the “edgy adult” cartoons Americans keep producing that rely far too much on crude jokes and stupid protagonists. I really can’t stand watching people get into trouble because of their stupidity, and find it worse when it’s played for laughs. I solidly prefer intelligence in my heros. And decent stories, for that matter.

Anime tends to win on both counts, which is why I tend to prefer it. It might be a bit formulaic at times, but then, what isn’t? You just have to look at TVTropes to see that nothing escapes formula, and well, if it did, it’d be so out there no one would like it. Formula has its place. It lets people know that this show will likely develop in certain ways, so they have a clue whether they’d like it in the future or not. And breaking the formula in the right spots tells a stronger story than avoiding the formula entirely. You have a known framework to work around that helps the odd things stand out.

Oddly enough, I tend to prefer the “Shonen” formulas. Shonen translates from Japanese into “Young boy”. There’s also a “Shoujo” set of formulas, for young girls. I tend to avoid those. I’d much rather take tales of adventure, action, and friendship over tales of romance and finding yourself. There are also more adult genres, though they aren’t as popular and tend to be much deeper. They also tend to be based in real world and adult themes, such as jobs and marriage issues, which I’m just not as interested in. So despite being a young woman, and solidly into my adult years, I think I’ll keep watching the shows featuring oddly-powered people exploring the world and fighting enemies.

  

Falling By a Tree, Hidden in Shadows

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Location Taken: Ithaca, New York
Time Taken: March 2010

My mom has a rather strong fondness for waterfalls, so we visit a large number of them. This particular one is Ithaca Falls, in Ithaca, New York. The water passes right by Cornell University before dropping a hundred feet or so, down the thin-strata slate of the area, and then winding its way over to Lake Cayuga, one of the larger of the Finger Lakes. The Finger lakes are glacial lakes, carved in the land when a mile-thick sheet of ice covered this area. They are very deep lakes, too, and the above-water sections of their valleys are steep-sloped. This means waterfalls abound in this area, cascading over the rocks in many beautiful variations of the dance of water, rock, and air.

Can you tell I’m fond of waterfalls too?

They’re interesting subjects to photograph. For one thing, there’s a rather good chance the light won’t be right, and it gets worse the deeper the valley it’s falling into is. Waterfalls erode rock, so they form notches in the valley – which mean that for three of the four directions, there will be some pretty serious shadows down in the valley. And the fourth has to be both angled right to catch the sunlight, and then it has to be the right time of day and for that matter day. Add in the fact that the most dynamic lighting involves light coming in from the side, rather than from the front or the top, and yeah, the lighting will be less than ideal. There are some waterfalls that get around this, thanks to sheer size or a rare quirk in the lay of the land, but most are secluded in their notches, and frequently surrounded by trees to boot.

So, since the lighting is less than ideal, how do you get a good photo of a waterfall? By using the other tricks of the photographer’s trade. Light is only one of the factors, after all, as important as it is. For this photo, I chose to focus on something other than the waterfall itself: a small tree, still leafless in late winter. It had a nice selection of rocks around it, and I could easily frame it in front of the waterfall. The light on the tree was poor – it was in shadow just as the waterfall was, but that actually helped some. The tree has a darker tone – which contrasts quite nicely against the white of the falling water. It’s nearly grayscale, in a cast of brown-grays rather than true grays. There’s a range of values, from the white of the water to the near-black of the shadows of the rocks. I may not have been able to get the brilliance shadows can bring to a photo, but I used what was available to its fullest.

  

A River Runs By It – it being a bridge

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Location Taken: Pennsylvania, USA
Time Taken: June 2010

Where US Route 30 crosses the Susquehanna River not far from the Pennsylvania-Maryland border (or the Mason-Dixon Line, if you prefer), there are a whole slew of bridges crossing at the same spot. I’m particularly fond of the railway bridge to the east, with its many fine arches and the row of small islands, each with its own tree, likely a remnant of an older bridge that was removed at some point.

I’d prefer it if it was easier to get a photo of. The only place to get this angle is while you’re on 83, and well, stopping on a busy interstate bridge just for a photo is, shall we say, frowned upon. At least there’s a shoulder, but it does mean that the railing’s even more likely to get in the way of the photo. And motion blur is rarely your friend when trying to take a picture of a landscape.

The Susquehanna River comes from a place hundreds of miles to the north, well north of the New York-Pennsylvania border. The main branch starts in Lake Ostego, a small glacial lake about halfway between Syracuse and Albany. I run across it where Interstate 81 crosses it, at the town of Great Bend, PA, right at the border. It’s named after the way the river bends across the land near there. The river is much smaller there than it is in this photo, still just starting its long trip to the sea, one that winds its way through the Appalachians, visiting Wilkes-Barre and Harrisburg, comes down into the Chesapeake Bay and finally exits into the Atlantic a bit south of the Maryland-Virginia border. Well, it’s more like it becomes the Chesapeake. The Chesapeake Bay, like many of the bays along the East Coast, is a flooded river valley. Back in the last ice age, the seas were much lower. All the water that went into the glaciers that covered so much of the land (including the areas where the Susquehanna now starts) had to come from somewhere. And since glaciers aren’t static things, they have a constant cycle of melting and renewal, the water flows down and forms river valleys, frequently deep ones.

As soon as the glaciers started to retreat, though, these river valleys were in for a change. Some of them had their rivers all but dry up, leaving a tiny stream winding its way through a massive valley. Others are doing just fine, still making their way along the old path to the sea. Which is where another change occured. Their old deltas are now far underwater, the new ones far upstream. All those fantastic bays that lead to so many fine fishing towns and settlements along the East Coast are due to 10,000 year old climate change raising the sea levels, bringing the water deep inland.