Still Looking Up

It seems I've been taking a lot more photos of clouds. Beach week had a few more storms, and a bit more rain than is typical. It made for dramatic skies though!

Storm at Sunset, North Myrtle Beach SC.

Storm at Sunset 2, North Myrtle Beach SC.

Reflected Sunset, North Myrtle Beach SC.

Sunset over the Marsh, North Myrtle Beach SC.

Golden Clouds, North Myrtle Beach SC.

Clouds with a Hint of Color, North Myrtle Beach SC.

Sun Hiding Behind the Clouds, North Myrtle Beach SC.

Morning Rays, North Myrtle Beach SC.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now

Still busy, always busy. I need to set better priorities and MAKE time. Here are a few from another recent road trip, this one south to Florida. A photographer I follow on Twitter posts photos of the clouds/light they find interesting. I do look at the clouds a lot but rarely take photos. Those tweets have prompted me to use my camera a bit more when I'm looking up. So here are a few as we were passing through Georgia.


Clouds #1, Earth Day Nature Trail, Brunswick, GA.

Clouds #2, Earth Day Nature Trail, Brunswick, GA.

Clouds #3, Earth Day Nature Trail, Brunswick, GA.

Started working my way through the photos from Greece. It is going to be tough cutting them down. In the end, they'll show up as a link to a slide show over on the right. I've already chosen over 100 photos and still have quite a number to go through. In the meantime, here are a couple photos from Metéora (a UNESCO World Heritage Site) that are a bit different from the others that have made the cut so far.

Shadows and Clouds - Meteora, Greece

St Stephen Monastery - Meteora, Greece

Another Desert Adventure

I'm not sure the photos will do yesterday afternoon and evening justice....but I'll try. Next time, I hope I shoot better under pressure :) In the end we were stuck for about 3 hrs or so until the wind and sand calmed down enough so that we could make our way out to the road.


An Afternoon of Clear Blue Skies in Kuwait




We Could See for Miles




We Had a Great Little "Camping" Spot




A Nice Breeze for a Glide





Trouble Rolls In





Roar is a More Apt Description





Same Rocks from the First Photo...Different Angle





Night Came Early

A Year Ago...

...we'd just returned from our cruise. Here are a few photos I took on the flight the Seattle to Salt Lake City leg of the flights home. The window view flying into and out of Seattle is just amazing.


Great Salt Lake - Utah




Crop Circles From the Air




River





Mount St. Helens - Washington State



Contrails and Mount Hood - Washington State

Pine Tree

Pine Tree - Clingman's Dome, Great Smoky Mountains National Park

Some of the Oldest Photos of Mine

that I can find among my scans on this computer...I'm sure I have a pile of negatives somewhere from when Ryan was born. I first really got into photography and shooting slide film in Australia the early 90's...maybe 1992 or 1993 when I bought an EOS-10s. It is interesting to go back and see how far I've come and how good I still think some of my early photos are. I also wonder what I'd do now photographically in the same situation but with the experience and equipment I have now...

The oldest first...too bad I didn't have the 70-200 2.8L IS for this one...I wouldn't count this as one that I still consider real good...it is just one of the very oldest I have.

Pink Cockatoos at Sunset - Northern Territory, Australia



This was just weeks before we left, on a road trip through the Northern Territory with another family that was also from Cincinnati and also leaving...this remains one of my favorite photos of all time and among the first I posted...I took 6-8 rolls of 36exp slide film on the about 10 day trip. If I took the trip today, I'd probably shoot a couple thousand photos.

Devil's Marbles - Northern Territory, Australia




Among the many highlights of that trip was our time in Kakadu National Park

Yellow Waters - Kakadu National Park, Northern Territory, Australia

Alaska Mist

One of the many highlights of our cruise was Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve. Stunning. A misty morning that cleared to beautiful blue skies with puffy white clouds by the time we got to the glacier. It was here that I began to worry that I would run out of memory cards for my camera. Easy to see why Glacier Bay is on the World Heritage List...

Here are a few photos of the morning mist on our way in to see the glaciers.

Mist at DawnGlacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Alaska




Clouds and MistGlacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Alaska




Mist at Waters EdgeGlacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Alaska

Above the Smog

I figure I'll work my way backwards through the photos from the holidays...

I took this photo a few minutes after an aborted landing Saturday in Sarajevo. We ended up landing in Zagreb and getting home a mere 9 hours later after a bus ride and all the fun that entails. The flight was diverted due to weather (fog) which in fact is not fog at all but pure pollution...it is so pure they should bottle and sell it. The air quality is always really bad this time of year due to burning low quality coal, wood and whatever else will provide heat, With temperatures in the teens (Fahrenheit), the past few weeks have been greatly aggravated by the Russian's shutting off the natural gas pipelines to Europe (and in particular Bosnia, which has no domestic production nor any storage facilities or reserves). With no gas for heat, that many more homes fired up the old coal stove...and what remains of the air is just lovely to breathe. The sun has truly been just a bright spot in the night time the past few days.

Above the Smog - SarajevoJanuary 2009

Sunrise

From a couple weeks ago. The color only lasted a minute or two, time enough to get my camera, turn off the alarm, open the door and take one shot.

Sarajevo SunriseNovember 2008

Looking...

Out the Window - Somewhere Over the U.S.September 2007

Messing Around With Stitching

These are notes for myself. I haven't messed with this in about 2 years and what little I learned at the time, I've obviously forgotten. Today I started relearning, because, at some point this summer I'd like to take make a large photo of Sarajevo so that I can have a large, but detailed panoramic print made.

Stitching is a method of taking multiple photographs that overlap and putting them together to get a much larger photo. For landscapes and cityscapes especially, it can make for a much larger more detailed photo in a large print. You can effectively end up with a photo that would require the equivalent of a 100 megapixel camera or more (not to mention the lens!) Stitching is commonly used for long panoramic photos.

Putting a bunch of photographs together at first glance looks pretty easy. Many digital cameras include some sort of stitching software in all that junk on the CD you probably stuffed in a drawer somewhere. I loaded mine on my computer, "Canon PhotoStitch". However, if you look close a the photos below, you can begin to see problems where the seams of the neighboring photos are.


Bosnian Countryside - Kakrinje, Bosnia




The first photo, a string of 14 photos shot left to right (16,000+ pixels wide once stitched) had two main problems, the first of which doesn't show up here. Because I was shooting "handheld" I didn't stay exactly level, I ended up having to cut parts of the bottom of the photos on the left off that I really would have liked to keep, and parts of the top off of the photos on the right. Use a tripod next time, and if necessary, do two rows. The other problem shows up especially in the roof of the house on the right. The exposure changes as I move across the scene. So next time, I'll take a shot of the brightest part of the scene and a shot of the darkest part of the scene and then in manual setting, use a constant aperture (which I already remembered to do) and a constant shutter speed (which I this time I let vary with each exposure) that will "work" with both the brightest and the darkest portions

The second photo (a vertical stitch of 3 photos) has some problems too. The varying exposure again, the distortion that comes from using a very wide angle lens, and I didn't leave enough overlap between the bottom photo and the middle photo, so I had to "help" the software a little more than should have been necessary. Next time, don't use such a wide angle, just take more photos instead, and make sure to overlap enough details for the stitching software to work with.


Big Sky - Kakrinje, Bosnia



Last, getting a good stitch is probably the easy part. Afterwards, the finishing work (which I didn't do at all on these photos) such getting the colors, sharpness, relative brightness etc all right could be tremendously time consuming and tedious across a huge 16000+ pixel photograph. And very last, at least the way I have the blog set up now, 1024 pixels is as wide as things can go, so you really don't see much once I reduce a photo to 1/16 the original size.

While on the Topic of Sunsets

and though they are cliché...each is unique, sort of like a fingerprint.

The Day Ends, 18 November 2007- Destin, Florida

Flying with a View

One of Many Window View's From the Past Week

Grand Vistas

I took this a little over a year ago after my week of photography and learning about Photoshop at the Santa Fe Workshops. I stopped at the White Rock Overlook on my way from Santa Fe to Albuquerque via Bandelier National Monument...at least that was the plan. Some of those clouds turned into nasty thunderstorms and on the Albuquerque side of Bandelier a few things happened....the light got really good after the storm (photographically)...but the road got washed out on the outskirts of a town I was heading into for gas...and I was running on fumes. The nearest gas station was 30 or 40 miles away, back toward Santa Fe. My focus switched to a desperate search for gas, I got very few photos, and I ended up buying an emergency 2 gallons or so from a corner store in the middle of nowhere for what I figured later was $10/gallon. The guy felt guilty selling it to me and tried very hard to talk me out of it, but it's not like I was going to walk...

Although I took this photo with my favorite lens, a Canon 70-200mm f2.8L IS, it sort of illustrates a problem more common to wide angle lenses and grand vistas....how do you "get it all in there" and keep the photo interesting at the same time? I like the clouds and the different colors across the landscape. The distance is implied with the haze and the rock formations. The only thing I feel this particular photo could use is some interesting subject matter in the foreground (harder to do with a telephoto). The photos I took there with a wide angle, with trees or rocks in the foreground, I don't really like. Anyway, some of you may find it boring (at least click on it and look at the larger version before reaching a verdict), but I kind of like it, especially because I know what happened next :)

Open Space - White Rock, New Mexico

Another...

Evening Storm in New Mexico (Image 1182 taken 5 August 2006)