Bright Nights at Four Mile

So filed under the category of “How did I only now hear about this” is an excellent local (Denver, Colorado) event — “Bright Nights at Four Mile.” It’s a collaboration between Denver’s Four Mile Historic Park and Tianyu Arts & Culture, Inc., the largest producer of Chinese lantern festivals in North America. The result is a wide array of larger-than-life lit sculptures spread out over 12 acres. Great for photographers, fun for visitors of all ages, I just can’t praise it enough!

Cotton Candy Museum

This is the Botanic Museum at the Lund University Botanic Gardens in Lund, Sweden:

Cotton Candy Museum

Or at least, the above is a view of the museum through a 665 nm infrared filter (with a red / blue color channel swap and other tweaking).

Using less processing on the same photograph results in a view that’s (to my eye at least) a bit more sinister in appearance:

The Botanic Museum at the Lund University Botanic Gardens; Lund, Sweden. Seen through a 665 nm IR filter.

In regular visible light, it looks more like this:

One of the nice things about photographing in infrared is that it works well in bright mid-day sunlight (which tends to be less flattering for other uses). The flip side of this coin is that when you’re visiting places like Scandinavia, you may not get bright mid-day sunlight all that often.

Purple Mountains Majesty

We recently went camping in the White River National Forest, here in Colorado. The camping areas are adjacent to the Flat Tops Wilderness, so we enjoy being able to dip into the wilderness on some quick hikes. Here’s a 2-frame panoramic view across Anderson Lake (near Trapper’s Lake), looking south from the Wall Lake Trail in 590nm infrared, with a few color tweaks — click to enlarge it:

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Miss Craigie, later Mrs. Reid

Chalk art by Olivia McLeod (@blackbirdart) based on a painting by Allan Ramsay. Seen at the 2024 Denver Chalk Art Festival.

Miss Craigie, later Mrs. Reid

This won the “Best Reproduction of a Master’s Work” award at the festival. And it’s even a reproduction of a “local” painting — at least, it’s on display at the Denver Art Museum, just a few blocks from the site of the chalk art festival.

The photo above has been rectified, to show what it would have looked like from above. The non-rectified version looks like this: Continue reading