Category Archives: Nature

A visit to Rifle Falls

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As I may have mentioned previously, we bought a camping trailer earlier this year.  So since camping is now a lot more comfortable for us than it used to be, we’ve been taking advantage of it to spend time in a lot of places we’ve not been to before.  So it was that we spent a weekend in Rifle Gap State Park, on the west side of Colorado.

Three Amigos

We honestly didn’t go into this trip knowing a lot about the park — we primarily thought it’d be a nice, quiet place to spend an otherwise hot August weekend.  The camp site itself was clean and well-maintained, if lacking in trees to slow the wind.  But not that far away from the Rifle Gap campsites is their sister park, Rifle Falls State Park — a real hidden gem of the Colorado State Park system. Continue reading →

Looking down on Long Beach

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Long Beach, Long Island, New York — as seen from 35,000 feet above:

Looking down on Long Beach

If you were curious, those dark lines converging toward the horizon are the shadows of clouds and haze in the atmosphere, and are officially called anticrepuscular rays.  A little nugget for everybody’s vocabulary…

EXIF:
Olympus E-M1, M.Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8 lens at 22mm
ISO 200, f/5.0, 1/800 sec.

Corona, revisited

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I’ll admit, I’m new to solar eclipse photography, much less to post-processing of solar eclipse images — so I’ll freely admit to being on a learning curve here.  My previous post contained an image put together from 7 photographs, using some commercial HDR software.  Subsequently, I found two helpful videos on how to do a similar thing using Photoshop (and it’s a pretty quick process, too) — here are my results:

Corona, revisited

This took a bit longer to produce, but I like the results better.  Your thoughts?

Back from eclipsing

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So we recently returned from a weekend trip to witness the 2017 total solar eclipse.  Long story there, when I get the chance to write it up — but the bottom line is that we successfully made it to a spot of land with clear skies, and even our teenager was impressed.  I’ve been tinkering around with various approaches for processing my photos (most HDR software has trouble with totality photos), here’s the first corona HDR image I’m mostly satisfied with:

Corona, 2017

FWIW, this was made from 7 stacked images using Aurora HDR 2017 software.

Waiting for the light to go out

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So, with about half of North America, I plan on driving to the path of totality for the upcoming Total Solar Eclipse on August 21.  I was originally going to write up some tutorial information on this, but since so much of it is already available, I thought it best to primarily link to the sites I think are most helpful. Continue reading →

Looking down the canyon

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A fisheye view of Echo Canyon in Zion National Park, seen from under “Weeping Rock:”

Looking down the canyon

This scene, BTW, is just a taste of the attractions in Zion. The place can get a bit crowded during the summer, but a shuttle bus service runs up and down the canyon, and many impressive sights are just a short hike away from a shuttle stop.

EXIF:
Olympus E-M1
Olympus M.Zuiko 8mm Fisheye lens
f/22, 1/100 sec, ISO 200