Tulips in bloom in Denver’s Civic Center Park:
Nothing of profound significance here, I just liked the pattern these were planted in.
Striped
Category Archives: Nature
Just waiting for lunch to arrive
We spotted this little guy (gal?) near the visitor center for the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, Florida.
Impressively camouflaged for such a little thing…
Tumbling tranquility
A calming scene, spotted in Portland’s Japanese Garden:
EXIF:
Olympus E-M1II, M.Zuiko 12-40mm f/2.8 lens @ 26mm
ISO 200, f/22, 0.4 sec handheld
Solar Bling
Another shot from my total solar eclipse trip back in August — this one a shorter exposure showing Baily’s Beads and prominences at the end of totality:
This was photographed in the wonderful town of Lusk, Wyoming — using an Olympus E-M1II camera and M.Zuiko 300mm Pro series lens.
A visit to Rifle Falls
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.
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
Long Beach, Long Island, New York — as seen from 35,000 feet above:
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
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:
This took a bit longer to produce, but I like the results better. Your thoughts?
Back from eclipsing
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:
FWIW, this was made from 7 stacked images using Aurora HDR 2017 software.
Out Across the Lake
Looking west across Lake Louise; Banff National Park, Alberta, Canada:
Waiting for the light to go out
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