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
Category Archives: Up in the air
Banff Twins
Canada Day fireworks in Banff, Alberta:
This shot was taken from the Banff Avenue Bridge, with a few seconds’ display reflected in the Bow River.
EXIF:
Olympus E-M1II, 12-40mm M.Zuiko Pro lens @ 24mm
f/8, ISO 200, 3 1-second frames stacked via Live Composite
Neighborhood Fireworks
About 3 minutes’ worth of sheet lightning in our Colorado front range neighborhood, captured with my Olympus E-M1II’s Live Composite mode:
EXIF:
E-M1II, M.Zuiko 7-14mm lens
14mm, f/2.8, ISO 200, roughly 180 frames of 1 sec. duration each
To the craters of the moon…
A handheld shot of the crescent moon, taken while exercising some new(ish) gear…
EXIF:
Olympus E-M1II, M.Zuiko 300mm lens / MC-14 teleconverter
f/5.6, 420mm, 1/250 sec, ISO 1250
Navajo Mountain
An interesting view, taken from high above Glen Canyon while on a flight home from L.A.:
Star trails and Perseids
The Perseid meteor shower had its peak a few days ago (late August 12 / early August 13 in North America), and since I both live in an urban area (bright night skies) and had cloudy weather that night, missed out on what must have been a good show.
But as luck would have it, we own a small bit of land in southern Colorado’s San Juan Mountains — a dark sky sort of place — and I’d already planned on traveling down for the weekend to do some maintenance work. So, I thought I should try to capture some lagging Perseids the night of the 13th / 14th — here’s my first shot from the series:
Bouquet of colors
We recently took a family trip to Montreal and Boston — so along with other things, it gave me a chance to put Olympus’ (relatively recent) “Live Composite” mode to work on Boston’s Independence Day fireworks.
For those of you unfamiliar with this, “Live Composite” is a feature of their OM-D cameras that allows you to do something like a long exposure — but without the usual risk that brings of overexposing parts of the image. You set up your exposure settings, start “Live Comp,” then it only updates a part of the image if it has become brighter than before — so you wind up collecting sort of a “high water mark” for each pixel / color.
It’s easier to use than I’ve described it, as for the results, you can see for yourself:
This was my first real experience with Live Composite — I’ll definitely be writing more about it in the coming weeks…
Scenes from a Colorado overflight
We recently did a bit of family travel — on our way from Denver to Phoenix, we were fortunate enough to have relatively clear skies and a late afternoon flight. Perfect for some aerial twilight photography of various spots in Colorado and the four corners region of the U.S.
First up for you, Colorado Springs (top of frame) seen over the snow covered Rampart Reservoir, not far west of town.
Colorado Springs is one of those places I normally see while driving through (in this case, on I-25) — from that perspective, the mountains form a wall to the west of the city. But from above, the fact that the mountains are essentially a (tall) rumpled plateau is much more evident.
The Super Blood Moon
I don’t know why it took me so long to post it, but here’s my favorite among the shots I took of last Sunday’s supermoon lunar eclipse (near the deepest part of the eclipse):
We didn’t have time to run off anywhere for a unique local point of interest in the frame, I shot this straight off the deck over our garage. Still, I like it — even with (maybe because of) the traces of clouds below the moon. The clouds swept through just after the eclipse started, and I was afraid they’d ruin the whole show, but they moved out just in time.
Playing with Hyperlapse
About a week ago, Instagram announced the release of their new free Hyperlapse app for iOS. So since we were headed to Ohio to visit relatives over the Labor Day weekend, the timing was perfect for me to use some flights to experiment with this new software.
Mind you, Hyperlapse does wonderful things, but it has its limits. It has essentially no settings you can change — you tap on a button to start recording, tap again to stop, then decide how much you want the video sped up before it is saved. The particularly impressive part of this story is that the app makes use of your iOS device’s built-in solid state gyro to help smooth out the device’s motion while you recorded the video.
Here’s a hyperlapse video (10x speedup) of our departure from Denver International Airport:
For the most part, it looks pretty good to me — but you can see some artifacts in the clouds from point to point. The default speedup is 6x, so on the flight home from Cleveland, I used that setting for three hyperlapse videos I made during ascent. Here’s a montage of them:
Maybe this was just a fluke, but the app seemed to do a much better job with things like clouds in the second video. A function of the speedup setting, or just dumb luck? Time (and some more experiments) will tell…