Category Archives: Up in the air

Fireworks in Steamboat Springs, Colorado

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This past weekend, our family was able to spend a few days (including July 4th) in Steamboat Springs — always a treat and source of plenty of photographic opportunities to boot.  This is the first time, though, that I had the opportunity to photograph the town’s fireworks.  So since there’s not a whole lot of information about the show online, I thought I should do a quick write-up to help future visiting photographers.

July bouquet

At least when we visited, the fireworks were shot off from three locations on the sides of Howelsen Hill — centered roughly on the ski jump, south and west of downtown. This means that many spots downtown will give you a partial view of the fireworks, but they seem to be fired to a low altitude — so unless you’ve got rooftop access, you’re likely to have an obstructed view. Continue reading →

Scooting on around

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So I went on a little trip to Texas last week for business, and managed to grab a window seat on the way down.  This gave me a fantastic view when our plane’s flight crew had to play dodge-the-thunderhead a few times on the way.

Scooting on around

This is just one of the beasts we had to work our way around (the orange tint is from the last bits of sunset working their way through the clouds).

Waiting for a break in the weather

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Life’s been a bit busy for us lately, but we managed to run off into the mountains for a little R&R over the July 4th extended weekend.  One of our stops was the neat little ghost town of Ashcroft, near Aspen.  On our way through the sights, my daughter alerted me to this little hummingbird perched on an old bit of wood.

Waiting for a break in the weather

Fortunately for me, this little guy was very patient on his perch — alert and watchful, but never startling or making any apparent move to fly off.

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Point of focus

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Anti-solar rays (a.k.a. anti-crepuscular rays) seen from a jet window off the coast of Moloka’i, Hawaii:

Point of focus

Most of the time when I’m flying somewhere, I’m stuck in whatever seat I happened to be assigned.  But every once in a while, I get lucky.

This was one of the very lucky times.

We took a family trip to Hawaii this past Thanksgiving (for non U.S. folks, it’s a harvest-related holiday in late November).  One of the inter-island flights we were on happened to be very lightly filled — maybe one seat in 5 held a passenger.  This meant, of course, that once we reached cruising altitude, I was free to move around and look for a good photo opportunity.

Since we took off just before sunset, and it had been a hazy / rainy afternoon, conditions were perfect for crepuscular rays.  As it turned out, getting airborne made conditions even better for anti-crepuscular rays — in both cases, parallel rays of sunlight appear to converge thanks to the viewer’s perspective.  In this case, the anti-solar point is just off the island of Moloka’i.

Fireworks with an Olympus E-M5

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Over the years, I’ve settled into having two semi-related sets of photography gear — a “large set,” and a “small set.” My small set of gear is all micro-4/3 stuff, and I recently upgraded that body to an Olympus OM-D E-M5 (yes, bit of a mouthful there). Or to be more accurate, I should say that I ordered an E-M5 back in March and it finally arrived a few weeks back.

So buoyed by reports of good performance in low-light situations, I took my shiny new (surprisingly small) little camera with tripod and cable release to a fireworks display that our town put on recently.

Celebration

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Gridded reflections

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The Denver Museum of Nature and Science is a fun place to skulk around in, should you ever be in town. Aside from all the great natural history material on display, the building itself has been added on to more times than I can count — leading to some interesting interior architecture.

Gridded reflections

I made this image in one of the building’s atriums (atria?), that once was a courtyard but since has been closed in and covered with a glass roof. Polished metallic wall tiles lead to interesting reflections and intersecting geometries.