Category Archives: Urban

Sparkly

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Sorry for the lack of posts recently, I bought a new computer a few days back and my workflow has been shot while I’ve been trudging through the process of moving all my stuff from the old gear to the new. But the good news, of course, is that I now have a much faster computer with dramatically more screen real estate (no more 15″ screen!). I can actually check my shots at the pixel level without spending all day scrolling around.

Anyway, I saw this collection of rhinestones while wandering around the stalls at the National Western Stock Show:

Sparkly

I didn’t see a lot of these actually being sold, so I have to wonder if this is really a fashion trend in the C&W world, or merely a reflection (no pun intended) of the shop owners’ own personal tastes.

The (old) view out front

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One of the precursors to actual photography was the camera obscura , in which a pinhole could be used to form an image on one wall of a darkened room or (later) a box. In their simplest form, these go back over 1,000 years — and if you’re lucky, you can occasionally find one to play with / in. Should you ever find yourself in the neighborhood, there’s a room-sized camera obscura at the Sherman Hines Museum of Photography in Liverpool, Nova Scotia. Although, as is generally the case with walk-in camera obscura, you can’t exactly point it:

The (old) view out front

So this is what you get if you photograph the image that the camera obscura has projected for you, inverted on the wall. A nice little historical view of the folks across the street…

BTW, Sherman Hines doesn’t get much press where I live (“south of the border”), but he’s a really impressive photographer — go check out some of his portraits and landscapes !

Red alignment

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We’ve got relatives in Arizona, so occasionally when we’re visiting we get an opportunity to drop in on some local attractions. On one trip I thought I’d experiment with a long-exposure nighttime shot of one of the telescope domes at Flagstaff’s Lowell Observatory:

Red alignment

It’s odd, but once your eyes get adjusted to the lighting, you don’t particularly notice its red coloration.

City ablaze

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One of the fun things about night shots is that you can get some interesting “free” effects from the different color temperatures used in street and building lighting. This is a shot of downtown Seattle, taken from the Space Needle late at night — shortly before they chased us all off the observation deck.

City ablaze.jpg

Here, the white balance is set to make the building lights look right — resulting in orange streets. I particularly like how the monorail line is silhouetted from beneath.

Originally posted to the old blog on May 5, 2009; on Flickr over here.

Riding the rails

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The tracks (rails of the Denver metro light rail system) glide by as we head home…

Riding the rails.jpg

I’d seen images like this before — but via film. I wanted to see what it took to make an image like this with my digital gear. After some fiddling, I found that an exposure of 1/30 second or longer works just fine — so long as the train is up to full speed (about 60 miles/hour, or about 95 kilometers/hour).

If you look very closely, you can see some subtle reflections from the inside of the train (since there’s no way to get my camera outside the window for this image). I’ll have to spend a little more time in Photoshop cleaning them up. Still, I like how this turned out. The rail tops are nice and sharp, and the rail ties are blurred out, but don’t overlap.

I’ve noticed one odd thing, though — because the rails are at an angle to the image’s edges, the image always looks crooked to me. I *know* it’s rectangular, but it always looks skewed. This must be some sort of illusion, I’ll have to look it up…

Originally posted to the old blog on June 25, 2008; on Flickr over here.

Radiating shadows

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On a trip back to New Mexico, we managed to stay a night and a day in Santa Fe. After the pup was in bed, Mrs. Argos wanted a little “me time,” so I grabbed my gear and headed downtown for some night shots. I thought this play of light and shadow was interesting:

Radiating shadows.jpg

The contrast in geometry between the shadow lines and the joints between the sidewalk pavers is kind of neat too. FWIW, I did very little to this shot other than crop it a bit and desaturate it (although not completely).

Originally posted to the old blog on October 23, 2009; on Flickr over here.