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 !

Blowin’ in the wind

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On our recent trip to Hawaii, I was happy to see that wind power seems to be catching on there. At one point we were driving along a highway that essentially parallels the coast, and saw a wind farm in the distance. Since we had a bit of time to kill, we headed off down a local road to get closer.

Blowin' in the wind

I took this shot from the side of the road (a single-lane access road for the local short-strip “airport”), just outside the fence. Pity the sky wasn’t clearer, but I still like the contrast between the windmills and meadow. If I find the time, I might just have to tinker with this shot in Photoshop to get rid of the clouds…

Poised

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A border collie gets lined up to catch a frisbee in the “Superdogs” presentation at the National Western Stock Show in Denver, Colorado:

Poised

I like this shot, but it absorbed far more time for post-processing than I anticipated. Let me count the ways:

1) The event center where “Superdogs” took place was lit far more dimly than I expected, so I had to shoot at 1600 ISO (noise galore in the original image).

2) Given the pace at which the events took place, I spent much of my time shooting in “continuous” mode so I could pick a starting image that both had a survivable amount of motion blur, as well as had workable composition (i.e., you could see both the dog and the frisbee). Note that due to the lighting, I was able to take few images at faster than 1/80 second.

3) There was still “too much dirt” for my taste in the best starting image, so I used a little Photoshop (Elements) trickery to reduce the vertical space between dog and disk.

So a couple of hours of work later, here you have it. I’m still wondering if I shouldn’t have removed even more space in the middle, but I like this result (for now…).

Waikiki evening

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On our recent Hawaii trip, we spent the better part of an evening wandering around the beach at Waikiki. Mostly I was hoping to get a good sunset shot (the previous night, the sunset was gorgeous — but I was on a bus headed to our hotel from the airport and couldn’t get a shot of it), but I figured I should make good use of the opportunity while I was waiting. In this one, you can just make out the silhouette of one person walking deeper into the water:

Waikiki evening

BTW, I never did get my sunset shot — night after night, the clouds wound up blowing in just in time to block the view.

Dancing toe to toe

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One of the constants when you’ve got a kid in grade school is that you’ll be seeing a lot of small animals in order to keep your own small fry entertained. So it was that when the National Western Stock Show came to town this year, we just had to check out something called “Dances with Dogs.”

The event’s put on by a local group of people who dance with their dogs to keep them (both humans and canines) entertained and exercised. Here’s a miniature poodle dancing with her human:

Dancing toe to toe

I just love the engrossed look on the little dog’s face…

This blue merle Australian Shepherd was also part of the dancing:

Blue merle

Danglers

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I saw these orchids along the trail to Akaka Falls in Hawaii, and just had to grab a quick shot or two:

Danglers

Handy spot they were in, hanging from a tree right next to the trail, but with the background vegetation about 100 yards distant. I almost cloned out the little bugs on the blooms, but left them in so this image wouldn’t look too “antiseptic” — but I’m still waffling on this point, so may have to revisit the image. What do you think?

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.

Why “Seldom Scene”?

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Maybe you’re wondering about the name of this new blog — at least, I know my wife is. I should take a moment to tell you where it comes from.

It seems to me that all too often we hurry through our lives, focusing on where we’re going and how late we are in getting there. Meanwhile, we’re obliviously walking right past incredible beauty all the time, every day. When I was gearing up to start this blog (and struggling to come up with a name I liked) it struck me that of the images I’ve posted on Flickr and other sites, most of my favorites were of subjects I nearly walked right on by — but then spotted out of the corner of my eye.

I almost called the blog “Scenes seldom seen,” but thought it was just too wordy. “Seldom Scene” is more compact, and ties in a bit of wordplay to boot. So that’s the story — in the future, I hope to capture and share with you a wealth of small fragments of easily overlooked beauty. Thanks for coming along for the ride…

Oh, and before I forget, this is a photoblog — so it’s got nothing to do with the bluegrass band of similar name.

Group shot

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On a trip to the Westminster Butterfly Pavilion a few weeks back, we saw this interesting crowd on a cluster of branches:

Group shot

I’m not sure why it was such prime real estate for the little critters, but they were all putting in a good effort to chase their neighbors off the twigs. At any one time, at most 4 butterflies were on the branches while 3 or 4 were hovering nearby, trying to take their places.