Day 2 on the Inca Trail was (as you’ve likely gathered) quite a workout. Folks on this trek got a longer-than-usual break at the end of day 2, so we can take a break here as well — don’t you think? Continue reading
Tag Archives: sky
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
The Olympus E-M1II and backyard astrophotography
A lot of people are still waiting for their pre-ordered Olympus OM-D E-M1II cameras to arrive — in the meantime, a number of them asked to see some high-ISO photographs to judge the camera’s abilities in the realm of astrophotography. After days of waiting, I finally got clear night skies where I live, so took some shots of the constellation Orion. Please bear in mind that I live in the south Denver metro area, so have to deal with light pollution — here’s the view looking south toward Orion from my house (enough sky glow to silhouette bits of a telephone pole and two trees):
For the above image, the EXIF is E-M1II, 12-40mm Pro lens @ 17mm, f/5.6, ISO 1600, 8.0 seconds. This is a SOOC image, by the way — all I’ve done to it is RAW conversion and scaling (to fit my blog’s template) in Lightroom.
But I didn’t only take this one image — I took a series of them, all unguided (i.e., on a still tripod): Continue reading
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:
Morning comes to Flores
Sunrise in Flores, Guatemala:
We didn’t get to spend much time in Flores on our autumn trip to the Yucatan — really, just a night sandwiched between the ruins of Tikal and our flight east to Belize. But we had a great night on the island, and were greeted in the morning by this amazing sunrise.
The original part of Flores (where we stayed) is an island in Lake Peten Itza — it was once the last Maya holdout (from the conquistadors) in the Yucatan peninsula. Now the island is connected to the mainland by a causeway, and the town of Flores covers more ground there than on the island.
Scooting on around
So I went on a little trip to Texas last week for business, and managed to grab a window seat on the way down. Â This gave me a fantastic view when our plane’s flight crew had to play dodge-the-thunderhead a few times on the way.
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
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. Â One of our stops was the neat little ghost town of Ashcroft, near Aspen. Â On our way through the sights, my daughter alerted me to this little hummingbird perched on an old bit of wood.
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.
Sky lights
I’ll admit there’s nothing of great societal import in this shot — just a beautiful sunset, taken along I-25 in northern New Mexico.
I grew up not too far from where I took this shot — one thing I miss about New Mexico is the sunsets.
Taking flight
It must be the kid in me, but I’ve always loved taking airborne images while traveling. Â I managed to get a window seat for this sky / sea shot over the Pacific ocean, somewhere near Hawaii: