Photo

A couple weeks ago I took a solo trip to the Canadian Rockies, visiting parts of Banff, Jasper, and Yoho National Parks. The mountains, lakes and glaicers were impressive. It was pretty hot by their standards while I was there, and I did not see any of the big mammals (they probably went north on vacation!). Click here to see the pictures. Hopefully I'll have a chance to finish up my journal about the trip in the next week or two.

A few weeks ago we spent a wonderful week at Edisto Beach, South Carolina. I don't get to the beach often, so I usually come with a lot of things I want to do. It's hard to get to all of them.

One of the projects for this year was to get some more Kite Aerial Photos (KAP). My KAP camera, a Canon Powershot G1, is not an ideal camera due to its weight and lack of an intervalometer (which permits multiple exposures based on a timer). What I've been doing is setting the 10-second timer on the camera and then running it up once for each exposure. That gets old fast, and puts a limit on how high you can get the camera before it shoots the picture.

Last fall I happened upon a website for guy in England who makes infrared LEDs to trigger cameras. One acts as an intervalometer. They're not super cheap, but a lot less expensive than upgrading to a new camera. So I bought one. I didn't get a chance to work with it much until this beach trip. I basically wired the LED to a small battery pack of two AAAs, attached the pack to the camera with rubber bands and taped the LED to be near the infrared sensor. It was ugly, but the LED triggered the camera successfully every few seconds.

The first day I tried it, the wind was howling down the beach, creating miniature sandstorms inches off the ground. Seemed like a good day to fly, so up the kite went. But the kite wouldn't stabilize, and kept making dives off to the left. Despite attempts to reel the kite in, the kite and camera crashed into the sand with a pretty good thud. The camera lens was popped out of axis and covered in sand. I thought we were sunk after the first flight, but the lens popped right back in place, and the I cleaned off the sand carefully.

I've been clipping the camera directly to the ring where the strings that attach to the flowform kite meet, so that's what I did this time too. The pictures from the first flight were all blurry. The camera moves a lot when the kite shifts just a little. At some point I'm going to have to build a proper Picavet suspension for this camera and run it up the line only after the kite has hit some stable air. But for this trip, fixing the camera just below the kite was all I could do.

After a few more tries in lighter winds, adjusting the camera exposure settings, I got a few usable shots, shown in this entry.

My KAP gallery is here...so far they're pretty poor but I hope to get better photos in the future.

I was surprised to read today that Minolta is getting out of the camera business. I used Minolta Maxxum 35mm cameras for years and even put up a page on my website for them.

In 2004 I got tired of waiting for Minolta to release a digital SLR that was compatible with my lens collection. So I sold off the whole thing on eBay, bought a Canon Digital Rebel, and started a new lens collection. I sort of felt bad leaving Minolta behind but now it seems like it was the right choice. And I've been really pleased with the Canon gear since.

The article mentions that Sony will take over developing digital SLRs for the Minolta lens mount. I hope they really do, but I won't be looking back. I've always been disappointed with Sony's proprietary focus ("standards" that nobody else uses, like those memory sticks).

So long Minolta; it was fun. Hello Canon!

I just received copies of a new mini field guide from the Virginia Tech Extension. It's entitled "Mid-Atlantic Guide to the Insect Pests and Beneficials of Corn, Soybeans, and Small Grains" (that's a mouthful!). It's targeted at farmers to let them know which bugs are good and bad for their crops. It's a sharp little pocket-sized guide, spiral-bound like a little notebook. The graphics and layout inside are very well done.

I had offered to let them use a couple of my images. They picked my Japanese Beetle, which even made the cover, and the Mexican Bean Beetle, both of which I have have posted on BugGuide. A couple other BugGuiders had their photos included too. Congrats to them!

The publication is Virginia Cooperative Extension publication 444-360.

I'm looking forward to seeing if any of my photos make the Kaufman Insect Guide, but that won't be out 'til January.

My wife spotted a snake by the lake while walking the dogs this morning, and I went down to photograph it. It was perched in some brush overhanging the water. At first I thought it was a cottonmouth because it was dark colored and had a thick head that looked triangular. Once I got a few photos, I noticed that the eye was perfectly round, and the snake turned out to be the non-venomous brown water snake, which I've seen before on kayak trips. It was a complacent subject, content to bask in the sun while I walked and waded around its area, looking for the best angle.

On the way back to the house, I spotted a chipping sparrow on the street, apparently eating some of our newly placed grass seed.

From my college friend Brian's blog, a link to some incredible before/after photos of the tsunami damage in Indonesia. In many photos the buildings in the before images are completely gone in the after. There are even some places where the land was stripped away.

On a happy note, there are some beautiful photos of the latest auroras on Spaceweather. The only aurora I've ever seen was a deep red one here in South Carolina in December 2001.

I was inspired by this blog entry to go out and take my own photos of Comet Machholz.

We've been fortunate to have some clear skies the past couple nights. The guy in the article mounted his digital SLR on a telescope that was tracking the stars to prevent star trails and blurring. My only telescope is a tiny Tasco from my childhood with a flimsy equitorial mount, so I decided just to put the camera on a regular tripod and live with the trails.

I tried my Digital Rebel with both my 100mm f/2.8 lens and 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 zoom. The zoom lens was easy to focus and handy for getting in close, but the slow aperture required longer exposures. The stars noticeably move in a few seconds when you're zoomed in, and my images all had small star trails.

I had some trouble focusing the 100mm lens. It seemed that I had to just bump the focus over from what I would call "infinity" to sharpen the stars. Once I did that it was nice to use the wide aperture for shorter exposures.

I took lots of shots at varying ISOs and shutter speeds with both lenses. My best shot is included here (click the thumbnail), and was taken with the 100mm lens at f/2.8, ISO 3200, for 11 seconds. It shows both the green ball of the comet on the right and the Pleiades cluster on the left, and has the shortest star trails. This photo is unretouched except for some cropping...I need to learn how to work on astrophotos in Photoshop.

At some point I'd like to get a decent telescope and mount the camera on it, or at least build a barn-door tracker. Then I'll be able to try better noise reduction and image stacking techniques.

I finally got around to scanning photos and posting a little writeup for my Southeast Arizona trip, over a year ago. Someday I'll catch up with the old trips and photos!

Click here to read the story and see the photos.

(After blogging for most of a year, I'm still debating as to whether a trip warrants its own web page, or I should just post it as a blog entry. It's so much less effort to post to the blog, but since this trip was so long ago I put it with the old trip reports.)

I've been scanning old slides and negatives lately. No matter how much I try to clean the film and the scanner, each scan ends up with visible dust marks.

I used to use the Photoshop clone stamp tool to copy a nearby color over the dust mark, but I found a method that I like better on this page.

It's still a tedious process depending on the amount of dust in the scan, but the new method is a little easier. But if I ever shell out for another film scanner, I'm getting one with dust removal built-in to the software!

I hope to have some new photos online soon.

I have recently been scanning old negatives and slides on my junky HP PhotoSmart scanner. I've been scanning at 2400 DPI (the max of the scanner) so I won't have to do it again. Saving these files in the TIFF format yields large 22 MB files. I'd prefer to store them in a lossless format. I found that a relatively new format, JPEG2000, has a lossless mode. There's a plugin that will let Photoshop Elements read and write JP2 files. The lossless JPEG2000 version of my TIFF file is only 13MB, a 9MB savings per file. That translates to a lot more usable disk space. Sounds like a great format to use....

But I recently found out that a company is claiming a patent on JPEG2000. The patent was denied in court but the company is appealing. A successful appeal could ruin a freely available and open format, and I don't think I want to archive hundreds of photos to a format that may fall by the wayside due to potentially high licensing fees from some patent owner. Don't forget about the GIF debacle.

As a software developer, it annoys me to see companies claiming patents on what amounts to mathematical formulas, or standard business practices that just happen to be implemented with a computer. By allowing patents on trivial software tasks, the USPTO has created a minefield for small developers who don't have a legal department to deal with that stuff. We just want to create useful software!

P.S. We seem to be stuck with software patents here in the U.S. Maybe the Europeans can do something to avoid them.