A photo from last year’s Halloween.
Category: Photos
Backlit Tree in Fog (Photo)
One of those rare instances where Kelvin makes a photo better.
Working Around a Solar Eclipse (Oct 2014)
I literally found out yesterday about today’s partial solar eclipse. Unlike the last one visible from Southern California in 2012, which was conveniently on a weekend, this ended up being right in the middle of the work day. Add in a lot of other stuff going on, and I didn’t have time to do anything like go out to a prime viewing spot or make a giant pinhole camera.
My original plan was to take a late lunch, see what I could see, then try to head back outside at the point of greatest eclipse. I sat on a bench in the courtyard, surrounded by trees, checking a tiny pinhole camera I’d made from a tea box at the last minute and also looking for a good spot with images projected through the tree leaves.
After about half an hour I started to wonder why I wasn’t seeing any signs of eclipse, and looked up the times again. Apparently the calculator I used didn’t account for daylight saving time. The good thing about that: I was early, not late. The bad thing: Greatest eclipse was actually going to be during/shortly after a production switchover at work that I needed to be on hand for.
So I headed back outside around 2:50 to look at the clusters of eclipsed suns projected by the leaves in the shady courtyard.
Exploring the Creek (Two Photos)
It was a late-summer heat wave, and while the picnic itself was spread out in the shade beneath some trees, it was over 100 degrees. Still, a preschooler can’t be terribly interested in his parents’ old school friends catching up, and my son kept trying to wander off to play in the hot, hot sun.
Finally, after lunch, I decided instead of bringing him back I’d go with him. On the other side of the hill we found a small concrete-lined channel, amazingly with water in it, then followed it upstream to where it opened up into a stream running through the grass.
Further up we found a wooden foot bridge, and then trees closed in around it. The shade was very welcome!
This second photo is looking back downstream toward the open area. Just behind me there’s a chain link fence that marks the edge of the park, and a hill leading up to the road. The stream is fed from a drainage pipe, and judging from the erosion patterns, it picks up a lot of runoff during the rainy season.
I took both shots with my phone in HDR mode to get both the light and shade areas clear. Unfortunately on the second shot it ended up blurring the leaves, since they moved just enough in the breeze between bracketed shots. It looks great on a small screen, though!
Radiant Sunsets
Last Tuesday I stayed late at the office. As I was leaving the parking structure, I looked to the left for oncoming cars and saw this. I was stunned. Instead of getting on the road immediately, I parked on the side of the street to look and take a couple of photos.
It didn’t look exactly like this, of course. The photo came out too yellow, so I tried adjusting it to bring out the orange tones, until finally I just started trying all of Snapseed’s filters until I hit on this one. I was surprised by the level of detail it brought out in the upper cloud layer, and how far the crepuscular rays actually extended.
I also took a photo with my camera, which was adjusted for sunset tones. It came out a lot darker than the actual scene, but the color balance is closer. Continue reading