P h o t o g r a p h y e t c
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Connellys Springs, NC 28612
davidcortner@pobox.com
(01/25/2010) Later that same day: When the December snow melted, it saturated the ground. All day yesterday and all last night, heavy rain fell -- as much as 5 inches in the watershed of the upper Catawba. The highest water levels since 2004 sent the river into our yards and over Rhodhiss Dam. Rhodhiss Dam is 65 feet high and 1,500 feet long. Put a few feet of water over the top of that and it makes a considerable sight and a mighty roar. Also a photo opp, since I missed the show in 2004 when the lake got just a little higher than this. Have a look.
Fresh Tracks (1/25/2010): Wrapping up my tenth CD (!) for the Caldwell County Traditional Musician Showcases. I love working on these since I get a lot of latitude to indulge some graphic fantasies, so to speak. Some samples after the jump.
In the shop (12/27/2009): When I use my 5-inch refractor for just looking (that is, when I'm not making photos through it), it's often mounted on an alt-az mount that's simpler and easier on the back than the equatorial I use for photography. The alt-az mount is on an old tripod which needed, among other things, new feet. I know an excuse to play with an old lathe when I see one...
Snow at Last (12/19/2009): We have snow in Rutherford College. I put a calibrated wine bottle out last night (I put piece of tape down the side marked off in inches — 2, 4, 6, 8, 10, 12). The bottle was 13.5 inches tall. 14 hours later, at 1 AM, there was a mound on the table where the bottle once was.
A place Out West (12/14/2009): Here's the latest notion. I buy a nice used RV (say, from a dealer in Arizona) and drive it to a nice RV storage lot in (say) Belen, NM...
The Monty Hall Problem (12/10/2009): See, there's this set of logic problems, or maybe it's one problem with many instances. Anyway, it's come to be known as the Monty Hall problem. There's a really good book about it called, reasonably enough, The Monty Hall Problem, by Jason Rosenhouse. That's Dr. Rosenhouse to you and me. Allow me to summarize...
Vintage Digital? (12/05/2009): I seem to have gone a little retro. I switched to Canon a few years ago, but lately I've been using an old war-horse of a Nikon. I miss the breed.
Nothing particularly dramatic tonight (11/27/2009): Mostly just making sure that what worked before is repeatable. So I aimed at the North America nebula with the 200mm F2.0 on the Hap Griffin Canon 20D with the Astronomik 12nm H-a filter. I did not refocus. Three changes...
(11/10/2009): I'm using thick clouds and heavy rain sent from many states away by tropical storm Ida to prepare a vintage, manual-focus 200mm F2.0 EDIF Nikkor for action under the stars during the next clear spell. Almost exactly one year ago (see 11/18/2008), I was messing with this glass for daylit use, but now I remember why I bought it...
Two thousand seconds (11/05/2009): that's how long the shutter was open to get the photograph above. It was shot under a brilliant, almost-full Moon. On a dewy night when I could barely see two hundred stars from one horizon to the other, this thirty-three minute exposure shows nebulae in a rich, 14-degree wide swath of the northern constellation Cygnus...
A really eclectic note (10/24/2009) which will may at first seem to have little enough to do with photography. But that's the way things go: you do x to help with y. So I've been rebuilding gear to regain access to some of my favorite places. Once I get there, Lord knows I'll make photographs. First, the November National Geographic does not have my shot of the Moon and Venus. Casserole, casserole (quoting Doris Day). Next time. Second...
A really esoteric note (8/2/2009) which will mean something only if you, too, are waging a battle against your neighbors' nightlight fetishes, and recognize and can string these terms into a sentence without breaking a sweat: "Baader 7nm hydrogen-alpha filter," "parfocal," and "Epoch 2010."
We turned left at Albuquerque instead of again going right (7/24/2009). Which means that as soon as I get caught up on some clients' webwork, I'm going to reward myself by working up a new folio of photographs from SW New Mexico, including the Gila Cliff Dwellings, stars and storms over the Casitas de Gila, a quick look at El Malpais National Monument, hummingbirds, an honest to God wild rattlesnake, and whatever else I can mine from 28,000,000,000 bytes of raw images I hauled home. If I promise to put it here, eventually I will.
National Geographic Magazine (6/16/2009) just asked me if I "would be amenable" to having one of my photographs considered for their "Visions of Earth" series. These are double-page spreads that run in the front of every issue. Well, gee, I guess I wouldn't mind...
I scored another APOD a couple of days ago (4/26/2009) using the 5-inch A-P mounted on that trailer I was on about down below. Lots of updates to that tale, so let's just link again. Scroll down if you've already been there. Is this cheating in blogoville? Sue me. And now... Hello, Dolly!
I went stargazing in New Mexico this morning (4/2/2009). Steve Cullen offered a get-acquainted promotion: spend an hour using a remote-controlled 20-inch Ritchey-Chretien his company, Lightbuckets, maintains in the Sacramento Mountains between Cloudcroft and Mayhill. I found his offer just before it expired and got my observing run set up just under the wire. The last week of March was cloudy and windy in the Sacramentos, so Steve moved the last few guest sessions to the company's observatory in the New Mexico bootheel, near Rodeo, in the afternoon shadow of Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains. The Rodeo instrument is 20% larger and feeds a far more efficient camera; retail on the telescope, mount, and camera is somewhere north of our mortgage (and the usual rent is $100/hour). While the sun came up in North Carolina and miles of clouds dropped inches of rain, "my" telescope mined 218 megabytes of deep sky data just ahead of the New Mexico dawn, here distillled using Maxim DL for this quick look:
So I've been working on a trailer (3/21/2009). Not the kind I worked on a couple of years ago ("book trailers," where we tried to sell books using a tool designed by and for people who'd rather wait for the movie; that was bright, wasn't it?). But the kind that will let me haul a telescope up 'n out from under these piney woods into the big clearing at the top of the driveway. There'll be some nifty metalwork and crude woodwork involved, and I'm going to love spending some time down in the shop rather than here at the computer, where life has been way too busy. Recession, what recession? They're killin' me!
Who has a time-lapsed lunar eclipse? (1/16/2009). My year began with an interesting request. A filmmaker working on a PBS project asked if I had images that could be used to put together a time-lapse film of a total lunar eclipse. Well, maybe...
One billion pixels under the
stars (11/30/08). Live view
on a Canon 50D and some new alignment and stacking software renew my
years-long effort to do truly decent astrophotography without
having to
transport and rebuild an observatory every single time I want
to shoot something way out there in the dark.
Addendum to "Fast Glass" (11/18/08) You know, at the end of the day, rather than mess with the 135mm F2 and the 200mm F2, would I rather just buy a 70-200mm F2.8 IS Canon zoom and have done with it? That's the way I'm leaning after another day of walking around irritating the cats by clicking at them while they sleep, bathe, walk, fight, play, and otherwise provide lens-testing fodder. Day before yesterday was all about fast, fixed, manual-focus lenses -- he-man Magnum Life Black Star straight-shifting muscle-car photojournalist glass -- and today I've been using the 70-200mm F4 plain jane Canon L-lens for comparison. And you know what? Crank the ISO to 2000 and let autofocus take care of sharpness, breathe carefully, shoot straight... and the results are usually just about as good or better. So I'm thinking a good investment would be the faster, image stabilized version of that lens. IS to stop my shake; a stop faster to help stop subject motion.... is this a case of taking back in the footnotes most of what's been said in the text? We'll see.
Fast Glass (11/16/08), anyone who's known me for more than four years knows I've always been a Nikon guy (Nikon FTn, 1971, too many to count since then). There are places I can turn up with my Canons and earn doubletakes. The point being that I have decades worth of good glass that hasn't seen a lot of duty lately. This is about to change. Here's why.
All day yesterday, into the night, and through one pot of coffee this morning (11/12/08), I've been trying to get Photoshop CS4 Extended, part of the Design Premium upgrade from Adobe, to do its thing without throwing a program exception ("The instruction at '0x0_____' referenced memory at '0x0____'. The memory could not be 'read'.") I tried several solutions recommended by experts and by novices all the way back to CS2. Reinstalled, made a dedicated account, dumped old DLL's, got rid of disused programs, cleaned out the registry. Etc. But what worked (and worked completely) was turning off hardware acceleration on my video cards. Thus does photography resemble systems analysis. Maybe I'll re-accelerate the cards incrementally after I get some work done; maybe I won't. I have nothing to add to this, so there is no jump.
Starting about three A.M. (10/19/08), I've been working up some photos I want to work on like this homage to Ansel Adams from last week's travels in northern New Mexico. Nevermind why I am disgusted with the arc of my projects right now, but I really need to work on some photos that I still care about. While organizing last week's take (see The Slowblog's entry about 8 and 16gb CF cards — we're talking several thousand shots), I realized that a great number of A-list photos from Wyoming from last year had never been worked up either (I'd only skimmed the cream for a first look, as shown on the year-old link on my home page). So there's still that to look forward to. And there are some in situ studioesque shots for a local jewelry designer to work on for his new website, and some weddings to prepare for, and, well, there's probably still reason to pick up a camera tomorrow. I'll be back into it soon enough. More fresh New Mexico stuff after the jump, and no more whining. Maybe.
The only thing special about this photo (10/14/08) of an old Chevy pickup truck is that it is the first of a thousand or so RAW images recorded beyond the 8GB mark on a 16GB compact flash card in a Canon 20D. Just before Amy and I flew to New Mexico for a few days, Amazon offered a Transcend 16GB CF card at a ridiculously low price. (It's twice as big, 3x as fast, and 4x cheaper than my trusty 8GB Lexar card.) The night before we left, I shot a few frames with it to verify that the Canon could see its full size and could write to it. Then I routinely erased the test frames by reformatting the card... and cut its size in half. The 20D saw it as an 8GB card; Windows saw it as an 8GB partition and 8GB of unallocated (and unallocatable) space. None of the partition managers I had or could download could restore its full size. After wasting a couple of hours trying to get the space back, I found the solution.
When Good Drives Go Bad (9/9/08) There was this sharp "tink!" and my G: drive disappeared. Of course I knew better than to try to restart it, but I did anyway, and all I got was the soft periodic click of death as the heads tried to get oriented... New rules to live by and a question to ponder more seriously: how many pictures should I keep, anyway?
Something Completely Different (8/2/08) A tip for would be WebYep users; a return to websites for writers; Flash-encpsulated DVD for a client's website; and down to the sea in (very small) ships...
Color Calibration (7/25/08) In the previous note, I parenthetically carry on about this Samsung 243T monitor. It's about three years old; it originally sold for 6-8x what I paid for it. It worked very well right out of the box; I fixed the base (although it worked OK with the broken base, as my eBay seller promised it would) with just $6 worth of JB Weld epoxy; and I just now calibrated it....
Technology Tempest (7/20/08) Monitors, iPods, and car stereos... Three years ago, the Samsung 243T was a $1,600+ monitor. I just bought one on eBay for $243 including shipping (oddly enough). It has a cracked base, but so what? At worst, I'll put it on a monitor support arm, and I might try that anyway. By all accounts this is a far better monitor for Photoshop [it's fabulous! 7/25] than the one I bought a couple of weeks back for twice the money. Lightning fried another monitor (7/14/08), so I'm now down two Viewsonic 19-inch screens in a few months. BreezeBrowser is making quicker work of the second wedding I've used it on (but I'm still learning some basic stuff about making it work well). My BVS batteries worked a treat for a studio shoot for a CD and book cover BUT something is awry with the company. Keep up with the domain names you give a damn about! (5/31/08) I've just spent a week getting one back for my wife . . . The real lesson is that I need to triple-check the status of those I maintain for others.
BVS Pulsar battery packs (5/30/08) -- I got really tired of having to wait for my studio strobes to recycle, and I hated having to look for outlets and string long power cords all over creation at remote shoots. Killing two birds with one stone, I bought a BVS Pulsar 3.1 kit and prepared my Canon Speedlites for location duty . . .
Alert! Chipset heat sink not detected, system halted! (5/25/08) With four websites and two portfolios begging me to work on them, a major monthly update for Desert Exposure just days away . . . This. Was. Unacceptable. I rebooted my machine (a Dell 4600C) to finish an XP update cycle and that's the message it gave me. 2 seconds into its boot cycle, it just stopped. Again. Then again. So I took out my soldering iron and went to work.
Going a little retro (5/16/08) -- I took some of the take from the big wedding over to the parents of the bride. Nice Flash gallery built in Photoshop. It looked good on their computer and I do enjoy the company of happy clients. Except that the navigation was cropped out by their tiny monitor which made it a lot less elegant to view than it should have been. My first thought was to adjust the settings. But my second thought was that this is just a specific instance of a general problem . . .
Reinventing wheels (5/12/08) -- So a couple of things have come out of my being overwhelmed with wedding shots. First, it's not like this is a new field to anyone but me. There's software and there are specialized vendors out there who exist to make this profitable. I looked at a couple of software packages and went with the simpler, cheaper of the two . . .
Managing worry (4/26/08) -- I shot a big wedding last weekend. Big for me, anyway. 3000 files to sort. Had some scares. First, it was supposed to be an outdoor affair. I'd walked the grounds ahead of time with the father of the bride, so I knew just what to expect. Ha. . .
I GET QUESTIONS....
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It's
not all night work here (11/23/2009): 
