On this day (a whisker of success)

November 18, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

In the previous post, I mentioned attempting in vain to capture any of the Leonid meteors nine years ago, ending with, “Leave it to me to chase meteors on the colder nights…” And since it was 4°C at 4 AM this morning, guess what I decided to attempt again?

The primary difference being, this time I was moderately successful!

But first off, the false alarm.

a satellite passing through during Leonids meteor storm
I saw a small handful of meteors this morning, mostly where the camera wasn’t aimed, but noticed one that might have made it into the frame. As I closed the shutter, I took a quick chimp at the LCD preview and saw this lovely stripe across the photo, notably not where I’d seen the meteor, yet pleased that I at least caught this one, if not two. Except, on returning home and examining the images that I’d captured, I realized that this and the following frame had matching lines across them, meaning I hadn’t captured a meteor (which will typically last less than a second and will never exist across multiple frames,) but a satellite instead. In this case, it was the Cosmos 2058, a Russian spy satellite – Stellarium will allow you to determine a lot of these, so if you haven’t downloaded it yet, why the hell not?

But I said I was successful, and I was. Not hugely, but this is a bona fide meteor.

meteor near Orion during Leonids meteor shower
That’s Sirius at lower left, with Orion showing at lower right, just to help orient you. I never saw this one, but during exposures I may often be looking around at other portions of the sky, seeing if any areas appear more active. I was experimenting with high ISOs on the 7D to shorten the exposure times and thus the star trails, but this means a) a hell of a lot more noise and blotchiness from the sky, and b) a lot more frames to maximize the chance of capturing a meteor. Nonetheless we have a classic meteor, showing the ‘tapered’ appearance that indicates that it flared to a peak brightness and faded – twice, it seems.

And then again, while the camera was still aimed in the same direction (which was the darkest sky direction in this region, the farthest from any cities that throw up too much light pollution.)

Another meteor near Orion during Leonids meteor shower
This one was almost nicely aligned with the previous, except these weren’t consecutive frames, so I’m confident that I captured two meteors here. According to science boffins, most meteors are about the size of a grain of sand, and most of the light they produce isn’t the meteor itself melting as it hits the atmosphere, but instead the air reacting to the velocity of the particle. Still, there are occasional color changes from meteors of different types, though I have yet to see one myself, much less capture one in camera.

By the way, the regularly-scheduled meteor storms are all the result of Earth passing through the stream of debris left behind by the passage of comets; in the case of the Leonids, it’s comet 55P/Tempel-Tuttle. They get their name from the apparent point of origin for most of the meteors, which is the ‘leading edge’ of the Earth as it enters the debris cloud, so the larger percentage of meteors seems to emanate from that portion of sky (radiant.) Thus the Leonids indicate that the radiant is the constellation Leo. However, they can appear in all directions, pulled by Earth’s gravity or simply catching the atmosphere as the planet passes alongside, and I’ve seen them traveling all over the place during busy storms, including almost directly into the radiant, so concentrating on just one portion of the sky might mean missing some cool ones.

I caught one satellite actually crossing the sky, trundling along with barely visible progress, and re-aimed the camera for a specific exposure. In a couple other cases, what I took to be meteors when examining the photos back home turned out to have paths in consecutive frames. The one below almost fooled me, because it shows a flare, but it took too long to cross the sky.

satellite ALOS Daichi crossing sky near Sirius, showing faint flare
See that brighter middle? Yeah, that should indicate a meteor, but it doesn’t. Instead, this is likely the satellite rotating and catching an angle to reflect the sun, given some weight when I used Stellarium to plot the satellite itself.

screen capture from Stellarium showing satellite identified as ALOS/Daichi
It’s pretty easy: open Stellarium, and use the progress arrows to reverse the Earth’s rotational effect until the clock approaches the time stamp of the photo (provided that you remembered to reset the camera’s clock for DST, which I’d forgotten.) Watch for a ‘star’ moving too fast or in the wrong direction, and click on it to see what it is. ALOS stands for Advanced Land Observation Satellite, and as you can see from the photo at that link, it’s covered in reflective foil; easy enough to catch the sun as the sunrise approached.

Through the small patch of trees to the east (this being a boat launch area on Jordan Lake,) I could see an inordinatley bright spot, and since the airport lies in that direction I suspected a plane, but it had no strobes and wasn’t apparently moving. After a minute, I’d confirmed it was Venus rising, and a bit later I re-aimed the camera and did a time exposure through the trees, flooded with the rains from a recent tropical storm.

Venus rising behind flooded trees
The sky was already lightening with the coming dawn, and I was starting to lose sight of some of the stars overhead, so after a few more frames I packed it up. Maybe I’ll return again tonight to give it another go, but for now, I can bask ever-so-slightly in the success of finally capturing a few (admittedly unimpressive) meteors.

On this date 47

November 18, 2020November 17, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

Just four (well, four-ish) this time – could have had a lot more, because I’ve shot plenty on this date, but some were repetitive, and some have already been featured in posts. We’ll start with 2003.

At this point in time, I was living in Florida but up visiting with Jim Kramer for a week, while he still lived in North Carolina. This was playing around with the macro settings on the Sony F-717 camera of his, some months before he mailed it down to me to use for a bit before it was sold off (he’d purchased the upgraded model.) I don’t think I knew the ant was actually in the photo – I was concentrating on keeping the center in focus.

The we jump eight years forward to 2011.

Ten years previous to this, I’d witnessed the fabulous Leonids meteor shower but captured no photos due to using the wrong film for such an endeavor, and this was the first time that I’d tried it in digital, this being with the Canon Digital Rebel, or 300D, or DReb as I called it. I remember it being a cold night and the batteries gave way after about an hour, during which I’d only tripped five frames with the digital camera, capturing nothing; I was also out there with the Mamiya 645 medium format (film) camera with Fuji Provia 100, which did a much better job that the film from a decade earlier yet revealed no meteors itself. This is a six-minute exposure (at f5.6, ISO 100) with Polaris in the frame, the focal point of the star trails since it sits directly above Earth’s north pole and so the rotation of the planet causes all of the stars to track in a circle, except for one.

[You won’t ever get a complete circle in a photo unless you’re very close to the poles themselves during local winter, when the sun never actually rises, but even then the horizon can brighten enough to ruin the 24-hour exposure needed, so…]

2015, be the year we be visitin’ now, and a bizarre composite to illustrate something.

I combined two nearly-consecutive images to show the different reflections visible in this green frog’s (Lithobates clamitans) eye. You see, I was testing out a new softbox option after I’d fried the old Sunpak FP38 flat panel flash doing something stupid (like hooking up a 12-volt power source to a system intended for 6.) One thing that I lacked with the old flash was portability, and I was experimenting with a folding reflector assembly on the Metz 40MZ-3i, so one of these images was with flash, one without, which should be clear enough. But both show the reflector, kinda. In the top image, you can see the round reflecting panel with a rectangular highlight, the distinct reflection of the flash head itself, but also the flash head off to the side, aimed indirectly so barely visible – and the matte black arms holding the reflector itself. All of this was acceptable, but could be improved, and mostly, I didn’t like the weight and horrible balance of the Metz. In the bottom photo, the shape of the arms and reflector are more obvious, silhouetted against the tree branches off to the side, while the camera itself sits more centered in the eye. These were taken in the backyard pond – well, the frog was in the pond; the camera and I were simply alongside it.

We’ll stay vaguely thematic as we advance a year to 2016.

Going through Mason Farm Biological Reserve that day, a quartet of painted turtles (Chrysemys picta) were posed fetchingly on a pair of logs in good light, so of course I had to photograph them. Notably, three of these photos show that November can be quite nice, climate-wise, and the fourth shows no indication of temperature at all, though I can tell you that the tripod had frost on it when I packed up for the night (we’re talking about the starfield shot now.) Leave it to me to chase meteors on the colder nights…

Tell me why…

November 15, 2020November 14, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

… I get up to things like this.

So, okay, I got two different detailed photos of a gibbous moon, one waxing, one waning, taken 10 days apart. And of course, at different heights in the sky, so angled differently, as shown here in the original orientations.

waxing gibbous and waning gibbous moons
Now, some landmarks. If you look at the left version, there is a dark almost-circular, almost-centered spot in the visible face, which is Mare Serenitatis, the Sea of Serenity – directly beneath it is Mare Tranquillitatis, the Sea of Tranquility, where Apollo 11 landed. Now we turn to the right version, and those two Mares are both sitting on the terminator, the line of shadow, rotated quite a bit – Mare Tranquillitatis is half in shadow. We’ll come back to this in a sec.

One of the things that I wanted to show was that full moons are usually boring, while not-full moons are more dramatic, showing greater detail and geology. To that end, I chose a particular spot visible in both photos and overlapped them in an animated gif (pronounced, “MOO-vee”) that morphed between the two.

animated gif showing how shadows define details For the most part, it works quite well, especially when you pay attention to that large crater with the prominent central peak (Theophilus.) With the light almost dead on to it, it appears as a faint circle, only revealed as a sharp crater by having some shadows to throw. This, by the way, shows the Apollo 11 landing site, just about centered in the frame. No, you’re not going to see anything (especially not with a 1000mm focal length) – Theophilus is 100km across, slightly less than the width of New Jersey.

You may notice that some of the craters don’t line up perfectly, and this is evidence of a particular trait of the moon, which is libration. The moon is in a synchronous orbit, mostly; it always has the same side facing Earth even as it orbits around Earth, trying to hide the flowers behind its back. But it’s not perfect, and thus ‘wobbles’ a little, which is called libration. It’s not really enough to notice from naked eye observations, and even detailed photos won’t illustrate it very well – until you do something silly like trying to overlap two photos of the moon in different phases.

Or even worse, animating it.

animated gif showing waxing and waning gibbous phases of the moon It took no small amount of playing around to line these up this way, believe me: first resizing the two photos by the same amount, then rotating a bit at a time to get the poles to match (near as can be determined by the shadows,) as well as shifting by small increments to get the overlap this good so the sphere, never actually visible, nonetheless appears complete – and realizing that, in ten days, the moon had also progressed enough along its elliptical orbit of Earth to change size a little, requiring re-scaling one of the images. The result looks pretty damn well like the progression of the shadow – except the details of the moon itself all shift enormously, well illustrated by the changing position of those two Mares. Or you can see someone else’s animation here.

This was, in fact, a major hurdle in doing that first gif above, because that spot was rotated further around the sphere from one photo to the other, warping and compressing the positions of the craters, and I had to do a lot of fiddling in the editor to get them as close as they are – not recommended to anyone who doesn’t have time and patience. It’s one thing to emulate the perspective change when you try to make text look like it’s on the oblique surface of a cooler, but another to cope with the shift along the surface of a sphere.

And to provide another illustration, we’ll take those two images and instead line them up with prominent surface features.

two gibbous moon phases overlapped and pinned on Plato crater
We already know the poles are pretty close, from the uniformity of the shadowed regions, so here’s what happens when you chose the crater Plato (indicated in yellow) as the anchor point. That’s not even close enough for government work.

How about if we use Mare Tranquillitatis and the landing site, the location and orientation of the first gif above?

two gibbous moon phases overlapped and pinned on Theophilus crater
That’s a hard nope, too. It should be clear that no amount of shifting or rotating will bring the two versions into a viable overlap.

I will note that some of the apparent shift is due to the tilted orbits of both Earth and moon, meaning the phase shadows will not line up perfectly because the sun isn’t dead on the moon’s equator; just like the seasonal changes in the angle of the sun on Earth, the moon undergoes a certain shift as well. Basically, all of this means that you shouldn’t really try to overlap different moon images and expect them to line up. But this is the kind of silly shit I do sometimes…

Showers and ‘shopping

November 14, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

Two things to mention here, real quick-like now.

First, we are approaching the peak of the Leonids meteor shower, in two days, but you may be able to go out at any time in the next week or so and see something – the moon will be dark, so if you have clear skies in your area, give it a shot. The worst that can happen is you get horribly slaughtered by the Meteor Shower Murderer, that psychopath that preys on innocent photographers that go to dark sky areas and sit around with their cameras on tripods, getting neckaches from craning to watch the stars for a couple of hours, because he’s got a grudge against people like that. Probably, anyway – I’ve never heard of any person or events even remotely fitting that description, and it’s pretty ludicrous, so the chance of it happening is decidedly slim, and the second worst thing that could happen is getting cold and not seeing anything. But if you’re, you know, out where the skies are dark and you have a great open sky view – the beach, say – and have time on your hands, go for it. I give some pointers for using your camera here, if needed. This page and this page will give you some more info. Stellarium and Heaven’s Above can also provide other objects to chase while you’re out there.

Second, I put together a new page on my own site to provide some pointers on combining images convincingly, otherwise known as editing two (or more) photos together, or pasting in something silly, or ‘Photoshopping’ (even though I’m personally talking about GIMPing.) In other words, if you want to make a fake photo for shits and giggles, this is my method, spurred by and illustrating this effort from a couple weeks back. If you want it to look good, don’t expect such tasks to be quick and easy, but it also gives great practice in editing skills that can produce something more useful than musical frogs. So if that sounds exciting to you (and it should,) have at it.

Best of luck with either or both, as the case may be.

A little demonstration

November 12, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

Branches across pond view
So this is just a series of photos that I set aside to illustrate something, waiting for a slower period, and since it will be raining steadily for the next two days it seems, now’s the time. It would be better illustrated ‘real-time,’ except to do that I’d have to have a documentary film crew following me around, which hasn’t come to fruition. Yet.

[Stop shrieking and running around the room – it’s never gonna happen. Sheesh, you’d think this was election results or something…]

The photo above pretty much shows what I first saw when ambling around the pond back in October, and the detail that made me pause for a second. A lot of the photos that I capture are a result of seeing something that wasn’t quite right, the break in expected patterns, colors, shapes, and so on, and this has two of them. One of them, lower right, is just a leaf suspended temporarily among the branches, but the other, above it and slightly left, was not a leaf, and not a natural aspect of the branches. This was what made me stop, and move closer.

something on branch
Definitely on to something now, since the shapes are far from typical for even a diseased growth on the branch – one of those on the top left side even seems to show light shining through underneath. Most likely arthropodal in nature. Still closer.

some kind of arthropods on branch silhouetted against sky
Crouching a little lower to use the light from the sky to outline them better, it’s now obvious: we got bugs. All of this was in the shade under a tree, no direct light at all, and while the photos increase the contrast and thus deepen the shadows a tad, there was still too little light for a clean view. Some additional illumination is in order.

bark lice Cerastipsocus nymphs in cluster on branch
I hate using on-camera flash, but I hadn’t gone to the pond with the full macro rig, so here we are, looking at stripey little bastards of some kind. I initially thought, ‘aphids,’ but the bodies didn’t seem quite right, and they aren’t – BugGuide.net pegs them as nymphs within the genus Cerastipsocus, a category of bark lice; one of the two species in the area is colloquially named as tree cattle. Adorable.

bark lice Cerastipsocus nymphs dispersing
The mere act of leaning close caused them to unpile and begin to disperse along the branch, like naughty kids in the schoolyard when a teacher approaches, casually and elaborately unsuspiciuous. But breaking up in this manner also made them much harder to see from any distance at all, so spotting the initial cowpatty, or whatever, was what allowed me to see them in detail.

The thing is, I couldn’t tell you how to spot things of this nature, and I can only give occasional illustrations of it like this; to the best of my knowledge, it just comes from being out there and paying attention to details, knowing how things normally are so that the little shapes and the anachronisms become evident. I can assure you, there are plenty of false positives, things that I look at closer only to determine that they’re not interesting after all, and I have no way of logging everything that I miss, except for the occasions where someone that I’m with sees something themselves; when they do, it’s from the same habits anyway.

So if you’re pursuing natural subjects, it helps (a lot) to get used to the natural patterns and shapes and colors, so that the items that aren’t draw your attention immediately. It won’t always produce a subject, but it’s amazing how often it does.

There’s something familiar…

November 11, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

fall colors from a few years back
So on Monday I started selecting the photos that would appear in today’s On This Date post, and ended up with two distinct possibilities from back in 2014; this was the second. In the context of the others, I knew this was taken around the nearby pond, but I couldn’t place that path anywhere, and most especially not the spiky yucca-maybe plant down there in the corner, extremely common when I was in Florida but considerably less so here.

And then I had a thought, quickly followed by another (I know, right? Wonder of wonders): I had just been out at the pond shooting what I could of the fall colors only a couple hours earlier. I checked the Sort folder, and there it was:

same location this year
The lighting conditions certainly make a huge difference, though the foliage isn’t as well developed this year, and initially, I’d used the ‘standard’ color and contrast settings for the shot, though I should have been using the ones I’d preset for such light conditions, so I at least increased saturation for display here. More noticeable is the different perspective, so I checked the EXIF info, but the two photos were taken with focal lengths only 3mm apart. For the top one, I was apparently further back, crouching lower and aiming higher.

It would have made a truly stunning, eerie, and unfathomable occurrence (well, actually just a neat coincidence) had I taken the second photo today, exactly (more or less) six years later, but noooo, I had to go and ruin it all. And today is going to be drizzly, misty rain all day long, courtesy of yet another tropical storm, so little chance of doing such an exact comparison. Note that I just did a podcast about improvements and making the effort and all that, so we can see how dedicated to the concept I really am.

On this date 46

November 11, 2020November 10, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

Like I said last week, lots to play with this week! In your face, Slow Period! Let’s see, now…

We start with 2010’s entry, a sampling of fall colors that didn’t get posted then:

backlit oak leaves during early autumn
I spend too much time trying to identify things like this right as I upload them for posts, instead of doing it, oh, anytime in the several years that I lived right next to it, so I’m definitively saying these are oak leaves, and confidently saying it’s a white oak, and tentatively saying it’s a swamp white oak, and that’s as far as I’m going. Do your own DNA test if you want to know if it’s the Roosevelt White Oaks or the Bouvier White Oaks.

On to 2012 [wait, no 2011? I didn’t have any photos from 11/11/11? No, apparently not.]

[Sorry, I wrote that the American way, which might have confused Europeans, so if you’re European, that would be 11/11/11.]

unidentified dark moth with fluffy forelegs
I don’t know what this moth is and I’m not checking. Okay, fine, it’s possibly genus Orgyia, whose name means, “moth that parties hard, hur hur hur,” [no that’s not true – it actually means, “the length of the outstretched arms,” which is the only way I offer this tentative identification.] I know this was shot near the front porch light one evening, and this version has been darkened slightly and had contrast increased, because that white background paint reflected most of the flash’s light back into the lens, a hazard of shooting macro on brighter objects and backgrounds; light hitting the lens directly will reduce contrast and saturation. Gotta love those Seinfeld sleeves at least.

Next stop, 2013:

very young green lynx spider Peucetia viridans with water adhering
We’d had three egg cases from green lynx spiders (Peucetia viridans) hatch out in the yard, so I had plenty of tiny spiderlings to work with, when I could get close enough to them. Judging from the other photos, the water here isn’t naturally occurring, but the result of applying a misting bottle, which I will do occasionally when the rain has been sparse because the arthropods generally appreciate it. The vertical part of the face that you see here is well under a single millimeter in height, just to give you a faint idea – breathing throws the camera out of focus too often, so I discard a lot of attempts when I go in this close.

2014? 2014:

unidentified Hymenoptera on unidentified flower
It’s a wasp, or bee – Hymenoptera, at least – on a flower. Or a flower mimic. It’s a picture – deal with it, I don’t want this to take all day to write.

And it’s one of two choices for this date, but the other will appear in a different post. Or has already. I haven’t written it yet, but this is being written a day ahead of time, so who knows?

Counting down (er, up) to 2015:

mating American bluet damselflies genus Enallagma making valentine shape
The best I’ll say is that these are American bluet damselflies (genus Enallagma) because there are too many species and I’d need to see the body segments better than I captured here. Shamelessly influenced by social media, they were posing while making a heart, awww. Though admittedly, most of the humans that do this aren’t actually engaged in The Task at the time. And even when they are, they won’t fly around that way, so credit/shame/whatever on the damselflies for this feat.

Finally, 2016:

sprouting mimosa genus Mimosa throwing distinct shadow on rock
This is likely a mimosa sapling (genus also Mimosa,) though there is at least one other species nearby that has nearly identical leaves, the partridge pear, but those don’t typically grow in these conditions, which is right alongside the Eno River. What I was after, though, is the shadow that put me in mind of fossil impressions, since ferns were so common in the very early stages of plant life on this planet. Looking at it now, I could have tackled it better I think, having the living leaves framed more against the grey rock – I have an upcoming podcast that talks about this (recorded but not edited yet.) So this is perhaps a ‘Before’ photo, kinda – I’m probably not going to go back to the river to reshoot this, especially since it was four years ago and the tree is likely different in appearance now; trees be like that. It’s the kind of adversity that you have to deal with as a nature photographer…

Podcast: Improvements

November 10, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

So here we have the… second? Is that right? Holy shit, that’s bad… podcast of 2020, kinda pathetic but whatcha gonna do: withhold your payments? Yeah, that’s right, sit down and hush up.

This time though, we’re going into improvements. No, not improvements that have been made, but improvements that will be made. Maybe. Hopefully. Soon… ish…

It’s actually a challenging and semi-complicated subject, without easy or even clearly-definable goals. But why waste time typing when it’s all here in audio?

Walkabout podcast – Improvements

And some of the things that I mentioned within:

Last year’s podcast about motivation.

My views on pursuing “art.”

I don’t really believe it should all be about money, but we also cannot survive without it very well either, so…

The instructional video that I did, my first big video project that I’m pleased with, even when I see room for improvement. The question is, should I be tackling more of them? And what would someone pay for access to them? (Yeah, I know, everyone wants something for free, but that’s not how it works. What are you gonna offer in trade?)

In there, I mentioned two of the goals that I’ve been pursuing, for the past few years actually: to obtain photos of praying mantises mating, and creating their egg sac (which may make for some decent video clips, the latter at least.) I have one, count ’em, one photo of each, both from years ago, and they’ve been sitting in the blog folder waiting for me to slip them in appropriately somewhere; the idea was, I’d show them in comparison to the new versions when I successfully completed one or both goals. But since that didn’t happen this year (again,) I’m posting them anyway.

pair of mating Chinese mantids Tenodera sinensis seen within thicket of pampas grass
Here’s a pair of Chinese mantids (Tenodera sinensis) mating, the only time I’ve seen it happen (ten years ago!), and it was so deep in the thicket of pampas grass that this was the best perspective I could obtain without disturbing them. Notably, the female’s abdomen already seems remarkably distended, not what I would have expected, but the bulk of the egg sac is protective layers, something akin to that expanding, hardening foam that is used to seal gaps, so that may be what’s taking up a lot of the space. It’s also possible that the male fertilizes the eggs immediately before they’re laid, similar to fish and frogs (where it happens immediately after,) so the development is at peak here. I honestly don’t know – that’s the kind of thing that I aim to illustrate and explain. I never did see the female create the sac following this, which means the next photo isn’t any close kin.

female Chinese mantis Tenodera sinensis almost finished producing egg sac ootheca in longneedle pine tree
This was actually taken many years previously, on slide film, as a female of the same species was almost complete in her task of producing the egg sac (ootheca.) Not quite as obscured as the one above, but still far from ideal. I’ve done my damnedest to keep mantises around to increase my chances of seeing this, to no avail, so these goals, at least, are waiting more on luck than on efforts. Granted, those efforts have netted me plenty of other photos and video clips, so they’ve been far from fruitless.

Oh, and the one podcast (so far) solely dedicated to humor – you can decide if I should ever attempt such a thing again. I think there’s room for improvement, at least.

Must be Saturday

November 7, 2020November 6, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

… and the Bay City Rollers are excited.

The first Saturday in November is Desaturate Day, as everyone knows. Well, everyone not living under a rock with worm tunnels between their ears, anyway. And thus I’m here to inspire you to wash out, go drab, and reduce it all down to black and white, because everything is simpler that way – for a given definition of “simple,” at least.

Not a lot of the photos that I’ve taken in the past six months or so really do well when converted to monochrome, but I scared up a couple, with some older entries for seasoning.

green treefrog Hyla cinerea in mixed-channel greyscale
We first saw our friend here back in September, and the original was pretty monochromatic in itself, though not in the way the term is normally used. I mean, technically, none of the photos in this post are chromatic in the slightest, they’re simply brightness values, but ‘nonchromatic’ isn’t in regular use – some dictionaries don’t recognize it at all, so we use a term that means “one color,” as if black, or white (I’m not sure which one is supposed to count,) is a color. It’s insulting to pedants, really.

Anyway, this version of the photo was done with channel clipping, a mix of the green and blue channels with a contrast tweak to make the most of the range. We’ll return to this particular practice later on.

How about another version of the Midmonth Abstract from just a few weeks ago?

small trees against foggy lake, in blue channel only
Because the original was primarily blue, selecting just the blue channel for this one rendered the foggy lake as an indistinct void for a nicely surreal affect, that a little tweak in Curves enhanced. It would have been nice to get just a hint of grey from the colors of the leaves, but this would have required much more selective level controls, practically the same as dubbing in elements from another frame, so I let it go; the near-black leaves and branches work well enough against the encroaching nothingness. True to form, the blue channel was a bit muddy and this shows, but I think it lends a dreamlike quality to it. Yeah, it’s perfectly intentional, that’s it…

unidentified backlit dragonfly from green channel only
We also saw this one earlier, here, and the contrast levels obviously lent themselves to this treatment. But this is channel clipping again, just the green channel because it brought out the darker wingtips; the red channel had them almost the same brightness as the rest of the wings, and the blue channel was simply too dark and muddy.

Let’s have a (more or less) natural monochrome.

Haw River in Bynum NC in infra-red
You may recognize this as infra-red, mostly from the bright foliage and black sky, and what I liked most about it were the brilliant white leaves on the little island, much more reflective of infra-red wavelengths than the trees nearby. This might have had something to do with it being October (back in 2006, not last month,) with the trees starting to become less green – or it might not, since I’ve seen fallen leaves still reflecting a lot of IR. Either way, I liked the starkness, increased here of course, but I would have preferred that bare tree to have been more prominent and isolated in the frame – since this was taken from a highway overpass, my options were pretty limited. And it might seem at first that I had problems with leveling the camera, but it’s fine, as a look at the horizon will confirm – the spillway runs at an angle to the road, so that’s the bit that’s not ‘level.’

Back to this year, when the early morning sunlight and some coarse textures lent themselves to the ol’ noir treatment.

juvenile likely eastern river cooter Pseudemys concinna concinna perched on rock, green channel only
This is another just-green-channel image, which worked best for the contrast; the red channel was lower contrast than this, while the blue channel (being the opposite of yellow) rendered most of the colors within as too dark overall. Most especially, that eye was a necessary element, but having the stripes and the carapace textures in the shadows provided more detail and depth.

I did these next two quite some time back, and never posted them because I couldn’t decide which worked better, so now I’m cheating and posting them both.

abandoned Lady Anne in super-contrast greyscale
We hunted down this shipwreck (okay, it’s more likely just abandoned) last year during a beach trip, but I didn’t quite get the appearance I was after with the direct approach, so later on I went the extremely high contrast route, which is an improvement, but I’m still unsure. There are two versions.

abandoned Lady Anne in super-contrast greyscale
These were both done using a technique discussed back on another holiday, yet what probably would have worked better would have been trees (or some horizon element) behind the roof of the wheelhouse instead of open sky. But that’s something for painters to chase – photographers can only take what’s there. Mostly.

It’s autumn, right? So it’s time for some autumn, um, monochrome…

oak-leaf hydrangea Hydrangea quercifolia leaves in autumn colors, without the colors
Okay, definitely barking up the wrong tree here (because this is not even a tree,) but this is the season for foliage colors, and the original was a fine example, so what am I doing converting this to greyscale? If we could answer that, it all might click into place. Doubtful, of course, quite a long shot actually, but the possibility exists.

Still, the contrast between the colors came out nicely. I forget what I did for this one (it was a while ago,) but it’s likely just the red channel.

Yet another, from deep in the mists of time.

morning dew in spiderwebs, extreme closeup greyscale
Let’s face it: this one looks good in both color and greyscale, and would look good no matter what I did to it – it’s that badass. I’d buy a giant print of this myself, if I wasn’t the one that had taken it. That it hasn’t produced my fortune yet is just evidence that too many people aren’t very bright, but then, we already knew that.

[Did you like that subtle little manipulation? I pretty much said, “Only stupid people wouldn’t buy this.” That’s slick marketing, that is.]

Finally, we return to the green treefrogs, because damn I shot a lot of them this year (good eatin’ through the hard winter months.)

green treefrog Hyla cinerea in mixed channel greyscale
Referring back to the original, you can see that the birdbath was a bright blue, which definitely begged for the channel-clipping treatment, but when examined, the blue channel was actually overwhelming, rendering the frog too dark while the birdbath was almost solid white. So I kept the green channel too, and adjusted the opacity of that to blend them together (like the first frog at top,) until I got the contrast that I wanted. Without seeing the original, it’d be easy to believe the birdbath was white and this affected the exposure to darken the frog, but no, we’re only talking crass editing tricks here. But if it works, it works, and I’m not going to claim this is Kodak Tri-X or anything – hey, I own up to my editing efforts.

Ah, what the hell

November 7, 2020 Al Denelsbeck

I know we just did some moon stuff a few days back, and we also just had (or are about to have, if I finish this post before the other hits its schedule) a lot of B&W images, but I liked this clip and had to share.

After playing around a bit, I angled the camera to align with the diagonal direction of travel for the moon, aiming slightly above it to let it come into the frame; it was definitely more dramatic with the terminator leading and the details slowly coming into view. Yeah, I know it’s not quite centered – you try to perfectly line up something traveling diagonally by shifting the camera ahead of it while it’s tilted at a matching angle.

Again, this is real time, the amount that the moon actually travels across the sky (or the Earth rotates, blah blah.) I did several clips, and this was the last, coming up pretty clear. But I have others in the middle that showed a noticeable amount of scintillation which caused the details, especially along the terminator, to ripple. While this is caused by atmospherics, air densities and movement and all that, I don’t know why they changed so significantly, back and forth, in the half hour or so that I was out. Yet this also shows that, unless conditions are optimal, a long exposure of a dimmer subject (everything else in the sky, really,) would easily be blurred by these changes, no matter how stable and sharp the rig, no matter how accurate the tracking system.

I’m gradually getting closer to doing some real telescope stuff, and expect to have some results this winter. We’ll just have to see what transpires.

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