As further evidence of my poor planning about this time a year ago, the normal weekly entry for the ‘On This Date’ posts would be tomorrow, but as I look at my spreadsheet for December 30th I find that (as far as my annotated, digital images go anyway,) I’ve shot nothing. Not a sausage. Hell of a finalé, eh? Ah, well – see you next year.
Nah, I can’t let it go at that. I did have some photos for both the 29th and 31st, so we’re going to double-down here at the end of the year and have two ‘On This Date’ posts this week. Call it your christmas bonus for a productive year, or something. Call it whatever you like – who’s gonna stop you?
So, going back to 2006, we have – well, only one that I’ll post, because I shot three all told, and two of them are detail photos of the underside of barnacles. I don’t think you can handle that much excitement, so we’ll use the other.
Curious to see how well digital handled long night exposures, I set up a borrowed Canon 10D in my adjoining woods and fired off a 15 minute exposure, aimed north – I knew I couldn’t locate Polaris through the trees but aimed in the general direction with a wide angle lens, and I believe I may have still snagged it anyway. The star arcs will describe a circle around Polaris (or would, if you could let the exposure go for 24 hours and, like, not have the sun come up,) so they’ll kind of indicate where it would be, and while it would be easy to believe that it’s that brightest spot buried in the tree to the left, that’s not quite in the right location. Plus that seems to be a little elongated itself from tracing its own partial circle. No, it looks like Polaris may be that very faint star directly to the right of the bright one, partially hidden within the branches (because it should be fairly bright in this exposure.) Regardless, the test told me a few things, including how digital sensors register light pollution (better than Provia film, by a wide margin,) and how distinctly they register star colors (worse than Provia.)
I recalled a post talking about doing a long exposure on the Mamiya medium format camera (thus film, and likely Provia at that,) and I do have a scan of such a photo – but then I remembered that I hadn’t even started the blog by this date, so that post and the subsequent MF exposure is referring to a different date – this one, actually. I suppose I could have posted it for the ‘On This Date’ post back in January, but no, that fell on the 29th too.
Oh, hell – it’s already scanned, so here it is. Just don’t count it as on this date, y’hear?
I’d have to go back and see if all the dust was on the slide itself (thus within the camera lens) or an artifact of scanning, which I consider more likely because this was done with a flatbed scanner with medium format capability. This is Fuji Provia F, better than the digital but still not ideal, though that may be due to the conditions and light pollution more than anything else; that orange glow on the tree is due to the neighbor’s porch light. My goals to do some of these long exposures while at the Outer Banks (the darkest spot within about 300 kilometers) still haven’t come to fruition, thought I did try.
So for our next negative from the mists of time, we have this authentic B&W image from Florida, back when I was experimenting with random films and developing them in the bathroom. It’s grainy partially from being old film, partially from being a time exposure in the dark, and partially from developing at a less-than-ideal temperature; film does best when the chemicals are 20°C, but even the cold water came out of the tap in Florida during the summer at better than 25° – subsequent efforts involved moderating the temperature of the chemicals with an ice bath. Anyway, what we’re seeing here is a train bridge at night, a long exposure as the train passed through, thus the streaks of light atop the bridge. [As a side note, I always find it disconcerting that train bridges have no guardrails, but then they don’t really need them, and if the train starts to leave the tracks, ain’t no railing gonna do a damn thing about it. Yet I still expect to see them.] This image has an anomaly, however, and it takes a little to grasp it.
The anomaly comes from the glow in the water, seen in the lower half of the frame. The lights of the train were reflecting in the water as they passed, and this is normal and expected. What’s not normal are the dark periodic arcs in those reflections, because they don’t make immediate sense. The exposure was for an unknown time, but at least thirty seconds, possibly much longer – doesn’t matter too much, because the key bit comes from the passage of the train lights, so call it ten seconds or so. It’d be easy to consider these shadows, but the moving lights wouldn’t throw a distinct shadow in one location – instead, they’d produce tracking shadows that would pan across the frame during the exposure and thus almost eradicate themselves in the reflections thrown from the same locations when they weren’t there. Not to mention that there wasn’t anything (like guardrails) to throw shadows in the first place.
So here’s what I think is going on, and engineer Jim Kramer agreed, years back when I first showed him the photo: it’s an artifact of ripple interference. Bear with me here.
Any water source will show ripples a great percentage of the time, mostly due to wind or breezes, sometimes due to flow, and these will generally be in one direction. And then, disturbances (splashing, vibrations) may throw out another set, usually expanding in concentric circles from the source; these won’t eradicate the existing linear ripples, but intersect with them, in places causing combined-height wave peaks, in others cancelling each other out and producing very localized smoothness. So as the train passed over the bridge, it produced vibrations that carried down the bridge supports and into the water, and these ripples interacted with the existing ones to create a double, overlapping pattern. And at key points in this pattern, the water simply faced the wrong way to send reflections of the train lights back to the camera. Because one set of ripples originated from fixed points, the bridge supports, the pattern presented a more-or-less immovable interference pattern.
The part that doesn’t seem to support this hypothesis is the number of bridge supports versus the number of interference arcs, plus the fact that they don’t appear to line up. And I can’t explain why there’s only one arc on the right side but dual arcs for the rest. So without experiments or video that seems to show how these patterns work, I’m not 100% convinced that this is right. Yet I also don’t have any other explanations.
Notice how, over on the right side of the frame, the reflection from the bright light in the distance cuts right through the dark arc, but this is expected because that light was shining on the water well before and after the train had passed, so the interference pattern would not have existed at those times. I don’t recall for certain which way the train was traveling, but I was favoring right to left, and the reflections kind of support this too, in that they’re extending further out/down from the bridge on the right side, where the ripples could travel farther while still catching the train’s lights.
Anyway, I thought it was an interesting artifact, and I remember noticing and pondering about it after scanning in the negative, way back when. And since there’s little to shoot and no time to shoot it anyway, this is what I got right now ;-)
Today is the twelfth anniversary of my first blog post, and that means it now has to pay adult prices at the movie theaters – even when it can’t see adult movies, be tried as an adult, or any other functions claimed by that exalted/overrated classification. Kind of a rip-off, really. Just for the perspective, this is itself the 1,934th post, but only the 1,877th that contains nothing but trivial, uninteresting content.
I looked to see if I’d shot any photos on that date, but nope; the first appears in 2010, but hey, close enough – one of those will appear at the bottom.
Anyway, a brief update. It’s been, I think I’ve said, a frustrating season, or maybe period – it’s lasted much longer than a month, has overlapped the ‘season’ change from fall to winter, and so on. As you likely already know, the US Postal Service has gone totally bonzo-fogus – both The Girlfriend and I have been tracking packages that are apparently taking sightseeing tours of the entire US, and so christmas carols this year included repeated choruses of, “This isn’t everything – more will arrive eventually,” which isn’t that catchy and hopefully won’t survive to next christmas. My work schedule has been almost as unpredictable and much more annoying.
And then there’s the computer, and while I can go into gruesome detail regarding that, I’ll just say that the end may, perhaps, be in sight. Long story short: the computer/motherboard that I’m now using, while sufficient in performance and abilities for my needs, has a BIOS lacking in one particular thing, and that’s support for harddrives larger than 2 terabytes. I discovered this, naturally, when I installed a pair of 3TB drives within, because the files are growing routinely and I need the extra storage space. Numerous workarounds were attempted, none of them working, until I finally decided to install a Solid-State Drive for the operating systems – this made the BIOS happy, and once past that and into the operating systems, the larger harddrives were not an issue. But this meant installing both Linux and Windows on said SSD, and I upgraded one (Linux Mint 20) and downgraded the other (Windows 7, because Windows 10 bites ass.) This led to numerous reformatting issues, including default file locations and rebuilding stuff like the MIDI music structure (more on that someday,) and I just discovered this morning that Windows 7 is now having issues. So, it’s ongoing, but at least the prime functionality has been restored. If you’re having trouble sleeping, send me your phone number and I’ll call you with the entire list of actions and results.
With all this, I really haven’t felt like working on posts, not at all helped by there being (as seen above) nothing interesting to post about. I know these are all first-world problems and a lot of people have it worse, much worse, and I should really stop whining, but I also feel obligated to have regular content here and feel guilty when I don’t, obligated to explain it, and I can’t explain it without delving into grumbling. Ah, well. I’ve got a couple of light posts that’ll be along eventually, and I’m still considering what I’ll be doing for the year’s end, or beginning, or whatever, but there’s nothing promising on the horizon. Is this screed giving an accurate reflection of my mood and attitude lately? I’ll see what I can do about digging up some humor…
In the interim, have a set of sparkly icicles, taken on this date in 2010, aftermath of a winter storm a few days earlier. I’d had a version of this sitting in the blog folders for a long time, never having made it into any posts, then purged it along with many others when weaning that folder down – and now reinstated it (but cropped tighter and bigger now.) That’s what I consider progress.
It’s pretty late at night/early in the morning on christmas, and I stepped out back to find something in the backyard (don’t ask.) It’s been raining like a mofo here for the past 24 hours, with some tornado warnings even, but the temperature’s been surprisingly warm – not for very long, so the meteorologists say, yet right now it’s not uncomfortable at all, if you don’t mind the dampness. And as I walked alongside the back deck with the headlamp, a trivial detail caught me by surprise, and I had to go in and bring the camera back out. I was afraid it might no longer be visible when I returned, but I got lucky.
That’s one of our ubiquitous green treefrogs (Hyla cinerea,) under the surface of the water within a planter – in fact, the exact same planter seen here, albeit a bit more weathered now from the intervening decade.
I was a little concerned that I might have been seeing a dead frog, and was about to snake a finger in to check once I finished shooting a couple of frames, but before I had the chance, my friend here decided it didn’t like the headlamp at this time of night, turned and ducked deeper within the reservoir. Well, fine.
I keep thinking I’m going to have a little more time to work on posts, and I keep finding myself wrong, but I’m making progress on another project for the first time in weeks, so even though I’m not putting up a lot here to read or view, it’s only temporary, and I’ll be back soon.
In the meantime, enjoy the holidays, be mellow, stay safe, and stay smart. Smarter, even.
And here we are – the 52nd week of the series, and thus the last ‘On This Date’ post of the year! Except, no, we’re better than a week away from the end of the year, aren’t we? That’s what I get for starting this on the 1st. And seriously, what kind of creator makes a solar or sidereal year with such an odd number of hours in it? Sheesh…
Anyway, we’ve got some seriously crappy photos this time around, but it’s mostly to illustrate a meaningless coincidence, as well as the less-than-optimal shooting conditions in NC winter, and to kinda-only-not-really make up for not posting a lot recently. Maybe it would have been better just forgetting all about this exercise…
But we’re committed now, so like a bad marriage, we forge on even though no one is happy about it! For, um, reasons…
We’ll start with 2006, when I heard noises in the woods behind my rental duplex and crept out with the Canon Pro 90 IS.
What you see here – perhaps – is a small herd of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) really not far off of my driveway, and I only took the photo to demonstrate that their coloration is better camouflage than a lot of people realize. Take your time, and see how many you can find. I’ll sit here and look for a different career while you’re doing so.
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[Hmmm, “Garage Floor Stain Cleaner”… probably better than what I’m doing now…]
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[Ooo, “Social Media Expert, must be proficient in TikTok and ShitFuck”… I could probably fake it…]
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All set? Let’s see how you did.
Really, I spent way too long with these images, and it’s largely because, a few years later, I got this.
This was in the same area, even though I’d moved out by then (this being 2010,) but I’d seen this albino doe a total of three times, and this was the second time that I’d gotten photos – once was by the headlights of the car in the very early morning, so you know that photo was an award winner! I really should have been trying harder to stalk it, but white-tailed deer wander a bit, are largely active at night, would have been nearly always on private property, and I really didn’t have the time to do so anyway. Albinism is semi-rare among deer – most people have at least heard of examples, and in some places there are entire herds of them. The natural predators that would have spotted them more easily (than, you know, the image at top) and culled those anomalies are barely around anymore, and even some of the deer hunters let them be – while others, of course, think they’re a better trophy, because deer are so notoriously hard to find and incredibly dangerous to boot. Yes, that was sarcasm – those that it’s aimed at need the help identifying it, I’m sure.
Yet, in between those, I got some photos too, because in 2007, there was another conjunction, this one of the moon and a planet.
I was still playing around with the Pro 90, but I suspect I did some slides of this too – I know I could have scanned those in, since the topic is, ‘On This Date,’ with nothing to specify digital, but I don’t feel like it. This exposure, about 45 minutes before the closest approach, was exposed for the moon details, and thus the planet was only moderately visible. The next, around the time of the closest approach, was exposed for the planet this time.
The images aren’t labeled with anything more than the frame number, but that yellowish hue to the planet made me think I knew which one it was, and a check with Stellarium confirmed it: this was Mars. I’m fairly certain this was at the time of the closest pass, though the timestamp on the photo denies this, but since it was off by close to an hour, I’m pretty certain that I hadn’t changed the camera clock to reflect Daylight Saving Time (seriously, this needs to be eradicated entirely – how are we ever going to explain this to aliens? “Oh, well, we get up at different times to use the daylight better, but we change the clocks constantly to pretend we don’t.”) But back on the subject, you can see that the brightness of the moon and Mars are significantly different and thus hard to get detail of both in the same photo, not that this slows down astrophotographers anymore because pasting two or more photos together is de riguer, it seems, but I tend to keep my shameless compositing to a minimum. And at this focal length, what are we gonna see from Mars anyway? Really good detail requires a telescope, and then of course, the moon would be well out of the frame.
Finally, we have 2016.
I did the small aperture thing to produce the starbursts, as I was experimenting with the christmas tree that year, because what else ya gonna do? Another version appeared in a post back then, that one with a wide-open aperture to render the out-of-focus lights as round blobs (helped by the closer focus.) We didn’t bother with a tree this year, or indeed even lights, because both The Girlfriend and I are lazy shits (it’s been that kind of year,) but if you have them up yourself or can sneak into the neighbor’s house without too much trouble, go experiment and make the most out of the season.
Happy Holidays, everyone, if I don’t catch you before then! I mean, who the hell knows what I’ll be posting and when?
Yes, I did indeed get out to view the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn yesterday evening – for what it was worth. I can tell you right now, there are better efforts out there, with better, more dedicated equipment (and probably no small amount of digital “enhancement,” or “compositing,” or as most people call it, “photoshopping.”) I knew how challenging a really impressive photo (or video) would be, so I wasn’t holding my breath.
But enough hemmingenhawing – let’s see what I really got.
This was with the Tamron 150-600 at 600mm, with a (not quite) 2x teleconverter, so effectively about 1000mm, and this is full resolution – the sharpest that I got. Got the evidence of Saturn’s rings and the faintest hint of Jupiter’s banding, but none of its moons (even though four of them were very much in evidence.) They were too faint for this exposure, which was 1/25 sec, ISO 800, and attempts at brighter/longer exposures turned up just the barest hint – and a lot of motion blur.
This was not from the rotation of the Earth, but instead from the breeze. We – meaning The Girlfriend, Buggato, and myself – had all gone down to a prime spot on Jordan Lake with a decent view to the west-southwest – and so had quite a few other people, several dozen at least. It was actually hard to tell, since there are no lights there and thus a decent count wasn’t going to happen – actually recognizing anyone else wasn’t going to happen. There was everything from people attempting to take photos with a handheld phone (snerk!) to some damn big telescopes on hand, and everything in between. I actually had two moderate telescopes along, but both of them have been in the process of getting put into spec and so neither one was going to get anything better than what I got with the camera lens, and actually much worse.
Here’s the deal: a standard telescope eyepiece is optimized for the ‘exit pupil’ which is just a little larger than your eye’s own pupil, because that’s all it needs, and this makes it several dozen times smaller than a camera sensor. Not to mention that it has its own lenses optimized for the focal length and light path. So attaching a standard SLR camera isn’t going to produce what we see when peering through the scope, because of this exit pupil thing, the lack of intervening lenses, and the size of the camera body itself (mostly the mirror box for that reflex mirror to throw the image to the camera viewfinder.) Ideally, a dedicated eyepiece camera should be used, but they’re damned expensive and I’m not into it enough to drop that kind of dough, especially when good exposures of interesting stuff will also need to have a tracking motor (which I have now, though I haven’t tried it yet) and precise alignment every time the scope is set up so the motor is actually going in the direction it should. That becomes a lot of effort for an area that possesses far too much light pollution. Plus the rig is large and cumbersome. So I should simply not have bothered with it at all last night, but briefly, I had a peek at the conjunction in the eyepiece, and it was pretty cool – moons plainly visible, and much brighter planets that the photo above. There’s still a chance that further efforts will appear here later on – just, not of such a conjunction because that’s a wee bit down the road.
While there, I re-aimed at the first-quarter moon and did a little video, which if nothing else demonstrated the effect of the breeze on the rig. I could have combated this a little by keeping the tripod down as far as possible, reducing the length of the leg and center columns that would be susceptible to the wind, and that would have worked better for the conjunction, down near the horizon as it was – not so much for the moon, way above at a 50° altitude. But anyway, here’s the clip, and note that even though the crowd is easily audible, the breeze barely makes an impression on the very wind-sensitive onboard mic – this was a breeze, and nothing more.
Now a trivial find, as I was editing. I was using the moon for sharp manual focusing, because the planets were far too small and with too little detail for precise work, and fired off a frame while the exposure was still set for the planets (and Jovian moon attempts.) Of course this overexposed the moon a hair, but it also brought out something else.
At full resolution, there’s a hint of motion blur at the terminator on the moon, and of course the exposure glare – but there’s a little boogie over on the dark side of the moon. No, it’s not a little prism (you’ll get it eventually,) but I wasn’t sure what it was, and to my eye, it was borderline of being inside the arc of the moon’s darkened edge – which would make it a satellite in front of the moon. I quickly brought up Stellarium (instead of sitting upright in my chair) and determined that it was only a star – but one that, had I kept watching for only a few minutes longer, would have disappeared behind the moon. Well, hell anyway – not that I could have done much about it, since a) it wasn’t visible even slightly to the naked eye, and so I didn’t know it was there, and b) it would not have been visible in video exposures either, so the actual disappearance could not be captured. Which is a shame, because winking out on the dark side would look cooler than disappearing against the bright side.
[A note: While the motion of the Earth’s rotation has the moon sliding left to right across the sky, at least in this hemisphere, the star disappeared against the left side, meaning the moon was moving left – which is true, since it pursues its own orbit. In essence, it moves a little bit slower across the sky than the background stars – and during a lunar eclipse, this motion also becomes apparent.]
Oh, and the reason that I said, “instead of sitting upright in my chair” above is that, despite the money I spent on this computer monitor, it still has a bit of gamma difference depending on viewing angle, and it takes a direct, or slightly high, angle to make out the full range of light. Had I been sitting up, I could have seen the very faint hint of Earthshine on the dark side of the moon, and known the star was indeed outside that arc. If you can’t make it out yourself, you may want to adjust your own monitor – it’s barely visible, but there – and if you’re doing this on a phone, I only laugh at you because you shouldn’t be playing with toys at your age.
But while we’re here, I’ll include a ‘normal’ exposure of the moon, only moments after the one above – as you can see, that rogue star isn’t visible, though it would be a few more minutes before it actually vanished behind the moon.
I’m slowly getting back into posting, though in your favor, I’ve been avoiding venting about the numerous frustrations that have been occurring, but regardless, I’ll get some more out a bit at a time. Go drink some eggnog or something in the meantime.
In 2005, I was living alone and thus wasn’t decorating a lot for the holidays, but I did run a single strand of lights along the railing of the balcony deck. Generally, we get one snowstorm a winter in NC, January or February, so in mid-December it’s more likely to be rain. I decided to play around with the lights and the small-aperture starburst thing, and liked what was happening, but the leaf was too shiny so I dried it on my shirt and tried again. A different crop, leveled properly, made it into the site gallery and into a public gallery as well. Later on, I played around with a self-portrait by the same lights, and The Girlfriend liked it enough to have it framed.
A year later, I was back onto a vivid colors kick.
I actually came across this many months ago, like March, and noticed that its origin date would fall on a Wednesday this year, so I saved it for this entry. That year (which would be 2006,) I was experimenting for a mildly-competitive photo mandate from a newsgroup, and I can’t even remember the topic but I think it was either Interiors or Technology, something like that. Anyway, I tricked out a faux CD/DVD reader image using the guts from an old laser mouse for the reader and an LED flashlight swept in a curve outside the frame to produce the rainbow refraction from the surface of the CD – it took a little playing to get the right angle for the effect. I was pretty pleased with it, but wish I’d had another light shining up through the center – not to be convincing or anything, but just for added emphasis. And while we’re here, I’ll point out that you can see the tip of the alligator clamp holding the circuit board for the mouse in the upper left corner.
A big jump to 2012 now.
The full story is here, but the gist is, this is a studio shot with another photo print of mine serving as the background – the one at right, in fact (which was not shot on this date so don’t count it,) an image that also served as an example in my video on cropping images. It was rotated 90° widdershins, but you can see just see a hint of the ladybeetle at top.
I keep meaning to shoot a handful of images just to use as macro studio backdrops, out-of-focus photos consisting mostly of one color or hue, to have a selection handy, but keep forgetting about it when I’m in good locations to do so. I’ll task the Invisible Mr Bugg with reminding me…
And finally, from 2016.
I’d missed out on a few gorgeous sunrises occurring right as I was heading off to work (you know, the drudgery kind,) so I made it a point to try for one on my day off, and this was the result – not as good as some of the others might have been, but more than acceptable. This was also posted back then, so take note: even though I could be inflating the uploads numbers by using unseen photos for these posts, I’ve been reposting some of the images already on the site – I’m not greedy, or egotistical or whatever might be used to describe such an attitude. Well, not that much.
First off, I apologize for anyone who’s ever seen this before, but not that much, because chances are you can watch it again without being bored. As internet popularity goes it’s a little old, but I doubt it received as much attention as some woman j’accusing a white cat (yes that’s a word.) I’m still not going to have a lot to post in the foreseeable future, unless I actually go somewhere a little later on and, the crucial bit, find something while I’m at it. So as I’m sitting here tracking packages and wondering if our postal service has completely shit the bed, we have this.
I came across this a few years ago I think, and saved the link then promptly forgot about it, which is a shame because it’s damn cool. My original link was through Gizmodo (though I believe it was Sploid at that time,) but their post didn’t provide a lot of background so I’m just going to embed the video here. Basic premise: RicKy Syers (his spelling) is a puppeteer and musician, and from the looks of things an accomplished drummer on his own, who tricked out a puppet he calls “Chopsy” and then demonstrates just how good it looks by playing along to Rush’s ‘Tom Sawyer.’
I want you to note that the ensemble even has a working kick drum and high-hat cymbal, so just the model work is impressive. But this was only a little demo, with the song playing in an ambient room and the actual rattle of the puppet on the drumset carrying through, so it wasn’t long before he did another version, this time with a music track on its own, as well as multi-camera work and synced (!) stage lighting, to Rush’s ‘2112.’
I can’t help but think how almost surreal it might have looked had he shrouded himself and his manipulating sticks in black; I also wonder how many more times he pulled this off before the arms of the puppet simply disintegrated. But there was one thing missing, and had he been able to include it, the illusion might have been virtually (heh!) complete: the ability for the puppet to sweat copiously. I mean, c’mon!
Now I gotta go play some other music so I don’t have Rush going through my head incessantly…
The moment someone talks about timing when discussing photography, most people immediately think of tripping the shutter, getting the photo at the key moment that ideal action or positioning occurs, and this is certainly one aspect that’s important, and thus, the first that I’ll discuss – which tells you there’s more coming along, too.
Timing the shutter trip is not just about reflexes. First off, recognize that the speed of the button press does not increase with exertion; we’re talking a movement of less than a millimeter on every camera made since 1985, so slamming, squeezing, or really, doing anything other than a gentle press will do nothing for your timing, and a whole lot towards moving the camera, changing your framing and/or inducing motion blur. Don’t get excited, don’t tense up. Just a subtle little touch – that’s all it takes.
More, timing relies on anticipating the moment, and occasionally, the minimal delay between that button press and the actual capture of the image – in this era of electromagnetic aperture controls, mirror actions, and shutter curtains, most cameras from the last ten to fifteen years have release delays so small they won’t affect anything except the most demanding of subjects, but older cameras may have noticeable delays, and really, the only thing to do about this is get used to it and compensate accordingly.
This is assuming that you’re ready to trip the shutter at that very millisecond, which requires that you’re paying close attention and prepared for the (perhaps unexpected) action. Generally, this should be the case the moment the camera is raised to your eye, but it’s startling how many people are simply ‘looking’ and not ‘ready to take the shot’ when they do this. Finger on shutter release, AF and metering active (usually this is done with the initial ‘half-press’ of the shutter release,) and subject aligned as desired. It’s more a mindset, really, the internal voice telling yourself, “I’m ready – show me what you got.”
A quick note about trusting frame rates. Current cameras can rip off a lot of frames quickly if you hold the shutter down (and have that option set in the first place) – as many as ten frames per second (fps) on the top-end models, but usually between 2.5 to 5. This means it’s tempting to just let the camera crank away when something interesting is happening, and hope that one of those frames captures the precise moment that you want. It’s a bad habit, one that I often warn against. Let’s say that you want to capture the contact of a foot with the ball in some sporting event, and to freeze action, you have a shutter speed of 1/250 second. With a rate of 10fps, you’ll still only capture 10/250 of of the action, or 1/25 of the action every second, or 4% if you like. And a typical kick takes place in about 1/4 second, so now we’re down to about a 1% chance. Granted, there’s probably a bracket of acceptable periods of contact, so let’s be extremely generous and say your chances are as high as 10% – is that enough? Better to simply wait for that particular action and trip the shutter right then.
Additionally, periodic things like a bird flapping its wings can actually coincide with the frame rate, so while you might be hoping to capture the bird with its wings raised high, you may get a sequence of frames with them in the exact same position; I’ve done this several different times. At the very least, insert slight pauses in the sequences, lifting off the shutter release for a fraction of a second to try and break this pattern – because, yeah, trying to time the flapping wings is exceptionally hard.
Anticipation is a very big thing that applies to countless subjects, the readiness that something will suddenly become a lot more photogenic, that some behavior or action or emotional response appears that makes the photo many times better than without. In some cases, this is a knowledge of the subject. In my present pursuits, I can often spot when a bird is about to take flight, because they physically prepare for it. When I was shooting weddings in the past, it was recognizing people, the earnest storyteller who would eventually reach a punchline, the sudden delight when someone new walks up. Behavior is more predictable than we often believe, but it takes observation and recognition of trends and tendencies.
… just a fraction later than idealSome of it, too, is planning and awareness of conditions. Again, presently, it’s knowing there’s a patch of clear blue sky that the flying bird will eventually pass into, or the head angle that will give a sparkle to the eye. With the past weddings, it was knowing the happy couple would reach an ideal spot in the entryway arch, or that the falling bouquet would appear best a meter or less above the heads/hands of the wedding party. This position means this will appear in the background, or the light subject will pass in front of a darker background (thus delineating it better) when it gets to this point. Not seeing this until it happens will often mean it’s too late to take advantage of.
Much of my macro work is done at very high magnification with a very short depth of field, handheld because setting up a tripod is both too slow and far too difficult in most situations. The flash takes care of motion blur, but not camera motion, the trivial wobbles and shifts in my position that cause the subject to wander in and out of that short depth-of-field, so crucial to these photos is the ability to trip the shutter as I lean back into the range of sharp focus. The same may be said for action shots in natural light, especially with a wide aperture that, again, shortens the depth-of-field, let’s say the sports doofus (I really couldn’t care less about sports) approaching the camera. Rather than relying on autofocus to try and tack a subject that continually changes distance, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn’t, you can set focus manually at the range that the subject will enter and trip the shutter as they hit this sweet spot. Some camera bodies, with Nikon notably, have this built in, usually called ‘trap focus,’ but I have never had the opportunity to try this out. If you’ve developed the skill on your own, you can do this with any camera, without having to switch settings.
Timing of conditions is another important aspect. Sure, it’s easy to know that sunrises and sets are ideal times (sometimes, anyway,) but it helps to know that the light and sky conditions will change noticeably within minutes or even seconds, as well as the chance that something photogenic will enter the frame; the sailboat may have only a moment or three when it turns at the right angle to throw a reflection from the hull or catch light through the sail, as well as when it passes across the glitter trail, the reflections of the sun on the water. Yet, changes can occur at any time of the day, such as when the breeze moves the leaves or stalks in the right direction, or tosses the fur of your subject just right. And the light can change, sometimes suddenly on partly-cloudy days, which changes the reflections, the color cast, the contrast, and the shadows, all factors in how the photo looks. Colorful subjects look better in lower-contrast light, like hazy or partly-cloudy, while textures look better with higher contrast and sharper shadows, so turning towards those subjects as the light changes can give you much better results.
I often tell my students that those fluffy white cumulus clouds that we all drew in grade school are very short-lived, especially around here; within the hour, they typically either vanish or thicken up towards overcast. And their position in the frame makes a difference too, filling in a bare patch of sky or appearing alongside (but not behind) our chosen subjects. The sun angle makes a difference on how blue the sky appears as well, tending to be deepest exactly opposite the sun, so midday is often not the best time to be out shooting.
Which brings us to the hour of the day. Mornings are the time for fog, dew, frost, and the first bird activities of course, so even without the performance of a nice sunrise sky, there are often subjects to be exploited. Evenings see the last bird activities as they forage before finding a place to roost, as well as returning boats or, if you’re into that kind of thing, the emergence of human nightlife. Dusk will occasionally reveal the early forays of the nocturnal species, but if you’re willing to go looking by flashlight (or ideally headlamp,) you can find the night dwellers, often species you will never see by day.
And then there are events, which may be as specific as an astronomical event or even just a flash at sunrise, or something particular in the lifecycle of a species, like the moment a fledgling leaves the nest box. For these, adequate preparations are necessary, such as knowing the exact times as well as being in a good location to witness the event, or it might take staking out a particular subject with the knowledge that it’s going to happen sometime soon; patience and readiness are the bywords here, perhaps testing your dedication to the pursuit because some of these things are only slightly predictable. For the black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) here, it had hung around the opening of the nest box for perhaps ten minutes, chattering excitedly for parents that were resolutely refusing to come by or answer (because that’s the way they convince the fledgling to commit,) before it abruptly bailed the box and started figuring out how controlled flight works from ground level. Its sibling, on the same day, took better than 40 minutes to get up its nerve, even though it was all alone in the nest box now. And while I captured this one (barely, and not very impressively,) after the long delay, the latter still leapt from the box while my hand was away from the shutter release.
It doesn’t matter how practiced you are, it doesn’t matter how ready you are – you will miss shots. These aren’t failures, they’re practice, the development of the skills necessary to improve your chances and your percentage of keepers. No pursuit is improved over dwelling on the missed opportunities – you just learn what you can, recognize that the dice didn’t roll your way this time, and keep your goals in mind for that next opportunity. But if you can give yourself an edge, that can only help.
Back on November 18th, I posted about going out early that morning to try and snag some of the Leonids meteor shower that was peaking then, and successfully capturing a couple. But a few days after that post as I was sorting the images, I looked closely at a few of them and realized that I was incorrect, in fact dead wrong, at least about a pair of them. They were pretty aligned, but not consecutive frames, and the frame in between didn’t show anything. Or so I initially thought.
Very close examination of the frame between those two (this is full resolution here) revealed the faint trace of a passage, right in line with the two on either side. In other words, I didn’t catch a pair of meteors, I caught three frames of a much slower satellite passing along in a polar orbit. The change in brightness indicates that it was rotating or tumbling, catching the sunlight from its high altitude off of a variably reflective surface or angle. In fact, it even appears in the next two frames as well, but extremely faintly as it exits the frame.
That’s not enough for me to illustrate effectively, of course, so I took the three frames and made an animated gif (pronounced, “zed”) from them. They had to be fairly large to even see the faint trace of the middle frame, and you’ll have to look closely.
It appears right in line with the others, though it seems I had a certain delay between the end of the first and the start of the second frame, much less so between the second and third. If it helps, look near the double star a little left and below center (these are HIP 34724 and HIP 34769, in the constellation Monoceros, while the bright star in the frame is Procyon.)
The movement of the stars isn’t evidence of my poorly aligning the frames, but their actual movement during that time, because the camera was on a tripod and firmly fixed, and I overlaid the complete frames before cropping. But unlike the first post, I can’t actually tell you which satellite this is, or even if it is one. Stellarium plots an awful lot of them, and you can even see them moving across the frame during the real-time displays, but this one hasn’t the faintest indication of being there.
There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that it’s actually some orbital debris, an unplotted bit of schmutz that split off from a launch or deployment. The other, more likely, is that it’s an Iridium satellite. Astronomers and enthusiasts from a decade or more ago know the Iridium series of defunct communication satellites, because they would produce brief and occasionally brilliant flares, even visible during the day, from their solar panels catching the right angle of the sun. The Iridium satellites are decaying in orbit now and are unpredictable due to atmospheric drag, so they’re no longer plotted – they’ll still be visible at times, but those times are variable and not tracked by astronomical software or websites. Most likely, they are tracked by military radar, keeping tabs on both any spy satellites and any debris that might pose a danger to other bodies in orbit, but that information isn’t readily available, if at all.
Now another bit of interest. Go back to that gif and look at the top left of the frame to see another satellite cruising across, right to left; this one isn’t plotted either. It starts to drive home how many things we have up there in orbit, because I was out there for just under an hour and caught an untold number of them, and right at the moment can’t even be sure that any streak that I captured is actually a meteor. I saw a pair, both outside of the camera’s angle of view, but do I have images of any? It seems more and more doubtful. And annoying.
But here’s something I didn’t post with the first, a satellite that I knew was there because I could see it moving, tracking slowly but perceptibly against the background stars, and I re-aimed the camera to capture part of its path.
Turns out this was the Hubble Space Telescope, which I’d made a couple of attempts to photograph before and failed because of conditions. The bright star nearby is Sirius, the brightest star in the sky (but still dimmer than several of the planets.)
Anyway, we can scratch this success off of my accomplishments, so maybe I’ll be out during the upcoming Geminids (peaking around the 13th) to try again. Sheesh.
The 
Timing of conditions is another important aspect. Sure, it’s easy to know that sunrises and sets are ideal times (sometimes, anyway,) but it helps to know that the light and sky conditions will change noticeably within minutes or even seconds, as well as the chance that something photogenic will enter the frame; the sailboat may have only a moment or three when it turns at the right angle to throw a reflection from the hull or catch light through the sail, as well as when it passes across the glitter trail, the reflections of the sun on the water. Yet, changes can occur at any time of the day, such as when the breeze moves the leaves or stalks in the right direction, or tosses the fur of your subject just right. And the light can change, sometimes suddenly on partly-cloudy days, which changes the reflections, the color cast, the contrast, and the shadows, all factors in how the photo looks. Colorful subjects look better in lower-contrast light, like hazy or partly-cloudy, while textures look better with higher contrast and sharper shadows, so turning towards those subjects as the light changes can give you much better results.
And then there are events, which may be as specific as an astronomical event or even just a 
Very close examination of the frame between those two (this is full resolution here) revealed the faint trace of a passage, right in line with the two on either side. In other words, I didn’t catch a pair of meteors, I caught three frames of a much slower satellite passing along in a polar orbit. The change in brightness indicates that it was rotating or tumbling, catching the sunlight from its high altitude off of a variably reflective surface or angle. In fact, it even appears in the next two frames as well, but extremely faintly as it exits the frame.
