The quick and dirty way

Al Denelsbeck

Those that follow and espouse pseudoscience, paranormal activity, alien visitation, conspiracy claims, alternative “medicine,” and plenty of other fringe beliefs can be found everywhere, and are often quite willing to get into a discussion/debate/argument/rant over such things. While there are a few of us that specifically seek to engage any such claims and are more-or-less prepared for the debates (which, let’s face it, is what they usually become,) many others aren’t so keen to go down that rabbit hole. I can’t really say that I blame them, because it’s the kind of thing that can go on forever and become very frustrating – even when you’re experienced with it. Believers, by a huge margin, aren’t the type to arrive at their conclusions through careful consideration of the pros and cons, pluses and minuses; usually, they latch onto something for much simpler reasons, often emotionally, and then try to find factors that help justify their emotions and thus make it all appear to be in the realm of rational decisions. So what’s most effective in dealing with such arguments is finding the way to display the lack of rationality, the little exceptions, or the blatant hypocrisies. But this is a type of fencing that can take some time to develop.

There’s a simpler way, however, and it works for a great many of these types of debates. Are you ready? Just say, “Okay, now what?”

Knowledge and learning have a particular trait, a goal if you will, and that’s to move forward, to know more about how our world works, to try and derive something useful from such endeavors. ‘Winning a debate’ is not a part of this process, nor is, ‘justifying an existing attitude,’ but that describes the goals of nearly all believers. It’s personal. They just don’t ever recognize this, and “Now what?” is a great way of laying it bare, because there almost never is an answer. I’ve used this a handful of times now and it’s stopped the debate dead each time.

It’s funny, because it can do a lot for highlighting the anachronisms and dichotomies that exist in the entire edifice.

“Well, scientists need to be investigating these things better!”

You just told me scientists aren’t trustworthy, part of the big conspiracy to hide the truth.

“See, that’s proof of alien visitors!”

Really? Cool! Where are they from, what energy sources are they using, do they have similar DNA, how do we contact them, do they play sports? Holy shit, I have a zillion questions…

“We need to shut Big Pharma down, go back to natural remedies!”

Hey, knock yourself out – sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you. Or just wait a few generations, and you’ll be the only ones left, right?

“There’s too many stories that show that ghosts exists to ignore them.”

Sure, okay. So what should I be changing in my life?

Seriously, it can be a lot of fun. Virtually every time, the goal of such debates is only to promote agreement, if that – sometimes the believer feels that they’re right if their opponent simply walks away, because dismissal is actually a sign of an unassailable position, right? It’s only their opponent’s intransigence that prevents them from admitting to it. Nobody that I’ve ever found, however, is ready for acceptance and especially progression – the next step simply doesn’t exist in their minds. And by that, you know what you’re dealing with.

Another simple tactic is to redirect their attentions. “Wow, Kennedy was killed by the CIA? It’s funny – I heard it was puppets of Castro.” Or, “You say jesus is our lord and savior? Well, what are you talking to me for? There’s a whole world full of other religions to convince first.” It’s a way of highlighting the peculiar demarcations that are drawn, where “Kennedy conspiracy” or “most of the world is religious” or “there are millions of people who swear by natural remedies” is support of their position, completely disregarding the thousands of conflicting claims underneath those big umbrellas. This can be especially fun, because just about everyone recognizes the presence of fanatics and isn’t ready to engage with them, even when they appear to be closer to meeting the believer’s own point of view than we are. Presenting the believer with the task of, ‘convince them first, then get back to me,’ will chase them away instantly and permanently.

The only topic that I can think of right now (I’m sure there are more) where the Now what? approach isn’t very effective is the anti-vaxx cult, primarily because their individual actions not to vaccinate their own children can affect the well-being of countless others who have parents with working brains – herd immunity is a thing. In such cases, engagement is the only legitimate response (since dismissing the matter is nothing but cowardice, with a lot of lives at stake,) and it helps to know at least a little about the topic. Not much is needed, really – the major proponents are laughable, the science ranging from a high of ‘dismal’ down to ‘nonexistent.’ This is one of the fields where the arguments are easily turned against themselves, since making a case that vaccinations are bad requires a scientific study, but the proponents routinely dismiss science as flawed or in the thrall of Big Pharma or whatever bugaboo is the dire threat of the month (it changes a lot, as do the supposed effects of vaccinations and the methods of countering them.) So, where exactly are these people getting their figures from? Ah, an ‘independent study?’ But how do you know they’re not paid shills? Show me how you prove this…

I am, as surprising as this might be, a big fan of elaborate sarcasm and, in some cases, outright derision – there really isn’t a point to treating something stupid with any kind of respect, and I’m inclined to think that it works against the skeptical goals to believe that we should. When employing this particular tactic, however, it helps to be as neutral and disingenuous as possible – after all, it’s a perfectly valid and logical response, one that effortlessly highlights the lack of social benefit for most of these topics. It’s not uncommon to hear a believer lament, “Scientists don’t take [so-and-so] seriously,” but this is more than a little hypocritical; science generally has standards and goals exponentially higher than any believer. It is precisely because the topics are taken seriously that they get dismissed through their lack of evidential support and/or because they lead nowhere.

I still love this lens

Al Denelsbeck

Or, The Ballad of an Equipment Experimenter.

unidentified backlit grasshopper OrthopteranYesterday while the Irascible Mr Bugg and I were out in the woods arguing over lens changes, I spotted a flash of pale wings in the sun and followed them. Turned out to be a variety of grasshopper (one of the big ones, that I tend to call a locust) that had spooked at our approach but landed on a nearby tree trunk, obligingly sidling around to get the sun behind itself. Okay, fine, I get the hint. I popped off a few frames with the Canon 100-300 L, since I already had it on the camera and I was working from a short distance off, then attached the Mamiya 80mm macro and crept closer. I eventually got close enough that the entire grasshopper, which measured all of 50mm in body length, couldn’t fit within the frame, and even had my own fingers the same distance away about to capture it, before it realized its terrible peril and flew off again.

I attempted to identify it once I was back home and had unloaded the memory card, but it turns out I had nowhere near enough photos to do this – there are a veritable assload of grasshoppers in the US, with very subtle differences between them (often enough seen only from directly over the back) and a lot of color variations among the same species that can make positive identification questionable even in the best of circumstances. These were not the best of circumstances, so the most I’m going to say is that I think this might be of the Subfamily Melanoplinae.

More interesting, to me at least, is some of the detail that could be seen when viewed more closely. The following image is full resolution from the original:

unidentified grasshopper Orthoptean in fine detail
I’d be inclined to say this is a Mediterranean species, judging from the hairs on its back, face, and chest, but maybe that only applies to humans…

Stupid stereotypes aside, I’ll let you determine how fine those hairs really are, but it’s safe to say we’re talking in the realm of spiderweb diameter. I was shooting wide open at f4, so focus range was short, as you can tell from looking at other areas of the grasshopper where the focus starts to go fuzzy, but just being able to resolve details at this level is impressive to me. And I didn’t even have the extension tube attached.

So, a bit of background explanation. The Mamiya 80mm macro is a lens intended for the Mamiya M645 series of cameras, medium-format film bodies long discontinued now. Manual focus, manual aperture. I had it for my M645J body, but adapted it to the Canon when my old dedicated macro lens started acting up and I didn’t have the money to repair or replace it. That was years ago, and I’m still using the damn thing, because it’s sharper than anything else I’ve ever used. To fit it onto the Canon bodies, however, took a little playing around.

homemade adapter for M645 lenses to Canon bodies
I used to be an avid model builder, and there’s a little bit of slang from those within that cult: “kit-bashing,” meaning scavenging parts from multiple model kits or old models, often not even related to the new one, to create additional parts or special details. That ability comes in handy when you like experimenting with camera equipment, because it can let you fit a lens that’s not even remotely similar to the body you want to use. In this case, I used a rear lens cap for the Mamiya M645 lenses (the largest diameter bit above) and drilled out most of the flat face, then epoxied in a reversing ring for Canon EOS bodies, itself only a few bucks online (a reversing ring is used to mount lenses backwards onto the body for extreme macro work, so it has an EOS mount on one side and filter threads for the front of the lens on the other – that’s the bit in the image with the red dot on it.) M645 rear lens caps don’t really lock on, however, they just snug down – they’re intended for dust protection, not actually holding the weight of the lens. So I had to create a locking tab.

locking tab details for homemade M645 to EOS adapter
Since the Mamiya lens doesn’t actually interact with the Canon body in any way, it doesn’t matter too much how they line up, so I just got reasonably close. I shaped the key pieces out of clear hard acrylic, because that material holds up the best out of those able to be worked easily with hand tools. The tab was carefully shaped to engage in the lens and pivot out of the way, then drilled through the middle for a pivot pin. The spring was scavenged from those little pins that hold watchbands to watches (a great source of tiny springs) and the pivot pin was just a portion of a straight pin, held at each end by little blocks of acrylic, with a hole drilled halfway through each, then epoxied to the Mamiya lens cap – you’re seeing one of them end-on here. Simple!

I wasn’t expecting a lot of use from it before something failed, but believe it or not, I used it for three or four years before I finally bought a dedicated adapter for about 40 bucks.

dedicated adapter for M645 lenses to EOS bodies
My homemade one still works just fine, because I used it to get this photo, but I have to say I consider such things a temporary measure – one cracked plastic piece can send your lens crashing to the ground, and the properly-machined metal adapters are recommended by far. Sometimes, however, such a thing isn’t close at hand, or even available, so if you’re handy enough and obsessed enough, you make do. It’s been working out well enough for me, at least.

On composition, part 27: Seeing ghosts

Al Denelsbeck

spiderweb with spider and dewdrops and background spiral
There appears to be, at least to me, a fundamental difference between how we view photographs and how we view ‘real life.’ It might say something interesting about our perceptions, but that’s a philosophical post for another time. When out someplace photogenic, for instance, we tend to notice certain things and yet entirely miss others, even when they fall within the frame of the photo that we’re taking. And we’re probably more alert to the details when we’re taking photos than otherwise. There’s a trait called “inattention blindness” that’s often very easy to demonstrate, with more than a couple of online videos showing how it works. From a photography standpoint, it’s how ‘photobombing’ can take place, where someone can show up in our photos because we never noticed them when taking the shot.

variable reflections and framingWhen we view the photos themselves, however, we tend to see most of the details. I suspect this is because, in the open world, there’s too many individual objects to pay attention to, and we pick the ones that our brains tell us are important. There’s also undoubtedly the visual aspect, most especially of depth perception, where we focus on something in particular and other things, out of focus, just don’t attract our attention. A photo is just one object, however, and we tend to think of it as ‘complete’ – what’s in there is intended to be in there and thus has some importance to the scene, mood, idea, whatever. Depth is flattened, with distance and separation between elements lessened or even eliminated, so background trees can easily blend into foreground bushes. It’s something that I warn my students about routinely.

But let’s take a look at that process, and most especially, seeing the unseen elements and using them creatively. One way that I demonstrate the difference is, when alongside some body of water, asking a student what color the water is. Usually the answer is something like, “Kind of greenish brown,” but for a photograph, this only applies if that’s the color register that’s going to appear in the image itself. Depending on the angle and the lighting, the water may reflect the sky or the background foliage, or show the color of the creek bottom, or even be inky black from reflecting nearby shadows – it’s easy enough to have combinations of these. By recognizing this, you can occasionally have the background of choice by changing which angle you’re shooting from and thus what the water is reflecting in your frame.

It’s not just water, however. Any portion of the background can become a useful element in the scene you create. Very often, it helps to position your subject against a contrasting background, or one that frames or surrounds it, while avoiding background elements that might interfere – the classic “pole out of the top of the head” is a prime example. As often as not, this means positioning yourself instead; crouching down can put a subject against a bright sky and eliminate clutter from background foliage, and for small subjects, you can even place a large leaf to change your background (or, in the macro studio, use a photo itself to provide a natural-looking background instead of the tabletop or garage walls.)

depth of field comparison images of skink
It’s probably obvious that the background behind the skink’s head could easily have been dark and thus wouldn’t set it off as well, but the difference in depth of field shows how this affects the impact too.

One of the harder aspects to manage is how the background will render due to depth of field, since most cameras routinely maintain the widest aperture, for clarity of vision and improved autofocus, up until the shutter is actually tripped; what this means is that depth of field will be the shortest available at that focal length and focus point in the viewfinder, but the image itself may render entirely differently. And while our eyes don’t have infinite depth of field, they focus so rapidly that we often consider everything to be in focus when examining the scene before we take the picture – it can be hard to know just what level of focus and blur is ideal. A lot of cameras have a depth-of-field preview option and it helps to know how to use this, but the view in the viewfinder/LCD is far removed from the finished image in size and resolution, so there usually still remains some guesswork.

dragonfly atop pond leaves casting shadow beneathWhat’s more fun, though often challenging, is to capture subtle details that don’t immediately leap to the viewer’s eye, but can be found on closer examination – there’s a certain delight in the discovery, and a recognition of your efforts to put together a clever image. Initially you may miss these yourself, but over time you’ll develop an ability to notice small details, or realize that a different approach might yield something twice as interesting. In a lot of ways being able to see things that others miss is a mark of a creative photographer, and can make the difference between a nice photo and a captivating one. It also helps to know what kind of effects you can produce, either in-camera or by editing; some scenes are obviously interesting, while others may become interesting with the application of a certain technique. This might mean adjusting exposure to make something darker and moodier, or boosting contrast to make it stark. It might even mean using a reflector or a focused light source to brighten a particular aspect of the scene and draw more attention to it, or simply converting it to monochrome or sepia tone – a faint hint of sepia and a bit of extra grain can instantly age a photo fifty years, but this often works best if you think of it when taking the original image.

The way that you frame (or subsequently crop) the shot can have an affect on how easy it is to see that extra element, since we’re used to expecting the important parts of the image to show up in certain areas – not too close to the edges, for the most part, but also balanced to a degree. If the subject seems too far off to one side or edge, we’ll be looking through the rest of the frame to see if there’s something else that was captured, and you can use this trait or intentionally thwart it if you like, sneaking in another element that falls too far from ‘proper’ framing to attract attention immediately.

butterfly with background leaves matching antennaeThere’s also a knack to seeing a particular element – a certain shape, or a certain color, or just a specific object – and realizing that it would work best when composed with another element, such as a contrasting color or complementary shape, then seeing if this can actually be accomplished; a simple example would be a yellow flower with another color blossom offsetting it from the background, which could require a significant shift from a ‘normal’ position to line the two up, but the end result is magnitudes better than the flower among neighbors of the same color, which is what everyone else sees.

Naturally, there’s the opposite side of the coin, where we have to see the subtle and unnoticed elements that we don’t want in the image in order to keep them out and avoid distractions – again, the photobomb effect, but it also applies to bits of trash or electrical wires or other things that we’ve tuned out but become far too noticeable in the resulting image. Granted, this is a pretty fundamental aspect of composition and it might seem like I’m belaboring the obvious, but it’s also true that all of us still miss things like this on occasion. It helps a lot to examine the surroundings in detail before even taking the camera out, so when the ideal subject or conditions or what-have-you captures our attention, we’re not wasting time looking over the entire frame to see what we don’t want in there – we’ve already chosen the vantage or angle that works best and is free from such detritus. As the bird crosses the sky, we already know that there’s a nice opening through the branches right there, or the clouds are optimal here, and can trip the shutter at the ideal moment even as we pan to maintain focus on the bird. Alternately, we might already have the lens aimed at a good spot (fixed on a tripod perhaps) and can nail the pic as the subject enters the precise portion of the frame. A little forethought can help a lot.

As we close, I’ll direct you back up to that opening image of the spiderweb. Yes, the spider was obvious and intended, a counterpoint to the focused dewdrops on the web, but what wasn’t intended was the spiral in the background, a bit of iron scrollwork on the porch behind the web. The resulting image was entirely different from how it looked in the viewfinder, due to aperture and flash, and I wasn’t expecting to see anything other than darkness back there. But the spiral is located very well in the frame, and forms a complementary curve with the most prominent strand of the web, not exactly lined up yet still tracing the same decreasing ratio – a nice addition to the image that was pure dumb luck on my part. Still not enough to offset the creepiness of the spider perhaps, but hey…

What? Last day of November?

Al Denelsbeck

That means it must be time for my warped idea of what an abstract image is.

autumn leaves in green channel with radically increased contrast
The autumn colors largely escaped me this year – you will likely see just a few images in another post at some point – but I snagged a quick pic in high contrast that I decided to play with a bit. Remember channel clipping? This is just the green channel, which produced a cool effect from the leaves by itself, but then I kicked the contrast up a bit to make it even more unnatural, because we all know that I can’t do art, or even shoot a compelling image in-camera without tricks.

I like how it kind of seems (to me at least) that the leaves aren’t even photos, but cutouts pasted onto the background. In fact, the photo that I had originally edited and uploaded had a few stray branches peeking in from the sides, well in the background, and these detracted from the dramatic effect, so I re-cropped the image to take them out and make it more surreal. The original, full-frame, sits below, so you can see what I started with.

original frame of autumn leaves

Too cool, part 36: Better than a lava lamp

Al Denelsbeck

And I like lava lamps.

This video comes courtesy of NASA, and the Astronomy Picture of the Day. It’s an elaborate computer simulation based on satellite and weather data, and shows the wind activity in the north Atlantic just a few months ago, during the peak of hurricane season.

It’s surprising to see such detail so soon after the season occurred, but it gives us a good view of how the severely damaging hurricanes of this year developed, and the various contributors. You can also see the effects of the west coast wildfires and how far the smoke travels, much less the sand dissipated from the Sahara in North Africa.

A little detail that I only noticed from living in the area and thus looking closely at it: numerous small sources of smoke, almost certainly local wildfires, start springing up in the southeastern US, pulsing almost rhythmically. It’s not particularly surprising, since we often see late summer droughts and this produces lots of dry fields and forests that are susceptible to fires. Countless patches of localized hot air, from sun-heated ground surfaces, form thundercells as they carry humid air high into the atmosphere, which in turn produces lightning strikes that are capable of starting fires in such dry conditions (in addition to the other causes of fires that occur.) Florida is especially known for such cells because of the humid air from the Gulf of Mexico that blows directly across the state and receives additional heating from the land as it passes; you can see how the peninsula seems to have separate air masses from the bulk of the country.

The next day’s APOD started raising a few questions in my mind. It shows a massive storm system in the clouds of Jupiter, not unlike the video:

cloud system on Jupiter captured by JUNO probe, courtesy NASA, JPL-CalTech, SwRI, MSSS
Now, here’s what I find interesting. When you watch the video, you’re seeing the effects of sunlight warming the waters of the oceans and the land masses of the continents, coupled with the air following the North Atlantic Gyre (which the video is centered upon, a big rotating mass of water that comes west across from Africa, runs northward along the east coast of North America, and crosses east over to northern Europe and back south to Africa again.) It’s clear that the land masses and the waters themselves, influenced by the rotation of the Earth, shape the storms that we have, and even create the hurricane season in late summer.

But Jupiter is a gas giant – it’s not even clear if it has a surface, or just gets denser and denser as it gets closer to the center of mass. While I can see rotational influences having some affect on the different elements within its clouds, it seems odd that so much activity could occur solely due to, for instance, the different densities of the various gases and their varying abilities to absorb solar radiation. I have the impression that things should become a bit more homogenized, the gases mixing together and presenting a more uniform ‘surface’ like Venus, or at the very least forming little more than striations from the rotation, but maybe I have the wrong impression of their properties. Or perhaps there’s a lot more going on under their obscuring cover than we know, with something more heat-absorbent providing the impetus towards storm development. Now I’m going to have to start looking for explicit details about Jupiter to see how much I’m missing.

Sunday slide 48

Al Denelsbeck

Eastern pondhawk draognfly Erythemis simplicicollis on skin of West Indian manatee Trichechus manatus
I’m fairly certain the dragonfly is an eastern pondhawk (Erythemis simplicicollis.) But that’s not the only species visible in the shot. Take as much time as you need to find the other, before you check out Sunday slide 13, which should visually clue you in. Yes, they were taken at the same time. I kind of like the idea of how it’s an unprepossessing image, until you know a little more about it.

Just because, part 25: the lead in

Al Denelsbeck

backlit water lily with reflection
The two images here both (perhaps obviously) came from the same outing, a student session, but are the inspiration for a composition post soon to appear. Sometimes it takes a little effort to separate ourselves from the concepts we hold of our surroundings to see what’s actually right in front of us. The image above is more subtle than the one below, but both made use of the flower’s own reflection as an element in the frame; below, it is probably even more distinct than the flower itself, despite the brightness of the colors. Both were casual shots, but if I really wanted to do high art, at least I should have picked those distracting bits out of the water and done some slight tweaks in positioning. Of course, if I was really into art, I wouldn’t tell you how the images could be better…

pond lily on long stalk with curved reflection

I still have reasons

Al Denelsbeck

Four years ago, I posted a rant about smutphones, and why I wasn’t about to get one. And so we revisit the topic as times change, because now I own one.

If you’re expecting some epiphany, some radical change of opinion, even some abject hedging, well, I’m happy to disappoint you. Most of the stuff that I mentioned in that previous post still holds entirely true. There are just three things that are different now that caused, or permitted, or whatever, this change of heart:

1. I got it for $20;

2. I’m still using the same pay-as-you-go plan that I was using for the flip-phone, which means less than $15 a month for usage fees;

3. A few too many people that I know cannot grasp e-mail very well (in some cases, at all,) and have to periodically communicate by text message, which is inordinately painful on a numeric keypad.

I’ve had it for just six months now, and boy has my attitude changed! No, wait, it really hasn’t at all – I still find them almost as annoying as I did before I had one. I still refuse to use it in any way while driving, and don’t carry on conversations in public – the most I’ll do is make a quick call to, for instance, confirm details about something. Even with the advancements in technology in the intervening four years, touch screens are still ridiculous and awkward – versatile, from an input interface standpoint, but not really adapted to such a small size and poorly suited to the main purpose of entering text. I don’t have big clumsy hands or fingers, but they’re still far too large for phone screens.

My primary reasoning behind the purchase was, I intended to do some remote hiking and kayaking, and wanted to have something GPS capable. The cost was significantly better than any standalone GPS unit, though probably less capable and by far less rugged. And I will openly admit, it’s pretty remarkable to have a versatile computer that’s actually smaller than my wallet (no, I did not opt for a larger model.) So, how many ways have I found to enhance my everyday activities with this magical device?

Not many, really. And I could certainly be using more of the capabilities of the thing if I tried, but the demand really hasn’t been that great. Here are some (if not all) of the ‘major’ changes that are facilitated now:

1. A notepad. It’s fairly handy for notes that I’ll refer to frequently, or reminders of stuff that comes up occasionally, like the size of a picture frame that I’m keeping an eye open for.

2. Remote access to e-mail. From time to time, I have to refer back to a recent e-mail that I’ve received, like for a student’s phone number or meeting time. However, I don’t read e-mail on the damn thing, much less write or reply. Those still wait until I’m at my workhorse desktop computer.

3. Voice recorder. I use this less than imagined, but still occasionally.

4. Weather. Sometimes it’s handy to know what’s coming my way, and even handier to have something that syncs to my current location.

5. MP3 player (especially Bluetooth.) At my other job, we have a Bluetooth receiver/speaker system, so I can play tunes easily. However, it’s more often the tablet that fulfills this duty, because it has a heartier battery. The car stereo has its own MP3 player.

6. Bathroom breaks. Yes. Primarily sudoku. The number of other games I have downloaded for the phone can be counted on one hand – the tablet has slightly more.

7. The occasional amusing photo to harass friends with. Maybe as much as once a week, but usually less. I can’t say my life would be poorer without this.

What it’s not used for:

a. Selfies. What an unbelievably vain and fatuous pasttime. And I say this knowing that this is the primary activity of a friend of mine.

b. Conversations. I have a landline for those, and don’t engage in them very often anyway. No, not even

c. “Important business calls.” When I’m out, I’m busy, and especially when I’m out with a student or client, I’m not interrupting them for another call – I find it inexcusably rude. But even if I’m ‘free,’ I won’t have a notepad, calendar, or anything else at hand to handle business calls, so those go to voicemail and I get back to them when I’m in my office.

d. Boredom. I can usually find something else to do.

e. Social media. It’s even stupider now than it was four years ago, so no.

f. Watching movies and video. Holy shit, no. Why would I inflict such a tiny screen on myself in this manner?

g. Car GPS. I already had one for the car, and it’s far better than the phone. By the way, I still look up my route at the desktop before I leave, and generally use the GPS only to know when the turns are coming up, since the route-planning logarithms in GPS units invariably suck.

h. Remote web access. I have used this a couple of times successfully, and attempted it several more. The interface is abysmally bad, and the results rarely ever useful. It is far more likely to greatly increase my annoyance than to provide some useful information.

“But Al,” you say, “haven’t you discovered the plethora of apps that can be downloaded that are tailor-made to your own lifestyle?” And I thank you for implying that I can in any way be said to have a style. Yes, I’m familiar with apps, and have even selected a few that add a small amount to my nature photography pursuits – not a lot, mind you, and perhaps I’m missing some real gems. First off, I have to say that I have installed and subsequently deleted at least four times as many apps than I have retained, simply because they didn’t work as intended or had poor interfaces. It can get kind of tedious. And this says nothing of the huge number of apps that I looked at but never installed, because they wanted far more in the way of ‘permissions’ to snoop around on my phone and usage history than was warranted by the ostensible functions of the app.

[Before you ask, I’m using Android, for reasons that should be obvious if you look at the costs above, but also because nothing that I have ever seen from Apple in the past fifteen years has been impressive in the least, while numerous traits have been serious game-stoppers, like ‘proprietary’ horseshit and their attempts at exclusivity.]

But here are a few apps that I have found of some use:

Heavens Above – I’ve been using this on the desktop for years, and the app is even cooler. Let’s you find visible passes of satellites, including the ISS, and will even give you a live pointer if you hold your phone up to the sky (and have the necessary hardware, which most have nowadays.) But much better on a bigger screen, so the tablet is the go-to device for this app, really.

3D Compass Plus – Not just a compass, but will overlay the pointer of your choice onto the camera’s view, so fairly useful for orienteering when you have to plot a precise compass direction – say, that tree is right at 272°, so we walk in that direction. There are a ton of other options out there of course, but I settled on this one from among those that I’d tried.

GPS Status – A very fast and handy plotter; no directions, but good for precise location as well as speed, altitude, magnetic declination, and so on. Good inclinometer too, which means it can be used to level the camera for those crucial applications.

LightMeter Free – Knowing how to use an ambient and reflected light meter can be fairly handy for photography, especially in situations where the camera’s onboard exposure meter can be easily fooled. Dedicated meters can be bulky and awkward, so this is a nice little substitute, and so far, has proved pretty accurate.

DoF – A handy little depth of field calculator, with a nod towards the crucial bit, which is how big you intended to display the resulting image (the bigger the enlargement, the lower the impact of depth of field – blurry stuff becomes blurrier with enlargement.)

Airport + Flight Tracker Radar – Nice realtime flight tracker, able to be used to know when someone’s flight is due in (before you get into the terminal snarl,) or just to see which aircraft are approaching the airport of your choice when you’re doing long exposures, as I used here. Not a huge help to most nature photography applications, but if you like light trails…

Timely Alarm Clock – One of perhaps a gazillion out there, but this one has been in use for a couple of years now, only on the tablet – I don’t leave the phone alongside the bed because I am not about to be woken up by cell calls or random alerts. Anyway, this alarm clock works great, especially in using a sound file of your choice as the wakeup tone. Years ago I had an alarm clock that played cassettes for just this reason.

And two more from the tablet:

ISS HD Live – Yep, realtime video from the International Space Station as it orbits, though occasionally defaulting to archive footage (courtesy of NASA, not the app.) Also plots the current position of the ISS on a map. Pretty cool.

QuickPic Photo Gallery – Mostly used for the students, but also just for showing friends (sometimes forcefully) a few of the images that I’m most proud of. I tried several different apps for photo albums but this one has been serving well for a couple of years now.

You are welcome, and in fact invited, to pass along anything in particular that you feel can benefit nature photography (or critical thinking, or wretched attempts at humor, et al) – I’m more than happy to examine the possibilities. So far, however, I just haven’t found any significant enhancement of my life from smutphones, even when I’ve embraced them – albeit distantly, like that aunt with the mustache.

Now, if there was an app that actually worked to market my images, well, then we’d see…

Let’s do it again

Al Denelsbeck

harvest moon rising over Jordan Lake
Today, October 6th, is International Time Warp Day, and to celebrate, I’m going to use the oft-ignored option in WordPress to publish this post at a random date, either ahead of or behind when I’m actually typing it. I couldn’t ever find a use for the function before, but I realized it was handy for this holiday.

Last night, the Insurmountable Mr. Bugg and I went out to Jordan Lake to try and capture the sunset, which, as I’ve said before, can be hit-or-miss – it’s really hard to predict just how the colors might turn out, even just an hour in advance. You might think that conditions like completely clear skies or complete overcast would let you predict that the sunset would be crappy, but I’ve seen things change in only minutes to produce some really great colors and skyscapes. Just, you know, not this time…

The moon, however, was more cooperative. As you can see from the widget on the sidebar there [okay, maybe not] the moon was full last night, and rose with a lovely golden hue. For reasons unknown, I hadn’t brought the tripod along, so I was forced to shoot handheld, not the best of options for clarity in telephoto shots. The old Canon 100-300 L lens was in my corner though, and I got more detail than I really expected. To give you an idea, the image to the right is the full frame of the detail crop that’s coming below.

By the way, I will repeat something that I’ve often mentioned, here and to students: you can’t try to shoot the moon with autoexposure. Go full manual, but knowing the settings can be tricky. When the moon is full and high overhead, the settings should be aperture f11, shutter speed of one-over-ISO – in other words, 1/100 second if you’re shooting at ISO 100, 1/400 second if you’re shooting at ISO 400, you get the idea. Near the horizon and showing colors like this, that exposure guide doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work for different phases of the moon either. For phases, you can refer to Keith’s Moon Photography page, but for the colors, you kind of have to wing it; start with the recommended exposure for a bright moon (in whatever phases,) but then start increasing exposure times or aperture opening because the moon is darker than when overhead and white – do a lot of variations. In this particular case, the exposure was f10 at 1/200 second, ISO 800 – meaning the moon was about two and a third stops darker than it would be when overhead. I had boosted to ISO 800, despite the noise that this introduced, because I was handholding the camera (actually braced against a pole,) and trying to keep the shutter speed high enough to prevent camera shake and thus blur the image a little bit.

Did it work? I’ll let you judge.

full resolution crop of moon handheld with Canon 100-300 L
This is a full-resolution crop from that second pic up there, and I really can’t complain about the results. The Canon 100-300mm f5.6 L is a long-discontinued, push-pull zoom with an ancient autofocus system, a bit slow and noisy, but for an easy-to-carry and affordable mid-tele, damn it’s sharp! There are plenty of reasons why it wouldn’t fit into any individual’s shooting style, among them the slow nature (in both autofocus and aperture,) but I don’t think I’ve ever come across a lens on the used market that’s a better bang for the buck.

Anyway, the Draconids meteor shower is peaking in a day or on, on October 8th and 9th, with the Orionids following about two weeks later on the 21st and 22nnd, so be sure not to miss them! And get ready, because fall colors are coming, and it promises to be a good show this year!

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