An Eclectic Mind

A few night shots.

Sorry about sharing so much photography lately, but I’m going through my photos and adding the best ones — or at least the ones I like best — to my Photo Gallery. Along the way, it seems logical to write something about them.

I made these about a month ago, during a nighttime photo shoot around the Colockum (formerly Quincy Valley) Golf Course. I thought I’d put them online already, but I can’t seem to find them. So here they are: the three best from that shoot.

Quincy Valley Golf

The Quincy Valley Golf Course and RV Park was built a number of years ago by a now semi-retired man named Chuck. It started out with nine holes, built on a farm field. Chuck later added another nine holes and developed some extra land as RV lots in an “adults only” community. (The small RV park near the pro shop is where I’m parked for the season.) According to Chuck, who now handle the RV park irrigation and landscaping, the golf course was well-maintained and featured ponds and landscaping. For various reasons, he sold it to a man who was a golf-lover. Over the course of not very many years, the man drove the facility into the ground. He went bankrupt and eventually sold out to the Port of Quincy. When I arrived in June, they were busy fixing the place back up. They’ve done a nice job in only a few months and I think the Colockum Golf Course — it’s new name — has a good future here.

But this sign, which is lighted at night, remains to remind us of the golf course’s past. It’s a great old-style sign that may not be in the best condition, but still calls out to passersby on busy state route 281 as they drive between Quincy, five miles north, and George, five miles south. My favorite part? The silhouetted golfer is wearing knickers. During the day, the sign is rather nondescript and not very interesting.

Night Tractor

The golf course is in the middle of farmland. All around are fields growing wheat, feed corn, potatoes, alfalfa, and other crops. There are all kinds of farm vehicles all over the place.

This tractor is parked in front of a metal building not far from the Quincy Golf sign. It’s illuminated by a single tungsten light fixture over the door to the metal building behind the camera. The camera picks up the greenish hue of the night, emphasizing the green of the tractor. The photo was taken not long after sunset, when there was still a bit of light in the sky.

I like the photo because the tractor makes me think of a sleeping monster — powerful, yet peaceful at rest.

Stop

The golf course and its RV park are on the corner of a busy intersection. State route 281 runs north/south between Quincy and George. Road 5, also known as White Trail Road, is a sort of Quincy bypass, that runs east/west and then north/south, west of Quincy. Because it bypasses the traffic light (and minor traffic) in town, its popular with truckers traveling between I-90, five miles south, and Wenatchee, 35 miles northwest.

There’s no traffic light on the corner. Instead, Road 5 has a stop sign. To make that sign extra visible at night, it has a pair of blinking red lights on it. This time exposure was long enough to catch both lights on, illuminating the sign. This must be enough — in the nearly two months I’ve been here, there hasn’t been an accident at the corner yet.

If you like these photos, I hope you’ll check out my After Dark photo gallery.

I finally figure out how to do it right.

I’ve been taking photos of the moon for years — since I first developed an interest in photography.

I remember one of my first experiments. I was in my late teens, away at college. My dorm room was on the top (14th) floor of one of the university’s six dorm towers. My room faced east. At moonrise one night, I set up my camera and tripod and took several long exposures of the rising disc. I developed the film — remember that stuff? — and was very disappointed with the results. The moon wasn’t round. It was oval. And there were no features. Why? Because my long exposure was too long and the moon moved during the shot.

Time passed. I stopped dating a photographer, graduated from college, and got on with my life. Photography wasn’t very important to me. Photographing the moon was, in my mind, something I simply couldn’t do.

More time passed. Enter digital cameras. They’ve done more for photo experimentation than any other development (pun intended). I could try all kinds of things and see results immediately (on a tiny screen) or almost immediately (on a 24-in high resolution computer monitor. How does a change in shutter speed, aperture, focal length, or lens filter affect my image? Try it and see! (The trick, of course, is to pay attention and remember what it is you’re trying. Remembering is not one of my strengths.)

So I tried shooting the moon again. I shot some photos of a lunar eclipse this past February. They weren’t bad. In fact, some of the folks who saw them liked them a lot. But I wasn’t satisfied. Not enough detail. Not clear enough.

Last month I tried again. It was my first full moon in Quincy. I was camped out at the Quincy Golf Course, which has an “RV park” connected to it. (The quotes are because there are only 5 full hookup sites, a bunch of partial hookup sites, and no other RV parklike facilities.) I brought my tripod out to take some photos of various things in night lighting. I got a bunch of good photos — check my Photo Gallery to see a few of them — but my shots of the moon were not among them. I liked these two the best. In the first, I lined up the moon with the Quincy Golf sign. The moon looks like a big golf ball. In the second, I shot the moon when it was still quite low. My camera angle included the road (State Route 281), which is heavily trafficked. The lines are the lights of cars and trucks whizzing by during the relatively long exposure.

The other day, I tried again just after moonrise. I used my 70-300mm lens, dialed in to 300mm with image stabilization on. I put it on a tripod. And then a shot a bunch of photos, examining each one after I shot it. I realized that the moon was too bright. And then my brain kicked in. What makes a photo too bright? Too much light; overexposure. What do you do if a photo is overexposed? Reduce the amount of light coming in. How do you reduce the light coming in? Two ways: close down the lens or increase the shutter speed.

Or, on my camera, just set exposure compensation to underexpose the photo.

So I set the exposure compensation to the minus side of the meter. At first, I set it 1/3 stop. I took a shot. No appreciable difference. A full stop. Better. Two stops. Much better; I could now see some detail on the moon’s face. Three stops, now beyond what the meter can show. Great. With each change, the camera increased the shutter speed. So I was actually killing two birds with one stone: I was decreasing the amount of light that came into the camera to avoid washout of the moon’s surface and increasing the shutter speed to shorten up my exposure, thus preventing blur from the moon’s movement.

Want to see the differences over time? Here are six shots. The first was taken without exposure compensation at 9:03 PM. The others were taken with various amounts of exposure compensation from 9:10 PM through 9:11 PM, about 12 seconds apart.

Aperture: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/40 second
Exposure Bias: 0

Aperture: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/60 second
Exposure Bias: -1

Aperture: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/80 second
Exposure Bias: -1

Aperture: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/120 second
Exposure Bias: -2

Aperture: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/200 second
Exposure Bias: -2.67

Aperture: f5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/250 second
Exposure Bias: -2.67

None of these images have been retouched. All I did was bring them into Photoshop, crop them to a 600 pixel square, and then reduce the resolution to 72 dpi.

But with a tiny bit of sharpening in Photoshop, at a higher resolution, the final photo doesn’t look bad at all:

What do you think? Have you used any special techniques to shoot the moon or other objects at night? Use the Comments link or form at the bottom of this post to share your secrets.

Action photos at the lake.

I spent the July 4 holiday weekend at Lake Pateros in Washington State. Most of the time I wasn’t flying — I spent 3.1 hours on Friday drying cherries — I was holed up at the extremely pleasant (and helicopter-friendly) Lake Pateros Motor Inn. Mike and I lounged a bit on the upper deck patio walkway right outside our room. The lake was wild with boaters and jet skiers and wake boarders. On a whim, I took out my Nikon D80 camera and its 70-300 mm lens. I set the camera to continuous shooting, zoomed all the way, and started snapping photos.

To my surprise, a few of them came out pretty darn good.

I continued snapping photos throughout the weekend. On Saturday, Mike and I took a helicopter flight around central Washington and we took turns snapping photos out of the helicopter. (He’s a pilot, too, and we had the dual controls in, so I had a rare opportunity to use both hands and decent equipment for aerial photography with doors off.) Some of those photos were pretty good, too, like Mike’s shot of downtown Chelan.

This all goes back to my theory that if you have decent digital photographic equipment, are in a good place to take photos, have good photographic conditions (i.e., lighting), and enough storage space on your memory card that you don’t have to skimp on the number of photos you take, you have to get some good shots. Mike and I took over 200 shots from the air during a 3-hour flight the other day. I bet we only wind up with about a dozen really good ones.

Anyway, I put the Lake Pateros photos online on a new Web site I’m experimenting with: Flying M Photos. I’m hoping to build up a library of stock and fine art images, as well as event images like this, for sale. With luck, this will fund my photography habit, which is quickly becoming quite expensive.

Were you out on Lake Pateros during the July 4 weekend? Check the site to see if I got an action photo of you! If I did and you want to buy a copy to remember your day at the lake, use the coupon code LAKEP to save 20% on your photo order.

A place for my best photos.

I’m an amateur photographer and, like many amateur photographers, I sometimes get lucky and capture a better-than-average image. While I’ve often shown my best photos here, I’ve been wanting to put them in a place of their own for a while.

I don’t like Flickr. I don’t think I want my photos as part of what seems to primarily be a social networking service. I do have a Flickr account, but I rarely put photos there.

I did set up a RedBubble account. When I first signed up, the service was small and I was very impressed by the quality of the work there. These weren’t snapshots and doodlings. These were pieces of artwork. And, when I ordered some cards and framed prints, I was extremely pleased with the high quality of what I received. Cards were printed on thick photo paper. Framing was professionally done and properly sealed in back. This was how I wanted my best work to be presented — among other high quality work, available for sale at reasonable prices for high quality product. I wrote about my initial experiences and excitement about RedBubble here.

Well, RedBubble has changed. As the service grew, it became just another image-based social networking service. A mutual admiration society where many people were uploading images that, in my opinion, were pretty crappy and other people were telling them how good they were in five word praises. Photos over-corrected with Photoshop. Cell phone images! Besides, the management of RedBubble seemed more interested in “art” than photos and really pushed that kind of work. I’m not an artist and really didn’t like much of what the RedBubble folks were pushing. The print quality, however, remains good, so for now, I’ll continue to upload my images there.

But I didn’t want to use RedBubble as a showcase for my photos. I wanted something better. Something more personalized. Something that showcased just my photos.

The answer came a few months ago when the folks at Automattic, makers of WordPress, and eight6 jointly released a theme called Monotone on WordPress.com. I tried it out and liked what I saw. The theme had the amazing ability to sample the colors in an image and choose one as the background for the image. It was like color-coordinating the mat for a matted photo. The results was unique and visually attractive.

But I had a few problems with the WordPress.com-based theme. The biggest problem was the way it handled post tags — it pooled them with tags from all WordPress.com users. So if I tagged an image with the word “Arizona,” clicking a link for that tag in my photoblog post would display posts tagged “Arizona” on all WordPress.com blogs. I was not interested in maintaining tags for the benefit of other WordPress.com users. (Sorry, folks.) And I certainly wasn’t interested in maintaining a photo blog with so many exits to other blogs. So After my initial trial, I stopped posting.

But Friday, I discovered that Monotone had been released for WordPress server installations. I decided to give it a new try by installing it on my server. The result is what you can find at http://photos. marialanger.com/.

I did have some problems with the installation. I think it’s because I followed the instructions to the letter. (Silly me.) When I removed the .htaccess file that had come with the theme and used the Permalinks feature of WordPress.com to create a new one, the problems went away.

Then I was able to customize the theme by making minor changes to its template files. For example, I inserted copyright information and reformatted for lowercase throughout much of the blog. I also made the vertical image format page wider. I’ll continue tweaking — I always do — but for now, I’m pleased with the way it looks.

And most image posts link back to RedBubble, where the image is available for sale in a variety of formats.

I hope you’ll visit Maria’s Pix and participate by commenting on my work. Your feedback will not only help encourage me to stick with it, but will help me to be a better photographer.

I get out and try to photograph the world around me.

I brought my Nikon D80 camera and four of its lenses with me to Washington state. I’ve been out a few times taking photos. I got some nice bird photos on Sunday, but I’ve also taken photos of some less interesting subjects. The other day, on a walk near the golf course late in the day, I got some nice photos of a wheat field and some weeds growing alongside the canal.

I like the wheat field photos. One of the themes I’m always pursuing in my photography is infinity. I like photos of things that seem to go on forever. The fields of wheat, corn, alfalfa, and other crops here are huge and, from the right angles, it’s easy to get a photo of the crop that fills the photo. The photo shown here, shows the deep furrow created by the irrigation circle’s tires as it moves through the field. I have other shots that are just wheat.

Here’s another fill-the-frame image. It’s the bark of a tree alongside the golf course. I love the texture of this. I think it’s a birch tree — most of the bark is white — but the white bark is split, with deep brown-gray cracks. There’s a lot of depth to this. It makes a nice desktop picture. (So does the wheat.)

I took this photo yesterday while on a bike ride. It’s a good example of the kind of farm fields around here. This is an alfalfa field with an irrigation bar on wheels parked on one end. This kind of irritation travels up and down a field — it doesn’t do the circle thing. The alfalfa has been cut and baled. The bales are left out in the field until they can be gathered. While this isn’t an especially good photo, it’s a typical scene in the Quincy area.

Yesterday afternoon, I went back to Quincy Lakes with my camera, 70-300 mm lens, and tripod. Although the lens has image stabilization built in, the tripod really is necessary when you set it to the full 300 mm setting. My goal was to get a photo of a Yellow-headed Blackbird. Not only did I get a photo of the magnificently marked male, but I also got a shot of a female. I got both of these photos from the same place I shot the Redwing Blackbird on Sunday.

I also saw and photographed an American Coot, which is like a duck, and its babies, but none of the shots are good enough to share here. I might go back in a few days and try again. I know where one of the nests are and as the babies begin to mature, I should be able to get better shots of them.

I went out last night to take some photos, too, but I’ll save those for another post.