Moon, You are Always Super to Me!

It sorta makes me cringe when the news cycle start up about the 'super-moons'.   I cut to this cartoon (in my head at least) that I'm not talented enough to draw, of a silly moon-boy-person in a cape running around and insuring the seasons and controlling the tides.

I mean, the moon really is super- all of the time, not just when the news anchor says so! 

From an astrophotography perspective it was a little bit of a bust.    I had planned to shoot two or three dozen 36 megapixel quadrants and then combine them as a gigantic Mosaic.   

Instead, I've been battling some sort of stomach bug for an oddly length amount of time but I did manage to eek out a couple prime-focus shots, despite haze, cloud cover and a rumbly-in-ma-tummy.

All that aside, I prefer the less-than-full moons.  More drama in the shadows makes for better photos (just my opinion).

There Are No Galaxies on Orion's Belt, Kid!

I always liked the scene in Men In Black where they were referring to "The Galaxy" being on Orion's Belt.     Reminds me of so many meetings I've been part of.  People, talking.. but not communicating.

Orion (M42) is currently below the horizon until around 5 am, then it flirts around the Horizon before daylight hits.    
From Australia, however, you can see it.

This is 5, 180 second exposures from Telescope T31 on via iTelescope.net, in Australia, taken yesterday.

I took some liberties in processing it.  
I should have a blog post up this week (towards friday) detailing how to do this!

Finally! A Clear (ish) night

Well, it says partly cloudy on the forecast but at least for this very minute me + a telescope + the Sony have a clear field of view to see some things.

In fairness, my son (He's 5) actually took this shot, in that he clicked the shutter :)

Some Rainy-Night Astrophotography

M31 August - 29.

Andromeda (M31) - Our Closest Neighboring Galaxy in "The Local Group"

I'm working on a blog post (and video), for this week, just a quick rundown of astrophotography, I believe the post will be called "Astrophotography for us mortals".    

It was raining here in Spanish Fort, not to be delayed, I captured the above image from five,  5 minute exposures last night, via a Remote Controlled Observatory in New Mexico.

Processed in Photoshop and Lightroom, only.  No Crazy Stacking Software.   Stay tuned for more info on how to do this!

Wonderful Authentic Old Things in Line

This was @ Kali River Rapids in Animal Kingdom  
 
I've always loved the little maybe-fake or maybe-real accoutrements that imagineering place around the parks to bring the extra feel of authenticity.

Subtle Swirls of Reflective Blue

I Wish I Could Paint

The one thing I learned in Art class in elementary school was that I cannot draw, I cannot paint.

I'm thankful for the combination of camera hardware and computer software to allow me to 'produce' images that are painterly because if it were left to my brain and fingers alone, my crayon drawings were always the ones adults would comment on in that 'special' tone: "Oh... yeah.....there it is... good .erm... job, Billy!" :)

Night Dwellers

I remain a bit surprised at some of the weird crap I see, out late at night, snapping photos.    The night previous to the one where this was shot, I spent some time at the end of the pier talking to the guys fishing (it was about 1 am on Friday Night /Saturday Morning).     I came down the pier and exited to the right towards a small patch of beach to snap some milky-way shots (or.. try to).   

I hear this strange sound in the shadows about 12 feet away.   I look over and as my eyes adjust, it's a couple -- doing what couples do, right there on the public beach of the eastern shore.  I didn't linger and no I didn't take pictures but they appeared to be old enough to know better :)   

The same night, I then headed down to Fairhope Pier to find it was quite crowded.   One reveler asked that I stop and speak with his dog, (a mixed-breed Lab) because, Rex (The Lab) had to tell me something.    

... and still, the same night, I helped a boater tie off to a dock along Point Clear / Mullet Point, only for him to ask me to help break into someone's boat house "a few miles down the road" because "he never returned my nets."

Yeah, nothing caps off a photo walk like a little B&E.  No thanks.    

..and this is why I prefer night photo walks in the colder months.  The cold seems to keep the crazy away.  :)

Readily Identifiable Flying Objects

There was this thing on the news the other day about a UFO (<a href="http://goo.gl/UxbVtD" rel="nofollow">goo.gl/UxbVtD</a>) it got me pondering.   My folks used to have these friends who claimed to have had several UFO, close-encounters..   As a kid living in the boonies, frankly, their stories freaked me out.     The idea of scaly-skinned, big-eyed grey beings paralyzing you in your bed at night with their near-magic technology and levitating you away into their space ship to do medical experiments, just doesn't sound appealing.

As I look back, those friends in particular used and mixed a lot of gnarly drugs.   So I'm sure any number of other mystical events occurred during their trips down psychoactive lane.

It did get me thinking.    If anyone would 'see' a UFO in the sky, why wouldn't it be the super observant photographers hanging around the Bay Fronts at night with reasonably good equipment?  Instead it is always the tourist who happened to be carrying Marty McFly's camcorder from Back to the Future.

So, this pinkish line in the horizon?  Not a UFO.  Just a helicopter.  E.T. has not introduced himself to me and the Greys?  Well, they are probably just looking for a good  sandwich..  

So thin, those things..

To the Greys out there, I recommend: www.earlofsandwichusa.com

Galactic conflict, avoided.

I Can Haz Kids?

As a work-at-home dad, the vast majority of my summer has been a little like this:
I'm cloistered in my home office, which is rather close to the living room, scratching my bald head trying to concentrate on some programming issue while my son has his face pressed up against the glass portion of my office door, Wii remote in hand,

"Daddy, can you come play with me?"    

"Sure buddy, as soon as I get off work this afternoon" / train of thought - completely derailed.

The kids started back to school, which makes the house eerily quiet aside from this similar little distraction, Penny - looking up at me as if to say, "I can Haz Kids to Play With?"  

Made in China

Over the weekend, my little girl (She's 8) turned over a cup and exclaimed, "Made in China!"  Why does everything say that?

At that moment, I wondered how to answer it.   

I thought about my years working for Wal-Mart during school, my perspectives at that time from the "Wal-mart Effect" principles of race-to-the-bottom retail pricing and my own challenges as a minimum wage - earner.

I thought about my years working in Customs - Foreign Trade Zone software and what I learned about the lopsided Tarrif structures that put American manufacturers importing parts from overseas at an uneven playfield w/ oversees manufacturers importing finished goods.

I thought about our own huge tax burden, the challenges that tax system puts on Small Business owners, stifling growth.    Then I thought about our failing national infrastructure and how those taxes are needed for infrastructure projects.

I thought about the human-rights issues in China versus the failing of our own education system to teach useful skills for the next generation workforce.

She could tell, she could read it in my stare that I was about to perch upon my soap box and go into "old guy" mode.   Finally concluding with some long-winded and preachy "When I was a kid / Get off my lawn" - themed dissertation...

So, I finally answered with:

"Yummy Chinese food.    Makes it easier to build cool stuff without feeling too full all day."

Yep, I'm going to leave it at that.

A Starry-Shadow-Selfie

The telescope is broken. (Boo!)   I was sitting out back marveling at a surprisingly clear summer sky and uses GoSkyWatch on an iPad. (You point to parts of the sky and it identifies visible and invisible objects, identifies constellations, etc)

It was around 11pm and the family was all asleep.    Noticing the visible band from the Milky Way was starting to retreat into the horizon, I decided to  grab the A7(r), tripod, headphones and wearable head lamp and set out for darker skies. 

I headed down Highway 98 towards Fairhope.  I'd never stayed at the Grand Hotel (maybe should try it!)  but I saw via Google Maps that a particularly ideal location on Point Clear that seemed would be the ideal spot to shoot southbound and limited light pollution.   

A 25 minute drive down Scenic 98 and I was at the security gate at the Grand Hotel in Point clear.    The guard didn't speak fantastic english but he did have one of those fantastic, thick, middle-african accents and a warm smile (and he didn't appear to be packing).

Niceness aside, I was shot down - "Sorry, guests only."

I thanked him for his patience with me (after showing the point on google maps that I was trying to find) and headed southbound for my plan B location, "Mullet Point Park".

All that I really knew about this area is that when I was on my sailboat, sailing north into the bay, these portions of the middle-southern portions of Mobile Bay seemed mostly abandoned and quite dark at night.   

Mullet Point Park did have a view of the Milky Way Band, though was retreating beneath the horizon and affected by plenty of light pollution.   

With the park lights behind me, the unintended star-and-shadow selfies ensued for about 30 minutes until I headed North for the respite of my bed around 2 am.

I used the Rokinon 14mm on the Sony A7, still working on getting the ideal distortion removal profile built but it is getting closer.  I think it'll be a good lens until someone comes out with a high dollar must-have alternative. :)

from <a href="http://www.graffitivisuals.com/blog" rel="nofollow">www.graffitivisuals.com/blog</a>

Good Stuff on the Horizon

I'm always quite partial to the Fall Season.  Lots of cool things on the horizon.    :)    The kids head back to school, the beaches get less crowded, shrimp gets cheaper and the weather on the Alabama Gulf Coast gets nicer.   

Hopefully, I'll find myself with a bit more camera time for my own projects, the summer has had me a bit booked with other people's projects.  

Drifter's Corner

I was a little off-put by the amount of fast-food trash around the Daphne Beach area during a sunset walk with the family, yesterday.  It's a shame when folks don't leave things the way they find them.

Zen Moments

I very much admire Zen ideals and I do, in my life and career try to exhibit some stereotypical zen-like qualities of peace, calm, slowness-to-anger, etc.

I try, anyway and usually fail. :)

But that's the problem with being passionate about things, when you actually care about outcomes, it is hard to react like a robot.

I encountered a company recently in my programming world that has these zen-references on their marketing face. I've found the people in the company to be decidedly un-zen to deal with.

Inflexible, short-sighted, combative and defensive, yet obviously brilliant. I dunno, I'm sure it is all my fault but I was expecting Jeff Bridges and ended up finding Steve Jobs.  It was especially surprising b/c they were a marketing firm and usually sales and marketing people are more.. 'bright and shiny'.

I keep trying to remind myself that the reason they frustrate me so much is that it reminds me of my own obstinance.  :)

Floating on a Pond of Air

I was over @ my neighbor's garden and I was struck that the way the background fell-off into a bokeh, it looked a little like these were floating on a pond of air.

The Faces of my Career(s)

A friend of mine posted on Facebook recently, about me that "Some people have hobbies, you just go master several careers." and of course he was being funny and flattering and was really just referring to my tendency to research and superficially absorb many different things.   The operative term being, superficially.

I suppose that's the great thing about information dissemination in the age of Google.   In times of past, we'd have to study as an apprentice under a tradesmen for years to get the meat-and-potatoes of a particular trade. Even Da Vinci called someone Maestro, early on.  Now, enthusiastic self-published youtubers are happy to show you their skills.

That isn't to say it is reasonable to expect a person to gain a full mastery of a topic via 'googling it' but certainly it seems to be the way to overcome roadblocks.

In my programming career, I've used search engines plenty to solve errors, which are usually not errors in programming syntax or algorithms but challenges in the programming environment or frameworks.   Visual Studio Wonkiness, Apple xCode unexpected behaviors, etc. I know plenty of highly talented and skilled developers that use Google, Bing, StackExchange, GitHub and others to build nearly all of their code.   I think that pattern of find, copy-and-paste code will one day soon be replicated via a clever code-generating Neural Network.

For every case of the good-spirited, brilliant-minded problem solver helping solve others problems or taking the time to post solutions to common problems, there seem to be 4 or 5 other internet-forum-trolls who are just angry about something, contributing only snarkiness.   These were the mean kids in your kindergarden class that snickered out loud as you raised your hand to ask teacher a question.

Then, in photography there is this amazing wealth of information, much of it for free or cheap to teach you about anything you'd want to know about cameras, technique, software, publishing, printing, editing, etc.    It is the reason why there is such a flood of amazing photography.  Almost  everyone has access to the Ansel Adams equivalents of our time through social media, from which to study and learn technique.

Between the incredible pace of technology growth and understanding and the accessibility of the arts to everyday people like myself, I feel we are truly amidst another renaissance of sorts.

That is, of course assuming that the internet meanies don't squash innovation and expression with cynicism and wrong-minded comments and posts. 

Must... shoot.. in.. RAW!!

I will freely admit that ever since I started using Lightroom a few years back, I've become somewhat of a "Raw Snob".

What's that?  Our refrigerator doesn't shoot in RAW?  It's crap!

But.. honey.. it's just a refrig... nevermind.

It's like I'm channeling Admiral Ackbar "It's a TRAP!" but instead "It MUST BE RAW!"

And yes.. I think I fell into the trap laid by some over-opinionated 'professional' who wrote on some photography blog somewhere that shooting in RAW + JPEG is stupid and needless...

Yet, now I find myself cleaning up/ archiving brackets of photos from 2011 and I have to say, I really wish I had out-of-camera JPEGs for these shots, so that as I delete the 40+ meg RAW files at least I'd have a pure example of the image for historical posterity.

So, what spawned this is I had turned off Camera RAW inadvertently and went out to shoot the Zinnias in my wife's garden.     At first I cussed alot when I saw the herd of JPEGS evacuating the memory card but then it occurred to me, 

"Dang, that camera has pretty good color!"

What's a Corellian to do?  For now, I guess it’s continue exporting to JPEG and deleting those RAWs from 2011.. :)

Miles Versus The Dark Side

The Seven Dwarves' Cottage

Can't overstate enough how fun this ride was.     :)