Category: Photos

It was (yay) clear but (boo) unseasonably cold on the Central California Coast for my first trip of significance this year, a combined business (Day of JavaScript at Google HQ) and not-business (visiting the fam) junket over a long week at the end of January. This photo is after wine tasting with my mother- and sister-in-law out east of Templeton, Calif., at Pomar Junction.

I’m totally blown away by this photograph that David took through his 6-inch 8-inch Newtonian telescope the other night during an icy, full November moon. The air was quite clear and the shutter speed fast (1/180), well-exposed such that I was able to pull out lovely detail during post-processing. Well done, Mr. Pencil!

Easy: taking photos of the night sky with my camera. Hard: correcting them. The skills needed to do this right are not ones I have. I almost don’t want to post this photo. Near Hood River, Ore.

148 seconds on a German Equatorial Mount (GEM). Translation: keeps me from getting star trails. Mostly.

This photo was requested of me yesterday. It’s a pleasure to find it and remember it. It was taken in May of 2001 underneath the Fremont Bridge on Fuji Velvia 50. It’s a 30-second exposure, which I can tell you because 30 seconds is the longest non-bulb exposure my Canon EOS A2 would take. Flash at beginning of exposure, Ben was a real brick, stood really still. I ran in after about 10 seconds and also stood still.

File this under family/nostalgia. Here’s a really gritty scan of a slide from the late 1970s, showing my Dad’s Swallow Doretti and my mom in front of what appears to be, maybe, the Coast Range west of Portland. According to Wikipedia, only 276 Swallow Dorettis were ever produced, in 1954-55. The car is built on the Triumph TR2 platform. I don’t know what ever became of it.

Sunset over ripening wheat fields near La Grande Maison, a several-hundred-year-old fortified house converted into a bed and breakfast. This is in the Loire Valley, somewhat near Saumur, France. More photos to come from the trip as I catch my breath upon returning to Portland.

Though Iceland has about eighty-seven thousand hundred waterfalls–enough that you glaze over at a certain point–Gullfoss is the tourist heavyweight. It’s impressive and huge. But everyone photographs it and comes away with the same general shots. I thought I’d try my 9-stop neutral density filter. This was taken in broad daylight and is a 75-second exposure.

The story now is not of blustery explosion but of a beautiful desolation caused by veritable storm fronts of billowing ash. Ash everywhere. In my socks. In David’s eyes. In the air filter of our rental car. Black and deceptively gorgeous, the ash, when airborne, brought visibility on roads down to near zero and is going to make me blow black snot for some time to come.

Flying over Greenland on a fight to Europe: not unusual. Not unusual, even, to see curious, remote, ice-scarred landscapes. But I was looking at this scene through my three windows in seat 2F (I’m convinced: best seat on the entire plane, an IcelandAir 757W) for some time before something made my scalp feel kind of funny.

It never got dark on our flight. We skirted the very edge of the curved track of sunlight across the planet. These mountains slipped below us at a time difficult to pinpoint, but it must have been something around three in the morning locally. OK, so picture this.

I was sitting on the starboard side of a plane flying roughly east. Thus, I was looking out of a window on the right side of the aircraft: looking south. Note the direction of the shadows! I’d been awake a long time and I was confused and time was loopy, but I was pretty sure of the various cardinal directions. The sun was coming from the north. How could that be?

David, slumming it back in 17F, was noticing the same thing. He was busy discussing the vagaries of BitTorrent with his young, Norwegian seatmates. One of them, Wilhelm (the first Wilhelm I’ve ever heard of who wasn’t also a Kaiser), was taking five iPads back to the mother country. They were all spellbound.

Later, David and I put our heads together and figured it out. We were far enough north that the sun, on the other side of the planet, was spilling over the top of the North Pole.

Everything in the past month or so has been intensely back-to-back. Work (invigorating but consuming), travel (invigorating but consuming), human companionship and family obligations (invigorating but consuming; think “cooking for 12″ and you’ll get the idea). I just got back from Chicago, a 4-day weekend with my mom and sister as part of celebrating Mom’s 60th birthday (back in January). It was a totally great way to spend Mother’s Day.

Weather, however, was a bit on the grim side. This shot was taken toward duskiness from the 96th floor of the Hancock Tower. I am always amazed by one singular thing in the Midwest: the water in Lake Michigan is always so jewel-toned and breathtaking.

I chose not to correct for the window reflection in the top right; that’s mostly laziness.