This is my photographer’s blog, for your consideration. I post some of my favorite shots here, usually along with some comments about how the photo was taken or post-processed. (Occasionally I have the vain thought that someone might like to read about that.)
Waves on water. Moving boat against a static background. Back-lit hillside with almost-backlit mountain. Bright high cloud layer. Impossible shot. Until now. (Click on the image for closer examination.)
Using my recently-discovered RAW-format HDR technique, I "developed" three exposure levels from one photograph containing the dynamic range of 36 bits per pixel instead of JPEG's 24 bits:
Photomatix helped me blend the three exposure levels into a shot that balances the highlights and shadows similar to the way my eyes did as I gazed at Mount Hood across the river from the Washington side of the Columbia Gorge. Here it is again, for comparison with the three component shots:
I know, I sound like a broken record about HDR -- but it's one of those tools I now consider to be essential. Also, shooting 36-bit RAW, every shot is automatically bracketed for post-production exposure optimization and potential HDR processing.
This is a very difficult shot to get, but you can't tell that from just looking at this downsized version. You can see the Moon, of course -- and Jupiter nearby. Although planetary conjunctions are not exactly uncommon, it is fairly rare to catch the Moon behind a dark translucent cloud in the same photo as a planet which is not behind a cloud. And, it's even more rare for that planet to be Jupiter. I have been trying for a long time to get our Moon in the same shot as the moons of Jupiter. The only way to capture that combination is for our Moon to get behind a cloud that is dark enough to allow a long-ish exposure for the moons of Jupiter. Last month, it almost worked.
I say "almost" because the moon chose to hide a little too soon -- the sky was not dark yet. So, while Jupiter's moons are somewhat visible, it's nothing to write home about:
Later that night, I obtained a much better dark-sky view of Jupiter's moons through an opening in the clouds:
Unfortunately, the Moon was not bashful enough to find a sufficiently dark cloud for the shot.
If you click on the image and view the shot full-screen, you can see the Jovian moons nicely in the same picture as our Moon. But someday I hope to capture the Moon as clearly as in the first shot, while the Jovian system is visible without zooming in.
But now it's winter in Oregon. Even if there is a favorable planetary conjunction of some kind, it's highly probable that they will be hiding behind thick rainclouds. Oh well. :-)
Here is something you don't see every day: A pre-sunrise rainbow. The landscape was still fairly dark, bathed in the dim golden light of the not-yet-visible Sun. But the moist atmosphere above had full sunlight. Rain droplets -- which later fell on our Oregonian heads -- acted as little prisms to create a beautiful column of color.
Galileo could not deny what he saw through his new telescope. These were not stars, as he had first thought when he discovered the moons of Jupiter on January 7, 1610. The little pinpoints of light, arrayed in a straight line near the large planet, moved. Stars don't do that. Even in the space of 30 minutes, one could observe changes in position relative to the planet and to each other, as I witnessed and photographed on Tuesday. (Please pardon the third shot's quality; I was shooting through a thick smoky haze.)
On January 10, 1610, Galileo observed that one of the objects disappeared behind Jupiter, then re-emerged later. He concluded that these objects must be moons orbiting Jupiter. It was a mini "solar system," in plain view of anyone who cared to observe. Eventually, Galileo even worked out their orbits and could predict when and where the Jovian moons would show up.
This was an earthshaking finding. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo: A planet with smaller planets orbiting it did not conform to the principles of Aristotelian Cosmology, which held that all heavenly bodies should circle the Earth, and many astronomers and philosophers initially refused to believe that Galileo could have discovered such a thing. His observations were confirmed by the observatory of Christopher Clavius and he received a hero's welcome when he visited Rome in 1611.
However, Galileo's "hero" status was short-lived: Galileo's championing of Copernicanism was controversial within his lifetime, when a large majority of philosophers and astronomers still subscribed (at least outwardly) to the geocentric view that the Earth is at the centre of the universe. After 1610, when he began supporting heliocentrism publicly, he met with bitter opposition from some philosophers and clerics, and two of the latter eventually denounced him to the Roman Inquisition early in 1615. Although he was cleared of any offence at that time, the Catholic Church nevertheless condemned heliocentrism as "false and contrary to Scripture" in February 1616, and Galileo was warned to abandon his support for it—which he promised to do. When he later defended his views in his most famous work, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, published in 1632, he was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy," forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest.
At issue was the belief that the Bible delares the earth to be the center of the solar system: Psalm 93:1, Psalm 96:10, and 1 Chronicles 16:30 include (depending on translation) text stating that "the world is firmly established, it cannot be moved." In the same tradition, Psalm 104:5 says, "the LORD set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved." Further, Ecclesiastes 1:5 states that "And the sun rises and sets and returns to its place" etc.
Of course, in hindsight all Christians now understand that these passages were written from the perspective of an observer; they do not address the astronomical relationship between the sun and the earth.
A friend of mine who is a pastor in California put it well: Careful observation of the natural world can cause Christians to go back to the Bible and reexamine whether it really teaches what we have understood it to say in the past.
On a recent trip to Idaho, we took a walk that crossed the Boise River on a footbridge. The photo above is what I saw from the bridge: sunlight glinting off the water's wavelets, a vehicle bridge with cars, and bright picturesque clouds in the sky. Surrounding the scene was late-summer green foliage, gently moving in the breeze.
Here was the camera's best effort to capture the scene in one photo:
The sun reflections were blown out, yet the back-lit bridge was underexposed. The overexposed sky lost cloud detail, but the trees were darkened by their underexposure.
Of course, the first photo is a High Dynamic Range picture, which rescued the scene. I have discussed HDR in numerous postings in this blog, but there has always been a problem: motion. In one posting ("Dynamic World Thwarts Dynamic Range Photography"), I lament the need for multiple photos to compile an HDR shot: "Until cameras start getting built with High Dynamic Range sensors to capture contrasty motion scenes in one shot, much of the dynamic world will remain out of reach of HDR photography."
Last week, much to my chagrin, I realized that the "until" time has already arrived for many motion HDR shots -- without the need to buy new equipment. The HDR photo above is an example of that "new" technology, enabling me to capture an High Dynamic Range image from a single instant in time -- a necessary feature for any photo with liquid water, breeze-blown tree leaves, etc.
As you may know, an ordinary JPEG digital photo is composed of data with 24 bits per pixel; 8 for each primary color. So, each color channel must be expressed with an intensity number of 0-127. That significantly limits the dynamic range. Wouldn't it be nice if cameras could capture more dynamic range in each shot?
Well, DSLRs do that very thing. In my case, the Canon 400D captures 36 bits per pixel; 12 for each primary color (0-2047). Then, when it constructs the 24-bit JPEG image to be stored on the memory card, it throws away the "extra" bits after applying color balance, contrast and sharpness parameters. But the original image's data -- all 36 bits -- is still available in the RAW format file, adding one or two stops of dynamic range. Duh. (Why didn't I think of that before?)
That lets me construct a triad of three exposures by "developing" the RAW data into JPEGs that are underexposed, normal, and overexposed. Then HDR software like Photomatix takes it from there.
With this realization, I will be able decide to use HDR after the fact. And, I'm no longer troubled by motion in the scene.
Of course, an extreme case like the Tillamook Air Museum's blimp hanger still needs multiple shots; six in this case, with a 9-stop dynamic range:
But now I can reserve the time-consuming sequence shooting for the situations that truly need them.
At 12:26p Tuesday, the space shuttle Discovery undocked from the International Space Station (ISS). At 9:20p, the pair presented a graceful duet of brighter-than-Venus dots silently gliding overhead. I guess the ISS didn't want the Shuttle to leave, since the space station appeared to be chasing it across the sky. Of course, the ISS will never catch up; the photograph proves it. The eleven-second trace for the Shuttle is 36% longer than the one for the ISS, vividly showing their relative speeds.
About 30 seconds later, both the ISS and Shuttle disappeared. Here is the trace from the ISS plunge into the darkness of Earth's shadow:
To see it larger, click on the image above. To see it full-size, click here.
The last time I saw the ISS and the Shuttle undocked, I was in downtown Cairo, peering between buildings, hoping my view was somewhat toward the southwest. This time was much better! :-)
It only happens a few times a century. First it was Callisto, followed by Io. Then, Europa and Ganymede briefly "kissed" before meeting their fate. One-by-one the the four Galilean moons of Jupiter disappeared. The first two went around the back; the second set across the Jovian face. Between 9:43p and 11:28p last night, Jupiter appeared to be moonless.
In the photo above, nothing looks amiss. Our own moon bathes the clouds with light while Jupiter peeks out from an opening in the lower-right. But if Jupiter is magnified, it seems strangely naked:
In comparison, here is how it looked in an earlier post, at the same zoom level:
At that time, all four Galilean moons were quite visible, in contrast to the view yesterday.
Note that the Jovian disk is overexposed to show the moons. In a differently exposed photo from last night, I was able to resolve some markings on the planet itself (more visible here thanks to contrast enhancement and a 2x digital zoom):
Of course, the resolution is not high enough to see the disks of Europa and Ganymede in front of the large planet -- or much of anything else for that matter -- but IMHO it's not bad for an ordinary telephoto lens and photographic tripod.
As a bonus last night, I also captured a fun shot of a baby dragon practicing his puffs. :-)
By getting up bring-n-early Monday the 17th, I was able to capture the conjunction of three beautiful objects in space: 1) Crescent Moon, 2) Venus, 3) Earth. Well, my close proximity to that last one -- my own planet -- makes it so that I could only show a relatively small piece. So I chose a picturesque section to represent Earth: Mount Hood, silhouetted by the coming sunrise.
Although the triad is lovely, showing all of the members together required a low-detail wide shot. Here is the mountain by itself, in all its glory:
And, here is a close-up of the Moon and Venus:
An hour later, the last member of the triad -- Earth -- dominated the sky by turning it bright blue. ;-)
This hummingbird visited Kathy and I while we were on vacation in Northern California, near the "Immortal Tree." (Click on the image for a bigger view.) Of course, the hummingbird did not care in the slightest about the tree nor the immortality it supposedly represented. The buzzing avian was only interested in the nectar of the colorful flowers:
Immortality from the Hummingbird Fountain of Youth! :-)
On Memorial Day, I shot my first gigapixel image -- 1.1 gigapixels, to be precise (89,790 x 12,650). You may recognize the view: Mount Hood from Timberline, at the tail end of the ski season. With my telephoto-equipped camera mounted on a tripod, I shot overlapping strips from left to right; top to bottom. 182 frames later, I had the ingredients for a composite photograph composed of over a billion pixels. (Ignore the missing sky segments; apparently the stitching program could not figure out how to assemble featureless colored rectangles into a continuous blank sky. I may be able to figure out a remedy in the future.)
To properly see a gigapixel image, you need a high-res viewer like the Microsoft HD View plug-in for IE. The image sequence below demonstrates a zoom-in from a wide shot showing the Timberline Lodge, all the way in to a trio of snowshoers on the mountain slope:
To see this as a full-window zoom-out sequence, click here.
If you have been to my office, the photographic angle for Mount Hood may look vaguely familiar. That's because you have seen it before, on my office wall. In the summer of 2005, I shot a 42-frame, 89.5 megapixel (17,358 x 5,158) composite of Mount Hood from the exact same location. Of course the snow was mostly gone, revealing colorful rocks underneath.
At the time, I was only using a 4-megapixel point-and-shoot digital camera. But IMHO, the composite results were fairly impressive.
To see it properly, you need a viewer. Fortunately, it's in a file format that can be displayed by gigapan.org -- a website dedicated to sharing large-pixel-count photos. To see the 2005 Summer Mount Hood shot in all its zoomable glory, click here.
Unfortunately, I can't yet upload the gigapixel-sized 2009 Spring Mount Hood shot to gigapan.org, since it's not in a file format they accept. I used AutoStitch for the 2005 shot, which outputs to JPEG format. However, the 2009 shot was way too big for AutoStitch -- it seems to run out of memory somewhere around the 150 megapixel range. I was able to achieve gigapixel compositing thanks to David, who pointed me to Microsoft's Research's ICE program (Image Composite Editor). It's free, and it works well for very large images (and small ones too)! Except for one thing. Once the pixel counts get very large, the number of supported file types drops down to only three: 1) TIF, 2) Microsoft's HD View, 3) Microsoft's Silverlight Deep Zoom. None of those are accepted by gigapan.org. So, I can only do the viewing locally on a computer unless I find a hosting service that accepts one of those formats. Or, a new automatic stitching program that outputs something else for large pixel counts.
But no matter what, I have officially joined the Gigapixel World! :-)
On a recent business trip to Mobile, Alabama, I was treated to a series of vistas that begged to be rendered in more than two dimensions. On the way east, my plane passed near Mount Hood, with Mount Saint Helens, Mount Rainier, etc. in the north background. On the way west, we viewed the other side of Mount Hood, with Mount Washington, etc. in the south background.
Accordingly, I took a series of quadruplet shots -- four photos taken in quick succession, forming several 3D stereo pairs. (The four shots are needed since you don't know until later what stereo separation will look best.)
To see the results, click on the images above. The first set shows the scenes in regular, flat 2D. The second set, when viewed with red-blue 3D glasses, shows the mountains in full stereo depth.
Of course, all this is just academic if you can't actually see the photos because you don't have red-blue 3D glasses. I have some sourcing information at the end of his blog entry, if you need it.
You may recognize the fact that technically, these are hyperstereo photographs since the separation between shots is more than the normal eye separation. The plane traveled about 350 feet between each exposure. When combined into a stereo pair, this allows the viewer to perceive distance separation in a scene that normally looks flat since the subjects are so far away.
One of the 3D pictures was not taken on the Mobile trip. In fact, it wasn't taken as a stereo pair at all. On my birthday in 2005, I was on the way back from a Cairo business trip. My seat was mid-plane, and I wondered about the collective gasps proceeding from the front of the plane, moving toward the back. I glanced out my window, and suddenly it became clear. We were flying just to the west of Mount Saint Helens, and it was sporting a picturesque plume of steam. My first thought was, "What a great birthday present, to see this!"
My second thought, a nanosecond later, was to photograph the scene. Grabbing my old point-and-shoot digital camera, I shot a series of photos as fast as the little electrons would move through the circuitry. Which was not very fast, given the older generation of digital camera. So, I wasn't even thinking in terms of 3D pairs. But later, I wondered if I could salvage a stereo view from the outtakes. The result was this (click on the image for a larger view):
Although the stereo separation is a bit more than is normally comfortable, it's an interesting view to see the actual roundness of the crater rim, with the steam plume at the center point.
There is one more thing you might find interesting. As we flew past Mount Hood toward the west, I zoomed up on the top, with Mount Washington in the background (click on the images for bigger versions):
As the vista unfolded, I shot fifteen photos in fairly quick succession. Later, I used that sequence to create a 3D video of the flyby. (Internet Explorer users: You will probably find the YouTube window below to be cut off on the right. If so, go here instead, and click on "HD" on the bottom of the YouTube window.)
For what it's worth! :-)
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As promised, here is some sourcing information for 3D glasses. You can get two cardboard pairs for $1.00 here:
With the shipping cost of $3.39, you might be tempted to get one of the fancier $6.95 ProView pairs, with rigid acrylic lenses -- but don't bother. My experience is that the fancy red lenses are not the right shade for computer screens. So, you're better off with the cheap cardboard variety. If you are in a hurry, rumor has it that some comic book stores sell red-blue glasses as well, but I have not verified that personally.
Last night, there was a beautiful conjunction of a thin crescent Moon, the Pleiades (a.k.a. the Seven Sisters, a.k.a. the "other Little Dipper") and Mercury (a.k.a. quicksilver). Even in the light-polluted dusky sky of Tualatin, all three elements were clearly visible as they chased the Sun toward the horizon. A nearby tree was illuminated by streetlight, providing colorful foreground for the scene. (Click the image for a larger view; you will need to tell your browser to show the picture at 100% size to see the details.)
Earthshine illuminated the dark side of the Moon to the degree that geographic details were clearly visible. Mercury is actually a crescent right now, but my telephoto lens was not powerful enough to show it as anything but a point in space. ("Astrophotography with a Camera and Tripod" can only go so far!)
In order to capture this scene, it was necessary to crank up my camera's ISO to 1,600. While that created some background image noise, it was a small price to pay to get the shot! :-)
There is nothing quite like seeing a very young crescent Moon in the same vista as the super-bright diamond of Venus. Although this February 26th conjunction shot shows the two planetary bodies close together, it does not convey what I saw. In fact, no photograph can really capture it, since the blazing gem of the cloud-shrouded planet will over-expose itself into a big dot near the Moon with its dim Earthshine. Even HDR cannot help, since a properly-exposed Venus would disappear into a few pixels' worth of image, hardly conveying the brilliance of the Evening Star.
The best we can do is to take two properly-exposed photos and enlarge them. The Moon is about what one would expect for the infant phase, as it dipped into a bit of horizon fog that evening:
But the surprise comes with the enlarged view of Venus. The extra February brightness is coming from a planet that is sporting a relatively thin crescent:
How can this be? Why does Venus get brighter as its crescent gets narrower? The mystery is explained here.
By the way, Venus completes my collection of planetary disks that can be captured with an ordinary telephoto lens. (See the Astrophotography With a Camera and Tripod blog posting.) Someday I plan to make a composite image that shows: The Moon, Venus, Mars, Jupiter with its moons, and Saturn with its rings.
A mid-January winter sunrise can be a magical time, where you can see golden sunlit branches at the same time as the normally-nocturnal moon.
As I was shooting the above photo, my peaceful morning was rudely interrupted by the furious honking of overflying Canadian Geese. Seeing their sunrise-bathed, gracefully aerodynamic bodies caused me to quickly forgive the intrusion, as I swung my camera lens in their direction.
In mid-January, Kathy and I took a day trip to Mt. St. Helens. (Or at least, as close as we could get before being stopped by snowy road closures.) After driving through miles of icy fog, we suddenly broke out into warm and beautiful sunshine with Mt. St. Helens presiding over the post-eruption landscape.
Click on the image to see a set of this and 10 other favorite shots, which includes the unconventional use of an emergency runaway truck ramp and a stately eagle ignoring the beautiful mountain behind it.
