Mar
18
This morning I went to the butterfly pavilion to take pictures with the Front Range Photography group. We went in early so that we could use tripods, but one of the things that impressed me, was that the butterflies would land anywhere.
So you had to be careful of where you were going to step. It was nice that the butterflies had no fear of humans, but I wanted to be sure I would not do any harm.
Mar
11
Went out this weekend with the American Photo Treks guys to do some star stacking and try out a star trekker.
I had been watching Dave Morrow’s videos about doing this, but Ken Childress had some good tips about doing this. Dave M had mentioned that the accurate setting in photo tips was what we needed to be using so I was using a 5 second exposure. Here I stacked 11 shots.
Here I was stacking fewer shots (so a bit more noise) but I exposed for the foreground more.
Nov
19
I just finished a class with Gabriel Biderman and Chris Nicholson from National Parks at Night about light painting and shooting black and white. Or as Vincent Versace would say, chromatic grey scale. To paraphrase Gabe, a lot of people shoot in color and only convert to black and white when the color photo doesn’t work. Usually I shoot black and white for a specific project or when a picture screams at me I need to be a black and white photo.
This was the last set of photos I took at our Sloss Furnaces workshop. I usually don’t think of taking pictures of star trails in the middle of a big city, but in this case the folks at Sloss were kind enough to shut off the lights for three days and allow us to do envision their historic landmark in a new way. This stack was about 38 photos and I finished just before dew fall. I really wondered about this, since I had been doing star trails up in Rocky Mountain Park with Chris, it was much darker up there so I was happy to see these results.
Ty from Sloss Furnaces gave us all a special tour when we started which added so much more to the experience. Ty mentioned that the Birmingham administration put funding the museum/furnaces to a vote. The vote was 100% in favor and they dedicated 3 million dollars. There are about 10,000 students that tour the facility on a yearly basis. In our case having Ty explain what these buildings and machinery contained within, helped us understand what we were photographing.
Not only is this interesting from the point of view of being a historian or technologist, but Sloss furnaces has an arts program that’s going strong. Being made of pig iron, their pieces are a little heavy.
Nov
4
Here’s a photo of the the isolation ward at the hospital on the south side of Ellis Island.
This is the isolation ward, and I got a feeling of abandonment here.
I’m currently taking a class with the Colorado Photographic Arts center taught by Frank Varney about Perfecting your Black and Photography and Prints. The photos I took on Ellis Island are interesting material for this class.
Oct
22
Fossil light. That’s what astronomers call light from stars and galaxies in the past. The site that I visited last week wasn’t that old, but light from 109 Piscium would be arriving from when they opened the hospital on Ellis Island. I went out to Ellis Island with Joe McNally and the Nikon School. Joe was kind to us and got us out to the south side of the island fairly quickly so we could get the morning light.
This was one of the doctor’s quarters on the island. As you can tell, this was serviceable for it’s era.
This picture was taken in natural light, just after sunrise. Thankfully we were able to use tripods.
The south side of the island was where the hospital was, so those folks who were immigrating who were ill and curable, spent some time there before being introduced to the rest of the population. It had to be bittersweet feeling for the patients who were being treated. Just another mile to get to New York City. But once they were cured they could find a job and get their new start in the United States.
The group, Save Ellis Island is working on restoring the south side of the island. Joe McNally had taken photographs for National Geographic, in 1988 and those photographs showed a gone to nature landscape, with buildings in very sad shape. Our guides from Save Ellis Island were telling us that they were aiming at a stabilized ruin. I think they have done a marvelous job.
As you can tell most of the windows were broken so most of the interiors had been exposed to the elements for years.
Oct
17
Spent some time looking at Freedom Tower tonight.
I took this picture around civi twilight. It was a nice balance between the twilight and the lights of the building. So for architectural photography, you don’t need to use HDR.
Earlier I was struck by the juxtaposition between the architecture of the mall and the Freedom Tower
Oct
15
Last weekend we had our last Rocky Mountain International Audiofest show at the Marriott in the Tech Center. The show will live on at another venue,
I always enjoy wandering this show, not only does it have some insanely good audio audio systems to listen to, and it has a number of folks who push the state of the art.
I jest and tell people that my Little Dot MKIV SE wants to grow up to be this amplifier, but it really doesn’t. There’s a world of difference between a Chinese headphone amp that’s designed for a specific price point, and this pictured Bob Carver amplifier that designed to be the state of the art.
For those of you wonder, this amplifier is 75 W stereo amplifier. It did sound very nice.
Oct
3
A few weeks ago we had Doors open Denver. For those of you who aren’t in Denver, a number of places open up to the public so you can see things you couldn’t normally see.
Mountain States Telephone Building
You can see this without going into the building, but I think the security guards were more forgiving of someone sitting on the ground and trying to get the right angle.
In the days of cell phones, I wonder how long it will be before folks forget that phone booths ever existed.
For our tour of the building, they brought us inside and showed us the executive offices and their museum.
One of the pictures I wanted to get was a nice picture of the inside of a cathedral.
St John’s
I have to thank the fellow who was patiently explaining the history of the church. He was forgiving of me, once again sitting on the floor trying to get just the right angle.
Jul
30
I had a chance to try out my long lens to photograph wild animals. I went out with the Tamron Tours and the Mikes Camera folks to The Wild Animal Sanctuary near Keenesburg Colorado a few weeks ago. They had a class the night before and we loaded up on the bus the next morning to go out there. 
The Wild Animal Sanctuary has a novel way to allow us into to see the rescued animals. They have elevated walkways to allow the public in. The animals don’t feel under stress if you’re in the sky to them. The Wild Animal sanctuary is speciallizing in rescuing animals that have been kept as pets, or roadside zoos or other unpleasant circumstances for wild animals. If you want to take pictures the animals have much more room to road around so using a long lens is a very good idea.
The folks from Tamron let us try out long lenses to get our pictures. Since I already had a Tamron 150-600 zoom I was just there for the experience. This is the first time I tried pairing that lens with my Nikon D500, so this was the equivalent of a 900 mm lens. Since there was no problem with light, I used a 1/2500 sec shutter speed to get a steady picture.
Jul
29
A few months ago the Colorado Railroad Museum put on a steampunk festival. They had some performers for the folks who were getting refreshments, and I was fascinated by this young lady who wasn’t on stage but working on her routine.
Sometimes you just want to stand there and watch what’s going on in the background. I didn’t want to disturb her concentration, and I certainly didn’t want to use any off camera flash.
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