Lazy days of summer

So it's been pretty quiet the past couple months. I had my now annual use-it-or-lose-it three week summer vacation in June. Mostly just hung out with Abby while Miranda studied for finals and then finished some research internships she had.

May and June did have two big astronomical events that Abby and I got to see together. First was the annular eclipse visible across northern California. I thought about driving two hours north to see the full eclipse but decided to see a pretty close to full one from our yard. Staying here let me share the view with the family and some of the neighborhood kids, too. Here's the peak

and a time lapse put together in photoshop

I used a 13-stop Kodak filter fitted to the front of my medium telephoto lens. It was great for seeing sunspots but probably wasn't needed at the peak. If I had it to do over I would've gone down to the Amtrak station and done a wide angle time lapse there instead. I think I'll only have to wait 5 years for that.

A couple weeks later the filter came in handy again when Venus transited the sun. I took Abby to a viewing party at Explorit and I think she had an idea of what she was looking at.

This won't happen for another 105 years. I'll be long gone but hopefully Abby will still be around and will have a vintage photo of herself to share with great-great-grandkids. After playing with Abby at the park I went out at sunset to try and get the show with something in the foreground. A few sunflowers from seeds of last year's crop had popped up in a wheat field near the house. I tried to incorporate one into the shot but the sun is a pretty bright object that silhouettes everything else. 

The thin ribbons of clouds helped dramatize the photo. A few days before this there were some more prominent clouds around sunset. Miranda had been asking me to get some shots of those sunflowers so I biked on over and snapped a few quick shots using the filter and holder I'd built for the Nikon lens. 

The rest of the vacation we used on family trips including one to Tahoe where I found these cool little butterflies

The iridescent shimmer on their wings looks great printed on metallic paper. We also day tripped to the Sacramento Zoo

and a kids' discovery museum in Sausalito. That museum is down at Ft Baker, just before the Golden Gate. When we came thru the tunnel and I saw the fog across the bridge I told Miranda that I had to stop just for one quick photo.

There is a standard view of the bridge from Battery Spencer that everyone takes. But the way the fog was moving I wanted to show more of the northern traffic lanes and that view is only found by holding the camera out over a chain link fence. The first time I came to this vista point for photos I was so anxious to get a shot I stopped here before getting that great view that you're supposed to get. But after looking at thousands of other photos from this area I only found one other person who thought to take a shot this way (and post it on the internet.) The combination of the fog, wildflowers, and long stretch of bridge leading to the north tower makes this my favorite shot of the Golden Gate. 

With the Golden Gate on my mind I tried planning out a good view for the 4th of July. Last year at Ft Baker we could see the Sausalito fireworks behind us so I wanted to see if I could use them with the Bridge for a unique view. I wanted the bridge head on, with the towers aligned, and mapped out where to go for the shot. One place was at the south edge of the bridge, the other was at Grand View park. On the 2nd I went down to check it out and see if perhaps the Marin Co Fair fireworks would be visible. They weren't, but the view was still grand. 

When the 4th rolled around I checked the live web cams in SF and saw the fog was going to be way too thick to get this shot. So we saved the gas money and driving time and stayed in Davis with some of Mir's friends. But if the fog is clear next year I definitely want to try again. 

I came back down to SF a week later to get Giants fireworks with the Bay Bridge. Not wanting to be stuck in Friday afternoon traffic I left early and did some exploring around the SF side of the Golden Gate. 

The view at Ft Point which should be called Ft. Windiest Place in the World

I then walked on the Golden Gate for the first time. Looking up at the south tower

Looking down on the pelicans.

There were also a bunch of dolphins playing, including a mother and calf, but the great photos I thought I had were all out of focus. Thanks Canon. Back to the land one last shot looking back from a picnic area below the viewing lot. What to do on a gloomy, overcast day? Use a large aperture to set the mood with vignetting and wait for nature to help fill out the frame.  

With the fog getting thicker I debated staying for sunset but the whole point of the trip was to get fireworks and the Bay Bridge. A quick stop at the national cemetery at the Presidio with fog casting the bridge in a ghostly fashion. 

Across town at Treasure Island the clouds had gotten lower and were looking to ruin the view. I set up 3 cameras but none could overcome the overcastness. 

I will go back to this sometime if just for a sunset/blue hour photo without the fireworks (and the clouds.) Just for reference, here's the Giants' fireworks back in April from down at the base of the island

One bridge I never have problems with during fireworks shows is the Tower Bridge in Sacramento. I tried doing 3D here one with telephoto lenses

and again with wide angles

but I think I need to move the cameras farther apart to make the 3D more apparent. And a regular photo from the grass islands along the Capitol Mall. 

One last shot from a couple nights ago. It was 100 degrees, no wind and no moon. Great for star trails. A sunflower field east of town with convenient parking beckoned. 

I shouldn't have waited til dark to set up. Just a half mile from town, maybe a hundred yards from I-80, but pitch black in walking down those rows trying to find a south facing flower. I finally gave up and went with the flowers looking east back into town. Not great but I did catch a pretty bright shooting star. How's about a wish for more great photos in the near future? 

A Golden View

There are few places in the world more iconic than the Golden Gate Bridge. And even though I was born and raised in Northern California it took almost 31 years for me to really stop and appreciate what a gorgeous icon it is. I'd come close a few times. Like in my first year of college when we tried to walk the bridge at night with some cute German exchange students and had the after hours security kindly tell us to leave the area immediately. There was also the camping trip I took in Boy Scouts to the Presidio when we sat on a hillside and talked about how the bridge bent under the weight of tens of thousands of people who gathered to mark its 50th anniversary. But on my trips down to the Bay Area it just seemed a touristy thing and not as exhilarating as a good hike up Mt Tam or as interesting as people watching around China Town.

It wasn't until a little over five years ago that I finally had an excuse to get to know that amazing Golden Gate. I'd taken a day off work to do some hiking around Muir Woods before going to watch the Giants' opening night fireworks over the Bay Bridge. After the hike I did some exploring and I pulled off at the last exit before the bridge. The first vista point there was Battery Spencer. It was one of the most amazing views I'd seen. The north tower stood huge nearby while views of the bay, Alcatraz, and the city skyline filled the span of the bridge. It was such a sight that after hiking around the headlands I stopped again at sunset. The golden glow of the bridge and city lights was even more amazing. After that night I made a habit of always leaving the city by going across the Golden Gate, partly because I didn't want to pay toll in Vallejo but mostly because there's nothing like driving across that beautiful bridge.

A few months ago when I found out about 75th anniversary celebration I knew it was something I had to see. There would be hundreds or thousands of other photographers around the bridge and I wanted to find a spot to make my photos stand out from the crowd. I thought about all the great views I'd found since that first trip like Hawk Hill, Slackers' Ridge, Kirby Cove, Ft Baker, or all the way back in Tiburon on the Marin side. Maybe Marshall Beach, the Legion of Honor, Crissy Field, or even Treasure Island on the SF side. I'd pretty much decided on hiking down to Kirby Cove when it dawned on me that this was a once in a lifetime event. It was not a time to be different, it was a time to be the best. And there was no better view of the Golden Gate and SF than Battery Spencer. I just needed to find a way to own it like nobody else.

I started planning how much gear I'd bring to shoot with and how many different views I could get from one general area. But the idea of leaving cameras spread out in a crowd seemed a little dangerous. So maybe I'd keep the cameras together but with wide and tight views. Then I remembered playing around with 3D anaglyphs about ten years ago. The results were pretty crappy since I was trying to make a stereo view with only one camera and people would move between pictures. But if I had matching cameras and lenses side-by-side, shooting in sync it could work. So every morning I'd check EBay in search of a good deal on a duplicate Canon 5DII camera and Nikon 14-24 lens. A little over two weeks before the show great deals on each popped up within minutes of each other. I ordered both and set about planning for a 3D shoot.

After two weeks of waiting I found out the lens was just a scam. I was pretty bummed but had already bought the camera and a special rail to mount two cameras on so I decided to try some 3D anyway. The day before the celebration I had to shoot a UCD baseball game for work. Needing some 3D practice and being the overkill type I took the Enterprise's old 400mm 2.8 lens and my nice 400 2.8 IS and set them up down the third base line. Usually one of these lenses is enough to draw stares but two together was just ridiculous. My lens sat just a fraction of a cm higher than the old one but with a little maneuvering in photoshop the shots turned out pretty cool.
Tom Briner pitching:

Brett Morgan batting:

That night the Rivercats had their fireworks over the Tower Bridge. I toned it down and used two medium sized 70-200mm zoom lenses instead of the monster telephotos from baseball. Unfortunately I  changed the settings on one camera which made matching the colors from the two cameras difficult. I almost never adjust the white balance but for some reason I'd set it to 'shade' and shot in jpg instead of the RAW files I usually do. Thankfully the Cats do this several times a season so I will have a chance to try again.

The next morning Miranda asked if she could meet up with some friends for drinks in the afternoon. I had wanted to leave early to be sure to get parking but decided to be nice to my lovely wife and let her go. She took that to mean I wasn't going at all. After a frantic phone call almost 5 hours later to get her back home with Abby I was on my way. On the drive I started to question if a stupid photo expedition was worth the fight with Miranda. About 15 minutes in, though, a ladybug crawled up the inside pillar of my windshield and calmed me down to where I knew I would still have a good night. I got down to the headlands with a little under two hours til showtime. But the road up to Battery Spencer was closed and the parking down at Fort Baker had long since filled up. I swung back on the freeway and down into Sausalito. Lots of other late comers were doing the same thing and I luckily found a parking spot in a neighborhood uphill from town to join the crowds trekking down to Ft Baker. Assuming there'd be no clear spots left for me wherever I managed to shoot from I pulled my 9 ft tall tripod out of the trunk to hopefully shoot above the crowds I figured to be stuck behind. So with ~25 pounds of gear in my backpack and that 18 pound tripod over my shoulder I set out to see how close I could get to the show.

I was in surprisingly better shape than I thought and made it to the base of the bridge just as twilight was setting in. One final push up the hill got me to the overlook with about 15 minutes to spare. Even though I'd practiced 3D the day before I hadn't yet tried the cameras without big lenses to the stereo rail. The screws on the rail were just a little too long for mounting directly to the cameras so they wouldn't sit tightly. Exhausted, I almost gave up. But having already overcome two setbacks I wasn't going to admit defeat yet. Folding over the cloth I'd covered the rail in for hiking I slid it under the cameras and tightened the screws. The cameras weren't perfectly level with each other but they were at least steady and it was the best I could do in the dark on short time. With wireless controllers on both cameras the tripod went up over the long line of photographers who had been waiting for hours to save their spots. I grabbed my smaller tripod and the extra camera and moved back to a higher vantage point where could still trigger the remotes.

Within minutes the show began with a beautiful curtain of fire sparkles dropping from the bridge to the water. It was an awesome sight to see but with the lights on the bridge off it was almost impossible to capture photographically. Then the real show began. You can see my tall tripod and twin cameras in the bottom right of this photo.

 

When I first put the cameras up I set them to the same settings I'd used for Rivercats fireworks. But a quick test exposure before the show looked really dark so I upped the ISO to brighten the photos. You can blame it on the long drive and hike or the short time for set up but really it was just one of my stupid brain farts. Using a test exposure in the dark instead of assuming for the light of the fireworks was just stupid. So most of the shots from the cameras I spent so much time on were just of big balls of bright light instead of beautiful streams of firework blooms that I'd hoped for. Still I got a few shots that were salvageable enough to try some 3D. 

Although I'd gotten the focal length and aperture fairly close on each lens there is still a huge difference in color and distortion between the superb Nikon 14-24 and my old workhorse Canon 17-35 lenses. It took a long time just to get it to look this crappy. Maybe when I've done a few more of these I can go back and try to clean it up some more. 

After the show the cameras were packed up without looking to see what I'd got. I figured I screwed up the exposure and didn't want to think about how bad it was on the 3.5 mile hike back to the car. Here's the exact route I took:

I'd been wanting a good hike for a while now and the cold evening air was perfect. And as I slipped past the long lines of cars waiting to get out of the one exit open at Ft Baker I felt the walk was almost a blessing. Although nothing seemed to go as I planned I'm happy to have experienced it and am definitely looking forward to the Golden Gate's 100th. 

Filter fun

I've been a Canon camera user since I got my first SLR camera as a teenager. Rebellious tennis star Andre Agassi was promoting the new Canon Rebel and that was good enough for me. I progressed thru several Canons, first film then digital, and grew a decent sized lens collection. Since I was a big sports shooter I had my eyes set on the big telephoto lenses and was always glad that Canon produced some of the sharpest telephotos available. But in the past few years, as I've started doing more landscapes, I found Canon's wide angle lenses did not perform as well. Many other Canon shooters had the same feelings and some found a way to mount Nikon's very sharp ultra wide angle lenses on their Canons. Some Canon clan would shun such treachery and liken this to putting a Chevy 350 in a Ford Mustang. But the days of Andre Agassi were long gone and I had no such loyalty to a company that wasn't producing the results I wanted.

So a few years ago when a cheap Nikon lens popped up on Craigslist courtesy of a bad divorce I jumped on the bandwagon. After waiting almost 6 months for the special adapter to be made in England I was off shooting landscapes as sharp as my sports shots. The pictures were awesome. Razor sharp and clean across the whole image. The only drawback to the lens was that it's front element was so big you couldn't mount filters on it. So in tricky light situations like bright skies and dark foregrounds at sunset I had to revert back to my old cruddy Canon lenses. Of course many other photogs complained about this, too, and eventually several filter makers came to the rescue with special holders that mount to the body of the lens. It looked good until I saw the price. All were $300 and up. The holder was almost 3x the cost of the filters.

Being the cheap engineering bastard that I am I looked for a way around this. The holder didn't need to be anything fancy. Just something that could mount around the body of the lens with grooves for sliding in the filters and have a way of keeping out stray light around the edges. Building my own holder would be a good way to satisfy my thriftiness and have fun with the power tools. I sketched up a design and started cutting. I took some old 1/2" plywood that was used for the drawer sides on Abby's dresser and cut a 4" hole in the center, about 1/4" larger than the diameter of the lens.

I cleaned up the board then cut some scrap 3/4" pieces of poplar hardwood, also left over from Abby's furniture, about 1" wide by 6" long. The filter I wanted to mount was a little under 1/8" thick, about the same thickness as the cut of the saw blade. One quick pass on each piece about a 1/4" deep gave a groove for the filter to sit in.

I used a little foam cushioning around the hole to give a snug and soft fit around the lens and help block stray light from reflecting between the filter and lens. I nailed the sides on and a test fit looked good.

I painted the interior flat black

and then cut some old black fabric and stapled it around the top and bottom to block the rest of the stray light.

Of course I would decide to finish something like this just when all the cloudy skies that needed filters would be going away for the season. Luckily there were a few clouds out a couple days ago for Abby and I to go check out the horse ranch near our house at sunset.

It's not the greatest example of what this lens and a 3-stop graduated neutral density filter can do but at least I know it works.

Another popular trend with filters now is the use of extreme neutral density filters to produce long exposure (one minute or longer) images in daylight. I'd always enjoyed doing something similar by moonlight. But being able to take those pictures in the daytime would be beneficial. I already had an old Kodak gel filter that could add 13 stops to my exposure, basically changing my shutter speed from 1/30 of a second to 120 seconds. The filter was too small to fit on the holder I just built but would cover my old Canon lens. Since a filter like this is used too create a motion blurred scene the poor sharpness of the lens would probably add to the effect I wanted. But like my filters for the Nikon lens, I had no way of mounting it to a camera.

Since I had the tools out it was time to make a holder for this filter, too. This filter had to be completely light tight. There were some old used holders on EBay for around $20. But like I said, I'm cheap and like to build things. The basic idea for gel holders is a clamshell design with a circular opening on each half and padding inside to hold the gel softly in place. I took a piece of 1/8 mdf leftover from the drawer bottoms of Abby's armoire and cut an opening about 82mm in diameter. The front filter thread on my Canon lens was 77mm and I had a 77-82mm adapter ring that I didn't need anymore. Fitting this ring to the holder would allow me to screw the holder right onto the lens. With a little sanding I fit this ring snuggly into the opening. On the inside of each board I glued a piece of black fabric and cut a circle to match the opening. When closed the fabric would help hold the gel in place and squeeze together to give a flat enclosure and prevent light leaks.

I put the filter in place and added a little electrical tape to hold everything in place.

Like the filter holder for the Nikon this one really benefits from clouds in the sky. The Saturday after finishing this there were a few midday clouds hanging around while shooting the UCD baseball game for work. I brought the tripod and set up the camera to see what I could get.

Again, not a spectacular shot but the motion in the clouds got me excited about what could be if I find a good location for shooting. Even though I haven't had the chance to put these filters to their full effect I'm still happy that my designs worked and didn't cost anything but time.

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The few minutes photo adventure

"I'll be back in a few minutes."
That's what I told Miranda as I was watching the storm clouds move overhead near sunset. I was in the garage just about to get greasy trying to build up an old bike from left over spare parts. I popped out to peak at the clouds and then thought "You know what, the bike can wait."

The wheat fields right across the street from the Nugget Market were a wonderful shade of green right now, I stopped by and got this shot two days ago on my way between assignments,

so I figured it'd be a quick trip there and back for a similar type shot.

As I pulled into the shopping center parking lot a faint rainbow started to appear in the southeast, almost the exact opposite direction I was going to be shooting. If I wanted to catch it I was going to have to find someplace else, quick. I pulled right back out of the parking spot and sped my way up to Poleline Road. Before I made it to the stoplight the rainbow was gone. Crap. But there were more clouds moving thru and if another rainbow appeared I needed to be in a good spot.

Up Poleline I went to another wheat field we pass on the way to Costco. The plow lines in it were quite exaggerated and made for a good vanishing point photo.


I was about 6 miles from home and started to debate wether to head back or try going up to the area with oak trees past Woodland. A nice big cloud was heading towards Davis that could make for a good shot. But it had been a while since I'd been to the fields up the road and wanted to see what might be growing there. I tried a few quick spots before getting to the oak I wanted in sunflowers last summer. A thin line of color from what was probably a gorgeous sunset over the Sonoma or Bodega Bay area popped right behind the tree to give some brightness to an otherwise dark image.


I started the drive back, on the scenic route of course, and noticed a big puddle on the side of the road next to two trees. I don't know why I decided to stop here but I'm glad I did. With the tripod center post reversed to get the camera as close to the water as possible, the reflection turned out pretty nice. Because of how the tripod was set up this image is upside down.


Back to Poleline, a.k.a County Road 102 in these parts, I went, happy with a decent outing. The northern edge of Woodland is the industrial area. The lights at dusk there can be quite pretty. And with the rains filling up a few drainage ponds I found another good reflection spot. I'm not sure what they're processing at this plant but the steam clouds flowing out into the cold air of this storm helped accent the lights of the factory and sunset.


With a few minutes turning into 180 minutes it was time to head home where Miranda made sure to remind me of my earlier comment. But she knows that my time moves at a different pace when I'm on a photo adventure.

I've complained a lot on this blog about being stuck at work when the skies were shaping up for good sunsets. Thursday Jan. 5 looked like one of those days. But the work schedule can be pretty light in winter and my only assignment that night was a 7 p.m. basketball game. With the winter sunset at around 5 I figured I had just enough time to make it to the open space in Vacaville and be back before the game. After checking in at the office I made the 20-25 minute drive and arrived with about half an hour of sun left. I reshot one of my favorite photos, the oak and rectangular boulder to see if the clouds would give me something better.

I processed this one differently, extracting the red and green channels, combining them into a grayscale, then toning it to look sepia like. Sometimes when I do black and whites with cloudy skies I pull only the red channel into the grayscale to give the most contrast to the sky. But I've noticed before that the details between channels sometimes shift slightly (insert complex explanation about the nature of optics, diffraction, visible spectrum, etc) It's hard to see in a small web picture but I really like the effect this and the use of a large aperture has on the details in the grass and boulder.

The actual item on my list was the old dead oak tree I'd shot before but at sunset. I tried adding the clouds and moon to make a nice color photo but still like the black and white from last time.


As I tried a few more angles of old shots I could see the color really starting to pop in the clouds visible over the nearby ridge. I hiked as fast as I could with my gear but couldn't find a good foreground subject before the colors started to fade. My lungs were pretty upset about all the work they just did for no reward. But as I started the hike back down the lights of the city started to shine and the waxing gibbous moon helped light the hills.


Having lived in a town as flat as Davis for so long I really liked having a high vantage point to see a similar sized city at twilight.

A few weeks later, with an itch to do more star trails, I headed back out to the barn I'd shot in the fog a year ago. I thought the old truck would make for a good foreground. After a pain in the butt 15 minute bike ride along the levee road by only starlight with a trailer full of gear I made it to the barn. I brought 4 cameras with me and tried multiple angles

I'm not even a mile out of town and there were almost too many stars visible. While the cameras were running I did a little exploring and decided to try a south facing star trails over the collapsed roof of the barn.

It was pretty dark out there but my eyes had adjusted enough to where I think I got a pretty good foreground. I like how the colorful glow from Dixon and Vacaville gives the horizon a fiery look. Unfortunately the battery only lasted about 20 minutes at this spot so I called it quits after this set. That and, even with gloves, the cold was getting to my fingers and toes.

With star trails still on my mind Mir gave me the go ahead to head down to the Golden Gate the next night. Wanting to get the most out of the almost $20 in gas I was spending I decided to try blue hour at the Palace of Fine Arts first. I've wanted this for a long time and almost had it timed perfect but accidentally took the Hwy 1 exit off the bridge instead of 101. The 10 minutes I wasted working my way back cost me the perfect lighting balance between the sky and lights. I was able to pull out the color and detail in photoshop but the pic is more grainy than I'd hoped.

I'm going to try again with better timing and some waders so I can get out into the water and avoid the tree and outcropping on the left of the photo.
Going back across the Golden Gate I set up three cameras for star trails, one on fishing pier

another at the edge of the pier

and the last as close as security would let anyone go to the bridge. It was the last angle that I like the most

Unfortunately the highlights on the bridge are too blown out. But as usual that gives me a good reason to go back again.

While I was breaking down my three camera set-up I played with a few more angles and found a unique view of the bridge and its northern approach reflecting in the water.
If I go back to re-do the other star trails I think I'll try one with this view, too.