Whalter and Me
Wednesday, April 23, 2025
Barn Swallows at the lake (second attempt)
Tuesday, April 22, 2025
Barn Swallows at the lake (first attempt)
We are back at the lake house near Malakoff. The boat docks have barn swallows. I'm trying to configure my camera after watching some videos. Thsi is an on going task. The cameras today have so many options that I am always learning new things about the cameras.
I thought I would try and capture the Barn Swallows. If you have seen them fly, you know they are very fast and agile. I eventually set the camera at 1/2000 of a second shutter speed and got some ok shots but if you zoom in, you can tell that there is motion blur. The highlight on the eye for example is three to five spots instead of just one. I plan to try again with a faster shutter.
Here are the results:
Saturday, April 19, 2025
Baby Geese at Richland College
Hi Folks,
I go out and take photos and I feel like I don't have a good way to share them. I could blast large groups of photos via text to various people but that seems invasive to me. So I'm going to try to post a blog entry more consistently. I will then send a link to people who might be interested in the topic. I would encourage you to subscribe so that you get notified when I do an updates. It would also encourage me to be more consisten knowing that others are enjoying my content.
I'm visiting my brother up in Richardson. Richland College is close by. They have a dammed up stream flowing through it and it seems to be a gathering place fo Canadian Geese. I saw two broods of chicks and at least three females sitting on eggs. I've posted the best here and created a gallery of more if you are curious. Also in the group is a barn swallow, an egret, a scissortail flycatcher, among others.
I hope you enjoy:
Friday, April 18, 2025
Testing various techniques for photographing flowers
Saturday, May 14, 2022
Walkabout Along the Gulf Coast - Day 4 - Historic Galveston
I did other things on this day but the big thing was taking pictures of the neat architecture in "Historic Galveston".
I was basically just cruising up the coast after spending the night at Galveston Island State Park. I was looking, again, to find some shipping activity and I did find where they build the drilling platforms. Then I saw the big cruise liners and thought I'd go look but you can't really drive by them so I thought I would park and walk over.
I had noticed signs for "Historic Galveston" and so I packed my architectural lens. What is that you ask???
The short answer is a "tilt-shift lens" but that will likely cause you to ask, "Perry... why are you such a dick!!!" So, to prevent that I'll explain. (Grab some coffee)
The film or the image sensor is a plane. And the lens is a plane. Almost all cameras put those two planes parallel. This causes the "point of focus" to be a plane and that plane is also parallel with the image and lens planes. Fine...
But now you need to photograph a tall building. What do you do? You point the camera up. Now the image, lens, and focus planes are not parallel with the face of the building.
That isn't really a big deal most times because the depth of field is enough to make your eyes happen. But there is another problem which is called "key stoning". The face of the building tapers off because there is now a "vanishing point" above the building. To rephrase, the sides of the building will taper towards a vanishing point.
Modern software can fix this but it is a post process munging and back in the film and print days, there was no software. What to do???
The solution is to keep the image, lens, and focus planes parallel with the sides of the building. "Detach" the film and lower it down. This requires the lens to produce a sharp image on a much wider circle including not only where the film or image sensor normally is but also where it is after it has been (here is the big word) shifted down.
The "tilt" part of "tilt-shift" lens is even more fascinating but I'll leave that for another post.
All that to say... huy guys... looks at these neat buildings!!!
Enjoy!
Friday, May 13, 2022
Walkabout Along the Gulf Coast - Day 3
As I mentioned, I slept at a KOA and woke to find the same four (or five depending upon how you count) planets lined up. I took a picture this time and I labeled them.
What isn't shown is the International Space Station. It came trucking from the Northwest to the Southeast at 5:45 a.m. and its path crossed right through the planet's elipitcal plane that we see the planets lined up on. Why didn't I take the picture???? Well, I had changed to the 500mm lens to get a close up of the ISS but I wasn't really prepared for that either and it basically passed through without me taking a decent picture. Oil well...
So... I packed up and started driving eventually ended up at Galveston Island State Park. Here is the day's path:
Breakfast was in a little place in Palacios, TX. There was a lot of shrimp boats. Here is a small sample of those pictures:
I crossed over the Colorado River
While driving I came across a nice old church and an old windmill. I eventually ended up at Port Lavaca. I was hoping to see some shipping activity but all the cranes were silent. I walked out on a long wave break and took a few random shots.
I eventually ended at the state park. When I got here at 6 p.m., the place was empty. Since then, the place has been flooded with Boy Scouts. All the sites are reserved so I'm not sure what will happen. Its almost 10 p.m. now... I'm going to sign off and hope for the best.