David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Views of the sky. Sunrise, sunset, clouds, and weather
Late August Star Trails. Since it looked like the sky was going to be clear last night, I left a camera out on the deck to get some star trail images. The first one was before midnight, and the second one after midnight. I did this set with a fisheye lens to get as much of the sky as possible. There is a tree in the front of the house that is blocking the northern star. I also used the images to create a time-lapsed video of the night sky.
Bats in Flight at Dusk. This evening as it was getting dark I noticed there were several bats flying around in my backyard. I knew that it would be a challenge to capture an image of the bats as they darted around chasing insects. The following images were taken with a Nikon D3s camera at 12800 or 102400 ISO using a 400 mm f/2.8 D II lens. The bats were moving too fast to follow using a tripod or monopod, so I was doing this hand-held. This is not a combination that you can hand-hold for long periods. I also wish that I had the VR version of this lens. There was no way that autofocus would work, so I manually set the focus distance to 25 feet and shot in high-speed burst mode anytime the bats flew by at about that distance. Of about 600 images, the following 6 were the best. I am open to suggestions how to do a better job capturing images of bats in flight.
After the Storm. It has been raining a lot since last Saturday night. The storm system is finally leaving. I hoped to get a rainbow, but had to settle for a landscape view from my backyard. But then again, it is not often I can take a landscape image with weather/clouds from my backyard. The image was taken with a Leica X1. The first version of the image is the “out of the camera” JPG. The next two were the Leica X1 version of RAW (Adobe DNG) that were processed with Capture One Pro 6 and Photoshop CS5. The main difference between these two images was the white balance). The final image was converted to B&W using Nik Silver Efex Pro.
Let me know which you like best.
Perseid Meteor Shower. Conditions for viewing the Perseid Meteors this year were not good. The moon was full with relatively high humidity and some clouds. I set two cameras up to take images overnight, and got maybe three images of meteors. I’ve made a time-lapse movie from the two image sets.
As a side note, I am running out of hard disk space. I could get another WD My Book external drive, but have run out of USB and Firewire ports on my computer. I’m thinking about a Dobro disk array. What ever I do, I also need to maintain an off-site backup copy. I worry about some of the cloud options, both due to cost and the fact that ATT limits me to 5 GB/month of broadband internet access.
Soaring Turkey Vulture. This week Thom Hogan has been publishing reviews of Nikon “Exotic” lenses. By Exotic, he is referring to the big telephoto lenses: 200 mm f/2, 300 mm f/2.8, 400 mm f/2.8, 500 mm f/4, and 600 mm f/4. In the reviews, he really likes the 400 mm f/2.8. I have an earlier version of the 400 mm f/2.8 D II (before VR or VR II). I decided to take it out this afternoon. Rather than showing some more images of the local deer, I’ll share an image of a soaring turkey vulture. The image was taken hand-held (yes this is a heavy lens (4620 g, nearly 10 lbs) — and even heavier when you add-on the camera body). The image is cropped significantly as the vulture was soaring well above the house.
If the sky stays clear tonight, I will try some full moon images with this lens (alone and with the TC-E III 20 teleconverter), and some star-trails looking for Perseid meteor trails.