David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Views of science and technology from around the world
The water was still running heavy in the nearby Rock Brook. A tree had fallen into the stream and got caught by the bridge. The Dogwood trees were in bloom, and the Carpenter Bees were out looking to drill holes into the wood exterior of my house. I’m not sure what type of tree or shrub it is where the leaves appear to be emerging from a pod. Individual images from the slide show can be viewed here.
Pictures of a squirrel in my backyard after finding a nut. The images were taken with a Nikon 1 V1 camera, FT1 adapter, and 70-200 mm f/2.8 VRII lens. I prefer the squirrels outside rather than doing damage in my attic. I’ve put up flashing Christmas lights and ultrasonic noisemakers in my attic to try keeping them outside. That worked for a while, but they ultimately came back. Finally it took traps and the physical removal of 8 nests. All of the insulation in the attic needed to be replaced, as well as the electrical wiring that had been chewed. The cedar shake siding on house was replaced with a concrete composite, and the soffits all replaced. Now all of the ways into the attic have been blocked.
I must have been bored, so spent an afternoon doing some autofocus and resolution testing with some of my cameras and lenses. The goal was to see which combination would be able to focus and provide the highest resolution image of Alexander Hamilton. Ideally, sharp enough to make out the microprint security feature on his shoulder. All of the images were taken with a Nikon D300 camera. The lenses used include a 105 mm f/2.8 VR macro, 200 mm f/2 VR, 300 mm f/2.8 VR, 400 mm f/2.8, and 200-400 mm f/4 VR.
Wintertime walkabout in Tromsø, Norway. Part 2: Ships and boats. With its long coastline, Norway is a nautical seafaring nation. I arrived in Tromsø on the MS Nordkapp, a Hurtigruten line ship three days earlier and would leave on a different Hurtigruten ship. On this day there were fishing trawlers, combination passenger ferry/Ro-Ro (roll on, roll off) cargo ships, and a fire/rescue boat named the Wanny Woldstad. Later in the day, the Hurtigruten MS Kong Harald stopped in Tromsø. I had been on that ship the winter of 2007. On the way back to the hotel, we watched a combination passenger ferry/Ro-Ro cargo ship be winched out of the water to into a dry dock shipyard.
Wall hanging system for prints being prototyped in my laundry room — A work in Progress. The goal was to design and build a simple system to display prints on walls in my house, and then deploy the system in many rooms as the house is renovated. I wanted something that would allow me to easily move or change the prints being displayed, and not need to use picture frames, or picture hanging hardware. The first attempt used a map hanging system. This limited me to rows of the same size [letter – 8-1/2″ x 11″; B+ – 13″ x 19″; or C – 17″ x 22″]. One other idea was to hold the prints up with magnets. This was first attempted using parallel strips of flexible 3M magnetic tape attached to the drywall. I tried a number of small magnets, but none were strong enough to hold prints larger than 8 1/2″ by 11″ and especially prints on thick archival papers. Looking for other options I found that cold-rolled steel had a stronger magnetic attraction. For the prototype I mounted thirteen 1″ x 0.125″ x 72″ steel bars on the wall. These were attached by drilling holes in the steel bars and then screwing into the studs behind the drywall. An image of the prototype is shown below. I used a series of different sized images from the day before starting the Spring 2016 Semester at Sea voyage. Future work will be optimizing the placement of the steel bars to work with letter, B+, and C sized prints. The steel bars will be painted the same color as the wall, and the round ceramic magnets will be painted white. Image taken with a Fuji X-T2 camera and 23 mm f/1.4 lens (ISO 200, 23 mm, f/1.4, 1/125 sec) pop-up flash bounced off the ceiling.
