David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Views of science and technology from around the world
CSX 8519 Railroad Locomotive. I had to stop for this CSX locomotive at two railroad crossings while driving home tonight. The second time I was in front of the queue and had the chance to quickly get the Leica X1 camera I carry in the car out and get a snapshot. Image converted to B&W with NIK Silver Efex Pro 2. Let me know if the image is too dark.
While reading the commentary on Thom Hogon’s site today, I saw that B&H (and other vendors) had received new Nikon 500 mm and 600 mm f/4 VRII Super Telephoto lenses and still have some available for sale. These have been in short supply for a long time, and may be in even shorter supply for an even longer time since the earthquake in Japan. I held out and did not place an order (and thus didn’t help the economy by spending nearly $20K). This was hard, since I missed many great photo opportunities while on the Semester at Sea, Spring Enrichment Voyage — Ultimate Travel Photography Workshop (UTPW-II) earlier this month. Several of the folks attending the workshop had the larger 500 mm and 600 mm lenses and were able to get some great images that made those of us with lighter kits (70-300 or 80-400) jealous.
Pink Flower — Macro and Wide Depth of Field. I used the pink flower from yesterday as an exercise to practice with a macro lens, flash, and Helicon Focus to get a macro image of a flower with an extreme depth of field in focus. Ten images of the flower were taken from rear focus to front focus by manually adjusting the focus distance on the lens. The raw images were processed with Capture One Pro, converted to 16 bit Tiff files, and then processed with Helicon Focus. Even though the lens was set at f/22, the actual focus plane was very narrow and thus needing several focus distances for Helicon Focus.
Snapshot of the CSX 7683 engine at a rail road crossing near my home in New Jersey. Getting a “grab” shot with a point & shoot camera is a challenge. After coming to a stop at the RR crossing, I had to get the camera out of my pocket, remove the lens cover, turn the camera on, adjust the zoom, and try to compose the image through the front window of my car. This was the second shot, and I was lucky get the train in the center. I didn’t get the best composition with the full rail road crossing sign being clipped at the top. Composition with a point & shoot camera requires a lot of luck with the delay between hitting the shutter button and the actual shutter release, and trying to compose the image with the rear LCD display. The other problem I discovered after the fact, was the camera was in “manual focus” mode, so focus for this image was just lucky.
When I checked the USGS website this morning I saw that the Delaware river was above flood stage at Lamberville/New Hope. I cross the Delaware River at the Lambertville/New Hope bridge when going to work in Pennsylvania. I went to take a look and took a few images. The river level was high enough to start to flood the Lambertville Inn parking lot and deposit a lot of trash and debris. Every several minutes a tree floated down the river. The Lambertville Inn is built to allow flood water to flow through and not reach the main floors of the building, and have an image looking through this open space. I assume that the Inn was built this way to protect it because of a history of flooding at this location.
