At the end, I am at home in the woods
I am supposed to be curating my color slide collection so I can make thousands of digital copies that no one will ever see. I got distracted because I had to find my old slide sorting light tables and in the process also found a box with three old cameras. Two of these might have been in the family since the 1930s and the other was acquired more recently, although it is the oldest of the three.
About 10 years ago I started making digital copies of old film negatives and color slides. The scanners I had access to produced disappointing results, so I tried taking a closeup of the film with a digital camera (Figure 1). The camera was the first DSLR I owned. This made very good copies, capturing most of the information in the old film.
Last week dozens of online photos of Comet NEOWISE enticed me to make an effort to see it for myself. At 9:00 PM on Friday I noticed that the sky was clear, threw some gear in a pack, and hiked up the hill behind the house. I sat in the grass in a big hilltop clearing as the sky darkened and first the comet, and then a million stars, and then the full sweep of the Milky Way emerged above me.
Vernal pools are enchanting places, the breeding habitat of dozens of animal species that would otherwise be absent or rare in a forest. But it is a challenge to take enchanting photos of vernal pools. If you stand far enough away to include the entire pool, lots of trees will probably block your view and the photos don’t seem to capture the essence or importance of the place.
The levee of Bayou Petit Caillou supports the long strip of houses that is Chauvin and Cocodrie, the narrowest towns I have ever seen. Way down delta in Louisiana, you are either on the levee, in the bayou, or somewhere out in the salt marsh. For exactly 100 years, Cecil Lapeyrouse’s Grocery has been on the levee. Today most of the houses are seasonal, and the store gets by with business from people coming down to shrimp or fish or have fun. We stopped by on our exit from the LUMCON Marine Center in Cocodrie where Public Lab held its annual meeting. That had fallen into the fun category. Continue reading “Gas Ice Bait Beer”
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In the 1970s I exposed about 400 rolls of black and white film. Most of these were 36 exposure rolls of 35 mm Kodak Plus-X which I bulk loaded and developed at home. I made an 8 x 10 inch contact print of each roll, and put an accession number on the contact sheet and the glassine envelope with the negative strips. I still have all 14,000 of these negatives and contact prints. If you think that preserving this collection suggests that I am farsighted, consider that I never put a single date on any of this material. In my twenties, it never occurred to me that I would not remember where and when I took each photo. Continue reading “Negative space”
The Lytro camera is probably the most interesting advance in photographic technology this year. An array of microlenses allows the sensor to capture information about the exact direction from which light is coming, and that allows software to focus every part of the scene regardless of it’s distance from the camera. To highlight this advance, the company’s first camera produced interactive online images which could be refocused by clicking anywhere in the scene (see some here). We have all looked at photos with out-of-focus parts, and it is a novel experience to be able to click on or touch the fuzzy places and have the crisp focus shift as if a focusing ring was being turned. But it has also been maddening to know that the captured data would allow the entire photo to be in focus all at the same time, yet this was not an option for any Lytro photo. It was a clever marketing approach, because modern digital cameras with tiny sensors have very good depth of field, and many of the photos we take now already have everything in focus. Allowing the viewer to “focus the photo after it was taken” highlighted how new this technology was. Continue reading “Lytro Schmytro”
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In honor of the opening of the new Crown Point Bridge across Lake Champlain (scheduled for Monday, November 7, 2011) I took my last free ferry ride and flew the Canon Powershot S95 over the Crown Point State Historic Site for three hours last week. The south wind was strong and steady at about 15 mph, but the Levitation Delta kite wandered a bit much to get good coverage for easy panorama stitching. I learned some new finesses of Microsoft ICE and was able to make some decent scenes with as many as 28 stitched photos, but could not construct a half-spherical panorama.
It didn’t seem windy enough, so I plucked dried heads of orchard grass and tossed them into the air. The live feed at WeatherUnderground.com had been reporting 10-12 mph NW winds at the Ralph Myhre Golf Course a mile away, but the grass was falling almost straight down here. On a knoll in the center of the field I felt a breeze, so I took off my pack and assembled the nine foot Levitation Delta kite (with wind less than 15 mph, the Sutton Flow Form 16 would stay in the pack). The delta flew out of my hand and climbed easily to 100 feet. It was flying to the south, not to the east over the cattail marsh I wanted to photograph. Otter View Park in Middlebury is the focus of Galen’s community service project, and he has been describing the plant communities in that marsh. I would not be able to photograph much of it today unless the wind shifted. Continue reading “Otter View Park”