Post Panamax? What’s that?

Posted on May 6, 2013 by Thanos
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The Sanko Royal passes through the narrow Gatun Locks in 2008

Great things are happening all around us, but the average person is not noticing them. How many have heard about the widening of the Panama canal, or the effects that will have on shipping? Slated to complete in 2015 the “Post-Panamax” shipping world will be different, and three US ports are making ready, including the port of Miami.


One of the biggest drills in the world finished drilling the second of two underwater tunnels in Miami. The project aims to boost the city’s seaport, and give Miami an economic lift when the Panama Canal is widened.

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Great Tripod Found at Crick Camera Store

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Thanos

This past week I got a new camera tripod, and it’s really sort of wonderful. It’s manufactured by Benro, and marketed as “Mefoto”. The best thing about it besides the amazing stability in a light tripod is the fact that it folds up so small. I’m able to fit it into an airline carry on bag because the legs flip back on the body. You can also attach just a leg to the center post to make it turn into a monopod.

[amazon-product align=”left” height=”260″ region=”us” width=”130″]B00BETIT68[/amazon-product]Here’s what it looks like at Amazon, but the best news is that I found a local camera store that matched the Amazon price when Amazon had a back order wait of over two weeks.

Crick Camera store is the best one I’ve seen this side of B&H, and they have a wonderful staff who are conversant in everything photographic. When I mentioned how I lost my eyepiece while putting a card in it to block the light, they knew why I would want to do that for wide angle astro-photography as just one instance.

Not only did they steal a march on Amazon who had to back order the Benro tripod (mid May was the arrival I got quoted,) but they also had everything else I needed. The atmosphere was relaxed, cordial, and not snooty as some photography stores get when they cater to pros. So hats off to Crick – I was really impressed and will be back often.

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Failed Photo

Posted on April 27, 2013 by Thanos

To get good photos you have to experiment a lot, to try different things and to stretch the bounds of your camera’s light capturing abilities. This experimentation means that you will have many failed shots initially for every good one, and that over time with practice you will learn the edges and bounds. Here’s a photo where I bumped up against a few.

camera shake

Failed photos are one of the prices of learning the art


What I was attempting to do was take a long exposure of running water to give it a dreamy blurred motion effect instead of the “frozen” look you get when you set the camera to auto. This is because the auto setting will always attempt to get you a reasonably high shutter speed for the available light and aperture, which usually means glassy looking still water with all motion frozen in time. Sometimes that’s exactly what you want, but for a scene like this you hope to capture that sense of the water’s motion instead.
I’ve tried this same photo at the same spot a few times, and I’ve never really gotten the aperture / lighting / and shutter speed combo in the range needed. The day I took this it was dim so I thought I’d finally arrived while the lighting was right. It worked but it didn’t because of camera shake.
So to get this I set the ISO to the lowest (100,) the aperture to the highest this lens would go ( f/32) which gave me the desired slow shutter speed of slightly over a half second. The water is almost right, however if you look close every thing else has a slight blur from camera shake because the shutter speed is just too slow to avoid that with a hand-held shot.
So the next time I take this I will have a tripod to prevent that. That will cause the rocks and everything not moving like the water to come out crisp and sharp. Some pros cheat scenes like this by forcing the shutter speed with a neutral density filter, but that’s putting the image through another piece of glass, which ultimately makes it less sharp. So I doubt I’ll ever get a set of ND filters, but who knows.

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Best Photo from Yesterday’s Walk

Posted on April 13, 2013 by Thanos

Kasey tends to scare off the wildlife when I walk with her, but yesterday towards the end she got tired and was just walking instead of ranging back and forth in wide swaths, so this brave little bird didn’t flee and hung out while I got a few shots with a 70-300 mm lens.

bird picture

300MM 1/400th @ f7.1 ISO 250 – click to embiggen

The lens I used is below, remember that I have a cropped sensor APS-C camera, so at 300 mm I effectively get 450mm which is great for shots like the one you see here.

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First Redbuds Showing

Posted on April 10, 2013 by Thanos

First redbuds

Yesterday was green haze day — all the buds are showing flowers or tips of leaves so when you gaze across the valley the grey branches show a very light haze of green. By this weekend all will be green.
These are the first redbuds I’ve seen on my daily walks.

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Arctic Ice Breaks Up in Beaufort Sea Back in March

Posted on April 7, 2013 by Thanos

A series of intense storms in the Arctic has caused fracturing of the sea ice around the Beaufort Sea along the northern coasts of Alaska and Canada. High-resolution imagery from the Suomi NPP satellite shows the evolution of the cracks forming in the ice, called leads, from February 17 — March 18 2013. The general circulation of the area is seen moving the ice westward along the Alaskan coast.

via Arctic Ice Breaks Up in Beaufort Sea – YouTube.

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Zombunny Rises

Posted on March 31, 2013 by Thanos

zombunny

Zombunny rises

Every Easter the dread Zombunny raises from the grave, and Kasey has to chase him down and kill him again.

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The Case for Marriage Equality: Perry v. Schwarzenegger

Posted on March 29, 2013 by Thanos

The 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia ended state bans on interracial marriage in the 16 states that still had such laws. Now, 44 years after Loving, the courts are once again grappling with denial of equal marriage rights — this time to gay couples. Two California couples have filed suit against Proposition 8, the 2008 initiative that limited marriage to opposite-sex couples. The American Foundation for Equal Rights engaged David Boies and Ted Olson to lead the legal challenge. The plaintiffs in Perry v. Schwarzenegger won in federal district court, and the case is now on appeal. Plaintiffs argue that Proposition 8 violates the Equal Protection and Due Process clauses of the U.S. Constitution and impermissibly singles out gay and lesbian individuals for a disfavored legal status. The speakers on our panel believe that the principle of equality before the law transcends the left-right divide and cuts to the core of our nation’s character.

Featuring the co-counsels, David Boies, Chairman, Boies, Schiller & Flexner and Former Chief Counsel, Senate Judiciary Committee; and Theodore B. Olson, Partner, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher and Former Solicitor General. With comments by the co-chairs of the advisory board of the American Foundation for Equal Rights, Robert A. Levy, Chairman, Cato Institute; and John Podesta, President, Center for American Progress.

via The Case for Marriage Equality: Perry v. Schwarzenegger – YouTube.

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The Truth About Global Warming – Science & Distortion – Stephen Schneider

Posted on March 21, 2013 by Thanos

Some of the very same people who were telling people that there weren’t relationships between lung cancer and tobacco use are the ones now telling us that global warming doesn’t matter. Please watch, and get mad – I don’t want my grandson’s grandson to live in a limited brutal future that most probably will result if we don’t start acting now.

Stephen Henry Schneider (February 11, 1945 — July 19, 2010) was Professor of Environmental Biology and Global Change at Stanford University, a Co-Director at the Center for Environment Science and Policy of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and a Senior Fellow in the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. Schneider served as a consultant to federal agencies and White House staff in the Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations.

His research included modeling of the atmosphere, climate change, and "the relationship of biological systems to global climate change." Schneider was the founder and editor of the journal Climatic Change and authored or co-authored over 450 scientific papers and other publications. He was a Coordinating Lead Author in Working Group II IPCC TAR and was engaged as a co-anchor of the Key Vulnerabilities Cross-Cutting Theme for the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) at the time of his death. During the 1980s, Schneider emerged as a leading public advocate of sharp reductions of greenhouse gas emissions to combat global warming.

Basic Information

Awards

MacArthur Fellowship (1992), Nobel Peace Prize (2007)

via The Truth About Global Warming – Science & Distortion – Stephen Schneider – YouTube.

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Waterproof Camera with GPS

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Thanos

For years I’ve used a point and shoot — a hideout camera that I could put in my pocket while walking around for those photo opportunities that come up when you don’t expect them. The very first one I had was the Kodak DC210, with an amazing 1 megapixel of resolution. (similar to this)

When the time came to move to more megapixels the natural jump was to a Sony Cybershot and its 8 megapixel but pocket sized awesomeness, the current models of the same camera are now available in a variety of 14 – 16 megapixel models:

DSC04507-2After years of use the lens started making a grinding sound when it extended, and sometimes the shutter-like cover leaves did not fully open. While in St. Lucia we took a catamaran trip in the rain and I didn’t feel the least bit uncomfortable snapping away even though the camera was getting drenched because I knew that the time had finally come to replace the Sony.
The pictures came out fine, and the camera did not get damaged, which got me looking for a camera that I didn’t have to worry about in water.

That search led me to the Nikon AW-100, a great little camera that comes fully featured. It can survive immersion up to 33 feet (10 meters,) freezing, and minor shock (drops from five feet.) On top of that has 16 megapixel sensor coupled with built in GPS.

While the glass is not quite as nice as the Cybershot’s Zeiss lens, the Nikon’s 5X zoom lens produces reasonably sharp photos throughout its range, from macro to telephoto. It has many preset modes, and a fully auto mode for capture. The GPS works great, and photos I imported to Lightroom dropped right onto the map once I turned on the GPS feature:Lightroom-GPS-placement

It works great underwater, (see photos below) and the built in ability to imprint time and latitude longitude onto the photo and/or to just capture them to metadata are great tools for scientists, police, sports enthusiasts, and others who need to document either their play or work. The built in GPS compass is also handy, and I can see myself using this camera for a metadata reference shot whenever I shoot a series with my DSLR’s and lenses. I have to say that I am loving the new tech acquisition.

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