Making it look better!

I was pleased to see that the county commissioners had done a "makeover" on the Huffman Mill covered bridge.  While their work was excellent I decided it could use a bit more touching up, so I removed the  guard rail, moved the bridge sign to the South end, removed the support cables on the West side, and straightened the slight lean that had developed (click on images to enlarge).

If you want to see what the bridge has looked like over the years look at the following images!  A great deal of credit for getting the work done belongs to the Spencer County Historical Society--Thanks!

This is an old photo showing the bridge in one of its worst conditions.  I don't know the year, but it is definitely pre- 1960.

In this photo, the bridge was a "natural wood" color (or perhaps painted brown).

The bridge also went through a green-white phase.  The beech tree to the left is the dominate tree today (seen above the bridge roof in the top photo)

Really small critters

I finally spent the time to replace the rather expensive incandescence bulbs in my Nikon Model M with high intensity LED lamps (using a small desk lamp from Ikia).  The result were better than I expected!  Here is a dark field image of some rotifers that were in a dish filled with rain water in my flower garden.

They are not sharp since they are moving rather rapidly, but all in all they don't look bad!

Soon......

Many of my summer garden seeds have germinated and are thriving in the garage!  It is predicted to be in the 70's most of this week, so maybe I can get started turning the soil.  I checked my garden yesterday, and the winter greens (spinach, kale, arugula) are still thriving, and a number of plants that normally don't overwinter look like they will revive if we don't get a late hard freeze.

Photoshop playtime

Mostly I was just bored, so I started playing around with the various blending modes in Photoshop.  I still don't understand them, but I like some of the things you can do.  This is actually a vertical panorama that didn't look very good, so I used the edit/fill command to fix the empty parts and then flipped part of the image and played with the blending.  Chances are I could never repeat the process!

Action Stereo

I love stereo photography (no kidding!).  Most of my images are taken using the so called "cha cha" method, where you take one photo and then shift the camera a few inches to the right for the second image.  One setup I have uses two Canon "point and shoot" cameras and software developed to override the built-in firmware.  This allows the cameras to be synchronized quite well, as shown by the ax in mid-flight below.

and in anaglyph...

These shots were taken at the Lincoln Village in Rockport Indiana.

I have no idea

Just another bug.  The total length of this one was about 12mm.  I am not sure why, but I thought his head and "shoulders" looks almost robot-like.  I guess I have been watching too many sci-fi movies.

The Blue Dragonfly

I have probably several hundred photos of dragonflies, most of them out of focus or otherwise not very pretty.  This one is not terribly good, but I like it anyway.  I shot this hand-held using my 70-300mm zoom with extension tubes.

 

Strange Shadows

I really like this image.  It is a panorama taken at Spring Mill State Park (about 9 images, total is about 200+ degrees) last summer.  While it looks like the shadows in the foreground are parallel, if you look closely you will see that the one in the center (from the column) is actually perpendicular to the two on either side (which are from the overhead viaduct).  Confusing isn't it!  It helps to remember that the viaduct is certainly not curved as shown in the panorama!

As always, you can click on the image to enlarge it.

Just another bug

This guy was on the window in my garage, so he agreed to a photo shoot (RIP).

I also decided to put him in stereo, so here is the "side" mug shot:

and the same thing in anaglyph.

Lint

That's right, lint--from the clothes dryer!  I guess you could say that lint from the clothes dryer is the cleanest dirt you can find....  Even though it looks like a gray mass, under a microscope it actually is an amazing collection of multicolored fibers and hair.

Click on the image to take a closer look.  In 3D it doesn't have enough resolution to really see it.

Vulture Humor

On a photo club outing we visited a quarry that was overrun with vultures!  In general they were not the least bit afraid of us as we walked a trail along the top rim of the quarry.  I took the first photo and Photoshopped the sign a bit to give it a bit more meaning.

As I walked up (to "Git Close To Edge") he finally took off, doing a graceful dive off the fence!

Another early spring flower

I keep noticing these small blue flowers which appear to be widespread in the neighborhood.  The flowers are only a few mm in diameter, but under the microscope they look lovely!  As nearly as I can tell they are a type of "Creeping Speedwell".  The images below were taken with my Nikon FS-2 using a new micrometer based system to get better resolution with my focus stacking.  Each of the photos was composed of over 30 individual images merged using Helicon Focus.

The photo above is fairly high resolution (click to enlarge), and the images below are side-by-side parallel 3D, followed by anaglyphs.

Looking at Photos

I was lucky enough to have several of my images selected for the annual School of Fine Arts -Bloomington Photography Club photo exhibit last year.  At the reception I snapped a photo showing the reflection of various guests and artists in the background.  My apologies to whoever the foreground photo belongs to (I know, copyright infringement!).  If someone recognizes their work let me know and I will credit them (it was a great photo).  It took a fair bit of Photoshop manipulation to bring out any of the details.

Click on the image to enlarge.
                    

Tower of Power

As spherical panoramas go this one is really bad.  I was at a park without  even a tripod and decided that trying to shoot a "little planet" spherical panorama would be interesting from inside the HV electrical tower.  As you can see the stitching is terrible (and I spent way too much time in Photoshop even getting this far) but I really like the view.

As you can see the towers go off in the distance forward (at the bottom, across the lake) and behind (top of image) me.  The next time I see one of these that I can easily get to I am going to take my panorama head!

Chirp no more.....

I like crickets, but not when they make too much noise.  This guy (gal?) will no longer bother me in the basement.

If you click on the image you should see it full-screen.  If you look closely you can see that he has two protuberances toward the rear of his body (shown below).  I hesitate to ask what they are used for....

Nighttime Panorama

I took this last summer on a rainy evening outside the funeral home that the Creative Focus Group (Bloomington Photography Club) meets in.  The photo is a 9 shot high dynamic range (3 shots for each of the three images) panorama.  You can tell that the wind was blowing by looking at the flag which shows a ghost.

Click on image to enlarge.

Kipp generator lamp

Not spectacular, but I like this photo.  I found an old Kipp gas generator years ago and with a bit of help from the glass blower (drilling a hole in the base) I converted it to a lamp which we keep in our bedroom.  One night the door was ajar and the light happened to strike the lamp at an angle that I thought looked rather neat.  I set up my camera and took a time exposure to get this shot.

Coming at you!

Learning how to get 3D images to "jump" out of the screen is fun.  Here is a shot I took of the railroad tracks behind my house.  As a normal stereo image it is OK, but having the tracks come out of the frame makes it much better!

If you click on the image you can get it full-screen.

Th "mini" weeds of spring (up close)

It isn't March yet, but some of my favorite weeds are already starting to blossom.  I love looking at the very mall flowers of the early ground flowers (weeds?).  This guy (bittercress) seems to grow everywhere and is very prolific.  You can see the flowers and the maturing seed pods on the central stem.  Although they start out very small, they can grow to be 4 - 6 inches wide for the whole plant.

The clay dish is 3 inches in diameter.  The flower stem is shown below in side-by-side stereo

and as an anaglyph.

A very old bug

I did this just to see if I could.  While at the local Rock and Mineral Show last year I foolishly spent $10 on a piece of amber that looked like it had all kinds of bugs inside.  I finally got around to cutting and polishing a piece and, sure enough, there is a 40,000,000 (more or less) year old mosquito (or some such creature!).  This again is a red/green anaglyph.

From the tip of the tail to the end of the head is about 2.5 mm.

It isn't always what it seems....

I have spent a fair amount of time recently working on my equipment, and I decided that a piece of "rough" limestone was an excellent sample to look at.  Since the BPC had a "share" for "what is it" photos I took the following (shown as a 3D anaglyph).  The width in the top photo is about 1/2 inch.

My dear wife took one look and suggested this as a better "what is it"--I have to agree that she has a good eye!

The limestone is on the right, mixed breakfast cereal on the left.

Escaping Spiders!

Watch out for spiders crawling out of their picture frames!  (you need red/green glasses for this one)

Messing with nature

This is a post I actually wrote last winter, but never got around to publishing.  I am still working on getting some quality snowflake photographs using my latest setup.  It is amazing how ugly most snows are, and this winter there has been almost no snows worth looking at!  Since I didn't have any new snowflake images, I dug out some of my older ones and fired up my Photoshop.  I created the following two snowflakes which were a definite improvement over the original:

Just because nature wants snowflakes to have hexagonal symmetry doesn't mean I have to agree.  And if I can have a five spoked snowflake, why not a seven legged starfish!

For details on how (not why!) this was done in Photoshop, check out my "Just Stuff" link.

Time flies when you don't post!

I had two people contact me concerning pics on my (terribly neglected) blog, so I decided I should at least try to put up a few new photos.  Shown here is how to get an afternoon of entertainment for $2.99 (plus tax).  I was taking a walk and stopped in the local Goodwill store.  The Sony digital camera actually had images on the memory card (someone had a nice vacation in Mexico!).  My guess is that they lost the charger or the battery died so they just tossed it.  In any case it took about 3 hours to carefully disassemble.

And no, I don't intend to put it back together!