It snowed in Kansas on Christmas Eve and Gina and Abby wanted to see some of the white stuff. We loaded up on the day after Christmas and took off hoping the roads were passable to my parents’ place in southeast Kansas where they got 6-8 inches. The roads didn’t get dicey until we got into Kansas. We didn’t have any trouble until we turned into the driveway at Pleasant Hill Farm and promptly got stuck.
The state of Kansas once called itself “The Land of Ahs” in its promotional materials. Get it, Land of Ahs=Land of Oz. Yeah, I know. This church sits near my parents’ little farm near Parsons, Kansas. We visited last weekend to enjoy an early Thanksgiving feast. (Cheese grits live on!) The farm is out in the sticks, closest town is six miles away, so it’s a great place to see the stars. For this shot I stacked 97 photos, each of which had a 30 second exposure. The advantage is that when the photos are combined, you don’t get the sensor noise that shows up on a single long exposure. It was the first time I’ve tried this particular star trails technique and it didn’t turn out as I expected. To do this right, you need an intervalometer to automatically make the exposures. Higher-end cameras have the intervalometer built in and you can buy inexpensive small intervalometers that plug into the camera. I had to use some computer software that has intervalometer capabilities and shoot the frames with the camera tethered to my laptop.
It’s a cumbersome arrangement and it didn’t work quite right. I let the camera sit clicking on the tripod while I went back to the house for an hour. When I came back, the software informed me it had attempted 160 shots or so but could only process 97 of them. No idea why that happened. Then I loaded all the photos into Photoshop and ran an action I found on the Internets that combines all those exposures into one shot. Some of the star trails are kinda jaggedy and I don’t know what caused that exactly. Was it the software? Was it camera movement from the slight breeze blowing that night? Who knows. Also the trails near the North Star are really faint. I suspect that was because I had the aperture stopped down to f/8. I needed to have it a little wider for such short exposures. The stacking did work well to get the exposure on the front of the church. Several cars passed by and swept their lights across the church when they turned the corner. I’m going to get a real intervalometer and try this shot again.
Here we have a more traditional star trails shot I made later that night. I just put the camera on bulb and opened the shutter and let it sit for about 50 minutes. I had some technical difficulties on this one, too. When I came back, the camera had shut itself off. I thought maybe the batteries had run out, but there was plenty of battery left. Maybe it got too hot and tripped some kind of breaker. The metadata on the frame said the exposure was 30 minutes exactly. Maybe the shutter will only stay open for 30 minutes, but I know I’ve taken longer exposures than that a couple of times.
The thing sticking up in the middle is an old grain silo on the farm. It’s green from a big yard light shining on it about 200 yards away.
Abby and Gramps got in a little fishing. They couldn’t find any worms, so they used dog food. They didn’t catch anything.
Abby, Aunt Jodie and I headed to my Mom and Dad’s place in southeast Kansas for a little Easter frivolity. Gina was on injured reserve with a bum shoulder and didn’t make the traveling squad this time. Abby and Jodie held a traditional Easter egg dying party on Saturday.
Since I was at my parents’ house in the middle of nowhere Kansas this weekend, I thought it prudent to try a star trails shot with the new camera. Star trails by themselves are pretty cool, but it’s the foreground that usually makes such shots really cool. The best thing I could find nearby were some hay bales.
Though I was really pretty far out in the country, the house has a big street light in the yard and there’s a church about 300 yards from the house with its own big street light. In addition, the small town of Parsons is about five miles away. It was actually hard to find a suitably dark piece of sky without a big street light in the way. Straight up was nice with a ton of stars, but I couldn’t get anything in the foreground with the camera pointed straight up.
What I ended up with was the hay bales with the lights of town behind them and the big light from the church shining on their fronts. That’s why they are that green color. I guess the light was florescent or sodium vapor or something. I shot on daylight white balance in raw and I tweaked it a little in CS3. Exposure was f/10 for about 30 minutes.
My parents live on 40 acres west of Parsons, Kan., that used to be part of a larger working farm. There are several sheds, silos and whatnot still on the property, including this old-time chicken coop. This is the kind of coop that Foghorn Leghorn guarded in the old cartoons. The outside has great peeling paint and deteriorating wood. The kind of stuff we amateur photographers like to take pichurs of. I set up a couple of flashes inside so the ceiling and back wall of the coop would be visible.
Labor Day weekend at my parents’ place in Kansas. They live out in the country with three farm ponds within walking distance. Dad and I hit the best of the three for a quick fishing trip. We landed four smallish bass in the span of about 10 minutes and got no other bites.
