Christmas Stars
Due to some technical camera issues, my photos of the various family Christmas events didn’t turn out very well. (I think my all-around lens has some focus issues.) However, when we went to my parents’ place in Kansas, I was able to get out on Christmas Night and shoot this star trails photo. The elder Daileys live out in the country well away from any serious city lights so the nights are quite dark. This barn sits less than a half-mile from my parents’ house. I tried this shot unsuccessfully once before. This time the idea was to take about 20 consecutive exposures of 4 minutes and combine them all in Photoshop. During the first exposure I used my little SB600 flash to pop some light on the barn. I set the pop at half-power, which turned out to be way too weak. I should’ve popped at full power two times, at least. And I should’ve popped on the little shed and tree directly in front of the camera. I had to bring the exposure on the barn way up in Photoshop to get it to show at all. I guess I’ll be going back to this spot with a more elaborate plan.
Fall Has Fell
The fall foliage in Arkansas was spectacular this year. My efforts to get a great fall shot were marked by ineptitude. This was the best I came up with. This is the canyon through which Cedar Creek flows on Petit Jean Mountain.
Random Ramble
I headed up to the Buffalo National River on Sunday to shoot some fall foliage. Gina elected to stay home and I couldn’t find anyone else who wanted to spend the day doing outdoorsy stuff with me. So I took off alone. The weather forecast earlier in the week called for cloudy with some rain maybe, which would be perfect for viewing and shooting the colorful leaves. It rained Saturday night and was still raining in Little Rock when I left the house at 6 a.m. but by the time I got to Conway the sky was clearing. When I hit Russellville the sky was clear and I knew that I was going to miss all the good light. By the time I got to the Buffalo, the sun was high and harsh. I had originally planned to do the Hawksbill Crag hike, but I bailed on that and decided to just climb to the top of Roark Bluff across from the Steele Creek campground. My photo suffers from the harsh light. You really need a cloudy day after a rain to really get the great colors that nature has painted across the bluff. This was the first time I’d hiked Roark Bluff. It’s dangerous up there. The photo-taking spot is on a little spit of rock that juts out from the main bluffline. It’s a sheer drop on either side. If you fall, you’re going to die.
Piney Sunset
This copse stands right along the path where I do my running in Two Rivers Park. It’s always pretty with the late afternoon sun and for three years I’ve been meaning to go out and shoot a photo. I finally got around to it over the weekend.
Abby Monday
It’s Abby Monday. She’s about to lose a top tooth and starting to look a little snaggley, kinda like Jewel.
Gymkata!
Gymnastics is the new activity at our house. And Gymkata is the best martial arts movie ever made.
(Two SB600s for the rim lights. One AB800 in an umbrella for the front fill. SB26 for the splash of blue on the poorly done background.)
Hillbillies And The City – Day 2
Day 2 dawned miserable. Rainy and chilly. So we decided to get some indoor touristing out of the way. We hit the subway for the first time and rode the uptown C train from the 50 Street Station to the American Museum of Natural History. The subway stopped in the basement of the museum. In the lobby were probably 1,000 people in line for tickets. The museum probably loves cold and rainy weather. Also in the lobby was a super-tall skeleton of a barosaurus.
Hillbillies And The City – Day 1
For years Gina agitated for a New York City vacation and this year, with my characteristic magnanimity, I decided to grant her wish. (Your B.S. detector should be screaming right now.) Several people expressed surprise that I would go to New York for a vacation. I guess because I’m usually a national park/driving cross country kind of guy. But NYC is one of those places everyone should see, right? Also I knew NYC would be a fantastic place to take photos, so I got pretty excited about going. The only time I’d been in the East Coast Megalopolis was way back in the summer after 8th grade when I went to Washington, D.C., to visit relatives for a few weeks.
It’s Puzzle Time
Did you catch the reference in the title to television personalities Moose and Zee? We thought we’d check out what life will be like when we hit 70, so Gina bought a puzzle and a card table.
Tumblin’ Fordyce
Sometimes Abby, Gina and I jump in the car and head off in some random direction. We ended up in Fordyce on Sunday. Fordyce’s only claim to fame that I know of is that Keith Richards was arrested there in 1975. When we got there we could’ve murdered someone on Main Street and gotten away with it because we were the only souls downtown. It was nice because no one was around to hassle us as we explored the ruins.
I got in some good brick-wall-shooting practice. I wonder why someone would label the burglar alarm in big red letters. It seems to me that you’d want to keep the location of the alarm under wraps so that a burglar wouldn’t destroy it before pillaging your building. Of course it’s about 20 feet up on the wall so maybe it’s safe up there.
Rex’s Liquor looked like a great place to score some Mad Dog 20/20.
Rex also has this great side entrance in case you don’t want anybody out on the street to see you going in.
Southern hospitality.
I did something to this photo I’ve never had the patience to do before successfully. A big guy wire from a phone pole extended from corner to corner totally marring the shot. I removed it using the magical content-aware-fill function in Photoshop CS5. I found an instructional video on on YouTube demonstrating how to do it.
Out behind the Dallas County Museum is a weird garden of signs with nuggets about the area’s history.
Fordyce is evidently proud of its high school sports teams, which have the redbug as the mascot. The redbug is more commonly known as the chigger, a most unpleasant parasite. (Note the sign in the previous picture explaining that Fordyce introduced the state to high school football.) This mural celebrating that first team is inside another building ruin that’s been cleaned up. Murals cover the walls on both sides with scenes of various high school sports, football through the years, basketball, baseball, track and golf. All the murals have the bizarre sea of chiggers rising from the bottom to suck the blood of the athletes.
Indian Creek Redux
My buddy Kurt and I hiked Indian Creek in the Buffalo National River a week ago. The creek is home to two waterfalls highlighted in the Tim Ernst Arkansas Waterfalls book: Copperhead Falls (seen above with Kurt posing) and Tunnel Cave Falls, formed by water exiting a cave. The trail begins at the campground at Kyle’s Landing and runs a little over two miles up into a box canyon. It’s a great hike. The park service doesn’t maintain the trail and it gets pretty rough in some places. I wouldn’t recommend it for the weak-ankled.
This was a weird hike photographically for me. I didn’t take many photos. For one thing, I did this hike a couple of years ago and shot a bunch of photos then. For another thing, I usually do these long hikes alone, which leaves me free to screw around and shoot photos that don’t end up being any good. Because I had a companion on this trip, I had other things to do, mainly flapping my gums with Kurt. For some reason I can’t seem to talk and take pictures at the same time. Kurt, however, had his camera out the whole time shooting me and the scenery and handing me his camera so I could shoot him and the scenery together. I didn’t mind. It’s more fun to have somebody along. Finally, Kurt asked me if I was going to take a photo of anything at all. So I snapped out of it and shot a bunch pictures of him in action.
This is my favorite one. Kurt emerging from the pit toilet at Kyle’s Landing with the sunset in the background.
The namesake cave for Tunnel Cave Falls is closed to explorers, but even if it wasn’t off-limits it appears a dicey proposition to enter it with it being 30 feet up a sheer bluff wall. No, I didn’t take a photo of the cave itself. I told you I didn’t do a very good job with the photography. The waterfall was dry, anyway.
I did manage to provide Kurt with a nice profile photo for his Facebook page.
It Keeps On Snowing
It snowed again on Friday and I went out to Pinnacle Mountain to take some photos of it.
Abby Thursday
I finally got around to getting some pictures of Abby in her dancing togs.
Strobist: SB600 on floor fired through shoot-thru umbrella. SB600 in shoot-thru pointed down from above.
(Note: I know the vignette is too strong making the edges of the photo blend into the blog background, but I don’t feel like fixing it.)
Um, Bokeh
I got a macro-focusing rail for Christmas and then I read on a photography blog about doing the Christmas-lights-bokeh thing. The two combined into a perfect storm of copycat macro photography of Christmas tree ornaments.
Can’t Catch Me
Gina went out of town earlier this week for a four-day business trip. Right after she left Abby had one of her great ideas: “Let’s make gingerbread men as a surprise for Mom when she comes home.” I have no idea where she came up with this. We’ve never made gingerbread men at our house and we’ve never bought any that I can remember. But because I’m a great dad I told her it was a great idea. She said, “OK let’s go.” I told her we’d better wait until the day before Mom came home so the cookies would be fresh. Everyday thereafter when I’d pick her up from school she’d ask if we were going to make gingerbread men. She’d then sulk for an hour or so when I said “three more days, two more days,” etc. I found a recipe on the Internets and went and bought all the ingredients and when the day came Abby and I went to a local kitchen store and bought big, medium and small gingerbread man cookie cutters.
I hauled out my trusty twin SB-600s and two shoot-through umbrellas to capture what promised to be a magical father-daughter evening. Also I figured the gingerbread men would make good subjects to shoot with the beater macro lens I recently bought on eBay.
Poppin’
Despite the hot and dry summer, the fall foliage has been pretty fantastic. I found these at Pinnacle Mountain State Park.
A Cold Night In Ol’ Leaky
We set sail in Ol’ Leaky again over the weekend. We tested its water tightness last time (she failed) and we decided to test her cold tightness this time. We headed up to Greers Ferry Lake near Heber Springs and camped at the Dam Site Campground. It was my first trip ever to the lake and the campground was excellent. We got a spot on a bluff overlooking the lake. It was our first kinda cold snap of the fall and temperatures were forecast for the high 20s. It didn’t get that cold but we probably found the bottom of our cold tolerance in the pop-up. The space heater ran all night and the electric blanket and double sleeping bag arrangement kept us just warm enough. Ol Leaky made a good star trails subject. The red-orange light on the trees is from the campfire on the other side of the camper.
Get Your Sunrise On
My Dad and I went out on our now-traditional hike on the last morning before daylight saving time ends. Only this year the end of DST wasn’t on the weekend of Halloween. I like seeing the sunrise so close to the end of DST because it comes so late in the morning, making it much more likely that I will be able to drag myself out of bed in time to see it. Like last year, we headed up to Petit Jean State Park to catch the dawn breaking from Stout’s Point. Granted, I haven’t seen a lot of sunrises, but this was probably the most spectacular I’ve ever witnessed.
Maiden Voyage Of Ol’ Leaky
This is Ol’ Leaky. We bought this thing in July for $1,500 and thought we either got a good deal or something was wrong with it. What was wrong was the roof leaked like a sieve. It had a big air conditioner on top and the roof sagged noticeably. After doing some research on the Internets I found out that this particular model requires special braces from the manufacturer when installing one of those aftermarket air units. It had no special braces. So I removed the air conditioner and sold it on Craigslist. Then I installed a roof vent and patched up some other stray holes and replaced the weather proofing on the roof seams. The seat and bed cushions had also been wet in the past so they were pretty stinky. We tossed out the big bed cushions and washed the upholstery and replaced the foam in the bench seats, which helped with the smell.
Kansas Star Trails
Abby and I went up to Kansas to my parents’ place over the weekend for my Grandma’s 95th birthday party. I wanted to take advantage of the clear skies away from the big-city lights to try some astrophotography. I needed to find something interesting for the foreground of a star trails photo and the gas well on their back 40 seemed as good as anything. I’d already done a few similar shots in the past using hay bales, a nearby church and an old grain silo. I made this photo by combining 19 photos each with a four-minute exposure using a cheap intervalometer I got off eBay. I lit the pump with a blast from an external flash during one of the exposures.
Harvest Moon
Not exactly what I had imagined when I went out to shoot the moon over downtown Little Rock, but this what I got. Because the moon is so bright, I couldn’t get the capitol and the moon at the right exposure with just one frame. If the moon is exposed correctly, the capitol is completely in the dark. If the capitol is exposed correctly, then the moon is just a white hole in the sky. So I combined three different exposures to get detail in both the building and the moon.
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