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.

I messed up, though, by starting the sequence too early, before it got slap dark. I further messed up by using the flash during the first exposure. I tossed out the first four exposures because the sky was still pretty light. The problem was that the pump was a silhouette in those later exposures. So I spent a couple hours in Photoshop cutting out the flash-exposed pump from that first exposure with the too-light sky. Then I layered that cut-out over the combined shots with the good star trails. Don’t look too close or you’ll see my ham-handed Photoshop skills on display.

When Photoshop stopped grinding away and displayed the combined photos, I was flummoxed because some of the trails passed in front of the pump. However, the trails behind the trees and other stationary objects stayed in the background, as you would expect. I’m not too smart, so it took me awhile to figure out that the pump must have moved. Now, according to my Dad, that well had been idle for some time. I walked down to it the day before and it was in the position you see in the photo. It was absolutely not moving. When I returned to take the picture, I spent about 45 minutes jacking with my camera waiting for dark to fall and the thing didn’t move an inch. But I went back through every exposure blown up big on my computer screen. The pump area was so dark in each one that I could barely make out that the pump had indeed moved up and down at least once and returned exactly to its original position. So some of the trails in the final product have a big gap.

The sky was as clear as I think I’ve ever seen. I wanted to take a straight shot of a star field to see if I could get the Milky Way to show up in a photo. This is the front of the house. The trees are lit by a florescent street light in the back yard.

A bunch of family came in for the party. We had to go for the big number candles for obvious reasons.

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.

My Dad’s sister Barbara and her husband, Sherril, came to town to visit Grandma Dailey, who now resides in an assisted living center in Parsons, Kan. Jodie, who’s working on a genealogy and oral history project, spent Saturday plumbing the depths of Grandma’s memory. At 93, Grandma’s got a lot of stuff to remember.

Barbara and Sherril, along with Rex the dog, held a rendezvous under the Keebler Elves’ tree in the front yard.

For the second year in a row, the weather on Easter Sunday precluded hunting eggs outside, so the Easter Bunny hid them in the living room.

All the eggs were at ground level, so Gramps and Abby got down low to find them.

On the way home, we found this giant Easter Bunny monument on the highway outside of Joplin, Mo. Abby didn’t like it. She told Aunt Jodie not to get too close.

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.

On Saturday evening, Dad and I went to one of the ponds on the place to do a little fishing. See the Fish On! post for more on that. On the way back to the house I noticed the setting sun was making the seed heads on a big patch of grass glow like they were radioactive. I headed back down there the next night to shoot the glowing grass, but it was kind of cloudy so the sun wasn’t as bright and the grass heads didn’t glow. Or maybe my mind played tricks on me the night before. At any rate, I did find this lone wild sunflower nearby. I used the Strobist sunset-as-a-backdrop technique and lit the flower by holding my SB-26 flash out to camera left and fired it using the built-in optical slave triggered by the pop-up flash on my camera. I think the pop-up even provided a little fill from the front. Sunflower. Setting sun. Get it?

I wanted to shoot these black-eyed susans with a slow shutter speed to get them whipping blurrily in the wind. The wind wasn’t blowing that hard and I didn’t have my tripod with me, so that didn’t work out so well. I did some photoshopping to the shot to give it a more arty feel. Does it feel arty?

The farm offers plenty of room to roam for a little girl and her plastic tricycle.

After we got home on Monday, Gina, Abby and I went over to Braum’s for a little ice cream break. Abby said she wanted blue ice cream in a cup. She checked out the many ice cream containers and couldn’t find any blue so she opted for the orange … in a cone. She’s like the weather. if you don’t like what she proposes, just wait a minute and she’ll change her mind.

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.