Missing Ingredients

After having been without my truck this past week for being in the shop, I decided to take it for a ride this afternoon. There was a washed out boundary on radar approaching from the NW. What made this significant is that there were light returns feeding into it indicative of surface backed activity. Using this as an excuse to just get of the house for a little while, I headed up into SE Logan County.

Leaving everything at home except cameras, I went completely on visual. Break reveals the exceptionally low cloud tops.


This is where it kind of gets interesting. Note the striations, you are looking SW but winds were gusting at my back and feeding into the feature. There is a definite rolling motion going on but because there is no lift, what could be rotating updrafts are merely horizontal.


Moving a bit closer, if we had better moisture, instability and lift, this may have very well been a mesocyclone. In the time lapse video found HERE, you should be able to make out the various non-linear motions. Call this the magic moment for it is here that sunlight is filtering through the clouds to create the faint color you see.




What hopefully lends credibility to the above non-event, I was at ground zero for where the Williamsville tornado of August 19th chewed a path through here and laid down a large swath of corn. This would be just out of frame to the right of the above shot. Had they not cleared the field, you could make out the path as it stretched to the SW along the entire foreground. I would have liked to stay for more pics but I was out of light and getting low on fuel.


One more to the NE from somewhere near Chesnut/Beason Park.


Heading home which involved back tracking up 54, I stopped at Kenney to get their grain elevator. The shadow of the flag is what drew my attention. Very busy place up there right now as well as out in the fields where the farmers are working around the clock to make up for lost harvest time.

Rock Springs Show / Sangamon Flooding

The art group I participate with (Barn Colony Artists) will be hosting a show through November out at the Rock Springs Environmental Center. Saturday was our setup day and since I arrived much earlier than what was scheduled, I used the time to document the ongoing river flooding as well as other opportunities.







That's the Wyckles road bridge currently undergoing reconstruction.








Edit: How about that sunset from Friday night!

Sunrise with Virga II

From Monday, the same as Sunday but a little less intense and instead of a rainbow behind me, just some leading edge illuminated striations in the cloud deck. Be sure to also check out the VIDEO.





Bonus pic, a shot from Black Bart's Pumpkin Patch located Warrensburg IL moments before moderate rainfall set in.

Sunrise with Virga

From yesterday, nothing new that I haven't already posted to Facebook but needed to keep up with my personal archive...


and behind me!


TIME LAPSE VIDEO

A Date with Orion

Early this morning I headed out to Friend's Creek Park located NE Macon County IL to view the 2009 Orionid Meteor Shower. The earth is currently passing through the dusty tail of Haley's Comet and the event is named as such since these particles originate from the constellation Orion. Overall, the show was pretty good. I didn't spot any fireballs but a decent meteor rate made the trip well worth it. Though I didn't score any ultra bright streaks, I was able to pull a few out from below. I also set up the camera and shot remotely via tethering to the laptop. I never did this before and the goal was to produce enough stills for a time lapse video. You can view this rather imperfect attempt HERE.

Orion vs. The Schoolhouse








Towards dawn, the show was pretty much over or at least not visible anymore.

Digital Negative

A couple weeks ago I went with Mandi on a pregnancy shoot for my good friend Jamie and her fiance. Aside from offering assistance, I used the experience as a learning opportunity and borrowed a Canon 40D owned by my other good friend Jason (how's that for trust?). We set up out at Friends Creek near sundown and got some very interesting shots. Arriving home and dumping my card with the 40D images, upon attempting to open the files using the Adobe CS2 RAW editor on my HP laptop that has not had any issues whatsoever with CR2 files, I encountered the following error.



I Googled the error only to find very limited information. Trying to open the files on Mandi's HP computer, the error repeated. I then tried opening the same files on Jason's Dell that was running CS2 as well and they were just fine. Resolved that it must be a compatibility issue with HP's, the best solution was to reinstall CS2 and hope that would correct the matter. Wondering if there was a way to convert the files to TIFF format without having to reinstall CS2 (since I have no existing problem with Canon Rebel XTi RAW files), I stumbled upon a recommendation to convert the files to Digital Negative using Adobe's DNG Converter. Upon downloading, installing and running a batch conversion of the problem files, the issue was resolved and I was able to open the files. I did not notice any significant difference in the file integrity. Apparently DNG is becoming an industry standard for addressing cross compatibility issues between manufacturers and their differing RAW formats. This has me wondering if RAW is going to be phased out altogether by DNG? We shall see but in the meantime, a few samples from the shoot that I am satisfied with...

(edit: They are much more colorful than what is shown. For some reason Blogger strips the saturation of everything I upload. Thought it was a browser issue but isn't and has been very frustrating.)

Static Macros

Almost nine months ago to the day, Mike Hollingshead pulled off an amazing macro shoot in that he documented static electricity discharging from his fingertips. From lurking on his site earlier along with continually zapping myself each time I touched anything metal tonight, I was reminded of his feat. Though nowhere near as complex nor intense as what he captured, I attempted to try and document this lightning fast energy release for myself.

The challenge was threefold... I needed to have a high enough sensitivity to pick up the carpet fiber thin light filament and a reasonable depth of field since I wasn't sure where my finger would land thus potentially ending up out of focus for being off center. Choosing a/v mode which determined shutter speed for the amount of available light, my time would ultimately be very limited due to incoming ambient light that I could not eliminate. Using the timer, I had 10 seconds upon pressing the button to shuffle around and build up charge. As the camera neared release I made sure to be close and when it went, would quickly place my finger to the doorknob. I probably shot at least 20 pictures to get the four you see. Sometimes I would get a good discharge but invariably touch the knob. Sometimes I didn't get back in time or others, not get close enough. Camera settings are with each image and imagining how funny I must have looked doing the "running man", it's a good thing no one was around lol!

ISO 800, F8.0, 1 second (I did tweak the saturation level a bit)


ISO 400, F8.0, 2 seconds (400 bought me an extra second but may have cost in sensitivity)


ISO 400, F8.0, 1.6 seconds (now touching a paper clip to the knob)


ISO 400, F8.0, 2 seconds


I definitely hope to play with this some more now as we move into the Winter season. Be sure to click Mike's name to see what he did!