A Momentary Light

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Last Saturday my wife and I went down to Washington DC to see the big veteran/motorcycle rally known as Rolling Thunder. There is quite a subculture that has grown up around Rolling Thunder, now in its 21st year. Do-rags, leather, vests adorned with colorful patches and motorcycles were in abundance. We met a couple from my wife's hometown who ride Harleys. Bill and Sally met us on the Mall near the Smithsonian and we walked down Constitution Avenue to a rally point known as Thunder Alley. We gawked at the spectacle in and around Thunder Alley, ate lunch (excellent barbecue) and walked over to the Vietnam Memorial and the Mall (pictures of the latter in the next installment).

Wow, the bikes were beautiful - gleaming chrome, world-class paint jobs... rolling pieces of sculpture. Here is the gallery:

A couple of weekends ago, I wanted a change of scenery, photographically speaking and decided to make a quick trip into Southeastern Pennsylvania, into Amish territory. I found the experience to be pretty frustrating, almost claustrophobic. Here's the thing - the Old Order Amish don't want you taking pictures of them. They consider photographs to be graven images and therefore against their religion. So there I am just trying to get a few shots of very scenic countryside (and maybe a buggy or two at a discreet distance, without showing the occupants) and sort of feeling like a paparazzi the whole time. Plus, the roads tend to be narrow with not much in the way of shoulders to pull off on. There I was, passing great shots of farm country and nowhere to stop the vehicle except the middle of the road.

At one point. I found a lane to pull off in and turned off the vehicle. It was pleasantly warm, the late afternoon sun was mellow, birds were singing...it was nice. I got a few shots. Later, I happened on a couple of Amish horses at pasture with blinders on. Disconcerting, but I guess they have a good reason for the practice.

After I got home I googled around for Amish photography. I saw a few shots of children on the backs of wagons and barn raisings that were obviously taken at a goodly distance with a telephoto lens. Huh. Well, the Amish are supposed to be pacifists but I guess you wouldn't want to risk sticking a camera in the faces of a bunch of them while they were armed with hammers and sharp chisels, now would you?

Here is the gallery:

It was almost a couple of weeks ago that some sort of front moved through and for a couple of days we had just the clearest skies. Skies so clear you could see the contrails everywhere, a constant feature of the East Coast landscape. I like contrails, I like the way they begin as thin bright spears in the sky and billow out into long trailing clouds. The moon was close to being full and was well up above the horizon in the early evening. I went back up to the Park of Dogs to see if I could get some pictures of mallards or geese on the pond.

A denizen of the Park of Dogs, preparing to fertilize a clump of grass:


The path down from the parking lot led through a meadow of yellow rocket (Barbarea vulgaris). The Man in the Moon was overhead, the leafless trees framed the meadow, and I knelt down and took three auto-bracketed shots for a high-dynamic range (HDR) image. Skirting a grass-sniffing dog, I went down to the pond and quickly realized that the light was too dim for detailed pictures of mallards that were apparently unwilling to hold still for just a few measly seconds. Looking back up the hill I could see some contrails framed by the leafless trees, the trees looked like black lace in the viewfinder. I took a shot with one of the old Vivitar zoom lenses I recently got off of Ebay. The sunset was all deep oranges and reds in that clear air and I took a few shots with the old Vivitar, then moved back to the Pentax 18-55mm AL II lens. The fading sun lit up the contrails and finally flickered out. To the east the moon was bright enough to just cast shadows. I set up the mini tripod on a picnic table and shot the pond in that cold blue moonlight.

So there you have it - the duality of nature, the ying of the ruddy sun to the yang of the cold blue moon. Some people might prefer the moon, I choose the sun. Here is the gallery.

OK, lemmee see here. Got a new K200D dSLR, got some pretty good zoom lenses to cover the focal length range from 18 to 300mm - got the wide and long covered. What about the short? The macro? Got to have the MACRO. Google is my friend... Lookee here, there's a nice Pentax D FA 100mm f/2.8 Macro Lens available and it's only *cough* $450. Hmmm. Hey, how about close-up/macro filters? Some would consider this solution to be, ah, jejune but not me, I'm a bottom-feeder. The Lensmate people show some pretty good results with Hoya close-up filters for use with their adapter and Canon point 'n shoot cameras. I just happen to have a set for my Powershot P&S cameras and they give some pretty good image quality. What did I do with those things? Got to be around here somewhere... Ha, found 'em. OK, we'll just slap on that #4 filter on the kit lens to my Pentax K200D dSLR and go out, get some shots of some weeds in the front yard, before the neighbors send a delegation to the house and I'm forced to mow them down. Whoa! Not bad! Saves me the trouble of tracking down a pricey macro lens. Check it out:

Yeah, I'm thinking that the cat has one of those creepy alien parasites in him, the ones from Stargate SG1. I mean, c'mon, look at the EYES on this animal. They're GLOWING. Just like the infested humans in the series. Look at his EXPRESSION. Oddly enough, he doesn't seem to display a heightened intelligence but he could be faking it.





On the camera front, besides revealing the cat to be harboring a Goa'uld, the Pentax K200D (normally set at 10 MP) turns out to do a really sharp 6 MP image here with fine detail and good tonal range. This with the 18-55mm AL II kit lens and the camera set in 'Bright' mode. Here's a 100% crop of some detail.


Well, that's all well and good but there is still the problem of the cat. SHE seems to be totally in his power. Fortunately, he hasn't got opposable thumbs so he has trouble turning doorknobs. Yep, I'm sleeping behind a closed door with the lights on.

A week ago we went back to Ohio, to continue the long and difficult process of cleaning out my in-laws house. Both are gone now, they were a wonderful pair and we miss them sorely.

I slipped out late Saturday afternoon with my camera, and in a melancholy mood, drove down to the Hocking Hills. I parked near the Mathias Log Cabin on Clear Creek Road and went into the woods towards the Thompson Cabin. The sky was overcast with a raw, cold breeze blowing. Spring had not arrived quite yet, there were hardly any buds showing on the trees. It was spooky quiet in there, just the wind. The beech trees still had leaves hanging on quivering at the slightest breeze..

I found some odd pock-marked patterns on some of the sandstone boulders, wall-art of the Fae, I'm thinking. Yep, if the Little People are around, this is where they would hang out. There were little burrows, doorways, into a base of the tree and a junction of a tree and rock. "Holy Crap," I thought, "I've fallen into hobbitville here." The moss was an intense, dark green. That old English folk song, "Down By the Greenwood Sidey" was running through my mind (it doesn't end well).

I drove down to Cantwell Cliffs and took the trail and sandstone steps down to the cliff edge. It was close to sundown by then, the sky was still overcast. I walked along the cliff edge up to where a small stream spills on over the sharp edge of the rock. Deja vu, the last time I was in there was 30 some years ago, collecting bryophyte (moss and liverwort) specimens for a botany class at Ohio State. And they were still there, everywhere covering the Black Hand sandstone. I passed a formation like a neolithic dolmen, and walked back up the rock stairway. They had quite a snowstorm a few weeks ago and a good-sized oak was broken off, the raw, orange heartwood vivid against the dark greens and grays. I went back to the house and met the rest of them for dinner.

The next day, I went to church with my wife and was pleased to see one of my nephews acting as an usher and the younger one reading the epistle. So there is a new generation coming along. The processional was the old hymn, "Now the Green Blade Riseth":

Now the green blade riseth from the buried grain,
Wheat that in the dark earth many days has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat that springeth green.

Spring is coming.

Here is the gallery:

I'm normally not an early adopter but I just couldn't STAND it anymore and went and bought a Pentax K200D dSLR. It came from Amazon last Friday. 600 some grams of 10 megapixel-shake-reduced-weather-sealed-customizable-out-the-wazoo goodness with the new 'n improved 18-55mm kit lens and a Sigma 70-300mm APO Macro. Fit and finish on this camera are outstanding, really feels solid. True to the Pentaxian tradition of dealing with Brand New Camera Fever, I ran around the house and took random shots of whatever, including my new-old King-Seely bandsaw. Tom's Buck Fever Camera gallery can be viewed at:

Back in early March I helped chaperone a church youth group on a trip to participate in the Nightwatch program at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in NYC. St. John the Devine is the largest gothic style cathedral in the world, full of some really beautiful spaces. I thought I'd try out some HDR with the Enfuse software and my Canon A630. I use Bracketeer, a GUI front end to Enfuse on my iMac. At that time, there was not a simple way to align slightly offset images from handheld shots and run Bracketeer so I used a (really dinky) tripod for all of the shots (Bracketeer v3.1 now offers image alignment). Bracketing shots on the A630 was made possible with the CHDK firmware hack and the promise of this was what finally gave me the incentive to install and use the hack. I used the bracketing script, EVbracket which is available on the CHDK wiki site.

With the articulating LCD screen on the small tripod the A630 was a wonderful platform for bracketing shots in the cathedral. It was unobtrusive and very quiet, I had the shutter set to 'silent' mode, something you can't really do with a SLR. At times I had the tripod pressed laterally against a wall or pillar with one hand while adjusting the camera and pressing the shutter with the other. My Op-Tek single-point neckstrap came in very handy here.

Link to the gallery:


Warning - the EXIF data for the 35mm focal length equivalents to the Canon A630 focal lengths are wildly off. 7.3mm on the Canon is equivalent to a 35mm focal length for a 35mm film camera.