Glenwood

I spent last Saturday morning hanging out in a cemetery with my camera.

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My photo buddy, Jeff Kohn, has been making an effort to shoot more often. We both like all natural landscapes, open spaces, and the grand view of nature, but unfortunately we both live in Houston. So, in an effort to keep our skills sharp (and also to get together and talk shop), we're trying to shoot locally on a somewhat frequent basis.

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Glenwood Cemetery is an interesting place. It's a very old (for this part of the world) cemetery that is still active, i.e. they're still putting people in the ground there. Jeff and I shot here last year, and he's been several other times as well.

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This past Saturday, we also met up with several other photogs. It's interesting to see their take on the place. Some folks focus on the details- the old headstones and statues for example. Personally, I like to shoot wide just like I'd do my normal landscapes.

Beer Review - Feb. 2010

Time for a beer review. These were my new selections from late last year.

Midas Touch by Dogfish Head Hugo, the "beer guy" at my local Specs (NW Houston), talked me into this one. Comes in 4-pack of 12 oz. bottles for about $13.

It's somewhat light, a little sweet, and has a nice, well-rounded taste that is most pleasing. The 9% alcohol gives it a good push into being "serious" :-)

The label states that it's made with barley, white muscat grapes, honey, and saffron. Don't let the foo-foo sounding stuff scare you off, this is a mighty good beer... so nice that I've bought it several times.

It's made from an ancient recipe, some 2700 years old.

More info here on Dogfish's website.

The Beast by Avery Brewing Co. I love Avery's beers. The Beast "Grand Cru" ale was a new one for me, and I was nicely surprised. It's a Belgian style ale, and is on the strong and dark side of things. It's very sweet, as most Avery's beers are, but most excellent. It was not an assault on my mouth as the name suggested. I'm definitely going to try this one again.

Rouge Chipotle Ale Beers that have unique flavorings are rarely done well. This beer adds chipotle with the subtleness of a sledgehammer. Now I like hot and spicy, and perhaps that goes with beer, but this one is over the top.

It also has a sour/bitter taste that is a bit much. It was worth a try, but it's not one that I'll be getting again.

Mikkeller Santa's Little Helper 2009 Oh the sweet goodness... this was awesome. This dark Belgian style ale was a treat. The lable claims it was "brewed with spices and cocoa powder". It definitely had a nice spice and also a smoothness to it that was pleasant. This was my favorite Christmas beer for 2009. Drinking it reminded me of being a kid again with a mouthful of chocolate candy.

St. Bernardus Christmas Ale You can't go wrong with St. Bernardus. This "liquid bread" type of beer is my favorite. The Christmas Ale was good, but not terribly outstanding. I can't say that I enjoyed it any more than their duble or tripel ales. I guess I was expecting something a little more spiced-up, but this beer was pretty mellow. A good drink nonetheless!

Allagash Four Ale This one was good, but not better than other Allagash beers that I've tried (see my previous beer reviews).

The Four Ale (made with four malts, four hops, four sugars and four Belgian yeast strains) was very calm yet full bodied. It didn't jump out with anything spectacular, rather it was behaved and some what subdued in taste. It was good, yes, but I enjoyed Allagash's other beers more.

More info here about the 4-ale.

Feb. '10 Update and Photos from Last Year

January has slipped by, and I haven't used up my camera in anger in a long while. I've been busy with LEGO stuff as well as remodeling our kitchen at home.

I have a bunch of photos taken at the High Lonesome last November and December that I need to edit and process. I've quickly done three of my favorites:

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I also made another time-lapse video of the night sky last December. This time, the exposures were much longer: 25 sec. instead of 8 sec. as the previous time-lapse video.

This video (click thumbnail below) is composed of 100 photos played at 8 frames per second. Each photo was shot at: 25 sec., f/1.8, ISO 3200.

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(1.5 MB, Windows Media File)

The files were shot as small JPGs on FINE with heavy noise reduction turned on. The long-exposure NR was turned off. Again, this was done using my "low-light" combo: the Canon 5DII and 24mm f/1.4II lens.

Welcome 2010!

Happy New Year!

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The photo above was taken yesterday morning in the Texas Hill Country. It's a 2009 image, but as I welcome the new year, I recall all the great moments and wonderful events of 2009.

Best wishes to you all in 2010 and may this new year bring you happy moments and good times.

November Big Bend Gallery Complete

It is done. My gallery of photos from Big Bend National Park is ready for viewing:

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I spent nearly 10 full days in the park and surrounding areas. During that time, I attended a TME (The Mindful Eye) six day photography workshop lead by Craig Tanner and Marti Jeffers.

The shooting opportunities were slightly different during this trip. Usually, my visits to the park are on my own terms, and I focus on specific areas, mostly accessible by hiking. The workshop itinerary focused mostly on the easy-to-reach, iconic locations in the park.

In project terms, this last trip was definitely a sub-project, much like my badlands project was this past March. I had a lot of opportunity and time to shoot well-known locations, something that I had not really done before.

My goal during this last trip was to shoot the easy spots and create a sense of place. The resulting collection of photos will hopefully add some balance to my larger, on-going project.

More Published Work

Just a quick note to capture recent and upcoming publications:

The Friends of Big Bend National Park have used my photo below in their recent newsletter.

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This is a scene of Scarlet Gilia on the Lost Mine Trail taken in September 2007.

BigBendChat.com will publish the following four photos in their 2010 calendar:

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The photos, top to bottom, are:
- Rainbow from the South Rim, Sept. 2007
- The Window just after sunrise, Sept. 2008
- The Painted Desert (badlands near Dawson Creek), Mar. 2009
- Meteor over my tent, Mar. 2009

Many thanks to both FBB and BBC for selecting and using my Big Bend photos!

More from Big Bend

I'm still chewing through (i.e. editing and processing) the photos I took in Big Bend last month. Here are a couple more:

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The above photo was taken in Pine Canyon at the end of the trail near the pour-off. The trees had turned lovely fall shades.

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The above photo was shot near Dugout Wells on a windy, sub-freezing morning. Finding that particular clump of cactus took a long time. Fortunately all the walking warmed me up :-)

More from Big Bend later...

Snow Day

Last Friday it snowed here in Houston. Yep, that's right... SNOW in Houston.

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It didn't really stick well. There was a little accumulation in the grass and on roofs, but it quickly melted. It was fun while it happened and a lot of fun for the kids outside.

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The following morning saw a very heavy frost. I stepped out into my backyard after the sun came up and saw a lot of little, interesting ice formations.

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We don't get this kind of weather often here, so it was definitely a photo opportunity!

Big Bend Photo Workshop

I recently attended a TME photography workshop with Craig Tanner and Marti Jeffers in Big Bend National Park. It was an amazing experience and I thank all involved, especially my family back home who tolerated my absence for 10 days.

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I have a lot of photos to sort through, process, and edit. I'm posting a couple here that I editing during the workshop for critique.

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Stay tuned for more...

Photo to be Published in Tx Hwy 2011 Calendar

I just got word that one of my photos of the bracken ferns in Bastrop State Park (from April of last year) will be used in the 2011 Texas Highways calendar.

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Many thanks to Texas Highways for a second year in a row choosing one of my photos for use in their calendar!

Night Sky Time Lapse

And now for something completely different:

6MB .WMV Video - click to watch

This is a short video made from 297 photos taken over a period of nearly 45 minutes. Each photo was 8 seconds long (shot at 24mm, f/1.8, ISO 12.8k), and there was a break of 1 second between frames.

I turned off the long exposure noise reduction, but turned on the high ISO noise reduction. It did help some, but I still applied noise reduction in post processing. The files were shot as small JPGs. I contemplated shooting sRAW, but didn't want to deal with file sizes 4 to 5 times larger than a fine quality JPG.

This was an experiment to see if it could be done, and I think it worked quite well. The movie is a little jerky - probably a resut of 0.125 sec. per frame (i.e. 8 frames per second video). I'd like to redo this in the future with different software and perhaps make it faster (maybe 15 frames per second).

Dark Skies Over the High Lonesome, Part 2

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19.4mm (eff.), 44 minutes, f/4, ISO 200

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24mm, 25 sec., f/2.2, ISO 6400

Dark Skies Over the High Lonesome

I spent last weekend at the High Lonesome Ranch in the Texas hill country. The weather was clear and the moon was new- perfect conditions for...

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24mm, 25 sec., f/1.8, ISO 6400

The greenish light was from an aerial light near our cabin. The yellowish glow on the horizon was a distant small town or maybe another ranch.

The white streak in the upper left could possibly be a plane, but at 100% I cannot see the usual dot-pattern that results from blinking lights typically seen on planes. It might very well be a meteor, but I was not looking at the sky during the exposure, so I really don't know.

The white, fuzzy glow (middle right) looks like a galaxy. I'm not sure which one, perhaps Andromeda (M31)? This shot is looking roughly NNE about 2 hours after sunset.

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24mm, 25 sec., f/1.8, ISO 3200

It's kind of hard to see in this small web-sized pic, but there is a bluish glow on the tree. I inadvertently light-painted it with my LED headlamp.

I set this shot up and hit the shutter, then turned my back to the camera and paced around a bit (while talking to my wife on the cell). All the while I had my headlamp on. I was careful not to look in the direction of the shot, but the light reflected off the ground, then off the tree, and was recorded by the camera. It's just that sensitive!