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As our Earth races around the Sun there are a few months, from November to February, when the Milky Way is not visible because it is blocked by the Sun. From March to October the galactic center (the brightest part of the Milky Way) is visible in the Northern Hemisphere and best photographed on a clear night with a new moon. I use an app called Photo Pills to determine what time the galactic center will rise above the horizon and the location - southeast sky in the spring, south in the Summer and southwest in the fall. On this night in April it would be visible from 2:03 AM til 5:07 AM and then the sky would start to get light from the rising Sun. Because there was haze on the horizon I couldn't really see the brightest part until about 3:30 AM and later. These photos with the lonely tree and the windmill were taken between 4:30 and 5:00 AM, ISO 1600, f/3.2, 25 second exposure with a 20mm lens and a sturdy tripod. They are single images. I could get brighter stars by using a higher ISO, but would get more noise (grain) in the sky, or use a technique of image stacking by combining multiple exposures in to one. Something to try next time. (Click the images to see larger.)
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We recently took a drive over to the Mississippi River near McGregor, IA to look for Fall colors in the trees. The colors weren't as intense as we had hoped, perhaps because of the dry weather, but we did find some pretty trees. The image above and the first three below were at Pikes Peak State Park. Left to right below - wild ginger and trees, a dry gulch, Bridal Veil Falls (not much water flowing), and last - colorful trees at Effigy Mounds National Monument north of Marquette, IA. (Click the images to see larger)
Lightning tonight. According to my weather app the storm was about 50 miles away. I take lots of long exposures with the hope that I will get a lightning strike in one or two of the frames. The camera is on the tripod, and I use a remote timer (intervalometer) set in this case to take 20 second exposures repeatedly. I never know if I will get a bolt of lightning during that exposure or if it will be in the frame, but sometimes I get lucky. I would never do this when the lightning is close or if I can hear thunder. 112mm, f4.5, ISO 250, 20 second exposure and cropped. Below is a second image taken earlier with a wide angle lens while there was still a bit of light in the sky from the setting sun. I got a triple! The three lightning bolts didn't happen at exactly the same time, but they happened within the eight-second exposure. The length of time the shutter is open has little to do with the exposure because the lightning strike is so fast, but does allow a wider window of opportunity to capture one. The exposure is controlled by the f/stop and ISO (and perhaps a bit of post-processing in Lightroom and Photoshop). 35mm, f/5, ISO 100, 8 second exposure and cropped.
Last evening I tried out the new digital remote trigger (intervalometer) that I have for my camera. I had it set to take one exposure every 15 seconds for about an hour and a half as the clouds came rolling in ahead of a storm. I stopped taking pictures when it started raining. Then I opened the 300+ still images in Adobe Premiere Elements and made them in to a time-lapse movie. (This is part-1. I'm working on a longer version over several days.)
Clouds Over Iowa from BruceGMcKeePhotos on Vimeo.
A week in Rocky Mountain National Park is barely enough to to soak in the beauty and splendor of one of our grandest national parks. It's hard to say what impressed me most. I took photos of sunrises, sunsets, rivers and waterfalls. I love the mountain streams and waterfalls, and the reflections of the mountains on the surface of the lakes early in the morning when there is no wind. We saw and photographed Elk, Mule Deer, Moose, Yellow-bellied Marmots, Pikas, ground squirrels and Chipmunks. We looked for for Bighorn Sheep and Black Bear, but had no sightings in the week that we were there. Perhaps a good thing, because I did see recent Bear droppings in the middle of a trail at 4:30 in the morning as I was hiking around Sprague Lake to set up to take sunrise photos of the lake and mountains in the distance (I started talking to myself and the shadows rather loudly as I continued down the trail - just to alert any large furry critters that may still be around). We saw lots of Mountain Bluebirds and Magpies and a few Clark's Nutcrackers and Osprey, but there didn't seem to be a lot of birds in late July.
If you see clouds like this just be glad that you're not under them. Somebody is getting a bad storm. I believe that these are Cumulonimbus clouds, which can reach tens of thousands of feet in altitude and produce very severe storms. The anvil shape at the top is very characteristic of these storm clouds.
The photos were taken from west of Britt Iowa, but the storm clouds (according to the weather radar) were stretching from South of Waterloo to South of Marshalltown, over 100 miles away from where I was. The photo above is a two-frame panorama. The photo below is a nine-frame panorama and the bottom clouds photo is is a four-frame panorama. Photoshop and Photoshop Elements have a very cool feature that will automatically take overlapping images and magically stitch them together in a seamless panorama. (Click the images to see a larger version.) We just got back from a trip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park on the Tennessee and North Carolina border. I love the mountain streams and the water flowing in and around the boulders in the streams. I think my favorite are the moss-covered boulders. With the camera on a tripod, a wide-angle lens, a small f/stop (f/16) to get a great depth of field and an exposure of a few seconds I was able to capture the milky flowing water in the streams. (The water didn't look milky in real life, that's just the way it appears with the long exposure.) For the stream pictures I prefer the overcast days or in complete shade, especially early morning, because the shadows are softer.
The mountains got their name for a reason. Mornings and evenings the mist and clouds hung in the valleys or on the mountain peaks, giving the illusion of the smoky mountains. I love the many shades of the layers of the mountains as they gradually fade off in to the distance. You can see more images of the Great Smoky Mountains here - http://www.brucegmckeephotos.com/great-smoky-mountains-np.html I gave in. I finally decided to post some pictures on Facebook also. Go to my Facebook page then click the Like or Follow button and you can stay updated on some of my photo adventures. Of course you will need to log in to Facebook to see them. -
https://www.facebook.com/brucegmckeephotos
Over a million Snow Geese. That's what I read on the Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge website on March 10 and March 17. A week later on Monday the count was down to 286,000. Still a lot of birds in one place. I waited until the weekend, March 30, and drove to northwest Missouri to see the sight. Boy was I disappointed. The numbers of Snow Geese were about 1/20th what they had been less than a week earlier, estimated at slightly over 11,000. Okay, that is still a lot of birds in one place, but not the several hundred thousand that I had hoped for. The Geese pause for a short while during their Spring migration and gather in large numbers at the Squaw Creek National Wildlife Refuge near Mound City, MO. It is quite a site to see hundreds of thousands of birds all lift off from the water at one time and the sound is incredible. In under two weeks over a million birds got up and flew north to their summer breeding grounds. Timing is everything and I missed it. I still got some nice photos though. Not a wasted trip. [Click the images to see a larger picture] I've been stalking a tree, for a couple of years. It's not far from work so I stop to see it on the way home occasionally when I have my camera with me, and have taken pictures several times. They are nice pictures of lonely tree, but somewhat lacking. I've been waiting for a great sky to really enhance the photo, but nothing spectacular so far....until tonight. I was heading home in another direction and glanced over to the West and saw the setting sun starting to shoot color up to the under side of the clouds...and I didn't have my camera with me. I made a u-turn in the road anyway and drove down to see the tree. The sky was changing by the minute and I knew that it would look good with the tree in the foreground. I had learned before that the view that worked well for me was with my DSLR and a 100mm lens and the camera on a tripod standing by the fenceline. I had none of those tonight, but I did have my iPhone. Sometimes the best camera to take a picture is the one that you have with you, and the iPhone is all I had tonight. I have been inspired by Mark Hirsh and his photo series "That Tree", where he took pictures of a lonely Bur Oak tree in a field with his iPhone every day for a year (click on the Gallery link on his web site to see his photos). I certainly haven't been doing it every day, but I have been photographing this tree occasionally for a couple of years - long before I knew of Mark's project. The iPhone has a much wider angle lens than I usually used from an easy vantage point, so, I had to venture out in to the cow pasture to get close enough to get the shot that I wanted. I normally have in the back of my car a tripod, boots and coveralls or a rain suit to slip in to when I need to take photos off the road, but I had cleaned out the car last week and didn't have my usual accessories. There I was in my slacks and dress shoes, just coming from work, tromping around in a muddy field, dodging cow pies. Sacrifices for a photo. I really wish I had the tripod though. I have a new app on my iPhone called Camera+. It has much better camera functions than the native camera controls and allow for easy selective focus and exposure compensation, allowing me to adjust exposure in the sky to somewhat get the effect that I wanted. I couldn't have done this with the normal iPhone camera settings. Overall, I was pleased with the photos I took, although not the same quality as the DSLR I think they look okay on the web page. After an exciting day at the Buffalo Roundup (see previous post) at Custer State Park in South Dakota, I got up early to look for a sunrise photo opp. Unfortunately, staying in Custer City we were on the wrong side of the mountains (hills?) and it was a longer drive than I had expected to get to the top to see the sunrise. Driving on the Wildlife Loop road on the south end of the park I spotted a Coyote prancing down the middle of the road in the twilight about 15 minutes before sunrise. I got the camera ready, resting it on a beanbag lens rest on the door window and slowly approached the spot were I had last seen the Coyote. To my surprise it was laying in the grass, about 30 feet from the road. I took several shots from the car window without even shutting off the engine and then the Coyote got up and walked away, poking its nose in several prairie dog holes along the way. This was just the start to an interesting morning. A short while later I saw several Wild Turkey walking along the road and in the grass along the road, Western Meadow Larks, Mountain Bluebirds, Magpies, Mule Deer, Pronghorn Antelope, Prairie Dogs, and of course Bison. Click to see more photos of Custer State Park Wildlife (bottom half of the page). |
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March 2024
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