Cranes in flight, shot with a super -telephoto lens (600 mm).
Laurie distributed the flowers and roses from Reyes around the house adding extra color, beauty and cheerfulness to each room. I got up in the wee hours of the morning to find one of the ghosts lying on the floor under Laurie’s robe. I thought Laurie was laying on the floor in the darkness, but I could see she was still in bed with cats on her as they were light the moonlight streaming through the window. I grabbed my camera and set it to high ISO, ghost mode and snapped some photos. The phantasm filled out the body of the robe, but it had no head, arms or feet. When I pushed on the robe, there was nothing solid under it to fill it out, but it was filled out, and the robe would pop back into shape when I took my hand off — I thought I heard a faint giggle each time I poked it, but I would not swear by it. When I got up in the morning the robe was laying flat on the floor — I guess the spirit, warm and comforted by the robe, had gone off to wherever it hangs out during the day.
When I came into the warm house after being out in sub-freezing temperatures, the lens on my camera fogged up, giving me the perfect fog effect on Guildenstern laying on my equipment bags. After the lens cleared up, I got a photo of Guildernstern trying to camouflage himself on the bags, but his yellow eyes and white whisker gave him away. Rosencrantz, Guildenstern and Diné rang in the New Year all snuggled up on the bed.
I got out my big tripod, got all bundled up, put on my 17-40mm super-wide angle lens, snapped a self portrait, and headed out into the sub-freezing temperatures to attempt to photograph the Quadrantids Meteor Shower last night starting at 9:30 pm, thinking I could get photos in the darkness before the moon came up at 11:00 pm. But when I got outside, I discovered there was a light cloud cover reflecting a lot of light off the city from the south, southeast. I followed the suggestions about how to photograph meteor showers on Spacedex.com’s Meteor Shower Guides, but it looks like I failed to capture anything but stars, planets and clouds. After an hour making exposures from different angles, I got pretty cold and went back inside. I woke up at 2:15 am, bundled up in the dark and went out the front door and tried some exposures from the front porch. The moon, at 65% full, was up to about 10 o’clock in the southeastern sky, so I made my exposures looking west and north. I got a nice shot of the Dig Dipper in the northern skies at 2:30 am, but again failed to get anything that looked like a meteors.






My new 17-40mm ƒ/4 ultra-wide angle zoom lens was delivered this afternoon, so I tried it out downtown (and on the rib roast I picked up on the way home tonight — we are having standing rib roast instead of turkey for Thanksgiving). The lens is sharp and has good edge to edge detail, even wide open at slow shutter speeds. The photo of Liz in Patrician Designs was shot at 17mm, ƒ/4 at 1/20 sec at ISO 100. Liz is a little soft because she was laughing, but the sharpness and depth-of-field is impressive. I bumped up the ISO to 400 when I photographed Megumi in Cafe Giuseppe (1/30 at ƒ/4). I photographed the mutual life building at ƒ/11 and One Up at ƒ/7.1. The rib roast was a little more work. I used two flashes, one on the camera, the other in my hand. At 17mm, I was about 3 inches from the roast, so I had to use manual focus, hold the camera with one hand, while aiming the flash with the other (I was too lazy to get out a tripod, which would have made doing the photo much easier). The exposure was 1/160 at ƒ/5.6 ISO 400.