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.
I’ve been so busy photographing birds, mountains, and shows that I’ve neglected the spiders. A daddy longlegs was hanging out being a willing subject when I got home tonight.
The lights are starting to go up on houses and buildings, and the sky had its own decorations late last night.
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.
A few more photos from the Marigold Parade celebrating El Dia de los Muertos.
Liz, who works at Patrician Designs, was a paper boy for Halloween. Getting a good photo of her clicking her heels was not an easy task, but we finally got a great jump and click — although she jumped so high, she about jumped out the frame — I was impressed. I managed to get a photo of an angel playing the piano, which is a pleasant addition to the ghostly images a got walking around downtown this evening. The three celebrants in the last photo had wonderful costumes, very well done, and appropriate for Halloween.
We didn’t get home in time for me to get a photo of the full moon peaking over the mountains, so I got the moon through our bamboo, moonlit corn, and the Sandias with golden cottonwoods by moonlight.
