Chris

At Heather Lake, on Mount Pilchuck, with Schmoo.

Kathy

One of my favorite places to kill a little time and occasionally pick up new stuff for my Block Play blog is Seattle's Math 'n' Stuff.

While looking through recent posts with a staff member, she asked what kind of camera this was, so after a brief discussion, I scampered out to my car and brought it in.

Of course I had to demonstrate it for her.

I rather like the results.

Hand held, fluorescent lighting, full-auto, cropped & tweaked in Picasa.

Outdoor blocks

For my Block Play Blog I enjoy photographing my constructions outside.

One of the challenges is balancing subject light with background light.

The image above has a white umbrella positioned to reduce and defuse the sunlight on the structure, so that it could be properly exposed without having the cedar branches in the background drop out to black.

Here, as for most of my block structures, I have used Shift-N to rectify vertical distortion.

Self Portrait

Sharing

My older girl & my mom.

Night Nights

This image is a response to an inquiry on Olympus Talk Forum about night exposures with the SP-570UZ.

My first reaction was "no problem, I have some." But a more careful reading determined that the request was for long exposures at low ISO on a tripod, and my shots were at high ISO, to allow slower shutter speeds and handholding (with image stabilization).

That sounded like a weird but interesting exercise - deliberately handicapping oneself like that can be a good learning experience, so I decided to accept the informal challenge.

I haven't turned up my old tripod yet, so I stuck a clamp and pocket tripod in pockets and took the camera on my evening walk.

It seemed like the streetlights made the streets too bright, so I turned down a dark alley and set the camera up with the pocket tripod on a recycling bin.

The above is probably the best of several shots at 15 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 100.

And just for fun, I bumped the "fill light" in Picasa up to maximum, then clicked the "I'm feeeling lucky" button for Picasa's best guess at optimum contrast and color balance.

The intriguing results are below.

Silly but fun.

Heron versus fish

We watched a heron catch & eat a fish.

He either jumped or fell the rock. We aren't sure.

But he got the fish.

[The original video is a nasty-big file (~58 mb). Blogger scrunched it into something more manageable & less clear. It is still fun.]

The heron had a lot of trouble with the fish but eventually managed to swallow it.

I had wandered off by then, so missed photographing the mid-throat bulge.