The beauty of the small

In electronic products,, smaller is better. When we look in detail we can see the life of an electronics board, not too different form the cities we live in. We are the electrons that move from place to place, trying to get here, trying to get there...

A board with lots, lots of little components.



Just a few of them... these make this computer to work.


It tells us if it is day or night...

And this one stores our most precious memories.

Flowers, flowers, flowers

Macrophotography helps revealing the hidden structures, the little details that we don't see every day as we don't have the patience, time or desire to find them.

Macrophotography of flowers and plants brings a new sense of beauty; an almost surreal world so close to us.

Isn't this beautiful?


Looking closer, this is what we find:


Mixture of species... new habitat.

Perfect structure...

... and color.

Wood and water

Frances Slocum State Park. - Summer



Water. Wood


Of course, a waterfall.

Several HDRs

Several HDR pictures, with several themes...

At sea:

By the lake:

From the ship:

HDR & IR

Doing High Dynamic Range with the InfraRed camera:

or depending on the post-processing:

High Dynamic Range - HDR

Our eyes work much better than any photographic film or digital sensor. This is obvious when we are looking at a scene that mixes bright lights and darker shadows. While our eyes can see the details in both the highlights and the shadows, when we try to record that scene in a photography the results are often disappointing. This is because the dynamic range of the digital sensor (that is the range from shadows to highlights) is more limited in the sensor than in our eyes. If we try to capture the details in the shadows, the light areas come out all white. If we try to capture the details in the light areas, the dark areas come out all black.

High Dynamic Range photography (HDR) comes to the rescue. HDR is based on taking several pictures of the same scene, each one with a different exposure value and then combine them all into a single photograph. This way, at least theoretically, the result is a picture with a level of detail in both, the highlights and the shadows. At the same time, this gives the photography a new feel, different from traditional photography. These are my first attempts at HDR. The location is Ricketts Glenn State Park in PA. And somehow, while taken these pictures, my neck managed to get in touch with Poison Ivy… no fun!

evening by the lake

getting darker

i like the reflections of the clouds on the water

our morning hike

On a different note...

These pictures are different from the ones I normally post here. They are not infrared or pinhole but they are different in the sense that we don't get to take them all the time.

The pictures are still shots from video camera recorders that were installed in high altitude balloons. Last week I was involved in the launch and recovery of a high altitude balloon that bursted at 92,000 feet (28,000 meters). That is, flying almost three times as high as a commercial airliner.

A portion of the balloon can be seen at the left; the reddish thing is the parachute that will be inflated close to the ground during the descent. The cube object is one of the multiple payloads that contain the instrumentation, cameras, telemetry, etc...

It is amazing how just at 90,000 ft you can see the curvature of the Earth and the blackness of space. Similar view below. The lowest outside air temperature was -60F (-51C).

The videos show extreme turbulence when the balloon crosses the jet stream; the payloads jump all over the place.

And just another view of the Earth...

What we are trying to do with this type of activities is to involve young boys and girls into science and engineering. Don't you think this is just fascinating ???

The lake

Sometimes IR images come out dull; no matter what we do, how we process them, they all look the same. But some other times they have that special magic that makes each slightly different process a new, more astounding image.

So this is one of these few times. At the lake.




Surreal colors...



Like a dream ...



Almost nightmarish...



Somehow attractive ...

and mysterious...

Texture and structure

Camping, summer 2008.

Bottom of the lake, at the shore with very shallow water.



After some color processing:



A different view:

Pintoids!

For a change, these are not infrared but pinhole photographs taken with a can of Altoids, about five years ago. Combination of Pinhole and Altoids = Pintoids. They are fun to work with, although you need a dark room to load, unload and process the negatives. The pictures here are scans from the negatives after being inverted.

Part of Deb's yard a couple of houses ago:

From the entrance to the apartment where I used to live:

Part of Deb's yard and the front of her van:

And just more yard:

I haven't processed film for several years now, but just looking at them makes me want to do it again. Maybe this summer ....