Out of Photons

Stars and Star Trails

2011-08-03T16:43:00.000-04:00

One of the reasons I like photography so much is because it allows you to capture moments in time that are impossible for us to perceive otherwise either because they are too fast or too slow for our eyes. Among the "too slow" examples are light trails left by cars and also how stars "travel" through the sky during the night (and I put "travel" in the metaphorical sense so my astronomer friends don't kill me...).

Arches National Park, Utah

I recently posted the previous star trail photo on Google+ and on 500px, and to my surprise I received several comments about it (which I thank a lot!), and some messages asking how to take such a photo. Thus, I decided to write a post with some tips and tricks on how to make these photos. I've taken several of them through the years so I want to share what has worked for me... but your mileage may vary. I'll try to explain using basic concepts when possible, but if you are not comfortable with what ISO, Aperture, and Exposure are and how they relate I would suggest you to search about it and try to understand more or less how they interact. This will become very important because we will be using the camera outside of its ideal range and thus the exposure meter and all that "automatic" magic that current cameras do might not work as expected.

First things first: what do we need? Actually the minimum requirements are fairly small:
1. Digital Camera: Duh! Obvious, but actually any digital camera with a manual mode will suffice (meaning that at least you should be able to control the exposure time). Of course one of those expensive DSLRs with gazillion automatic functions will make your life much easier, but any camera in which you can control exposure time will do.
2. A Sturdy Tripod: I don't know how to emphasize more the "sturdy" part, but it is fundamental. No matter how much you try to stay still and not touch anything, even if you are using a remote switch to take the photos, it is inevitable that some vibrations will occur and you need a strong tripod to minimize that shake. Just a mildly strong wind can make your tripod vibrate if it is not sturdy enough... and these photos require at least 15 to 30 minutes of exposure. Any shake will reduce your image sharpness... and we don't want that. So please, specially if you already invested a lot of money in your top-notch camera and sharp lens, don't be cheap and buy a $40 dollar tripod.
3. Patience... and most likely strong will and a hot beverage, because you will have to wake up between 2 and 4 in the morning, and most likely you will be sitting in the cold for a long time. For the photo above I woke up at 3:30 am, spent a good 30 minutes composing and then another hour shooting. So be patient.

There are a couple of optionals that I highly recommend:
4. Flashlight: you will be shooting in the middle of the night, and if you really want stars in your photos you probably are also in a place where there is almost no light... hence the flashlight. You can also use it to "paint" your foreground if there is no external light available and you don't want just a silhouette in your photo.
5. Remote switch: Not all cameras allow these, but if yours does, it is highly recommended. The basic switches will allow you to take the photo without pressing the camera's shutter button, and thus less camera shake. The more advanced ones will actually allow you to program the exposure time, number of photos, etc. It can simplify your shooting a lot.

Now that you have all you need the next thing on the list is... research. Indeed, this should be on your list every time you decide to go out somewhere to shoot. Today you can easily research your travel destination in Google Earth, Panoramio, Flickr, and so many other sites. There you can find what people have already shot, and thanks to the magic of geotagging you can even know where those images were taken. That will always help you prepare your trip and take advantage of the best spots to get a good photo.

Even if you don't care about this there is another set of important things you need to check out before you leave to make sure you can take these photos: the ephemerides of the place you will be visiting. There are several sites online where you can get them, so make sure you take a list with at least sunset, sunrise, moonset, moonrise and moon luminosity. As a side comment, if you are having a full moon during most of your trip, you will most likely not get a lot of stars. That is because when we have a full moon the Earth is in between the sun and the moon, hence as soon the sun sets, the full moon will rise and vice versa, so the really dark (and useful) part of the night will be minimal. But that is not bad... you can still do wonders when the moon is out, so just be creative. Remember that the amount of stars you can see depends on how much light is out there, so knowing when the sun and the moon won't be polluting your star-filled sky is essential. You definitely don't want to be waiting for 2 or 3 hours in the cold at 2 AM in the morning because the moon is still shining... and by having the sunset times you also know when to go to that great overlook you found earlier to take sunset pictures.

All set? Ready then, off you go. Once you arrive to your destination, while hiking around, look for interesting places. You need to do this during the day, otherwise you will waste your valuable night time looking for what to shoot instead of actually shooting. Even take a couple of photos to see if you find something interesting, but always remember that there will be little or no light, so think of shapes more than colours. If you are in the northern hemisphere, make sure you look for interesting places by looking to the north, and vice versa if you are in the south. That is if you want to get those concentric circles you see in the picture above. In that case I made sure I was pointing my camera to the NNE to have the circles centred to the left of the photo (and you can see the Polar Star in the centre). If you don't, then you will end up with lines streaks instead like in the photo below. Also notice that in that photo the moon was up when I took it, so the amount of stars was reduced significantly.

Balanced Rock, Arches National Park, Utah

Ok, so now that you have a couple of cool spots to take your photos you just need to wait until the desired time during the night, but prepare to get there at least 30 minuted before to set up everything. Once you put your tripod and the camera in place the first thing you will notice is how hard it is to compose and focus when there is no light. So how you do that?

The composition part I do it by trial and error. I remember from my search during the day more or less what I want to put in the shot and where to put my tripod, so I start there. Then I take a couple of test shots and recompose accordingly. These shots have two purposes: one is testing your composition and the other setting the correct exposure. In general I take 30 second exposures to check these two things, and since almost all cameras have at least a maximum exposure of 30 seconds (without using any additional triggers) it is a good bet. With 30 seconds you will be able to record small trails that can indicate you where the star trails will be, where the centre is and so forth. For the rest of the settings I start with a large aperture (generally f/4 if I'm using a wide angle) and ISO 800. Of course everything will depend on your sensor, so use these values as a starting point and play around until you get something you like. The histogram will not help you much in this instance, since most of the sky will indeed be totally dark, so you must trust a little your instincts and check if what you see in the screen is relatively decent. More importantly, once you go back home and start processing your images take note of the ones that worked, so you can use those values when you go out again in the future. That is how I got the 30 sec., f/4.0, ISO 800 as a starting point for my Canon.You will need to tweak it of course because it depends on your own personal taste (e.g. how many stars you want to record, if you want more then increase the ISO, or reduce the aperture), the camera's sensor, and how much light is in the sky (any cities around, the moon might be out, full moon, new moon, etc.), among other things.

Once you set those numbers correctly you need to make your second important decision (composition being the first): stars or star trails. If you want static stars (maybe even a cool photo with the milky way or just stars during dawn like in the photo below) you will have to reduce your exposure time, depending on the focal distance of your lens. For example if you are using a wide angle (around 14 mm) I've been able to take photos of 15 to 20 seconds without any noticeable star trails, so the stars actually look like dots and not small lines. Of course once you start increasing your focal length, and thus zooming into your subject, the trails become more noticeable and you might require to reduce your exposure time even more. In order to compensate for that exposure reduction you will need to crank up your ISO and suffer with the wrath of the sensor noise. Depending on how good your camera is, you can go really high on your ISO and still be able to pull it off (via noice reduction in post-processing), so play around with your camera beforehand to see how far can you go. You don't want to come back and realize the amount of noise made your photo unusable. In general the fancy DSLRs have a much better ISO performance than the cheaper point-and-shoots, so this will make a huge difference in the final quality of your photo. Now going from 30 seconds to 15 reduces exposure (and thus the amount of "light gathered") in half (also known as 1-stop down), hence we need to double our sensor's sensitivity, which implies going up from ISO 800 to 1600 (1-stop up in ISO, and thus keeping the total exposure the same). This will increase your image noise, so don't be too disappointed if it doesn't work.

Stars at Dawn, South of Chile

One the other hand, if you want star trails, you will need to increase the exposure. Here is where the remote switch with a timer saves the day. You put your camera in bulb mode and leave the remote shutter pressed for as long as you want. The problem is that the longer the exposure time, more noise will creep into your photo, since the sensor will become hotter. The solution is taking many shorter exposure photos and combine them in post-processing. I generally don't go for more than 3 minute exposures. Going from 30 second to 3 minutes (180 seconds) implies you will gather 6 times more light (that is a little less than 3-stops up), so we need to reduce the sensor's sensitivity 6 times too (i.e. about 3-steps down), to ISO 100 to keep the same nice exposure we calibrated in our test shots. Easy right? Now you can take all the 3 min. pictures you want, without worrying about noise and then put them all together in Photoshop later (I'll explain how in a second).

What about the focus? Ok, this one is trickier. If you own a high-end lens this part can be very smooth. Those lenses come with markings that indicate the distance, so you just need to set it to the correct value. Given that you want to have both your foreground and your nice starry background in sharp focus, you need to set the focusing distance and the aperture to make sure that happens. This is material for a whole other post but the summary is the following: the aperture and focusing distance will set your depth of field, which is the range between the closest and furthest distances to your camera that will look sharp and in focus in your photo. The larger the aperture (the wider the lens opens) the smaller the DOF, the smaller the aperture, the larger the DOF. So why don't we just put the aperture all the way down to make sure that we maximize the DOF? well because the smaller the aperture, the less light we get into the camera, and thus we need to increase something to keep the exposure correct: that means either increase the ISO or the exposure time, and both of them are bad ideas since they will increase the amount of noise in our photos. So we want to reduce the aperture just enough to keep our subjects in focus. The answer to what aperture and at which distance to focus is given by the hyperfocal distance. In simple terms this is the closest distance at which you can focus and still make sure that objects at infinity (i.e. our starry background) are still in focus. Anything less, and your stars start to become blurry. The hyperfocal distance depends on your lens size (its focal length) and the aperture, so given your lens, you need to reduce the aperture such that your subject is further away from your camera than the hyperfocal distance. Of course this will imply that you need to estimate the distance to your subject, but with a little practice you can do that more or less accurately. You can google "hyperfocal distance" and you will be able to find charts for different focal lengths and apertures or if you are the proud owner of a smartphone, download one of those free DOF calculators that are out there (DOF Calculator for Android works like a charm, and you get it for free at the android market, here) and use it to determine the aperture. Again recall that the smaller the aperture the larger the exposure or ISO, so once you determine how many stops to reduce the aperture, you will have to do the same to either the ISO or exposure (or combine both) so that you increase the same amount of stops that you lost in the aperture. Then you set your lens to focus at your subject (which should be at the hyperfocal distance for these new settings) and voilà, all will be in focus. What if you don't have a fancy lens? then the flashlight comes into play, as you can use it to focus your camera. Just illuminate your subject, so your camera can focus, and then set the aperture accordingly. Remember to set your lens to manual focus after that, since you don't want the camera trying to re-focus on every shot. Note that you can do the same procedure if you are using a fancy lens. In that case you can use automatic focus to make sure that the closest part of your foreground subject is sharp, and then read the distance that appears on the lens and use it to determine the correct aperture.

Finally, the only piece missing is the white balance. If you have a DSLR, please shoot in raw and forget about it. You can then tune it in post-processing. Now if you prefer (or are forced) to use the JPEG road, make a couple of test shots with different settings to see what you like the most. I prefer to set mine to incandescent or tungsten to give a slight bluer glow to the ski, but you might like it warmer, so play around beforehand.

After that is just shooting and enjoying the night. Have warm clothes and/or a hot beverage at hand because it can definitely become really cold.

Once you have all your pieces it is time to put them together, to make those large start trails. The steps are easy, but you will need special software like Adobe Photoshop to do it. Here is the procedure:

1. Open all photos in Photoshop, and select one to work in.

2. Copy all other photos into the selected photo. They will be copied as layers over the selected image, covering it. Don't worry, we will fix that in the next step.

3. Once you have all the photos as layers in a single file, for each layer you need to set the "Blending Mode" (just under the "Layers" tab on the right) to "Lighten". This will superpose the light parts of each layer, effectively adding all the trails.

4. Do this to all the layers except the one at the bottom, which should be the "background" layer.

5. In the top menu select "Layer" and "Flatten Image" to squash everything into a single layer and you are done!

Here is another examples of star trails I took back in Chile.

Remains of a Chapel after the 2010 earthquake, Tapihue, Chile

I hope that although the post is a little long it was clear enough and gave you good tips to make cool star or star trail photos. If you want to add a link in the comments to show your results or just add your personal experiences, feel free to do so.

Sharing a Single Photo in Google+

2011-07-27T14:53:00.002-04:00

Google+ is the new social network that Google released less than a month ago, and that already has more than 20 million users. I won't derail this post into a Google+ review, there are plenty of those out there, but I will just say that it is a great platform for those interested in sharing photos. Given the amount of privacy control it gives (which is also intuitive to use and not hidden in an obscure setting), and how it is linked to your Picasa albums, it makes it great to share photos... and that is why there are many world class photographers that have jumped into the Google+ wagon and started using it to share their work and receive instant feedback. Tray Ratcliff, known for his HDR photos, has compiled a list of many photographers in Google+ in case you are interested in following a few. Also if you already have several albums in Picasa, the first thing you notice once you get into Google+ is that you are not using any of your Picasa space. That is because all your small photos (smaller than 2048px I believe) don't count towards your 1 Gb. storage in Picasa, so great news!

Now, given that Google+ is just in its ß form, it still has a lot of wrinkles to iron, and one of those wrinkles is how to share a single photo. If you have some albums in Picasa already, you will see that at the album level you can press "share" on top or at the side, and decide with witch circles (or single e-mails) you want to share that album with. That will post the whole album on your Stream in Google+, and only the selected circles or e-mails will be able to see it, and it shows the first image sort of big, and then a couple of small thumbnails of the next two photos in the album. But you will not find any way to share a single photo from that album. The share button in Picasa will popup a small window offering you to send it as an e-mail... so no luck there.

To show a single image on your stream like Tray does (check them out here if you like), you have two options, and none of them is optimal (yet):

1. Picasa Link: The only way I know to share a single image in your stream (with the image being large, not just a tiny thumbnail) is by using the URL address on Picasa. To get that, go to your Picasa webpage, get to where your image is, and copy that URL on top (not the URL you get by pressing the "link to this photo" button at the lower right, that will add a tiny thumbnail on your stream). Then go to Google+ and add it to your post. You can either add it somewhere in the post you are writing (Google+ will automatically add a large photo at the end of your post) or add it by pressing the "link" icon on your post. You can write anything you want on your post, and once you press share, the post will appear with whatever you wrote first, the photo next and the text of the image's caption after that. If you click on the image you will go to the beautiful photo gallery that Google+ has.
Drawback? Any comments made on that post will be kept on the post and you will not see anything in your photo. So if you want to have the comments synchronized in both places this is not the way to go.

2. Upload a new picture: This is the only way I know to keep the comments synchronized in both the image and the post. On your Google+ page there are four icons on top: Home, Photos, Profile, and Circles. Go to the Photos one and you will see a huge red button saying "Add New Picture". Click it, add a single image, and then you can then select the album you want to put it in and any comments you want to add on your post, just as before. Once you share it it will look almost identical to the previous method, but it will also add a link to the whole album on top of the image. Drawback? If you use Lightroom, like I do, to post your photos, you will not be able to use it. That might be a huge drawback since it adds an extra step (you need to export to your hard disk and then import to Google+) but also you loose the connection between the photo and Lightroom. This allows you to edit a photo even after it has been published in Picasa, and the changes you make will be reflected there too, without erasing the comments or +1s the photo might have.

If you want comments in sync and use Lightroom... you are out of luck... (at least for now).

Summer Cleaning

2011-07-25T00:07:00.004-04:00

Finally I had some time to order and clean things around, so I re-organized my whole web footprint. From now onwards www.rax.cl will serve as my web command centre or hub, and from there I will link all the other places where I have things that might interest some human being. If you want to be updated automatically about changes in any of my pages you can click the subscribe link at my "What's New?" page here: link.

After much consideration I've decided to focus this blog only in Photography, so I cleaned it a little and hopefully now it will serve it purpose. Here you will find a selected number of photos, as well as some short accounts of the trips where I took them. I will also add some tips & tricks I've found around the web or I've learnt along the way.

Stay tuned!

New Year on an Airplane

2011-01-04T23:45:00.001-05:00

   After a little more than a year and a half we had to go back to Chile to renew our visas. Why? Because Dani is taking an awesome course about disability for the Doctorate at NYU, and it turns out that the course is in Ghana! so... she needed to travel outside of the US, and thus we needed to renew our visas so she could come back in.

   Nothing too terrible, thanks to the guys at Fulbright the process is relatively simple, although you still need to wait some time for all the bureaucratic requirements, plus the variance in the timing that in this dates is somewhat high. So we enjoyed the Chilean summer, while in New York my friends had to deal with a large blizzard (sorry guys), spent some time with our folks, celebrate Christmas, and all that. If I have time I'll write a post later about it, with some of the places we visited.

   Now back to the main story of this post. Since Dani needed to be in Ghana on the 3rd, and thus fly from New York on the 2nd, we needed to be here on the 1st, and that meant spending New Year's Eve on the airplane. I did that once before with my parents like 10 years ago, so it wasn't a big deal, plus I'm not very attached to this specific point of the earth's orbit, so I had no problems flying that day. It became a little complicated in terms of logistic, as the US Embassy was closed on the 31st, and until the 30th at 4:00 pm we still did not have our visas ready... quite an experience, but thankfully everything worked fine: we got our visas and were ready to board our plane on the 31st.

   The last bad experience of 2010 was that our plane was delayed. The airplane we were supposed to board had some sort of problem, and they changed us to another plane 2 minutes before boarding time. The problem was that the new airplane needed to be checked and cleaned, and that meant that we had to wait for another hour to board. Considering that the plane was scheduled to leave at 10:45 pm, that meant that there was a high probability of spending new year stuck in an airport... but here is where the bad things stop.

   So, what are the good parts of the story? First, we were upgraded to Business, so that meant real champagne, nice food, and sleeping flat on our way to New York. It also meant that we spent the waiting time on the VIP lounge, which is not much better to be honest, but at least you have free food and free Internet.

   Finally we boarded the plane around 11:30 pm, and the captain was so cool, that he decided to do a small detour and fly over Valparaiso's Bay. Now for all my non-Chilean friends: Valparaiso is a large city to the coast of Santiago, where very new year they do a huge fireworks show. Of course the place is packed with people so it is almost impossible to go, and if you dare to go it is kind of hard to find a spot unless you start preparing with enough time... just like those crazy guys that want to buy the new iPhone on the release date. I have never gone there to see them... until now, and from a completely different perspective. Have you ever looked down to see fireworks? Well here it is:

That is Valparaiso's Bay with a couple of red and blue fireballs near the coast. The previous time I flew on this date I think we were around the Atacama Desert when the new year arrived, and not too lizards over there celebrate the festivity, so no big firework shows. Plus when you are in Business you have like 3 windows for yourself to choose from, so it is easier to find a nice spot to take pictures.

Another view of the "bay area". plus a small spot to the right side which I think is Laguna Verde. And at the back, on the upper left of the picture you see the huge monster that is Santiago... well at least you see the north-west part of it. We were sitting on the other side of the plane, so I have to thank Dani for talking to the couple that was sitting at the other side and that allowed me to shoot a couple of pictures... with a couple meaning like50. Hey... its free!

What else? Well, as I said before, nice food, wine, champagne, and most importantly, a nice bed. There is nothing like sleeping flat while on a plane, so that was the best part for me at least. I woke up like 7 hours later, somewhere in Florida (above... I was still on the plane of course), when the sun was just starting to show, which is one of the great moments to take pictures, together with sunset. So here are a couple of shots I took:

After breakfast, we were above the coast of North Carolina, and the sun was a little over the horizon already. The low (for the plane) clouds made a nice cushion, so it was a very nice sight.

Finally we were already arriving to New York, so we had to close the tables, turn off all our stuff, but Dani convinced me to keep the camera around, just in case the landing was interesting. We flew over Fire Island, where we have gone during the summer to "enjoy" the weather, and then landed with a really nice view of New York between the clouds. So thanks to Dani again...

But the good things don't end there! When we arrived there was almost no one on the airport, so we were able to go through customs really quick, get out suitcases, and then go back home. Luckily the express E train went by a couple of minutes after we got to the station and the weather was quite mild compared to the previous weeks, so it was actually nice to walk back home through Columbia as always.

And that was the new year's story. As someone in Chile would say "reguleque" (long story). So happy new year! and have a great 2011!

The Russian Wedding

2010-06-07T00:50:00.001-04:00

   Well, they say that if you are going down you should do it in style, so that is why Arseniy, my Russian friend and classmate, not hearing any of my warnings decided to get married with his life sweetheart in Punta Cana, in the Dominican Republic . You can't do anything more stylish than getting married in the beach of a exotic Caribbean island, so he definitely wanted to go down in style.
   As I love the beach and the hot weather I was elated to participate of course, but Dani was too eager to miss it so we finally bought a pair of tickets with an all-inclusive package and we left to Punta Cana, escaping from the hot and humid weather of New York to get the even hotter and more humid weather of Dominican Republic... but with all you can eat, just like the IEOR lounge.
   In order to get the most out of our first day there we took the earliest flight to Punta Cana. Regretfully that meant to wake up at 3:30 am, which is not bad per se, but if you went to bed at 3:00 am after cleaning and arranging the house after so many days out, basically you just have enough braincells awake not to drool while seating on the subway on the way to the airport. Of course our friends from the MTA had all the subways in weird schedules and detours, but we were able to make it on time. At least you are tired enough to sleep in those wonderful and spacious economy class seats, so I had a nice 4 hour nap. Nah.. it wasn't that bad as the nice lady on the counter gave us one of those emergency exit seats, so although you still can only recline the seat 1.3 degrees as usual (which I guess it is enough so your head doesn't fall forward while you are sleeping) you can at least stretch your legs all you want (disclaimer: as long as you don't want too much of course).
   Anyway, after those awesome 4 hours of sleep Dani woke me up and gave me the camera to see if I could take some pictures of our landing. In general I seldom take the window seat but this time I had, so I gave it a shot. Here are a couple of pictures of the Dominican Republic from 5,000 feet above or something like that.

   By the way, if you click on any of the pictures you will be able to see a much larger version. You can also go to the Picasa Web Album (linked at the end of this post) to see all the images.
   The airport is rather rustic, which means that you only get a staircase outside the plane and you walk to the airport building. Now the change from the AC at full throttle inside the plane (I guess they don't want to spend too much refrigerating the food) to the humid air outside was quite a shock. I tried to get a couple of pictures before entering the airport building but it was impossible as even my eyes got tarnished due to the humidity, so I will have to wait for when we come back.
   Everything worked quite fast: our luggage was one of the first to come out and a bus was already waiting for us outside, ready to take us to our resort. The only thing that was not so "dreamy Caribbean Island" was the weather, as it was really cloudy, but as the weather was so hot, you could be wearing just your bathing suit and be fine.
   After visiting one of the buffet dinners, which was next to the pool, we took a walk around the beach while we waited for our room to be ready. It doesn't look as cool as when you have a clear blue sky, but I still think that it looked quite nice:

After walking for a couple of minutes we arrived to a set of shops, which were selling anything and everything, from Mama Juana (a mixture of Rum and some local spices) to cigars and seashells. As we look rally Latin of course, we were approached by every single shop owner to go and see what they had inside. Maybe next time I should come with a t-shirt saying I'm Latin... anyway, after zigzagging around insistent shop owners we finally came back to the hotel.

   We only saw Olga, Berk, Carlos and Allison during that afternoon, as Arsenyi and the rest of the Russian folks were visiting Santo Domingo, but were supposed to come back soon in the afternoon. Of course "soon" in here has a completely different meaning, as it can mean 1 minute (which never happens) or several hours, hence we were not surprised when "soon" meant that they arrived after dinner.
   Although we had to go to bed early that day, as Arseniy and Olga had already prepared activities for the next morning, the whole wedding gang got together to keep on enjoying the "all-included" resort and ended up in the disco.

   The activity for the guys the next day was a fishing trip, while the girls went for a swimming, snorkelling, and sightseeing trip around the island. Apparently fishes know that we humans are extremely lazy so they only go out early in the morning, where none of us is around (at least concious). That meant that we needed to wake up at 6:30 to be ready to leave at 7:30 on our fishing expedition, which was awesome considering I had slept only 4 hours on a plane the "day" before. Anyhow... we were all up early that day (even the Groom), and ready for our boat trip.

No, this was not our fishing boat... I think it was actually the third from left to right, which was the tallest one out there. Off to the sea!

Well, it actually turns out that fishing for Mahi-Mahi and King Fish in open waters if very similar to proctoring a test when you have a CA with you. Basically the captain and his assistant (the CA equivalent) will prepare all the rods and leave them ready at the sides of the boats. Meanwhile we would just sit and look dumb (not that we can do much better) and wait for a fish to get caught (undergrad equivalent in this proctoring comparison?).

It turns out that even fish are kind of lazy over here, so instead of going out early in the morning they started appearing around 11:00! Not that I wouldn't do the same, but if we only knew I would have loved those extra hours of sleep.

We were actually losing hopes to get something that day when we got our first hit, actually two hits, as two Mahi-Mahi's decided the bait looked tasty at the same time. On top you see the guys fighting to get those fishes on board.

They say that every time you tell the story of your fishing trip the fishes grow more and more, so by the time I'm writing this we should have caught two blue whales, but regretfully I have the pictures so you can see they are only moderately sized fishes. Two Mahi-Mahi and two King Fishes. Well, that is better than go back empty handed so the crew was happy and didn't engage in mutiny, but instead decided to pillage and plunder the bars of the resort.

On top you see the whole "fishing" team and below apparently it would be Captian Davy Jones, although I am not sure who was Jack Sparrow in that trip, as several of our crew members became a "little light of stomach" due to all the rocking of the boat, but we will not mention any names in here...

Back to the hotel, basically we just relaxed and wasted our time in the pool and doing some. Nothing else can be said...

Next was the big day. Although the last two days were awfully clouded, miraculously this day was sunny and only some white and puffy clouds could be seen in the morning. Maybe it was God giving Arseniy a goodbye gift, who knows. Even though we went to bed late, we woke up early with Dani and went to ask for our snorkelling gear to spend the morning swimming around some of the reefs near the shore. It was great! with lots of colourful fishes and sea urchins. Regretfully I have no pictures of that, but if you would like underwater photos, just send me the money for the waterproof case for my camera and I will gladly upload some in my next trip :D.

After Arseniy got his last meal... being single that is, all the guys got together in one room while the bride and the girls got together in another one. Nothing fancy, just a couple of speeches and a shot of something, and we were off the meet the bride.

The guys from the hotel had everything ready on the beach, even the clear sky. The only bad thing with clear skies in a Caribbean Island is that that means it is going to be hot as hell, and you will be sweating like a race horse. That is if you are wearing only a bathing suit, but as this was a wedding we all had nice shirts and long pants, which were completely soaked by the end of the ceremony.

Here is a picture of the Best Man and the Dead Man... sorry Groom (same thing...)

As you can see, from the red carpet to the chairs, the champagne, and the petals, at the hotel they had everything ready for the ceremony. The best man was not behind, and he got a nice seashell to put the rings. Quite a nice touch!

Congratulations! Here Arseniy is signing his fate (hopefully, as everything was in Spanish so he could actually be just selling a kidney), while Olga smiles. The ceremony was in Spanish too, as the judge (or whatever name it might have) only spoke Spanish, but a lady from the hotel was giving a short English version to the crowd.

A toast and the band starts to play for Mr. and Ms. Kukanov.

After that, and as we were already wet by all the stewing, we took several pictures in the ocean, trying to refresh a bit. There are more pictures in the Web Album if you are interested.

smile!

Forever

After such a wonderful ceremony, and while the newly-weds had their indoor photo session we went to enjoy the pool bar and escape from the heat. Prost!

And after that we ended up at the sea as Berk really wanted to go there instead of the pool. We finished that day with a nice "formal" dinner at the Steak House, which included a delicious wedding cake, the disco after that, and after they threw us out because they needed to close the place, we went to swim to the ocean. So dead tired after such a wonderful day we went to bed.

The next day started cloudy and stormy just as the first couple of days. We had planned a boat trip after lunch, to go around the north east side of the island, next to where there resort was. I though that with the bad weather we basically would not be able to see much, but actually the sky added a lot of dramatism to the photos as you can see here.

The trip consisted in going for snorkelling in a reef a little to the east of the resort, and then to a calm beach where you could walk several miles into the ocean and still have the water on your waist. The snorkelling was great. The reef was quite larger and with more impressive fauna swimming around than what we saw back next to the resort.

The water on the beach we went later were so calmed that you could see the reflection of the sky over them. It was really impressive, and as you can see, even though Dani is very far away into the ocean (that little dot on the right of the image is her) she has the water barely on her legs.

Although the boat left us in the middle of this "pond" we actually walked all the way to the shore, while some of the rest of the guys tried to do some water ski. Dani, who does it splendidly, helped several of them so they could actually do it, as they haven't tried it before. She was an excellent teacher and most of her students were able to do it on the first try.
In the meantime some of us walked along the beach, as there was another resort there with a couple of parrots at the entrance.

We were for hours in that place, while almost everyone tried to do some skiing. After that, the boat's captain asked Dani to do it, as he had seen her skiing the day before, so we had quite a nice skiing demonstration.
Back at the hotel, there was a flea market, with paintings, jewellery, and many other things, like wooden statues and bottles with the special roots used to make Mama Juanas. Berk impressed us with his bargaining abilities, reducing prices ten-fold, while Dani got a pair of necklaces and bracelets just for smiling. It is understandable though... it is impossible to resist that smile and those eyes...

As usual, we ended the day on one of the fancy restaurants of the resort and then on the disco. This time we had to gather all our patience as Arseniy wanted to play a bunch of music for us, and while the DJ was eager to accept a couple of bucks for doing it, he left soon after leaving the job of actually putting the music to the next DJ. As you can imagine nothing was done until we started complaining, as when they come with their "tranquilo, ya mismo lo hace" ("don't worry, soon he will do it") speech, you know you actually need to worry and start asking for it. In the end they finally did it, I guess in part because nobody wants a bunch of angry Russians in their disco... nor a Latin girl complaining.

Regretfully, all wonderful stories must end at some point (and I'm not talking here about Arseniy's life as a bachelor, but our vacations), and the next day was the last one for us in this island. We woke up relatively early to get some last minute pictures, pack our stuff and be ready for our bus to take us to the airport.

At the entrance there was a nice flock of Flamingos, which that morning appeared to be in some sort of Tai-Chi lesson, as they were all contorted.

Finally, on the airport I was able to take the picture I wanted since we arrived. While waiting to board I left the camera outside so the lens got the same temperature as the air and thus not get any moisture over it. Here is the result.

Regretfully I must confess that I had, for the first time, to apply some Photoshop over this. Not that the picture was too bad, but there were a couple of panel doors in the middle of the garden. The problem was that in order to blend the doors with the rest of the environment these geniuses decided to paint them bright yellow (I know it was probably for some safety reason, but I still want to make fun about it), and it was impossible to find any angle where those doors didn't appear, so I had to go down the Photoshop road to make them disappear.
So that's all for now folks!

Running Around the East Coast

2010-06-04T18:10:00.001-04:00

   As Dani was receiving her Masters degree now and participating in her commencement ceremony, her parents came to see her and they invited us to go on a trip around the west coast in an RV. For those of you who don't know, an RV (which stands for Recreational Vehicle) a.k.a. motorhome, is a big car (almost a bus) where you have an almost full house inside with kitchen, bedrooms, and a bathroom. It was an awesome way of going around, as you are able to go around just like if you were on a car, but much more comfortable. I will give a small daily summary (with pictures of course) of  what we did on each of the amazing 9 days we spent on this trip. To start, here is a map with the whole trip:

View Larger Map

Day 1 (May 13th):
   We didn't do much on our first day as we basically had to travel all the way to Long Island to get the RV, which they only give it to you around midday, and then drive all the way back to Manhattan to put our stuff inside. That meant that we were not leaving before 5:00 pm, and thus we were not able to get very far. Our first camp ground was on the Delaware Water Gap, a huge natural reservoir close to Stroudsburg, PA. These camps have everything you need, from bathrooms and supermarket to full hookup for the RV (meaning electricity, water, and sewerage), so you just park your car and you are ready for anything. In this case anything meant just sleep, as we were really tired after all the work and the trip.

Day 2 (May 14th):
   Now that we were a little bit more rested, we woke up early-ish, as we had quite a long road ahead as we wanted to get to Allegheny National Forest which is literally at the other side of PA. Here is my view after I woke up that morning.

After getting all our things ready (and taken a quite large amount of pictures, specially macro ones) we set off on our trip, leaving this first camp site behind.

Our lunch stop was not very far away, as we took it quite slowly. We stopped near Dingmans Ferry, on the northern part of the Delaware Water Gap. The place was very nice, and although the visitors office was closed, we were still able to hike (actually just walk) a little trail up to the Dingmans Waterfalls. The day was gorgeous and we found quite a large amount of insects on our way to the falls, so it was an excellent opportunity to try out the macro extension tubes. I must say it was quite hard to focus as the tubes make the depth of field quite shallow, and is specially hard if your subject is a hysterical caterpillar who apparently had just drank an espresso by how fast and erratically it was crawling around. From a bunch of photos I took I was able to get a couple on focus, but it was worth the try. I think...

But not only insects were a good catch that day. We were quite lucky as apparently it had been raining during the night, so most of the plants and trees still had some drops of water around, giving another great opportunity for using the macro.

After this it was basically just a long drive to the Allegheny National Forest, to which we arrived very late, to camp site a few miles to the south west of Bradford, PA. The camp was managed by a retired couple who were the nicest people on earth. They actually waited for us to arrive (quite after the closing hours) so we could find our way inside the camp and park the RV without any difficulties.

It was so late that after a couple of long time exposures like this one I just went to bed.

Day 3 (May 15th):
We woke up relatively early-sh and decided to walk around the park a little, before heading to our next destination.

As you can see we were very lucky as the forest was really green and the light was very good. Plus, as it had been very humid lately there were tons of mushrooms which I learned are excellent subjects for using the macro (mainly because they don't move, not even with strong wind which tends to make flowers move all over the place and hence make the focusing a living nightmare).

Our lunch break was relatively close by, at the Allegheny Reservoir, a lake created by a dam that was a few miles away from the camping site. Again we were really lucky by the weather as we had an amazing blue sky with patches of clouds here and there that gave us some awesome views.

The mid-day sun though was a little bit too strong so some of the views had an extremely large range of light values to be able to get them all in a single photo. But with some exposure bracketing and blending those images together you could achieve some nice landscape photos, like this one.

After driving around the area we finally arrived to our new camp site, which was a few miles south of Erie, PA. It was a huge camping site with a lot of people and many activities specially for children. It even had a small artificial lake inside, where you could rent a little boat to go around and you can see in this picture.

Day 4 (May 16th):

We were so close to Erie that we decided to go and visit it, and specially visit the Pesque Isle State Park, which is a small peninsula that goes out into Lake Erie, and that is had ponds, loads of wildlife, and even sandy beaches.

As you can see here, there were even some floating houses in the inner ponds of the Isle, like these ones in Horseshoe Pond.

In one of the ends of the Isle there was also a very nice lighthouse, that together with the cracked pier and the blue sky made an incredible view.

There was also a lot of people fishing (and resting like in this picture), although you don't see many of them.

Our next stop in the tour was Pittsburgh, PA, which meant a long drive south. Once we got there we just parked the RV near Carnegie Mellon University and started walking around the place.

Regretfully everything was closed as it was the day of the commencement ceremony, so there was not much to see, neither at CMU nor at U. of Pittsburgh. But they both have a very nice campus so we spent a lot of time walking around. On top you see what I think is a track for some of those robot races they have at CMU, while at the bottom you see one cool statue they have at CMU next to the Miller Gallery.

After that we kept our south bearing and drove all the way to Washington PA, a small town in the south west corner of PA, as out next camp site was a couple of minutes away from it. The camping site was much smaller than the previous ones, and as the Interstate 79 passed right next to it, it was quite noisy.

Day 5 (May 17th):

In part thanks to the trucks and buses going by the nearby highway, we woke up really early and ready to leave. Regretfully it was raining a lot, plus there was an outlet mall just next to Washington, so we spent the morning there.

The objective was to get to a camp site right after the George Washington National Forest in Virginia, at that meant leaving the main highway and crossing part of West Virginia through secondary roads. The wonderful thing about this is that you end up going through really small towns and villages that are build around the road, which in general consisted on two or three houses, a church, and a supermarket. Very similar to some of the small towns you can find in the south of Chile.

We first crossed the Monongahela National Forest, which is in West Virginia, but the last part of the road was ascending the whole time. As it was really cloudy (and the clouds were kind of low) that only meant that at some point we were going to get stuck in a really dense fog, which happened just as we crossed the border between West Virginia and Virginia.

After that it was basically all downhill (literally), but the farm type houses and green meadows were still there.

The next big city we visited was Monterrey (VA not Mexico), which is a small town in between the Monongahela and the George Washington National Forests.

After that we crossed the George Washington National Forest, and we finally arrived to our camp site, which was a few miles south of Stauton, VA.

Day 6 (May 18th):

The camping site was one of the best we had visited, as it had a very good infrastructure and it was not as full as the others we had visited, so we decided to stay there for an additional night. But was we are in "visiting mode" we were not going to just stay there for a whole day of course! There were many things to visit around the area so we woke up early to be able to visit many of them.

The first thing was the Natural Bridge National Park, which is a small piece of the George Washington Forest (on its southern tip) that had, as it's name indicates, a natural bridge. The story tells that the Monacan Tribe, which lived in that part of VA, were able to flee from their pursuers (the Powhatans) thanks to this bridge that appeared out of nowhere when they had lost all hopes. So, it was a sacred place for them.

Legend also told that George Washington visited this place while he worked as a surveyor, and that the initials G.W. that are carved there were done by him. Below you see a view of Cedar Creek, the small tributary that passes below the bridge.

Apart from that, in this place they also have a couple of museums and a full recreation of a native village. Additionally, a couple of miles back there is a set of caves (also included when you purchase your ticket), which are quite nice. The place was really empty so we had almost everything for ourselves, including the caves, which had some bats here and there.

After that we just went back to the camp site to rest and go to bed early as we had a lot of things to do the next day.

Day 7 (May 19th):

We started really early today as there was a long trip ahead of us, plus we wanted to go through a secondary road that crossed the Shenandoah National Park instead of just taking the highway. For that we needed to drive up to Waynesboro and then head north to the park entrance.

The park is extremely beautiful and they have created a special highway called Skyline Drive, which crosses the park through its long side, going up to the highest peak of the park and hence giving amazing views of the surrounding valleys.

An additional attraction was the Appalachian Trail crosses the park and Dani was eager to hike at least a small portion of this mythical trail. For those of you who don't know what this is, the Appalachian Trail is a hiking trail that is 3,500 km. long and that goes from Maine all the way down to Georgia. As we clearly will (regretfully) not have the time to do the whole trail, Dani wanted at least to hike a small portion of it.

So we hiked for a couple of hours while Dani's parents went on with the RV to where we would come out of the trail, and thankfully they were waiting for us with cold sodas and a nice lunch.

Here a couple of views of things along the trail, like this massive spider web on top, which surely had quite a large number of spiders inside, although we didn't stopped to check :D. The other photo is of part of the trail, when we got visited by a slightly dense fog. There are more pictures of the trail in the Web Album which I link at the end of this post.

After the much needed lunch and rest, we headed north through Skyline Drive until the exit to Luray. Luray is a small town in between the Shenandoah and George Washington National Parks, and that is famous for a set of caverns they have open to the public. As we had already visited a set of caverns before we didn't expect something radically different, but this cave was really wonderful. They have illuminated the cave is such a way that everything looked gorgeous, so I spent my whole time there taking pictures in every direction. This first picture shows the Mirror Lake, a very large underwater lake of crystal clear water, which was flowing so softly that its surface allowed a perfect reflection of the cave's ceiling.

The rest of the cave was equally beautiful, containing all the possible geological structures you can imagine. Additionally, at the entrance, they give you an audio tour that explains every single one of these structures so you come out with tons of new information. The whole tour takes like an hour and a half so be ready to walk and stand for quite some time.

These are just a couple of the pictures I took inside, and you can find the rest of them in the Web Album at the end. Apart from being one of the largest (and most visited) set of caves in the US, they also have the largest musical instrument in the world: a Stalactite Organ. (just in case, stalactites are the ones that hang from the ceiling and stalagmites are the ones that grow from the floor upwards). Basically the organ has connected to each key a solenoid that hits a stalactite that makes the corresponding sound. To make it must have been quite a task as you had to go around the cave with a tuning fork hitting different stalactites until you found one that resonated at the required frequency. They even do a demonstration of the organ and they play one short song that bounces all over the cave.

Outside the caves there is also a museum, this time it was am automobile and carriage museum that had some of the first carriages and cars in the US.

Finally, after all the walking and looking we set our course to or next destination, a nice campground near Hagerstown in Maryland. Again we were lucky with the weather as the sunset was great and next to the camp there is a small river (a tributary of the famous Potomac) where we found a floating pier that gave us a splendid view of the sunset and the moon after that (and also gave me several mosquito bites... but it was worth it).

Day 8 (May 20th):

The next day we started again early, and spent some time going around the camp site and in my case taking some pictures as usual. The camping site was really nice and well maintained, with nice gardens and a playground.

The objective of that day was to visit the Antietam National Battlefield, where one of the important fights of the American Civil War took place. The park is really well maintained, and at the entrance they give you a map with the explanation of what happened in every place, and then you can just go around in your car checking the different tour stops. Before leaving the information office I found this little fellow walking around. I tend to like spiders a lot, but specially these ones (the common jumping spiders).

Back to the battlefield. The place is enormous so you really need to go around in a car to visit it completely.

I don't know what this is, but it looks like a groundhog. The little fellow was sitting there like a statue while I kept on getting closer and closer for a better picture. As he didn't move the whole time I got to think that it was actually fake, but suddenly I got too close I guess and it started running really fast to one of the holes that were behind the fence.

Other sightings included ducks, geese, and deer like this one below.

The last stop of the tour was the Antietam National Cemetery where many of the soldiers that died on this battleground were buried.

Back on the road, we kept on going north, as our destination was in the middle of PA, so we needed to do a lot of driving.

But, on or way we stumbled into a new park called Catoctin Mountain Park, a very nice park with a lake called Hunting Creek Lake in the middle. So we left our course north and went to see that lake and rest a little bit.

The detour showed to be quite interesting, as the forest surrounding the lake was really beautiful and we were able to spend part of the sunset at the beach on the lake. The problem is that that meant that we were going to arrive quite late to our destination but I guess it was worth it.

Day 9 (May 21th):

This was our final day of travel, as the next day we needed to return the RV. The problem is that we needed to return it before 12:00, which meant that we needed to arrive really early to NYC, to be able to leave everything in our place and then drive all the way to long island to return it, so this last night needed to be quite close to NYC.

As the first camp site in which we stayed was close enough, we decided to go there and arrive early to enjoy a little bit of calmed time. So, after a couple of hours (and a small detour to a mall...) we ended up in the same camping site we started, at the Delaware Water Gap, and thus finishing this amazing trip.

I hope you enjoyed the pictures as much as I enjoyed taking them.

HDR Photography

2010-03-25T23:10:00.002-04:00

   While I finish arranging the pictures from our Spring Break week (yap... too many of them), I decided to write about one interesting photographic technique called HDR or High Dynamic Range photography, as I have received a couple of comments about the HDR pictures I've made.

So, what is this HDR business?
   Have you ever taken a picture where you have to "sadly" decide if either you go with a washed out sky or a dark subject? A typical case is when you have a subject with backlight (meaning the main source of light is behind your subject and hence in front of your camera). You have to either decide if you go with an almost "all white" sky in order to show the detail on your subject, or darken your subject in order to keep a nice sky. This is specially painful when you have a very nice and meaningful sky, that would make your composition much better. In the general case you just have parts of your picture that are too dark and others too light for your camera and hence you cannot cover the whole range the subject has. Here is where a High Dynamic Range Photography comes into play, so we can capture a larger range and have most (or at least more) of our picture with the correct exposure.

   To show how this works let's go over a couple of examples.
   This first picture is from the chapel right next to St. John the Divine Cathedral, here in New York. Although in this picture part of the road and the snow appear to be in the correct exposure, the sky is completely washed out, and the chapel itself is relatively dark.

The following picture shows how nice and dramatic was the sky that day, by taking the previous picture with -2 stops of exposure. The problem is that if we have the correct exposure to show this wonderful sky we end up with an extremely dark picture and now we can see even less of the chapel as before.

On the other hand, if we try to improve the exposure of the chapel, and highlight its features, we lose that dramatic sky.

This other picture, taken at Zion National Park in Utah, has a similar problem. Although the sun is not in front, the sky is clearly too white when we try to have the river in the correct exposure. At the same time, the stones become too dark and can barely identify their texture.

Again, if we take a darker or lighter picture we will be able to "save' only parts of the picture, but never obtain an overall nice picture.

One solution for these situations is to go the HDR way. What you do in HDR Photographs is basically grab these 3 (or sometimes many more) pictures, all exposed at different levels, and combine them to create a picture that has "correctly exposed" most of what you see in it.

Here is the result of doing such a procedure on the images above:

Much cooler pictures right? Well, not everybody loves these things so the answer is not always yes :D. Plus it is really easy to go overboard with the processing and end up with really ugly results. In this Album you can see some of the results I've obtained playing around with this technique. Some look kind of natural and cool as everything looks fine, but others end up with a very unnatural sky or a greyish colour over them. As I'm not an expert on the subject (nor on the programs I used to make these HDR pictures) it must definitely be my fault, but I still will post some of my findings so you can do your own pictures.

So... what do you need to make such images?
First, you need to find a subject that would require such a technique. Cloudy days are specially nice for this as the cloudy sky can give a lot of dramatism to your picture, but in order to have it at the correct exposure you will definitely have to underexpose your main subject. Hence, using HDR will highlight both, a nice sky and a nice subject.

Second important thing is a tripod. It is not mandatory (actually the river image you saw before was done without one), but it helps. As you can imagine, at some point you will need to put all your images one over the other, and in order to obtain any results you will have to align them. If you are taking them using your hand it is highly probable that you will shake a little (or even a lot if you need to change the camera setup after you take each image) and then alignment will become a painful process. Also as in general you use this technique for landscapes, you will have your camera with a really small aperture (f/22 or something similar) which will require longer exposures and thus a shaky hand can kill your image.

Depending on the camera you have is how easy this will be. Extremely simple point-and-shoot type cameras might not be able to achieve such a trick. You need at least to be able to control some properties like exposure time without the camera changing everything for you. So put your camera in manual mode, set your aperture to the desired value and move the speed until you see it has the correct exposure. If you don't know how to do this check your manual. A good tip that works with these cameras is to set the camera to Aperture Priority mode (Av in some cameras), set your desired aperture and see what the camera tells you is the correct speed. Then go back to your manual mode and set the same aperture and speed you saw before, and take your shot. Next, keeping your camera steady and the same aperture value, move up and down the speed and take pictures along. How much up, how much down? Depends on your subject. In general +2 -2 stops will be a nice range, but in some cases you might require much more. And sometimes you might require several pictures (not just 3) to cover all the exposure values and give nice texture to your image. Just play along and see what happens, this is one of those "learning by doing" experiences.

If you have a fancy camera on the other hand, chances are you already have the possibility of taking these images easier. Look your manual for something called "Automatic Exposure Bracketing". This function is generally used by photographers to take the same picture with several different exposures automatically in order to minimize the required post-production. In our case we can use that tool to automatically take our shots. In Canon cameras at least, you can take 3 shots by setting the AEB mode, where you select the size of your range (+ and - stops), and start shooting. If you are using a tripod, just set your drive mode to "2 second timer" and once you press the shutter button the camera will automatically take the 3 pictures. Now if you are using your hand as support, set the drive mode to H (high speed) and just press the shutter once, but keep it pressed until you hear the 3 shots are fired. If you have the drive more in the "normal" position you will have to press the shutter button 3 times and thus increase the chance that you will move or shake while taking your pictures.

Another advantage of fancy cameras is RAW mode. These cameras allow you to take pictures in a different (and larger) file format that contains much more information that the normal JPG ones you get with simpler cameras. When you make an HDR picture generally you will add a lot of noise to the image and at least what I've seen is that when you have the larger files of the RAW pictures you get better results and less noise than with the JPG ones, which already have a lot of noise due to the compression they suffer when saved.

Now that you have your set of pictures, you just need a software that allows you to merge them. Technically, what you saw before are not HDR pictures, but a mapping of an HDR into a "normal" picture. Real HDR pictures keep the information of all your exposures at the same time and you can move around seeing the "correct" exposure of each piece. In our case we will squash all those images into a single normal one that will highlight the correct information in the correct place. There are several programs to do this. The three I've used with nice results are Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, and Photomatix. There are several excellent tutorials on-line to teach you how to do this with each program, so it doesn't make much sense to write a new one. Just Google for "HDR Tutorial" and you will find several of them.

Enjoy!

rax.cl Officially On-line!

2009-09-22T21:19:00.000-04:00

Finally, after several years not updating my webpage at all, I created a whole new website with what I've been up to, some of my pictures, programs, and other links... check it at www.rax.cl