Archive for December 8th, 2008

the birds

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

A couple of interesting things in this photo. First, the birds…it was like The Birds, the movie. These crows kept landing on the tree, flying off the tree, circling the tree, squawking all the time. It was actually kind of disconcerting.

The second thing…this is a digital infrared photo. Infrared photography takes in near-infrared light (it doesn’t see through things like x-rays or anything – it’s just past red). Unlike visible-spectrum film where things that are brighter show up as brighter in the final result, infrared responds to things that reflect specifically IR more efficiently. Chlorophyll – that which makes leaves and grass green – is especially reflective, and much IR photography is done in the spring.

This was taken yesterday, in very December. The leaves are actually all kinds of colors – red, yellow, brown. None of them green. The leaves are dying, and falling with each wind gust. Yet here you can see that all of the leaves come out the same “color” in IR.

I was quite surprised by this, actually.

This is a false color image – IR doesn’t have color (since color is just a mental mapping and interpretation of various wavelengths, and since our eyes can’t pick up IR wavelengths, we have no interpretation of them). But the camera and processing method creates these false colors which have an interesting and hopefully aesthetically-pleasing effect.

Walking in, I spotted a car where the windshield was framed with painter’s tape.

I presume that the windshield was recently replaced, and they wanted to put some tape down all along the perimeter to make sure that the glue or whatever method of holding it in place “set.”  However, it seems to me that painter’s tape is not exactly the best of adhesive materials…I know it comes off easily but…it comes off easily.

And by “them” I mean me and the few lucky people that read this regularly .

The tagline for this blog, my general, is “Why have 10 blogs on specific topics when you can have just 1 with all kinds of random topics?”  Well, I do still have one separate blog – my photoblog.  I have this separate because sometimes I get a bit technical in those posts, and because I thought some people would take just that feed, of just my photos.

However, with the WordPress 2.5.x>2.6.x upgrade fiasco that ran across the board, where I lost all of my posts on all of my blogs (I run a few others as content management systems for sites), I figure I should just merge the two.  So all of my wonderful photo posts will be here, too .

Get ready, world!

along the trail

Originally uploaded by kaiyen

This was taken towards the first third of what was probably a 4 mile hike in Alamaden-Quicksilver Park in San Jose, from the McAbee Road trail head.

The camera, a Yashica Mat 124, has been giving me flare problems. Even with a hood, if there is sun coming into the camera at all, it will flare you get these ugly little circles on the sides that look like light just leaked in and decreased contrast, etc. They are impossible to get rid of, since they just kind of bleed in.

So on a lark, I glued some felt into the camera.

There is a printing technique when doing darkroom work where one files away bits of the negative carrier to produce “sloppy borders.” The edges are not nice and crisp. You have probably seen this at some point with photographic prints.

Well, while I did crop most of it out on this photo, you’ll notice on the left edge a bit of the felt blocking the light, but in an uneven way, creating essentially a sloppy border.

I think I will take advantage of this from now on. I’m actually quite happy with it.

And considering I was guessing with exposure on expired film of a type that is not usually amenable to wrong exposures…I’m pretty happy with this.