Went to West Falmouth harbor at sunrise this morning to shoot photos and video. I was surprised by temperatures in the 40's.
Monte
als ice bucket challenge
My son nominated us for the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge. With only 24 hours to respond the video was a rush job. It is intended to be tongue-in-cheek to respond to the criticisms by some that the ice bucket challenge is a superficial, middle-class phenomenon. We made our donation at the ALS website (www.alsa.org) and here is our video:
Monte
hummingbird
In the garden with my camera today.
To get this picture I set my camera (Nikon D5300) on a tripod with a 105 mm macro lens about 20 inches from the feeder. The exposure settings were 1/3200, f 4.0, iso 400, no flash (it was late afternoon and the sun was shining at an angle on the feeder). Then I cheated.
I could've waited patiently for the bird to show up, but I wanted to have coffee. So I attached my gadget for shooting time-lapse photography to the camera and set it to take pictures every 3 seconds. About 500 pictures later I got this one.
Monte
broken
My natural inclination is to photograph the flowers that are as nearly perfect as possible. Today I focused on the flowers that were old and imperfect, like me. The ant was a bonus.
Monte
photography in my garden
Spent a few hours on a sunny day looking at my garden through my camera lens. A lot of things happen just out-of-sight of our casual, and often distracted, glances.
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three squash
Watching a small garden grow.
frozen bee
Today I was back in the garden with the bees. Thanks to a guy named Jimmy Daly at this website I learned how to solve the shutter speed problem I mentioned in a previous post. Evidently, Nikon sets the maximum shutter speed when using a flash at 1/250. That is not nearly fast enough to freeze the wings of a bee in flight. Mr. Daly has a great post on how to set the camera to override this default maximum flash sync speed.
This picture was taken at around 6:30 PM with my Nikon D7000 and a 105 mm macro lens with a ring flash system. The camera settings were f 9.0, 1/3200 and an iso of 1000, which is too high and caused a slightly grainy image. I was worried about the setting sun and the fading daylight. I should have just boosted the power of my flash a bit more and stayed with a lower iso, but I'm learning.
In the category of missed opportunities, while I was photographing the bees a bird flew into my bird bath not more than a few feet from where I was standing. The bird, splashing about, flapping her wings and generally having a great time, didn't seem to care about me at all. It would've been a cool video clip. So, tomorrow I will be in the garden with my camera on the bees and my video camcorder focused on the bird bath.
Monte
yellow squash
Squash is one of the easiest things to grow, but I'm still proud of myself when I grow something that I can actually eat. I like the question-mark shape of this yellow squash.
bee approach
Playing with my camera on a sunny day in the garden. I was using a Nikon D7000 with a 105 mm macro lens. I couldn't get the shutter speed to be faster than 250 so the bee's wings aren't "frozen." I should spend more time reading the manual.
The camera was on a tripod and manually focused on this particular flower. I waited, in the sun, until a bee arrived. I used a cable release to avoid shaking the camera and a ring flash on the lens.
Monte
parlous politics
I had just finished reading about Michel de Montaigne and the 16th century French wars of religion when Mitt Romney made his comments about our rights coming from God not government. The volatile history of mixing religion and politics is centuries old - and ugly.
Monte
pithy
Pithy is a word I frequently encounter while reading. It’s an adjective that means concise and forcefully expressed, unless you’re talking about a piece of fruit, in which case it means the fruit has a lot of pith, which is the soft, white spongy stuff inside the peel. Pith is especially abundant in grapefruits.
But in this case pithy means concise and forcefully expressed. I most recently came across pithy while reading a book on how to read Montaigne, imaginatively titled How to Read Montaigne by Terrence Cave. The word appeared in the following sentence: “And above all, in a remarkably pithy sentence that occurs a little later, he asserts his rights of ownership of everything that he says, regardless of where it comes from …”
It’s a good word.
Monte
reading montaigne
Spent the day reading a book on how to read Montaigne. I think it's helping.
imagine a world on two wheels
National Public Radio recently had a story on the enthusiasm for using bicycles for transportation in Copenhagen. What I found interesting about the story was the broad agreement among citizens and politicians in Copenhagen on the benefits of riding bicycles over driving cars. The journalist reported that politicians on both the right and the left of the political spectrum ride bikes to work and support the idea of building more bike routes.
In Copenhagen they are expanding existing bike lanes and building bike super highways that will connect urban and suburban neighborhoods. People can, and do, commute long distances by bicycle. City officials in Copenhagen expect the expansion of existing bike routes to have a positive impact on the environment and to reduce health care costs by as much as $60 million per year.
It makes sense to ride bikes instead of driving cars whenever possible, but people need to be able to ride safely, hence the need for designated bike paths and bike highways.
Could we do this on a large scale in America? I like the idea. See my video on saving the world with bicycles
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References:
paying attention
I am a reluctant gardener. Even that is terribly overstating the time I spend in my garden. This week, for no particular reason, I took my camera to the garden and began snapping pictures and shooting some video. There's a lot going on out there at a level that is just out of sight for the casual observer.
It's just like me to stumble upon something this marvelous when it is almost over. The few flowers left in the garden are getting thin and it won't be long before the New England winter turns everything brown and dormant. But I'll be ready next year with my camera and a plan to plant as many bee and butterfly friendly plants as I can squeeze in.
This photo was taken using a Nikon 105 mm macro lens. The photo was manipulated in photoshop with the oil paint filter. I like that filter, even though "real" photographers will scoff at me for using it. But since I'm clearly not a real photographer I get to have fun with the filter and create an image that not only looks like what I was seeing, but feels like I was feeling.
Monte
flower days
It's astonishing what can be seen in the everyday world when we look a little bit closer.
To really appreciate the images in this video make sure to click the "gear" icon at the bottom of the video box and select 1080 HD as the video quality. Watch the video in full screen mode.
I was playing around with my Nikon DSLR camera using a magnifying lens filter to shoot close-up video in my flower beds. Flower and insect anatomy may not sound exciting, but the images in this video reveal the sublimity of the natural world.
There are several things I now realize I could've done better, like remembering to lock the exposure to avoid the flickering effect seen in the video. Still, I think the possibilities of close-up video can be appreciated from this brief clip.
The music, which I think is wonderful, was written and performed by David Ianni, a professional pianist living in Luxembourg. David sent me the piece a few years ago when I was producing the Fitness Rocks podcast. David's music is available at iTunes.
Monte Ladner
running, stories, and people
This is a picture of a small house by the road I walk on to get to my local bike path. It’s about a quarter mile walk from where I live to the bike path. In the summer the path is so crowded with tourists riding bicycles, pushing baby buggies or jogging that I usually avoid it and get my exercise indoors on my spinning bicycle. However, today I felt like walking, or maybe even running.
I haven’t run in more than two years on account of chronic ankle pain. During that time my aerobic exercise has been limited to daily 45-minute workouts on my indoor spinning bike.
I began with the idea that I would alternate between running and walking short distances. The bike path has markers every tenth of a mile so doing intervals of running and walking is easy. But once I started running I didn’t feel like stopping and I wound up running the entire 4.6 miles that I usually walk when I’m walking on the bike path.
The cool part of this story is that after not running for over two years, and being just a couple of weeks shy of turning 53 years old, I ran the 4.6 miles in 32 minutes and 46 seconds, which is an average of 7 minutes and 7 seconds per mile! I ran the third mile of the run at 6 minutes and 50 seconds because two people on roller blades passed me and I wanted to see how long I could keep up with them.
I’m pretty proud of this small accomplishment, that’s why I wrote about it. As we get older we like to feel like we still have some of the spark from our earlier years.
And that brings me back to the picture of the little house with the crooked window. It’s an abandoned, dilapidated old house by a marsh. When I walk past it I wonder about who used to live in it. They must have walked the same route to the beach that I walk. What did they talk about inside the room with the crooked window? I am like the old house, and so are you. As time goes by people won’t know who I used to be or that I used to be a good runner, and they won’t care. Like the house, we will grow old and crooked and other people that see us will never know what secrets we have. But wouldn’t the world be just a little bit kinder if people wondered? To wonder about the history of strangers is to see them as fellow human beings and recognize that we all have a story.
Monte Ladner
fly
I've been playing around with the oil paint tool in Photoshop CS6. This was a remarkably docile fly that remained motionless for several macro shots before leaving.
Beef: There are Consequences
This is a nicely done video on the costs and consequences of our lust for beef.
Spider
No spiders were harmed while making this picture. This guy was crawling across my gym floor while I was working out. I scooped him into a box and got my camera set up for a macro shot. He remained a cooperative model for about five minutes while I took several shots, but then he tried to jump onto my camera and it was clear that he was done taking photos. I got him back into the box and released him into the backyard.
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Orchid
Once a week we go to Whole Foods for groceries. I'm always tempted to buy an orchid and today I did. Mostly, I wanted to take pictures of it. Flowers are a common photography subject for beginners like me. They make great models because they never complain about endless retakes and repositioning lights and camera angles.
Nikon 105 mm macro lens, f14, 0.5 seconds, iso 100 and two 26 watt 6500 K fluorescent lights.
Monte