Posts Tagged: Nikon D850

Middle Aged and Old :: Sweet Pea and Belle

Posted by & filed under art + photography, news + events.

Middle Aged and Old :: Sweet Pea and Belle

Sat. 10.26.19 – Sweet Pea and I are in Arizona visiting / dog sitting the lovely, but very elderly, Miss Belle le Cane while her people are out and about. Our good old friend Miss Belle is now 14 1/2 years old – or somewhere in her 90-somethings. Belle is feeling her age.

Belle arrived to Family Hanen as a rescue puppy in October of 2005 while I was away at grad school. There were a lot of good years in between 2005 and 2019: dog beach, dog parades, dog sitting, walks, playing fetch – and a whole lot of photos.

Belle is still trucking on with heart pills and CBD oil. There is very little running but she perks up about an hour or so after the food/pills/hempoil.

In other news, Arizona is Arizona. It is dry and warm to hot.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nikon D850 and a 50mm lens. For the curious, Sweet Pea is a rescue as of last year August and is estimated to be between 6-8 years old, most likely closer to 8.

More Macro Photo Experiments

Posted by & filed under art + photography, nature + environment.

Macro - Aloe Flowers Macro - Passiflora Macro - Star of Persia Flower

Sun. 05.26.19 – Today I went out and about with my cheap Amazon $12 extension tubes for Macro photography. I went out and explored yesterday to see if there are any flowers in Hyde Park that would work to take macro photos of. The answer was yes as late May spring has fully sprung in the London parks.

Thus, I took my extension tubes with a manual 24mm old Nikon lens along with my Nikon D850 DSLR out and took many photos up close. Very up close.

Here are a few of my favorites. Per usual, double click to see the enlargements.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nikon D850 at Hyde Park in London, UK.

Light Pollution : Asterism

Posted by & filed under nature + environment, photos + text from the road.

Light Pollution : Canis Major Light Pollution : Orion

Wed. May 1, 2019 – Happy May Day – be it of the traditional It’s Spring! style of May Day or the 20th Century Workers Unite! style of May Day.

Even with education, activism, and communities making an attempt to keep the skies in the American West dark, the switch over to more energy efficient lighting on and around homes and in street lights have made communities brighter than ever at night.

Two of the ‘rural’ dark sky spots that even a few years ago I could be astounded at how many stars I could see from a house or yard now are nearly washed out with too much light. Two days ago, I asked one of my brother’s neighbors to please turn off their front patio lights when they go to bed, kindly last night they did so but to little avail.

Rather than doing the currently fashionable photography trick of processing an astrophoto within an inch of its life to have an incongruous scene of lit foreground object with AMAZING Milky Way Photo, I have instead processed these photos as my eye saw them.

How did my eye see these two adjacent scenes last night? Bright street lights casting light domes to light up houses and to wash out the night sky to the point where one only really sees the bright stars in a constellation. While the asterisms were clear, but the detail was scrubbed out.

Please folks, go read the resources of what average folk and cities can do at the IDSA and let’s work at making sure that all of us can see the stars on a clear night.

Let’s wipe out light pollution.

*****

Double click on the photo thumbnails for the larger photos. Both photos were taken by Ms. Jen with her Nikon D850 and a Nikon 50mm f/1.4G lens.

Tidbits for a Weekend’s Reading

Posted by & filed under art + photography, tidbits.

Snowy Convict Lake Reflections

Fri. 01.11.19 – Here are a few articles to start your weekend out right. Happy Friday!

* Earth’s magnetic field is acting up and geologists don’t know why

* Memo to conservatives: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez understands taxes better than you do

* A Moral Panic

“The real story of machine learning is not how it promotes home bomb-making, but that it’s being deployed at scale with minimal ethical oversight, in the service of a business model that relies entirely on psychological manipulation and mass surveillance. The capacity to manipulate people at scale is being sold to the highest bidder, and has infected every aspect of civic life, including democratic elections and journalism.”
“Frankly, as long as we continue to view the planet as an endless “resource,” as long as we uphold the rights of individuals and corporations to amass infinite wealth while others go hungry, as long as we continue to believe that governments do not have the responsibility to feed, clothe, house, and educate everyone—all our talk is mere posturing. Why do these simple things scare people so much? It is just common decency. Let’s face it: the free market is not free, and it doesn’t give a shit about justice or equality.”

* Arundhati Roy on How to Think about Empire

“And now we have the era of Trump, in which we learn that intelligence and nuance are relative terms. And that W, when compared to Trump, was a serious intellectual. Now U.S. foreign policy is tweeted to the world on an hourly basis. You can’t get more transparent than that. The Absurd Apocalypse. Who would have imagined that could be possible? But it is possible—more than possible—and it will be quicker in the coming if Trump makes the dreadful mistake of attacking Iran.”

* Why Rashida Tlaib’s “We’re gonna impeach that motherf*cker approach” is good for Congress

“One of those leading that charge is Rashida Tlaib, the new representative from Michigan’s 13th district and one of the two first Muslim women to serve in the House of Representatives – and she is wasting no time in making her voice heard. “We’re gonna go in there,” she said, speaking to the progressive organising group MoveOn just hours after she was sworn in, “and we’re going to impeach the motherfucker.”

This caused the predictable backlash of pearl-clutching from Republican circles, whose faux-outrage at the swear-word would, perhaps, have had more moral weight if they had not spent the previous three years justifying their support for a president who boasted of “grabbing” women “by the pussy,” and attacking Democrats for their “political correctness”.”

Photo of the Snowy Convict Lake Reflections taken by Ms. Jen on 01.08.19 with her Nikon D850 and a Nikon 50mm f/1.4G lens in Mono County, California.

Just Before Dawn on All Saints Day, or Getting Up Too Early to Photograph the Sunrise at Mackerel Cove

Posted by & filed under art + photography, nature + environment.

Sparky sitting nicely, waiting for a treat Sunrise at Mackerel Cove beach

Thurs. 11.01.18 – To a person who is not yet on East Coast Daylight time, but instead still three hours behind in Pacific Daylight time, waking up at 6:40am in Rhode Island to be out at Mackerel Cove beach to photograph the sunrise and dogs running free at low tide was a bit of a difficult thing to do – though it was well worth it.

The air was cold, 30-something degrees fahrenheit – hat, gloves, and a jacket were needed. The sun rose slowly, with the first pink light reflections on the wet low tide line at 6:50am. For the next twenty or so minutes, Sparky the black lab ran happily after her ball while Kenji the island dog poked along the high tide kelp piles for edibles, as the clouds lying low in packed cotton ball formation in the eastern sky turned from gray to pink to neon pink-orange-yellow to the sun rising over the trees and houses on the east side of the cove. From 6:50am to 7:18am, it was magical.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nikon D850 and a 50mm lens.

Pygmy Nuthatches at the Dripping Faucet

Posted by & filed under art + photography, nature + environment.

Pygmy Nuthatches at the Dripping Faucet

Sat. 10.20.18 – Once again the pygmy nuthatches returned to the water faucet today and I was prepared with my Nikon D850 and a 300mm f/4 lens. I was further prepared by optimizing the fn button on the front of the D850 to switch image size between FX and DX crop so that I would get more reach to take a nice photo(s) of any birds at the water faucet.

This photo makes me happy.

Two Sides to Every Chipmunk…

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Sunbathing Chipmunk, front Sunbathing Chipmunk, back

Thurs. 10.18.18 – I have fallen in love with my Nikon 300mm f/4 prime lens that I recently obtained, it truly is a delight of a long reach lens. The photos it takes are clear, the lens is light and easy to hand hold on my Nikon D850 camera.

I was twenty plus feet away from this Yellow-pine Chipmunk and I still got a good set of photos, albeit a bit de-saturated, with this lens through a heavily tinted dusty window.

Double click on the photos to see them in a gallery, and then click on the icon in the top right to see them at full resolution.

Enjoy.

Convict Creek Aspens

Posted by & filed under art + photography, nature + environment.

Wed. 10.17.18 – The beautiful golden leaved aspens at the delta where the Convict Creek meets Convict Lake. The light through the autumnal leaves was amazing in this space.

Photo by Ms. Jen with her Nikon D850 with a 50mm lens.