Lebec Cloud Formation

Tweedledum or Tweedledee?

I'm not real political as a rule. I hate getting my hands dirty in the shit that passes for discourse these days. In my opinion we've not had a good president since FDR and he was really a great leader by accident. A smart man, something quite lacking in most leaders unfortunately, he realized that in order to save capitalism and the US he had to make major changes in the way the government worked. He put his personal interests aside and did what he felt was right for the country. Such a noble act. His actions brought us back from the depression and guided us through most of the war. But since his time we've had a string of crooks, opportunists, grifters and simpletons. We've seen these clowns take a great nation and make it into the laughing stock of the world. Living in Europe I get to see this up close and personal. But nothing prepared me for what we have now. We get to choose between the ultimate grifter and the buffoon. Between the ultimate insider and an 'outsider' who is more inside than even Hillary. Both so obscenely rich that they are absolutely disconnected from the daily existence of all but the most wealthy. I'm so disgusted with them that I'm not even making the effort to vote. It really doesn't matter anymore who is president. Neither of them will be effective as the real power behind the throne sits in the C-suites of major banks and corporations. Big money and large corporations are in control now. In control, that is, until they run the whole mess off the cliff. The idea that only the investor matters is so corrupt and stupid that it's laughable were it not so tragic. Greed is not a good basis for society ... sorry Gordon Gecko. We all live on this rock ... a small, fragile stone circling a minor sun in a minor galaxy. It's all we have and we're destroying it so a few people can grab even more obscene wealth. But when the wheels come off ... and they will come off pretty soon ... all that money won't be worth anything. Sorry to be so negative but that's our reality.

Lebec Cloud Formation

When I'm in LA, especially in the northern suburbs, I drive north up I-5 to a rest stop near Lebec to spend the night. It's only30 miles but seems light years from the frantic climate in the city. The air is cleaner, there's open sky and I can let my system wind down just a bit. Round trip burns about 4 gallons of gas in my little truck so I save quite a bit over even the cheapest motel and I don't have to take all the gear out of my truck. All in all a good deal.

Anyway, this last trip into LA I was sitting in my truck reading on my tablet. It was just after 8pm. I happened to look up to the north and saw this cloud. It was amazing and the most unusual formation I've ever seen. I grabbed the 60D with the telephoto zoom and walked out into the surrounding brush. I tried to take a timelapse of the cloud but something wasn't right as I found major fluctuations in the exposure levels between shots. Even using my custom deflicker program I was unable to stabilize the footage so, for now, it's going to wait until I can figure out a way to fix the problem. But I did get some excellent stills of the cloud. It had formed over a series of low hills just to the north of my location. I'm not sure of the dynamic but have to assume there was some striation in the upper level winds interacting with the wind deflecting off the hills. The cloud was quite fluid and dissipated over a 40 minute period. The sun was setting to the west (to the left of the frame) and much of the fluctuation, I think, is the amount of light being reflected by the ice crystals in the cloud. The color changed too as the sun set over the coastal mountains. It was an amazing sight for sure. Anyone out there who can offer a reasonable explanation for why this happens?

Lebec Cloud Formation - 70mm(1.6 crop),f/11,1/250sec,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Griffith Observatory Sunset

What Is Happening to my Country?

This has been a horrible week in America. Two senseless shootings by cops and then, yesterday, 5 cops died in Dallas due to snipers. Can someone please tell me what the hell is happening? Are we at war with ourselves? Can't we find a way to get along? Is the divide between us so deep that only more bloodshed is our future? Where are our elites ... don't answer as I already know where they are. AWOL! We haven't had a statesman in our country in most of my lifetime. Just greedy, corrupt politicians who sell their votes for money. What a bunch of crooks. And the current presidential candidates ... I hesitate to even say that word ... are atrocious. I'm now of the opinion that America is lost, falling fast into the abyss. We may very well be beyond redemption. Might it be time to just pull the plug and start over?

Griffith Park Observatory Sunset

I spent 2 evenings at Griffith Park Observatory. It's a really wonderful place and the views of LA are overwhelming. I highly recommend the place to anyone who's visiting the city. The view will blow your socks off.

Anyway, the second evening I had an agenda to do timelapse of the city but I wanted to wait until the sun was completely down. I had some time and could see that a really nice sunset was in the making. After you've done this for a while you get a sense of the clouds and the possibilities for a good sky. It seemed there was a nice display coming so I scouted around the place to see if I could incorporate the building into the sunset. I was lucky that there was a corner on the sidewalk where I could set up my camera and take a series of pictures without having to worry about people tripping over my rig. I had my 16-35 f/4 on the 6D (a really nice combination as you can see) so I set up the intervalometer and let the camera do the rest. I took 384 images over about an hour and the result was really nice. I'm incorporating the sequence in my video but thought it would be nice to show you one frame. This is really a composite of 2 shots, one at peak sky and one when it was dark enough so the lighting on the building stood out. I blended the two images in Photoshop and then used the NIK software suite (now free from Google) to fine tune the result. Then went back into Lightroom and tweaked the image until it was perfect. This is LA at it best ... a very beautiful location and the sky very near perfect. Enjoy!

Griffith Observatory - 25mm,f/11,1/4 sec,ISO 1600,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Griffith Observatory

Ideas...

This last week I've been concentrating on what comes during the next cycle. Right now it still looks like I'll head home in mid-January with the intention of staying until mid_April. I'm already starting to wheeze and suck on my inhaler more and that will intensify as winter approaches. Some things are very predictable, especially my health and how my body reacts to certain irritants.

I'm still pondering exactly what the agenda is once I arrive. LA plays big in all my thinking so I'm working on the tasks to accomplish once I'm on the ground there. There's a big video to film and tons of images to be taken. I'm looking at high quality videos from the new 5D Mk. 3 along with timelapse and hyperlapse sequences. I've also been looking at Blender a lot this week ... for those who don't know what that is I'll give you the short explanation. Blender is a 3D modeling application (free as it's open source) which can create entire stories in virtual reality. Think about any of your favorite fantasy movies (Terminator, Transformers ... you get the idea) and those fantastic creatures were all modeled in programs like Blender. I've been looking to see if it's possible to create a virtual human who can be my homeless lead. Why, you ask? Because it's easier to get a virtual human to do the things I want him to do than it is to get a homeless guy to do. The homeless tend to be somewhat unreliable and difficult to manage. They tend to do what they want to do and aren't really interested in listening to (or following) someone else's direction. There's also the risk issue ... working with the homeless can be dangerous as they tend to be unpredictable. Drugs and alcohol can make them crazy. And I have a lot of equipment which I'd like to keep. So a virtual actor has some appeal. I'll gauge the situation on the ground when I get there and decide which way to go based on who I find. But I want to be prepared should the facts dictate using the virtual character. So I've gotten a human 'rig' (from a free software called MakeHuman) that allows me to design the character I want and then bring it into Blender. I've already created "Screw" (my main character) and am now working to improve him so he's fully rigged (able to move) and looks almost believable. It's a lot of work and there's a ton of stuff to learn so I'm very busy these days.

Of course, there's also those photos to take so, while I'm in LA, I'll be using my spare time to visit interesting locations and to get amazing images. I'm also intending to work on my TL and HL sequences as they can be interesting and challenging. Learning new techniques is never going to stop as long as I'm still breathing.

Beyond LA things get a bit more iffy. I want to visit lots of places throughout southern California and Arizona in the time I have left. At the very least I want to see Joshua Tree, Death Valley and the White Mountains in CA and maybe a return to several places in AZ. If I have time I may work further north but I don't want to duplicate the 10K mile wander I did last spring. That's just too hard on me and my truck. I may also just hunker down in either Joshua or Death Valley for a while and work on all the images and videos I'll have accumulated in LA. I need to do preliminary screening and color correction on all that stuff. So it's highly likely I'll get a place in either park and just spend most of my time doing that. Maybe a week or more. This may change but the basic framework seems to be gelling nicely.

Griffith Observatory

During my stay in LA I spent several afternoons and evening in Griffith Park. The Observatory, high on a hill overlooking downtown, is especially interesting. Edwin Hubble did all his groundbreaking work there (yes, that Hubble from the space telescope fame). It's now a major attraction in the city and every night it fills up with an overflow crowd who come to see the amazing views of LA and the Hollywood hills.

The last night I spent in LA I decided I wanted a timelapse sequence that combined the observatory and downtown. To do that I had to walk a steep road high into the surrounding hills. As I'm asthmatic it was a challenge but I took my time and manged to find the perfect place. I set up the camera with my telephoto lens at 70 mm focal length and framed both locations. The sky was filled with clouds and the threat of rain was ever present but I felt getting the sequence was too important to worry about some water. As the sun set I started shooting and this went on for about an hour. I got some really nice images. This is the last image in that sequence. If you look carefully there's rain already falling downtown. I grabbed the camera and walked 'briskly' down the hill, arriving at my truck just as the sky opened up. It wasn't rain ... it was buckets of water and soon the road was a river. I sat patiently, waiting for the deluge to stop and then headed out of the city and toward the coast.

Griffith Observatory - 70mm(1.6 crop),f/11,13 sec,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0

Santa Monica Pier

Burning Man is Over

I guess the latest burning man ended on Sunday. I've always wondered what it would be like to spend a week in the dust and heat of summer Nevada with 70K other slightly crazy people. I've heard it was much better before it became a success so maybe I'm not really missing anything. That's always the problem with these things ... they start out as really cool ideas and then, because they're cool, they become popular and then mainstream and then ... they're toast because all the people and all the expectations destroy that which made them good in the first place. Every festival like this should have a limited shelf time ... a few years ... and then should be discontinued as a bad idea. Nothing good lasts forever. Humans attach themselves to anything that's too good and destroy it. So it is with burning man ... the extremely wealthy carve out their own little 'gated community' and fill it with million dollar buses and keep everyone else out and ... ruin the whole thing. There ought to be a rule that excludes anyone with too much money. Can't the rest of us 'little people' have something that's exclusively ours?

Santa Monica Pier

It's probably one of the most photographed ferris wheels in the world. Right on the beach, just below the million dollar flats and expensive homes and high class hotels ... there sits the pier. It costs a lot of money just to park there for a few hours. Fortunately, for us photographers, that's not a big concern. The parking concessions shut down around 7 at night and don't start up until well after sunrise so I was able to skip most of the costs. But I had to walk a long distance with my heavy equipment so that's the trade off one has to make. Anyway, I got to the beach just after 7 and lugged my gear down the beach sidewalk until I was pretty close to the pier. Most people had already abandoned the beach and most of the exercisers had already finished their routines and headed for the showers so it was just me and a handful of other photogs wanting to get that signature image. In the spring there's already afternoon fog so getting a blazing sun behind a thin layer of clouds is a long shot at best. And, the air is already pretty heavy with smog so it's problematic one can get that iconic shot. So I put the 70-200 f/4 on the camera and concentrated on the pier. It's really quite colorful with the lights on the wheel and the brightly painted rollercoaster so there's plenty to please the eye. It's a 3 exposure HDR and finished in Lightroom. I worked with the sliders quite a bit to bring out the colors. Hope you enjoy the ride. Keep your arms and legs inside the car at all time and absolutely don't scream!

Santa Monica Pier - 70mm(1.6 crop),f/11,HDR,ISO 100,license CC BY-NC 4.0