Monday, January 28, 2008

the fourth day


F2.8 - 2.0s - iso200

the third day


F5.0 - 1/170s - iso200

This photo is from a few days ago. In my very first post the image with weird trees contains this very same sunset - you can see the diagonal dark backslash in both photos. I pulled over further down the road on my way home to take this (my driving was suffering...). You can see snow blowing off the peak to the mountain left center. It was quite glorious.


This manhole is where I have been working in the recent past and will be again in the near future. I'm splicing both copper phone lines and fiber optics down here. The copper is done (MS2), the fiber ahead (fusion, with an FSM-17S).


This is what you see when you open a filled PLP splice case. You have to dig through this hard gel(the dull amber stuff) to get to the copper wires. After splicing, the case is reassembled and re-poured with a two-part polyurethane gel. They call it re-enterable gel in the industry - however it acts just as if it were designed to resist re-entry at all costs. After some struggle I got the job done, though...

Sunday, January 27, 2008

the second day

Fuji F30, F7.1, 1/480, iso:100

This first image I am calling "Homecoming" because it happens to be what I see every time I round the last few bends in the road and am, to all intents and purposes, home. Sometime I will get a night shot of this. I took this one mid morning with the arctic sun shining northwards straight and low. After taking this shot I climbed the bluff (to my right in the photo above - use your imagination) because I really wanted to get a photo of the mist rising from little rivulets in the Delta river's delta. Check out Google Earth if you are interested in how it all fits together geographically. Today the temperature was around -30F. That cold and below the river water steams - that's where all the mist you see above is coming from. When the sunlight hits it just right the streams & mist become like ribbons of gold, which I have only ever captured from the road before.

Below is what I found from the top. Not as good as I had hoped. It was a lot of work to get up there and really chilly, also. I had on a snow suit and snow boots but there was a gap between the two and the knee-high drifted (also super chilled!) snow packed its way into a nice hard ring around each ankle... By the time I slid my way down to my van again my ankles were totally numb - but my feet were quite normal, which is something I had never experienced quite that way before.


Fuji F30, F5.6, 1/600, iso:200

Friday, January 25, 2008

The first day

So... There is the first photo. Is that the largest size I can get from this blog's standard machinations? if so, I will have to work something else out.

The caption could be "weird trees". A forest fire took out hundreds of acres of black spruce around Ft. Greely some years ago and their black skeletons are still Seuss-ishly standing guard today. The photo is untouched, and for sure at least the color could use some help in the G.I.M.P. because this camera doesn't seem able to understand what a sunset really looks like.

I've never kept a blog before, and hope this will be an exception. Here's a bit of background to get started.

Although I have always liked snapping photos both from a creative and a technical (ie I like technology) aspect, I received a bit of a cattle-shock in this department by being asked to photograph someone's wedding. I was actually asked almost by accident, not because of perceived ability - but that's another story. Being versed enough in the lore to at least glimpse the enormity of what I was getting into, I started some research. I began to be fascinated with the subject of photography in a depth I had never thought about before.

To cut a long story short, here I am today. I borrowed a Canon 20D (having previously inhaled the manual), some pretty decent lenses and a 580EX flash and armed with my recently won theory spent a day experiencing something new and quite wonderful. I made a lot of mistakes. I understand what some of them were, but not all. However, I got some good photos (at least, ones that made the family happy) out of it. Maybe I will put together a sampling into a web album in order to get some comments that might help me out.

Back to today - the proud owner (still) of a Fuji F30 point and shoot. Sorry, thats all you are going to being seeing for some time... I am saving up for an SLR. It will probably be Canon, since I already acquired a glib of knowledge about their line. I hope it will at least be a 20D, since I have used both this and a 350D and would say: no comparison. Perhaps a photo might come out as well from one as the other... but the controls are just not in the same league and there is not the same tangible joy of using a good tool.

In the meantime the Fuji is really great for a compact point and shoot. It is my work camera and I have it with me wherever I am which obviously I could never duplicate with an SLR. You will probably hear more about it in time.

Six Trees.