photography
All posts tagged photography
Thursday was a really, really lousy day at work! Started out in the wee hours with a power failure in the server rack, then a yahoo co-worker moved a couple of networked printers before their time putting them out of use, then the HR manager's PC died, and on and on and on. By the end of the day I was stressed out, my body hurt from head to toe, I was angry, frustrated, and I was physically exhausted having stayed up late with observatory programming the night before and scrambling to work an hour early when I discovered there was a crisis in progress. This morning was a time to unwind a bit on my way to the place of Thursday's torments.
One of my favorite local places is a city park in Olmsted Falls. There, amongst hand-carved rocky walls, grow mosses, flowers, and trees. Nearby a river slowly wears down its rocky bed creating the falls for which the town is named. The light and the atmosphere are peaceful there. It's on my way to work.
An unkempt and smelly lily pond is adjacent to the park's tiny parking lot. I was looking for frogs or turtles, and even heard but did not see a bullfrog. Then I noticed the tiny black dots floating amidst the tangles of pond weed… tadpoles! Hundreds, maybe thousands of tadpoles were swimming everywhere. Most were of a very small, deep brown or black variety dotted with yellow. What I thought were bubbles of gas burbling occasionally to the surface turned out to be much larger bullfrog tadpoles! They darted to the surface, gulped air, then dove back to the relative safety of the pond floor!
Before leaving, I strolled to the bridge carrying a street over the river valley and crossed to the north side. There, perched just on the river bank, is a house of enviable location. Still, I got my respite and a bit of stress relief through a much less permanent visit to a tiny city park. One of my favorite places for, now, several decades, David Fortier River Park.
It surprised the heck out of me when She Who Must Be Obeyed suggested we take a drive back to Granville, Ohio today and re-photograph the Swasey Observatory! On our first trip out there on Friday the weather was gray and rainy. Today the weather was warm and sunny with fluffy clouds thrown into the blue sky to keep it from being too shocking. We had a nice drive out via a different route from Friday's and took another shot at it. I'd grown to like my original picture, even with the gray sky and soft light, but today's bright sun and blue sky really set off the scene. On the way towards home we stopped by another location I'd wanted to re-photograph: the Warren Rupp Observatory, home to the Richland Astronomical Society. It was a fun drive cross-country and I got a nice portrait of the Observatory's "warm-up room" and dome atop a hill outside Mansfield, Ohio. A day of driving, perhaps, but happy travels.
Addendum: An interesting photo was posted to the Palomar Skies blog… yes, the historic and world-famous Palomar Observatory! See: Palomar Flies its Colors! It turns out the technical name for this phenomenon is "circumhorizon arc." More on this may be found at: Atmospheric Optics.
It's going to be a stormy evening.
It was another beautiful spring morning and I had a tiny bit of spare time… enough to stop by the park in Olmsted Falls. I spent a relaxing few minutes enjoying the fresh air, listening to water flowing over rocks in the nearby river, and observing the morning light's effects on the scenery around me. I was about to leave, not even having unpacked my camera, when I spotted some young tree leaves. They were lit up in a golden tone I haven't seen since last fall… in April. I can't explain the biology and physics at work here, not that it matters much to the resulting beauty of early morning light pouring through young tree leaves with a dark wall of rock as background. One day the weather is hot, the next morning there's frost on the windows. These leaves look like fall but the day felt like spring. Pardon me if I'm confused.
PhotonStopper 