Undecided

I arrived here on Monday and will leave Friday.  I was sent to learn about the NSNA 4050 Switch (Nortel Secure Network Access Switch).  While the topic is very interesting to me, I don’t think I could keep people’s attention if I got all work focused.

So instead, I’ll talk about the clouds.  I brought my digital camera and decided to play with the circular polarizer and take photos of clouds.  The Dallas area suffers from (I say suffers because I don’t like) high humidity.  Combine high temperature and high humidity, and I’m absolutely miserable.

But, the humidity does make a nice environment to support a plethoria of clouds, like this:

or this

and this

and

and

and

and

and this one, which is my favorite of the bunch

Now, if you don’t know anything about polarization then you could always check out Wikipedia.  The summary is, it brightens the blues by blocking specular reflections.

Now, wasn’t that much more enjoyable?

I thought so.

For those who didn’t read the full preview and discover that it was actually a joke, go back and click the link.  For those that did, here’s the excerpt of the punch lines for many of the faux features offered in the D90:

1. uVR: “With uVR enabled, the combined power of the batteries sends a current through the step-up transformer. This then delivers a 110 volt shock through metal pads around the grip. The resulting electrical shock matches the shutter speed (maximum of 10 seconds).The shock causes a very stable clenching of the photographer’s muscles while the shutter is open, simulating the stability of a tripod.”
2. In-camera editing: “To save money, the CS3 licenses were bought from a Russian spammer at 1/50th the regular price, allowing Nikon to keep the price of the D90 competitive. “
3. Shutter delays: “The D90 solves this problem thanks to Nikon’s new MindProbe technology. MindProbe scans your brain, looking for those tell-tale low amplitude beta waves that signal an imminent shutter-press. By the time your neurons react, and you actually press the shutter, the D90 has already captured 3 images (or 6 in GTI mode).” …

   “My Nikon contact tells me their R&D people are now working on a system that eliminates the photographer altogether. Nikon’s customer research has discovered that when a photographer takes a great image, they claim all the credit. But when a photographer takes a bad image, they blame the camera.

   By eliminating the photographer, Nikon plans to eliminate lousy photos altogether.”

4. Universal memory compatability: “The D50 and D80 caused some controversy by moving Nikon’s consumer-orientated DSLR models away from CF cards. This lead many Nikon users to resort to unseemly and ungentlemanly language in the forums (expressly forbidden under the terms and conditions of the standard Nikon warranty).

   In an effort to avoid such distasteful events this time around, and ensure everybody can enjoy a D90, Nikon now supports the following storage formats…”

5. Wireless Anywhere: “… Nikon has put a series of satellites in orbit that are dedicated to receiving wireless remote signals from users anywhere on the planet. These are then forwarded to your camera, allowing you to trigger the shutter no matter where you are.”

 And much more.

The entire article is of course intended as humor.

Still no luck.  This is an underexposure composition that I improved in post-processing.  I think it came out very well.  Sadly, to make it very picturesque, I’d have to spend some time cleaning the bird-gunk off the bridge… and I’m not about to spend my time doing that, no matter how much I like my apartment complex.

I decided last night to finally head out and start looking for a freeway to compose a slow shutter exposure of freeway lights.  It was an interesting project.  One of the things that I immediately noticed is just how much I don’t notice any more.  Things that you just take for granted.  Where I live in the USA, they have guard rails and safety fences around every bridge (to make suicide more difficult and pedestrian accidents near impossible).

I had to do a lot of hunting around for the right freeway, and then I had to step off of the sideway and on to the dirt to get the angle that I was looking for.  Unfortunately, the shot I wanted to take just wasn’t possible since they actually put up signs that said “Pedestrian traffic prohibited” so if I got stopped by a police officer while taking my photos I would have ended up with a misdemeanor citation.  And while I am interseted in pushing my photography experience, I’m not interested enough to pay fines to get that experience.  I’m reasonably happy with the reasults and will probably aim to do this kind of thing again in the future with other overpasses.

I ended up driving to 4 different over passes looking for one that I could get both a good angle on the freeway and also one that did not have “pedestrians prohibited” signs put up.  Once I found it, then I had to figure out how to navigate the parking lot (which was actually segmented in to at least 4 separate parking lots with limited ingress-egress access) to get closest to where I was going to set up my camera.  Then I had to patiently wait at my car while a pedestrian who I passed 3-4 times in the search for the right parking lot entrance finally crossed over the bridge (i.e., overpass) I’d settled on.  I think I made him a little nervous driving around him as he walked solo through a poorly lit parking lot (or two).  Finally, he was gone and I had my parking spot, so I humped my gear up to the overpass, dithered about stepping off the sidewalk on to the dirt that led down to the freeway below, and erected my tripod to begin.

With a dozen or more photos of the same scene at different shutter speeds and different traffic compositions, this is the is the one that I ended up liking the most.  The yellow lights that stutter along the path are signal lights to indicate the driver was changing lanes.  You can even see the lane change in the path of the tail lights.

I’m about you bore you with technical photography comments, if you can’t wait to move on, skip to the next paragraph.  This is a 12.5% crop (resized) of an original 15 second exposure.  The original size photo shows a lot of “bounce” to the tail lights.  I’ve driven this freeway before (tail lights are West-bound I-580) and it’s a rough freeway, but I never realized just how rough (thank God for shocks, eh?).  After re-sizing, the “bounce” is almost eliminated, which is nice.  The exposure wasn’t extended enough in retrospect.  I was really aiming for the landscape to show up with the same visibility as the photo below.

This is much more of what I was aiming for, but I didn’t get my exposures correct in the first few photos.  After looking at this, I realized that I could crop it and remove some of the extraneous elements that draw the eyes away from the composition.

This is a better crop because it eliminates the cars in the upper right in the original photo, and it also removes the tops of the bushes in the lower right.

It was a fun experience and I look forward to doing it again in the future.