Harbor at Dusk

One of the interesting things is that when I start my walk later in the day, is that I get to photograph in a different kind of light than I normally see.  This is interesting because to the eye, it was almost completely dark.  So I set my camera on the railing and cranked up the sensitivity of the camera to 3200, and shot this at 1/10th of a second with the lens set at 150mm and I took a number of exposures to make sure there was not any camera shake.  What's fascinating is that there was not even a hint of color when seen with my eyes.  It was such a surprise, and a pleasure to see the pink color in the sky and reflected in the water.

 

Heads Up!

 

And now for something completely different!  I love the things I can shoot in close-up with my long lens!  I can zero in on a small happening in nature.  These three Mallards were feeding at the time.  They are foraging aquatic vegetation on the bottom of the harbor.  This is a feeding technique that they prefer and use most often.  What's funny is that when the tide goes out, they could just walk over to where they are now and eat, but they don't.  The trick for me was timing.  I would see one with head down and two with heads up.  Then two with heads down and one with heads up.  I stood in one spot for several minutes before I got this perfect shot!

The Disk of the Sun

I started my walk a bit earlier today, so that when I got to the harbor, the Sun was still in the sky, although it had settled into the treeline over on the Port Washington side.  I watched the Sun go down and photographed it as it did.  I like this photograph best, because the Sun is surrounding a single tree.  It is so handy to have a 400mm lens for scenes like this.

 

A Walk After Sunset

I left late for my walk this afternoon.  The sun had set just before I got to the harbor, and the colors in the sky were subtle and beautiful.  I shot a bunch of photographs of the sky and the water, from several different vantage points.  This photograph is my favorite of them all.  It was nice having a few seagulls in the foreground, and of course when I saw the single gull who flew through the scene, I clicked the shutter to record this.   

Building the Heathkit

So many people wrote me and said that I couldn't have been smart enough to put a Heathkit together!  But today, completely randomly, I found evidence!  OK, this is unbelievable!  I went up to the attic to start going through old photographs in boxes that haven't been looked at for YEARS.  Seriously.  Had no idea what was in them.  I took about 8 boxes and started through them.  And this is what I found!  I mean, this is astounding!  I had no idea that I still had these photos!  This is me, standing in the back yard with the box that my new Heathkit kit came in!  You can tell I am excited, because I am standing in snow with no jacket on.

And here I am on my desk with a pair of needle-nosed pliers, wrapping a wire around a terminal of a potentiometer, before soldering it.  The soldering iron is in its holder in the lower right corner of the photo, and the partially finished Heathkit is in the center of the photo.  What else do you notice?  That I am wearing a striped shirt, instead of my signature white shirt?   :-)  Below I am hunched over some part of the construction, using my soldering iron to make connections.  Seeing all these photograph brings it all back!  Wow...  OK I was kidding about people telling me I wasn't smart enough to build this.  I just was checking to see if you believed that...   :-)

 

Hard to Part With...

This is my first Ham radio Transceiver, a Heathkit HW-101.  I bought it as a kit and assembled it myself.  It required a lot of soldering and wiring and installing small components on circuit boards.  I worked very carefully, and triple checked every step I did, and when I turned it on the first time, it worked perfectly!  I remember my first contact with another Ham, an electrician who worked in a coal mine in West Virginia!  We used Morse code and slowly tapped out messages back and forth with a telegraph key.  That was a thrill - communicating by radio.  I think this was about 1978 or so, long before the advent of computers.  Later I talked to people all around the country and the world by voice, instead of Morse code, with this radio.  I even met one of my best friends, Chuck, who was in Texas, when we met just by chance on the radio.  Eventually I bought a more modern commercially made transceiver, and this one sat on the side unused.  But it has a special place in my heart because I built it, and because it was my first.

This is what the inside of the radio looks like with all the old-fashioned radio tubes! It has spent the last 40 years pretty much unused, stored in the attic or in the basement.  I don't remember the last time I used it.  But I held on to it for all these years.  Until today.  It was time to take it to recycling and leave it with the rest of the electronic waste.  Man, it was SO hard to leave it there and walk away from this!  The radio, as you can see, is in mint condition, but most likely the capacitors in it are dried out and no longer working, but it still looks nice. But it is time to clean up and throw out and get rid of "stuff."

 

The Beauty of Flight

I went for my usual walk late this afternoon, and took a detour through the beach where we have our Tuesday coffee and donuts.  There was a tree I wanted to photograph against a clearing sky, and after I did that I continued walking in the sand.  Suddenly a group of a dozen seagulls descended from above me and several of them passed by me in flight, very close.  I couldn't believe how close this one came to me, so I quickly got off 3 shots as it passed.  I love the beauty of birds in flight - perfect, efficient, beautiful aerodynamic beings!  I didn't need a telephoto lens for this one because it was so close.  The beauty of the photograph is also enhanced because of the gray clouds above, with faint hints of blue.