The Providence River

Dick and I went to downtown Providence today and drove around.  He has photographed Providence all his life, and sells beautiful photographs of the city he knows so well, through a gallery in town.  So we drove down streets that were familiar to me from his photographs that I have seen.  Then we went down to the Providence River to see a new very modern, very beautiful pedestrian bridge across the river.  What happened some years ago was that they moved Interstate 195 where it crossed the river, to a brand new bridge south of this location.  You can see the new curved bridge for I-195 on the left in the distance.  Then they built a new pedestrian bridge, where I am standing, where I-195 used to be.  One reason I took this photograph is that I really love the look of the power plant with the three stacks on the right.  You know that I love industrial stuff and so I have the power plant and then two different bridges.

 

Coleus!

We are visiting our friends Dick and Trauti in Massachusetts.  We pulled into their driveway after a four hour drive, and it was overcast.  As we were getting out of the car the sun came out and this magnificent plant lit up the garden just outside their side door!  I couldn't believe how brilliant the color was or how beautiful it is!  Perhaps you know them as painted nettle or poor man’s croton, depending on where you’re located, but for many of us we simply know them as coleus plants (Coleus blumei).  I of course, had no idea what the plant was called so I asked Trauti and then I went online to read about it.  I do love the other names for the plant which I discovered online!  This single plant really brightened my day!

 

A Little Project Around Here

We decided it was time to get some new rugs downstairs in the dining room, the living room, and the front hall.  I assumed that we would just get new wall to wall carpeting.  Kathy thought that maybe we should consider area rugs instead.  So we decided to rip up some strips of the old carpet to see what condition the floor was in underneath the rug.  We haven't seen the wood floors in years.  So we saw they were in pretty good condition, and would only need a light sanding to freshen up the surface, and maybe some light touch up with a wood stain, and then two coats of varnish.  So off I went.  Here I am using a brand new sander which I will post about at a later time.  It does an amazing job in a short amount of time.

So here is the same section of floor after I sanded, stained and put one coat of varnish on.  We have a house that is nearly 100 years old, so we didn't want to have a heavy duty sanding - we like that the wood flooring looks like it has been used for that long.

 

Eastbound on the LIE at Sunset

We were headed eastbound on the Long Island Expressway, on the way out to Orient for observing.  The sun was nearly set and most of the light was off the landscape.  I came up a hill to the top and suddenly there were these traffic signs over the road that were glowing with sunlight.  That's because they have Scotchlite on them.  Scotchlite has "retroreflectors" embedded in it, and those may be small glass beads or prisms that return the light in the direction from which it came making things many times brighter than normal.  It was an unreal sight, and fortunately I had my "toy" camera with me, and managed to quickly get this shot.  Yeah, I know, no shooting while driving...

 

The Andromeda Galaxy

This is the Andromeda galaxy.  This is what our galaxy looks like.  But it is not us, it is our sister galaxy.  But if you were in the Andromeda galaxy and looked back at the Milky Way galaxy we would look like this!  For the photographers out there, this was taken with a 200mm f/2.8 lens, ISO 3200 and an exposure time of 30 seconds, on a special mount which tracks the movement of the sky.   But you need to be under a really dark sky.  The Andromeda galaxy is is a barred spiral galaxy with diameter of about 152,000 light-years, approximately 2.5 million light-years from Earth!  And it contains about one trillion stars!  The Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies are expected to collide in around 4–5 billion years merging to form a giant elliptical galaxy.  It is a wonderful sight in a telescope but in long exposures through a telescope, like this photograph taken from the Negev Desert in Israel, you can see it in all its magnificence! Andromeda Galaxy in Color

 

The Milky Way!

Well, here it is, the Milky Way!  It is a magnificent thing to see, and I think when I was putting together a talk on light pollution for a high school class recently, I read that 80 percent of the population lives under light polluted skies and has never seen the Milky Way!  I remember seeing it as a kid growing up in Connecticut, but I don't believe you can see it now where I grew up.  So the Milky Way is actually our own galaxy.  It is enormous beyond imagining.  Think of it as a 33 RPM record - it has diameter of 87,000 light-years but is only about 1,000 light years thick for most of it, but there is a bulge at the center of the galaxy.  It contains between 100 and 400 billion stars!  Since we are in the flat part of the galaxy, out toward one edge, when we look up out of the galaxy, we don't see as many stars as we see if we look toward the center, or out toward the edge.  In any case, it is a magnificent thing to experience if you can see it from a dark-sky site, like out west, or in an area that is 100 miles away from even small cities.

 

The Joys of the Unexpected

So a friend and I drove all the way out to Orient Point to do some observing.  Usually I just drive to Custer Institute, where I am a member, but on the last three visits, you could barely see the Milky Way because of light pollution.  So we drove for an extra half hour to a boat launch ramp in the middle of nowhere, and the skies were absolutely stunning!  The stars blazed with a brilliance you can only get from a site that is not light polluted.  While taking a break from using my telescope, and my camera to photograph some heavenly objects, I walked down to the end of the boat ramp and saw this!  I was stunned at how beautiful it was!  So I went back and got my camera and tripod.  There was absolutely no wind at all, and no waves, which is why I could make a fifteen second exposure of a boat on the water and have it not move at all!  The boat was illuminated by a security light from a marina a short distance away.  The brightest object near the top right of the photo is the planet Jupiter.  What an astounding thing to go looking for one thing and find something else!

I Know, This is Getting Old...

I promise this will be the last infrared photograph I post for a while.  Maybe.  I just think it is an interesting scene, with the trees and the clouds.  For most of the infrared photographs I have posted, I have converted them to just black and white.  But the recent photos, I have left as they came out of the camera, which means they have a slight bit of color in them.  But for some reason I have left the color in because it helps define, for instance, the trees in the distance from the water and the sky.  I did convert it to monochrome and a lot of the elements blended together.  Just in case you wondered.  I will post the monochrome version below after I convert this one so you can see the difference.  Maybe you find the slight color difference distracting?  That's the thing about this blog, you learn something new every day...   :-)  Which photograph do you like best?

 

Seeing the World in a New Way

I am back to my old tricks again, using the infrared camera to make something that you are so familiar with, something different.  But there is something valuable here - the scene seems so completely changed to me, when all the foliage on the trees becomes something different than how we know it.  The whole scene seems lighter and brighter than it  normally would be and because of that, I want to spend more time carefully looking at everything.  So this makes me see the world in a new way, and that's always an interesting experience.

 

A Light in the Steeple

I spent all day trying to figure out a photograph for the blog post tonight.  No luck.  I looked on the way driving to my astronomy meeting.  No luck.  But on the way home, I drove by the Old First Church in Huntington, which is a classic white church with beautiful steeple, and there was a light in the steeple!  There's my shot!  So I parked the car and did a number of photographs.  This one represents the scene best.  So I did some research as to why a church might have a light in it at night.  Here is a quote from the Clover Hill Reformed Church, in Hillsborough, NJ:  "The lighting of the steeple each night is a reassuring sign of hope, of God's presence.  It is a signal light, shining in the darkness and pointing us to this truth."  I love that thought!

 

Rusty Pilot's Course

A week ago Saturday I attended a "Rusty Pilot's Course" offered to members of the Aircraft Owner's and Pilot's Association, out at MacArthur Airport in Islip. It was a three hour course that covered a lot of information that pilots need to know when flying, and which many of us are a bit "rusty" on.  We met in an aircraft hangar, and it was fun to be around airplanes, and hear airplanes just outside starting their engines.  Topics of the course included Pre-flight Preparation - Documents, Weather and NOTAMS, Airport Operations - Markings and Procedures, Radio Communications, and Airspace and Charts.  Whew!  A lot of stuff to review!  In addition, on my own I have been studying the aircraft manual and aircraft performance, FAA rules and regulations, Aerodynamics, Pilot techniques, and Aeromedical factors.  Whew!  I am exhausted just writing all that down!

It was a great way to spend the morning, talking and learning so many things about flying.  Sometimes I think my brain is full, but I keep adding stuff to it and I think that is good for us as we age, because it keeps us mentally sharp.  At least that's my theory!

 

Well THIS Looks Scary!

Showers had been forecast for this afternoon, but nothing seemed to show up.  Until late, that is.  I was working on my bicycle outdoors by the garage when I realized it was getting darker.  So I took my bike off the repair stand and put everything away, just as some raindrops started to fall.  I looked up at the sky and took a couple of photographs with my iPhone but the angle was not wide enough to take it all in, so I ran in the house, grabbed my SONY with the 18mm lens, and ran out and got this!  Then I ran back in before any rain might fall.  We had only a few sprinkles, but there was a distant sound of thunder in the far distance.  So it was a false alarm, which was fine with me.  But it does look like the end of the world, doesn't it?

 

The Strand Kiosk at Central Park

  The Strand, the largest independent bookstore in New York City is really famous.  Established in 1927, it is now in its third generation of family ownership. I used to go there all the time, and it was always dangerous in terms of my wallet and my back.  I would promise myself to only buy one or two books and I would leave with a bag of 6 or 7 heavy art or photography books, all at half price!  The main store is at Broadway and 12th street, downtown.  They also have this kiosk on Fifth Avenue and they have a lot of books there which they put out on tables.

I had to stop, of course, and browse a few titles on the tables, before I continued on to the Met.  I am always SO tempted to buy some of the books about New York City, because I don't have enough books at home already!  Yeah as if!

 

Trying to Save my Aloe Vera

We have had this Aloe Vera plant for years and years.  I think it was given to me by someone I photographed once.  It has been the  balm for so many burns we have suffered over the years.  But it has not been healthy.  I have watered it, and fed it fertilizer, and worried that I water it too much or too little, or used too much fertilizer or two little.  And for two years I have known that I need to re-pot it.  So I finally did that.  This plant sat in the kitchen window which faces west. There is a suggestion that too much sunlight is not good for this plant  So I moved the newly repotted plant to a window in the back room.  It is doing OK, I think, but there is not a dramatic change.  I will have to photograph it again with this same background and you can tell me what you think.  Oh, the other thing is, whenever I look up Aloe Vera photographs on the web, all the plants are brilliant green, not like my plant.

 

Overgrown Horse

I may have photographed this horse before.  It lives in front of the discount wine store I visit from time to time.  When I first photographed it, you could see the entire horse.  The other day I parked the car, and then happened to look out my side window and thought that this was funny.  The plants have all grown considerably, to the effect that the horse's head is "missing."  made me laugh, and I hope you laugh as well.

 

107th Infantry Memorial

This is an astounding memorial to the men who served in the 107th Infantry Regiment during WWI.  It is located on Fifth Avenue, with Central Park in the background.  I pass it every time I walk to the Met and always stop to look at it, and many times, to photograph it.  I can't take my eyes of each of the soldiers.  While in France, they saw heavy action, and at the end of the war in November 1918, of the 3,700 men originally in the regiment, 580 men were killed and 1,487 wounded, with four of the regiment's soldiers being awarded the Medal of Honor.  The bronze memorial was donated by 7th–107th Memorial Committee and was created by the sculptor Karl Morningstar Illava (1896–1954), who "drew from his own experience serving as a sergeant with the 107th."  This memorial was conceived in 1920 and was placed in the park and unveiled in 1927.  If you are ever in the city, you can find it at 67th street.

 

Infrared Scene

I took my infrared converted camera out with me on some errands the other day, and you have already seen one of the photographs of that trip - the trees along the harbor.  Well, this was the first shot I took on my trip  You will be pleased to know I was completely stopped at the red light when I shot this.  Usually my infrared photographs are just of nature.  I saw this and picked up my camera sitting on the rider's seat and managed two quick shots before the light changed.  I love this shot because of how gorgeous the trees are in infrared - they are stunning.  And what makes the photograph more interesting are the traffic lights hanging in the middle of the photograph.  I think is about the contrast between nature and mechanical things.  Please click on the image to see it in a larger size.

 

Thunderstorm!

I was awakened at about 5AM by the flash of lightning, and then as time went on, I began to hear thunder.  Before too long the rain started, and it was a deluge!  I went back to bed but then the thunder and lighting grew more frequent and louder. So I got my camera and did this photograph of the neighbor's trees illuminated by their security light.  Because of all the rain, you can see things looking foggy.  It all tapered off and was over in about half an hour, and I went back to bed.  Below is the radar image of the storm.  Sea Cliff is the location of the blue dot, and you can see that we were under the worst of the storm at one point.  Maybe our dead grass will start growing again!

 

Fifth Avenue Street Scene

On my stroll up Fifth Avenue to the Met I am always looking for photographs along the way.  I never know what I will see and when I see something, sometimes I have to spend time looking at it to see if it is good enough.  But that was not the case with this scene.  I had just crossed the street when I saw this, and I stopped in my tracks!  I only took two frames, but I knew that I had gotten the picture!  I guess it was the three paintings that a street vendor had on display.  I think it was because of this burst of color that stood out from the background.  I actually am taken by the portrait on the top - I believe it is Frida Kahlo, a famous Mexican painter who lived from 1907 to 1954.  I didn't buy it but I did get this photograph!

 

You Learn Something New Every Day...

My father used to say that "You learn something new every day," and I have always believed that.  At least if you are a curious person.  So I happened to notice these curly hoses surrounding this tree on Fifth Avenue, on my walk up to the Met.  After seeing several of these, I saw a man with a NY Parks Department shirt on and asked him what it was about.  I was stunned with his answer!  They are injecting a fungicide into the base of the Dutch Elm Trees that line the sidewalk on the Central Park side of Fifth avenue!  They have to do that once every two years, and they have been able to save the trees from Dutch Elm disease!  I thought that ALL Dutch Elm trees were already all gone!  Not the case.  He said that Central Park has a lot of Dutch Elms.  I remember growing up, people telling me about the deaths of enormous numbers of these trees.  What a relief to hear that these trees have been saved.

So I really didn't do a good job of reporting this story!  I should have done a wider shot that would have showed more of the equipment used to do this process.  There was a large storage battery connected to an electric pump that pumped the fungicide mixture out of that garbage pail and into the tubing where it was injected into the tree.  Sorry for failing to do a good job on this story...

And this is what the beautiful Dutch Elm trees look like.  I have done so many photographs of pedestrians walking up and down Fifth Avenue in the "tunnel" created by these beautiful trees.  And I never knew they were Dutch Elms.  Like  my father said: "You learn something new every day."

 

The Changing New York Skyline

                                          

To get to the Met I take the N train from Penn Station up to Fifth Avenue and 59th street.  When I stepped out into the daylight from underground I saw this scene and thought about how the skyline of Manhattan has changed, with the advent of very tall, very thin new buildings.  They have been nicknamed "pencil towers."  There are three of them visible here.  Why are they being built?  Because there is money to be made.  In New York, which is arguably the city that has seen the most dramatic increase in pencil towers over the past decade, the causes are for one, the maximum height of a building depends on floor area ratio, FAR, of the building within its own plot. Essentially the smaller you build within the plot, not using up the entire base area, the higher you’re allowed to build upwards. Developers in New York can also buy so-called ‘air rights’ from surrounding properties. In simple terms, every building in the city is given a certain amount of air above it. However, neighboring buildings can buy that air off them if it isn’t being fully used, allowing them to build even higher. Combined, the FAR and ‘air rights’ rules actively encourage the building of super-tall structures on tiny areas of land.No matter the direct cause of pencil towers, however, there’s one commonality behind the vast majority of them. They’re usually glamorous, expensive statements intended solely for the super-rich. Does anyone need to build that tall? Of course not. It’s simply developers looking to cash in on absurdly high property prices.

The New LIRR Concourse at Penn Station

In June of 2019 the Long Island Railroad started construction on a new concourse at Penn Station.  They wanted a wider corridor and higher ceilings than what they have had since I have been on Long Island.  In order to do that, they had to install giant "head knocker" I-beans which lowered the ceiling even more.  That gave the construction workers a place to work, unseen, overtop the people walking underneath.  Man, some people were tall enough that they nearly had to duck their heads to avoid hitting the beams.  And the corridors became so narrow.  It was a bit claustrophobic, actually.

Well, at the beginning of this week, they unveiled a section of the new ceiling with illuminated LED panels of light overhead and it is a whole new world underground at Penn for us LIRR riders!  What a pleasant surprise it was after living under these I-Beams and planks for three years!

This is the new Seventh Avenue entrance which goes directly to the street, and which I have showed you before.  How wonderful and bright this all is with the new illuminated high ceilings down in the concourse!  There is still more work to do, but we are getting there, at long last.  Oh, and the new concourse is much wider as well - all the storefronts on the concourse were moved back some distance to give more room for rush hour travelers.

 

Waiting at the Depot

I went to the city today to see a photographic exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  My trips all start the same way - I have breakfast at home, then drive over near the train station and park my car, and then walk to a Dunkin' for a cup of coffee at and then drink it while waiting for my train at the depot.  I had a great day, and more about that in subsequent posts.

 

Layers of Clouds

         

I was finishing up my bike ride today and as I got to the foot of Laurel Avenue I saw these amazing clouds.  What really got me was the cloud layer way in the distance, closer to the horizon.  The only device I had for taking photographs was my iPhone 5SE, which would make me the laughingstock in a group of iPhone groupies.  So I used what  had and made a photograph.  So this is a cropped version because my iPhone doesn't have the telephoto lens that I required.  The image is pretty grainy if you enlarge the image. But, hey, I got something.  Such beautiful clouds from overhead to infinity.

At the Harbor

So in desperation of finding some nice photographs for the blog, I decided to abandon real creativity, and go with cheap tricks!   :-)   I got out my old SONY a200k which is a smallish mostly plastic digital single lens reflex camera that I bought for $525 when I retired back in 2008 to carry around in the car all the time.  I didn't want my brand new Nikon D-300 and lenses which I bought at the same time, bouncing around in the trunk of the car wherever I went.  I would only carry the Nikon when I knew I was going to photograph something special.  Anyhow, the Sony a200k was a faithful camera, worked perfectly, but after about 10 years of using it almost every day for the blog, I thought I better replace it before it died because that was the camera I took on vacations, because it was much lighter than my heavy Nikon.  So, still working perfectly, I decided to send it off and have it converted with the addition of a special filter that allows that camera to only see infrared light.  You have seen photos like this that I have done before.  So I have started taking it with me just in case I saw things that might look better in infrared.  So of course I was driving along the shore of the harbor and stopped to shoot this and I think it is a winner!  Such wonderful shapes of trees, living and dead and cumulus in the distance, and of course the strangeness of any deciduous trees which show their foliage in white because they reflect so much infrared light.  I hope you like my "cheap trick."

 

Happy Labor Day!

The other day, on our astronomy mailing list, one of the really good astrophotographers posted a photograph that he made through his telescope of the "Elephant Trunk Nebula."  He posted it in both black & white and in color and he was not sure of which one he liked best. You can see the black & white version here:  Elephant Trunk Nebula  Other members over time chimed in and suggested which image they liked best.  There was no clear choice.  So that got me thinking.  Since this is labor day, and labor day is about work, I thought I would talk for a bit about how I work.  Here are two of my favorite photographs, one in color, and one in black and white.

The first photograph is "Road and Fence, Canyon de Chelly, AZ"  It was taken with a 35mm camera using color negative film..  The second photograph is "O'Neil's Grave" on El Camino del Diablo in Arizona.  It is a famous site. I made this photograph with black & white Polaroid Positive/Negative film using my 4x5 camera on a photograph workshop with a photographer named Mark Klett.  Both photographs were made with specific film, one in color and one in black & white.  How do I choose which film to use?

Ahah!  That is the question! So here is the answer I posted on the astronomy mailing list

As a photographer who has worked in both black & white and color  film in my professional work and in my personal work I feel I should be able to explain exactly why I like a black & white image or a color image.  But I can’t!  Some images just leave a powerful feeling in me that they should be done with just one film or the other.   And I can’t tell you why!  Go figure!  It just resonates with me in some way.  I wish I could offer some kind of reason, but I am at a loss…. It is all about feeling.  But of course feeling is how I work with everything. That’s how I determine composition in all my photographs.  I move the camera around and zoom in or out or walk nearer or further or left or right, and it is all based on feel. Then it just “feels right,” and I take the picture.   I wish I had a clue.  It is all intuitive by now, after photographing almost every day of my life since 8th grade!  That’s about 65 years!  You would think by now I know why I do what I do.  But I don’t.

There, that was helpful to everyone, right?  :-)  I hope everyone enjoyed their labor day.

 

"I'm Going to go Out to Look for a Blog Post..."

 I am finding it difficult to come up with blog posts these days.  I am not going anywhere and I am not walking in the heat (or riding my bike when it is over 80 degrees.) So it is hard to come up with photographs.  So I knew I was out of pictures I had taken and saved and could be used for the blog.  So I got my camera and put a macro lens on it, for close ups, and told Kathy I was going outside to look for a blog post.  I got to the front steps and then looked over at the garden to my right and saw the decorative grasses.  So I thought I would start there.  This is one of the "things" that grows on the end of the stalks, and we usually see them from the side.  They look like white versions of caterpillars.  Only in my explorations I tried photographing this thing from the end.  Wow!  It was difficult because I was really close to it and the wind was blowing it around gently, but I finally managed to get a photograph that was in focus and not blurred by motion. What an astounding thing this is to see in close up!  Even when I was photographing it was hard to see the delicate structure of the plant.  But when I opened the full resolution image on my computer, I was once more absolutely stunned by the beauty of nature.  And just outside my front door!  If anyone would like me to send them the full resolution of the photo, please email me.  You won't be disappointed!

This is a view of the plant that I photographed.

 

Hardest Worker on the Planet

OK, so this post will be all over the place!  I am like that sometimes!  I was mowing the lawn and wonder of wonders I saw a Monarch butterfly!  I was thrilled.  But it was flying away from the garden and I had no chance to photograph it.  But I was thrilled, what with the terrible loss of the population of these magnificent insects, here was one in the side yard!  It had been on this Sedum plant, so that's a good sign.  Just in case, I grabbed my camera and put a close up lens on it. Then I noticed that the plant was swarming with honeybees!  So that's what I had to photograph.  I kept at it with my camera, but these industrious workers move so quickly and fly from blossom to blossom SO fast that it is not even funny.  Then my thoughts switched to the importance of bees, in terms of pollinating EVERYTHING that we need to survive as a species, and I was doubly impressed thinking that, and then seeing how hard these insects work!  It is something to behold and to contemplate!

 

Observing Night

We had an observing session last Wednesday night on the planetarium grounds.  We had broken clouds for the first two hours, but we could do observing between the clouds for a while.  Then the clouds cleared and we had skies completely open.  This is a special telescope being used with a "night vision device." A night-vision device is an optoelectronic device that allows visualization of images in low levels of light, improving the user's night vision. The device enhances ambient visible light and converts near-infrared light into visible light which can be seen by the user; this is known as image intensification.  Light amplification with these devices is improved to around 30,000–50,000 times.  We could see nebulae so faint looking through this device that you would have to make hour-long exposures in a camera to see them! It was a spectacular way to view the universe through that device!

 

A Quick Project

Last week on a Wednesday night we had an observing session with our telescopes at the planetarium.  There were a bunch of people there, including two moms with their kids.  There were a lot of telescopes to look through, and eventually they came to look through mine.  Unfortunately, I was using a different telescope with an eyepiece that was much higher off the ground. So the two moms and another woman had to stand on their tiptoes in order to look at Saturn.  I am a great believer that everyone needs to be relaxed in order to observe objects carefully.  So I had a flash, and thought that I should make a platform only six inches high that would be lightweight and could be carried and moved around the telescope easily.  That's why the slot in the center - that's where you put your hand to pick it up and it is well balanced if you lift it  there.  So I found some scrap 1/2" plywood in the garage and cut all the parts out in short order, and then the next day fastened the parts together with wood glue and screws.

It is not a fine piece of furniture, but it is very sturdy and serviceable.  I wish I had used new plywood, though because the finish is a bit rough.  I know people will only be walking on it so what does it matter.  I guess it's a matter of pride that it look good when finished.  Anyhow, it is painted all white so no one will trip over it in the dark.  But when I was done painting it, above, It looked bland.  Well, it IS bland.  Who cares.  Well, I care.  I thought it needed something else.  Maybe something so both adults and children would know it was meant to be stepped on!  And the lightbulb went on!  And my solution is shown below.  I think it makes this a wonderful observing accessory, instead of just some "thing."  I love my new creation!