Lights and Lenses
Moon over San Francisco, October 29, 2014. While at the Exploratorium. Shot with 300mm lens and cropped. First night trying to photograph the moon.
It seems that I save up for photography purchases, and always get them a little too late. At the end of 2012, it took 4 years to save enough saved for a dslr camera, but not before my summer teaching in South Africa. Imagine all those beautiful hiking/scenery photos and safari animals photographed on something better than and iPhone 4. Since then, I have been saving for a GoPro (waterproof, HD, tiny, the possibilities are endless!) and a nicer telephoto lens for my dslr. While I wanted the GoPro first, I ordered a 75-300mm lens the day the Blue Angels returned to San Francisco for Fleet Week. I love seeing the air show so much I saw both weekend shows while they were here. Unfortunately, my telephoto did not arrive in time to catch stellar shots of sound-barrier-breaking plane, but I did have been doing more of sunrise, cloud, cityscape, and night-time photography since then.
A few days ago, Adrian and I attended a lab members event at the Exploratorium. Not only was it game 7 of the World Series, but It was a night with the astronomers learning about urban astronomy. We learned about how the brightness of stars are rated and the identification of some summer constellations and asterisms. The city lights were bright that evening, lots of orange for the Giants, as well as the nightly display on the Bay Bridge. The perfect opportunity to play with manual camera settings.
After the lesson with the green laser pointer (I am sad that mine is missing) we looked through a hand-built telescope (possibly 9' high) at the Ring Nebula N57 in the summer triangle (Near Lyra). Things aren't as brightly colored as they are on the internet. It was just a fuzzy image of dots - I mean stars. Mars was beautiful and so was the moon.
As we move deeper into fall and winter, our bank of south (south-east) facing windows have been showing up spectacularly pink sunrises. I often find myself staring at the various cloud formations, and bringing my camera to the balcony for a couple quick shots.
Playing with manual settings on the dSLR. Bay Bridge, Treasure Island, and a ferry. Taken at the Exploratorium.
The clouds and view of SOMA and China Basin... I think.
