On Monday, October 4th, a large reservoir filled with toxic red sludge in western Hungary ruptured, releasing approximately 700,000 cubic meters (185 million gallons) of stinking caustic mud, which killed many animals, at least four people, and injured over 120 – many with chemical burns. The 12-foot-high flood of sludge inundated several towns, sweeping cars off the road as it flowed into the nearby Marcal River. Emergency workers rushed to pour 1,000 tons of plaster into the Marcal River in an attempt to bind the sludge and keep it from flowing on to the Danube some 45 miles away. The red sludge in the reservoir is a byproduct of refining bauxite into alumina, which took place at an alumina plant run by the Hungarian Alumina Production and Trading Company. A criminal probe has just been opened by Hungarian authorities.
With dozens of spacecraft currently orbiting, roving or otherwise and traveling through our solar system, I thought it would be interesting to get a general snapshot in time, using images from NASA and ESA spacecraft near Mercury, Earth, the Moon, Mars, Saturn and a few in-transit to further destinations. Collected here are recent images gathered from around our solar system, at scales ranging from mere centimeters to millions of kilometers.
A photography technique that frequently catches my eye is the use of silhouette – placing a subject directly between a primary light source and the camera. The effect can be painterly or haunting or evocative. It can break a subject down to basic ideas conveyed only by line and shape, where an individual might appear iconic. Collected here are a handful of recent photographs from around the world, where we can only see the outlines of the subject, our minds (and the captions) are left to fill in any details in the darkness.
“Earth From Above” is the result of the aerial photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s five-year airborne odyssey across six continents. It’s a spectacular presentation of large scale photographs of astonishing natural landscapes. Every stunning aerial photograph tells a story about our changing planet.
On my recent vacation we were back at our old digs, where I had gotten the previous shots on my DLSR, and set up to use my Exilim high-speed camera (EX-FH20 model). We got a visitor within a day, and some more action over the course of the week. Mostly females, though it’s tough to say if it was just one repeatedly visiting or not, and I did spot a male, with its prominent red patch on his throat, on one or two occasions. After discovering that reaching for the camera and turning it on usually scared them away, I went for the option of mounting the camera on my Gorillapod and placing it on the table in front of me, requiring only a click to turn the camera on (it tended to shut off during the wait for a visit to the feeder). I also left it running while I stepped away, and then scanned the footage for evidence of a visit. The drawback of that option is that 5 minutes of elapsed time is more than an hour of footage at 420 fps, and almost three hours at 1000 fps. That’s a lot of data to sort through. The fixed targeting of a tripod caused some missed shots when the bird would hover about a foot away from the feeder, but the alternative was more missed shots. The difference between this and shots “in the wild” is that you know where the subject is going to be — at the feeder — and don’t have to track it as it flies. And you know it will be flying, unlike the many potential subjects who just sit there until you run out of patience and stop filming. That’s when they decide to jump or fly.
I got shots at both of the faster frame rates, along with some stills using the burst mode, which captures 40 frames in a second.
Here’s a sequence of stills from the burst mode, turned into a movie
Now we go to 420 fps
and finally, on to 1000 fps. This last movie is even better at showing the distinct change in the pitch of the wings as the bird moves away from the feeder, hovers, and then flies away. Which is pretty cool.
Note that all three movies should represent between a second or two or so of elapsed time. 420 fps = 14:1 and was 37 seconds long with some dead time at the end, and 1000 fps is 33.3:1, with a playback of 40 seconds. I slowed the frame rate of the stills down to 15 fps when I converted the sequence to a movie, to make it last longer than one second. Even so, the flap rate seems very slow for that sequence — I suppose it’s possible there’s aliasing going on, and/or my settings are different from what I thought they were. Other still sequences show more flapping. The sound they typically make jibes with what I get from the internets, that the beating is somewhere in the range of 20-200 Hz; it was this low-pitched fluttering that was my first indication that a visitor was nearby.
I did get many more shots, but uploading them to youtube is a bit of a pain — the upload generally craps out at least once, which makes me reluctant to try too many large files. I have had limited success with the java option which supposedly lets you restart a stalled upload (finally got the 420 fps movie shown here to upload; I had originally uploaded a shorter clip).
If you want to see how the pros do it, go here. Better shots, but they put in a whole lot more time and have better equipment at their disposal.
Photographer Charlie Hamilton James placed the camera in a waterproof box and set it up in the pond, wired to an infrared trigger that fired when something crossed its path. This image was the result of several weeks of patient monitoring.
This is the lighthouse at Barcelona, NY (on Lake Erie), and was taken by my then-pre-teenage niece in 2006. We were out geocaching and I handed her my compact camera and put her in charge of taking pictures. Good enough camera so that the original is 100 dpi at about 12″ x 18″ or so. I printed it up on poster paper and sent it to her (Remembering to add a copyright notice; I think she got a kick out of seeing that on the poster.) I’m invoking fair use — it’s only fair since she used my camera. And besides, I’m non-profit.
Anyway, I’m headed back to that general area for the 95th Jones family reunion, and I may not have internet access while I’m there. If that’s the case, you’ll have to make do with the couple of posts I have in the queue, and I’ll have to make do with visiting with relatives, photography, geocaching, reading and card games.
