Late Friday night I went outside to photograph the meteor shower and was presented with a sky full of clouds. While that’s terrible for meteors, it had compensations.
I wound up taking hundreds of shots of lightningbolts. Most were pretty meh, but some were pretty good. I’ve cropped and resized some of the better ones, a small batch after the break. Click to view.
Tonight while out at the far end of a walk several cats came out and were friendly. One is a pretty tiny mommacat with her kittens; but just a few days ago she had herself a great big belly, so I imagine there’s another set of smaller kittens out there somewhere.
A photo from about a month ago as the heat started to build up:
Nope, not a post about SJW’s screeching about an insufficiency of diversity in STEM fields. Instead… photography.
Your average modern decent camera has a white balance setting that allows you to choose from settings such as direct sunlight, incandescent lighting, fluorescent lighting, etc. The idea is that you can get photos that look right even if the lighting is off.
Trouble is, sometimes it’s hard to tell what’s “right.” Below are four late-night panoramas. The two that look “bluish” use the “incandescent” setting; the apocalypse-orange ones use “sunlight.” The latter are the closest to real, I think, in that the clouds and skyglow are lit up by a vast number of sodium incandescent lights. When the white balance is set to “incandescent,” the horizontal panorama looks ok to me, but the vertical one… well, I’m torn. The bluish one kinda looks better (especially the horizon), but the orangish one captures the colors of the Milky Way better.
Opinions?
Boring headline:
Interesting photo attached to MSNBC tweet:
Alternative interpretation of the photo:
Because.
Raedthinn chillin’ in one of his favorite spots, backed up by Fingers.
Fingers gazes with disdain down upon her subjects.
Buttons looks with dismay upon the unwelcome scene of the vet clinic
Speedbump looks up in befuddlement at, well, everything. He’s not that smart.
From the Juno Image Processing Gallery, here’s a closeup of the Great Red Spot on Jupiter. It was taken as a close enough distance that the Spot appears disproportionately large.
Any bets on how long before someone uses this image to claim that Jupiter is flat?
So yesterday I wandered down to the WalMart in Perry to get some groceries. As I approached the front doors, a guy dashed out at a dead run, with a WalMart employee hot on his heels… but the employee basically stopped at the door. Seemed likely to me that it was a shoplifter. I didn’t feel bad about not going to chase the criminal down my own self. I wasn’t all that close, and the guy was *fast.* I’d’ve had trouble chasing him down in my car.
So, that over, I went into the store and did my shopping.
About fifteen minutes later I’m on my way out. As I approach the doors, a car zipped past the doors at an unreasonable rate of speed; following close behind it was a police SUV, lights and sirens going. I figured it was a speeder getting pulled over by the cops. Seemed odd to be that far into the WalMart parking lot, but oh well. A moment later when I stepped outside, I looked off to the left and the car had pulled into a parking spot; the police SUV had pulled in behind it, boxing it in. As I was parked nowhere near that ongoing incident, I gave it no further thought.
I had no more than crossed across the “road” right in front of the WalMart entrance when the same guy I saw earlier went dashing back into the WalMart entrance. With the cop right behind him. Both were moving at speeds that made me feel real, real old.
OK, sez I, this might be worth watching. So I turned around to go back into the WalMart to see what might be going on in there. When I saw through the open doors the same guy yet again, heading towards the exit at a high rate of speed. But this time, before he got to the door the same WalMart employee I saw earlier intercepted him. It was a collision between someone small and fast against someone slow and quite a lot bigger. Speedy McShoplifter hit the ground and the cop was on him like white on rice. As I stood like a damnfool slackjawed toooorist in the WalMart entrance, the police officer managed to get the guy cuffed. That seemed to bring the festivities to an end, took the zip right out of the feller.
After more police showed up and things settled down, I briefly spoke to the WalMart employee. My first bit to confirm was if that was indeed the same guy I saw earlier; turns out, yup, it was. The short story related to me was that he was indeed shoplifting and was chased out, then led the police on a merry chase around town… and then went back to the very same WalMart, apparently “looking for his girlfriend.”
I have the sneaking suspicion that interesting chemistry might be involved.
Because that’s what all the cool kids do these days, rather than making myself useful I took a few photos with my cell phone. Only one was any good, so here it is. There is almost certainly some interesting video of the incident… when the police officer grabbed the runner, a bodycam hit the floor. The WalMart employee I mentioned picked it up and held it afterwards, pointing it at the cop & the perp. That it came unglued when things got interesting is perhaps not a spectacular sign.
Shoplifters do not have my sympathy. Shoplifters who run back into the very store they just got chased out of? Yeahhh… what’s the *opposite* of sympathy?
For years I’ve been trying to find a cost effective way to create a convincing “gold” surface finish on models… not “gold colored,” or “gold paint,” but something that actually looks like gold. Chrome can be adequately taken care of with Alclad and a few other high end paints, and there is a complex system available that seems to do a damn fine job of laying down an actual thin layer of silver, but gold remains elusive.
One substance I recently tried, and was unsurprised to find didn’t work, is the Rustoleum “Mirror effect” paint. If you spray either the gold or silver onto a surface, the sprayed surface just looks like gold or silver paint. but here’s the selling point: if you spray it onto glass, the *other* side should actually look like a mirror. Kind of a neat trick, but not something I generally have much use for… the *outside* of a model is what matters to me, and I hardly need to fill my house with mirrors.
But I did try it out on a few sheets of acetate (or maybe mylar), just to see what the result was… and I was surprised to see it’s actually pretty spiffy. The sheets in question are 12X18 transparencies, printed with black-line diagrams; these were intended for use in creating cyanotype blueprints. But these sheets were abandoned for various reasons… the cyanotypes looked unimpressive, or the subject didn’t seem all that great, whatever. And so they’ve been sitting forgotten over the years. And they were sitting where the cats could get on ’em and scratch ’em up, so they were of no particular use to me. But then I sprayed them with the silver (and the F-1 diagram with the gold) and the results are really quite impressive.
They look perhaps not so much like mirrored glass as really, really polished stainless steel. The scratches and scuff marks – some in the shape of cat paws, because I guess cat paws are rough enough to scratch acetate – actually add a little something to them. Take a look at let me know if this sort of thing seems appealing and worth $10-$20 each for. I honestly don’t know, but they do look pretty interesting to my eye.
These are just the sheets I had sitting around that I’d written off. Obviously I’d do other subjects… the ones on the cyanotype catalog, of course, along with others. The Apollo 11 plaque seems like it’d be pretty snazzy done this way. Seems maybe maps might be interesting done this way. Put into some sort of production, the sheets would of course be newly printed, pristine and printed in reverse, so that the mirroring paint would go on the same side as the black-line ink. This paint is pretty fragile (low-tack tape designed to not pull up paint pulls this stuff right up), so that might mean that large format prints which would have to be shipped rolled might be impossible.
If you are a female cat, there’s no more desirable place to be than right next to or – if you’re ambitious – right on top of a big, fluffy male cat like Raedthinn. This, however, is a situation that Raedthinn rarely approves of, preferring to keep to himself.
