Dobson Central Photography

My wife and I have encountered three of these in our house in as many years. At a quick glance, it sort of resembles a scorpion of some sort. After further study though, I started thinking they were some type of spider. It wasn’t until this past weekend, that I took the time to get out my macro lens and spend some time taking some photos of it. There looks to be eight legs, however the longer legs look like they are being used as antennae.

Up until today, I still did not know what this creature was. I contacted someone at the Nogales port of entry who works for APHIS today. He was quick to identify this animal as a tailless whipscorpion. While I was taking photos of this, I swore that it looked just like that spidery creature in the 2nd or 3rd Harry Potter movie. Guess what? It is the same creature!!

Click the thumbnails below to see larger versions.

I mentioned the colorless sunrise that happened after the meteor shower. Well here it is. Nothing worth writing home to mom about, but in case you were wondering what it looked like. There appeared to be more color in the original, than the resized version below.

Click the thumbnail to see a somewhat larger version (not the original version).

As promised, here is the one capture of the meteor shower. As I mentioned in my previous post, it’s not impressive by any means. You’ll notice lots of red dots throughout the photo. These are not stars. This is caused by the image sensor in the camera. There is a noise reduction on the camera, however I opted not to use this option this time around. I’ve used it in the past and it works, but severely slows down your photography time. For those that have never used this, what it actually does, is take two pictures, each with the same exposure time. So, for this thirty minute exposure, I would have had to wait for an hour, just to see this shot. I opted not to use this because I can do the same in photoshop, by taking the same exposure time with the lens cap on and applying the difference to the two photos. It works the same way, as far as I know. I did this on a few photos with my old camera and it worked fine. Had this photo been deserving of this process, I would have applied it, but alas, you get to see the image sensor noise.

This photo has been scaled down to be web friendly. Click the thumbnail to see a somewhat larger version. The original size is far larger than this.

Overall, the whole experience wasn’t bad. I was concerned with cloud cover ruining the photography shoot. So, when I got out of bed at 3:10 am, the first thing I did was go outside and checked the sky. A waning gibbous moon was out and very few clouds. Cool. No need for a flashlight, there’s plenty of light to light my path in the desert.

I was out of the house by 3:40 am and on site by 4 am. On site, but not on location. I had to walk a good distance in the desert to find a decent spot. I forgot how spooky it is out in the desert in the dark of night, away from civilization. Yes, I had the moon to light the path. . . to a certain extent. Getting away from the city lights, really took the brightness away from when I first poked my head outside. I should have brought a flashlight, but I could still make out the trail, so I continued on.

The hooting of the owls kept me company, but all the noises as a whole kept the hair on the back of my neck standing up. The rustling of little critters on each side of the path as I walked, the occasional bird getting spooked and flying off within several feet of me, all added to the spookiness. Even my own foot steps in the dirt seemed loud and ominous in the quiet of the desert night. The bats. Yes, there were several bats that would occasionally appear in my eye sight. All flying around, looking for insects.

The birds and bats, I could identify with. I knew the sound of the birds. I saw the bats. The rustling in the weeds, on the other hand, was something else. It wasn’t large noises, but rather subtle swishing. Swishing? That’s the best way to describe it. Not a large enough noise to make a person stop in their tracks, mind you, but it was a noise. So, I chalked it up to possibly small lizards (even though I knew it wasn’t lizards) and kept going up the trail. Still, something else bothered me.

I believe it was the unknown sticks up ahead or off to the side of the trail and wondering if it was a rattlesnake that probably bothered me the most. This also started my mind to think of all the things I couldn’t see. Things that could be hiding in the distance, listening to me come up the trail, smelling me, waiting for me. Yes Virginia, there are mountain lions and bobcats that prowl at night for sustenance. Wait a minute. . . I could be that sustenance.

I kept my tripod in my strong arm, thinking I might be able to defend myself from a mountain lion with it. Yep. A four legged empty stomach with claws of fury. Yeah, a tripod would really stop that. . .

A half mile into the desert I finally found what I was looking for. A nice sized saguaro cactus with arms. Not the best arms, as I was looking for one with larger arms, but arms nonetheless. It was good enough to have in the foreground of the photo. I also had the Santa Catalina mountains in the background and a good sized portion of the sky to capture the meteor shower. After framing the shot, I had half of the frame for the sky and the cactus just to the right of center. Perfect.

I took a five minute exposure. As best as I could tell, everything looked a little soft. So, I played around with the focus, but it wouldn’t move. I tried the opposite way, still nothing. Maybe this isn’t the focus ring. Ah, the new lens. The focus wasn’t on the end of the lens, like my last lens that was stolen. After a minute of stumbling, I finally found it up close to the camera.

I still needed to focus on something. I set it to auto focus and was going to let it focus on the saguaro. For night photography? It’s a trick I’ve used in the past that works. Set the lens to auto focus and after it’s finished focusing where you want it, turn off the auto focus. The focus will remain where you wanted it for the rest of your shots. The problem was, I didn’t have a light source for the camera to see where to focus. So, I tried using my flash in one hand to light up the saguaro, and let the camera focus with the other hand. Still no luck. Ok, let’s set it to infinity. I couldn’t read the lens to see if I was set on infinity, the spot where time elapsed night photography focusing should be. So, I took a guess from memory and started the exposure. It wouldn’t be until after sunrise that I would find out that I was correct.

During the first five minutes of my exposure, I started thinking that I’d never get a sharp photo if I had been wrong. Hold the phones! I started thinking I had a mini flashlight in the truck. A half mile way. More noises. More darkness. More unknown. There was nobody in the desert to steal my gear, so I braved the noises and went back to the truck. Along the way, I missed my turn off and walked an extra football field, only to return back the same distance.

No flashlight in the truck. Ah well, dawn is coming and I better get back soon, otherwise I’d have an overexposed sky. So, I make the half mile trek back to my location. More noises. Even though they were the same noises, they were just as spooky the third time around as it was the first and no tripod to defend against claws of fury. Yeah, like that was ever going to work.

I get back to the camera and stop the exposure. Nice exposure, a little soft focus on the cactus and the sky and exposure looks like I shot it an hour in the future. There’s lots of light from the sunrise that hasn’t happened yet. A 30 minute accumulation of light during my exposure. I captured some nice star trails. But where were the meteor streaks in the sky? I never caught a single one. It would have been a nice shot if I had, as they were going the opposite direction of the stars trails. At this point, I can only imagine how it would have turned out.

Since sunrise was only a few minutes away at this point, shooting another exposure would only prove the same results. So, I pack it all up, and decide to walk further out in the desert, hoping to get a shot of some birds or the sunrise if it decided to be a good one. I took a few shots of a colorless sunrise. Nothing spectacular. I listened to the birds waking up and continued watching bats flutter around, eating mosquitoes that probably had fed on me earlier in the night. The sounds of their echo location was somehow calming and pretty cool to listen to.

My adventure was over. The sun was well on its way to rising over the mountains. People would be arriving soon to do their daily workout of walking trails or bird watching or whatever they do at the crack of dawn. My experience of the meteor shower, albeit wasn’t what I expected, was definitely an experience I won’t forget anytime soon. It’s nice to get up before everyone else and experience the unknown. I got to see at least half a dozen falling meteors in the sky. I also learned a valuable lesson. No matter how well you know your equipment or how well lit the moon is, always pack a flash light. I can honestly tell you, I will be looking to purchase a small, powerful LED flashlight to add to my equipment.

I’ll add my single shot of my experience to the news later this week, after I’ve had time to process it. If anyone managed to capture the Alpha Auragids Meteor shower, I’d love it if you’d share your photos with me.

For those of you that are into night photography, a rare event is about to happen on September 1st, 2007. The Alpha Aurigids meteor shower will be coming and it won’t be back for another 70 years. The event will be going on for several days, but it’s predicted that Earth will be in the climax of this event at approximate 04:33am PDT. The meteor shower will be visible to the naked eye and best viewed by those on the west coast of the U.S. (including Alaska and Hawaii) and also in the western provinces of Canada.

What is the Alpha Aurigids? From seti.org

Some time in the 40 years or so around 4 A.D., comet Kiess (C/1911 N1) passed by the Sun, ejecting a cloud of dust particles. The comet returned in 1911, after completing one orbit. The dust particles were pushed by the Sun’s light into slightly wider orbits and have been returning ever since, forming a thin ongoing stream of dust that usually passes just outside Earth’s orbit. On occasion, the combined gravity of the solar system’s planets moves this dust trail into Earth’s path. Earth encountered this 2000-year-old dust in 1935, 1986, and 1994, causing a meteor shower known as the Aurigids.

This very rare shower will occur again on 1 September 2007. A brief shower of tens of meteors will radiate from the constellation of Auriga, many as bright as the brighter stars in the sky. The Earth will be in the thick of it during the one hour centered on 04:33 a.m. PDT. The shower will be visible by the naked eye from locations in the western United States, including Hawaii and Alaska, from Mexico, and from the western provinces of Canada.

This unique encounter could provide insights about how long-period comets loose large dust grains and about how to translate the observed dust trail crossing into physical data about the parent comet, and even provide more evidence for the hypothesized “pristine crust” of a comet. This crust would be the product of cosmic ray bombardment during the years when the comet was in cold storage in the Oort cloud.

This is definitely something worth seeing, and hopefully capture a few keeper photographs. I hope I can get to bed at a decent time so I can drag myself out of bed at the crack of dawn.

I had a fun weekend. We took a drive down to Lochiel, Az this past Friday for the weekend and I was able to get in some photography time along with riding a Honda 250 4-stroke quad that my sister now owns. We were going to stay the whole weekend, however, due to the weather and some uncomfortable sleeping arrangements, we all decided to come back a day early. We plan on going back in a few weeks, once everything starts to get green down there. I already have a couple of spots picked out for some possible landscape photos for our next visit, if the weather and sunsets are better. I’ve posted a couple of photos in the gallery from this trip.

For those of you who enjoy getting out into the country and are avid bird watchers, there are a whole slew of birds down in Lochiel. Campgrounds are available over at Parker Canyon lake if you want to stay a few days. Lochiel is about a half hour drive away and it’s all open country. It was in the open country where I was able to photograph the mule deer. Lochiel is the first spot in Arizona that I have ever seen this many turkey vultures and peregrine falcons at one time. There were a whole bunch of other birds that I wasn’t able to identify or photograph but plan to, if opportunity presents itself and the birds will stay in one spot long enough. I didn’t get to see any owls this time around, but I did hear them at night. I also managed to capture a peregrine falcon in flight (below) and a cute looking calf. The falcon wasn’t good enough to enlarge so I didn’t put it in the gallery. Even though these aren’t in the gallery, they’re worth sharing here in the news. Click on the images to see the larger version.

I just returned from a family vacation in San Diego a couple days ago. Overall, the trip was great. Tiring, but great. It’s amazing when you go on vacation, you always feel more tired and need a vacation from your vacation when you return. The weather was awesome. I believe it was in the mid 70’s while we were there, and Tucson was averaging 110 degrees. I didn’t get to spend a lot of time photographing what I like. Most of the time it was spent taking family snapshots at Sea World and Lego Land. While at the beach on our last day, I did get a few shots of some seagulls and pelicans. Coincidentally, we ended up sitting next to another photographer at the beach. Her kids and my son ended up spending a few hours playing, so it was pretty relaxing for us to just kick back and enjoy the quiet afternoon. Overall, I’d like to go back to Mission Beach and just shoot some photography down by the boardwalk. There appears to be lots of photo opportunities down there.

Since we arrived home, I haven’t had much time to process any photos yet. The following morning, I was back up at 4am and went downtown shooting more architecture shots with my mom. Later on in the day, we threw a BBQ/Pool party for the family and today I was helping my sister move. So, even though I’m on vacation, it seems that we have to go back to work, so we can get back to our regular schedules and get things done again.

Hopefully everyone had a great 4th of July. In the next week, I hope to have some time to process the photos and post some of the good ones from downtown. Stay tuned. . .

I’ve had a few days to play around with the gear and ultimately, everything is good. Here are just a few things I thought I’d share my opinion on.

1. Canon’s 30D camera is great and I’m still experimenting with all the features available to me. I went out shooting the other night and used the mirror lockup feature. I love this option, although I have to admit, I did get burned by it a few times. I’m still not quite used to pushing it twice to take the photo. The sound of the shutter release fooled me several times and it wasn’t until 30 seconds was up, that I realized the mirror lockup was disengaging and I didn’t take a photo.

2. I haven’t tested the Bogen-Manfrotto 676B Digi Monopod out yet but it appears as if it will do the job when I need it. It doesn’t fold down small enough to fit in the camera bag, which is my only complaint. Aside from that, it’s light and it should work just fine.

3. Canon’s Professional Gadget Bag (1-EG). I’m not sure what they were thinking when they said it can fit two SLR cameras and 5-8 lenses. There’s no way I could fit all that in there. The 100-400mm lens is too tall for the bag, but if I rearrange the compartments a little, I may find that I can lay it down nicely in there. I haven’t taken the time to try it yet.

The bag is great and larger than the last bag I had, but to fit two SLR’s and 8 lenses, I believe, is impossible. If anyone purchases this bag to carry two bodies and all their lenses, they’ll be sadly mistaken. Still, the bag is large enough for most of my equipment and I’m happy with it to use on day trips and small vacations. For extended vacation trips where photography is the main subject, I’ll be using a backpack.

The insurance check came in last week for all of our stolen property. This past weekend I was able to replace all my camera gear off of B&H Photo Video. I’ve already received questions on whether or not I was going to buy the same camera. I quickly thought about it, but I could not see buying a camera that is already out dated. I looked at the Canon 5D and of course drooled over the 1DS Mark II again, but they still aren’t in my price range. The 5D was a lot closer, however, I still have my eye on the Mark II, even though it will be quite some time before I shell out $8,000 for a camera.

So, what camera did I go with? I went with Canon’s 30D camera. Years ago, I sort of regretted buying the 300D. It wasn’t because it’s a bad camera. In fact, it was a very nice camera to make the switch from film to digital. The down side with the 300D, for me, was the fact that I outgrew the camera features after the first month. I expected it to be rich with high tech features that would take me a while to figure out, since there really wasn’t much to shooting film. There were several extra options I wish I had, that the 10D offered. Shortly after purchasing the camera, the 20D was released. Once I saw the features on the 20D, I knew I should have waited. I know, hind sight is 20-20, however, I don’t regret purchasing the 300D at all. It was a fine camera until it was stolen, and truthfully, I would have used it until it no longer worked. If the specs hold true, that probably would have been another couple of years (users report between 10k and 17k photo limit on the shutter, but Canon says between 50k and 100k). The same reason why I did not go with the new Digital Rebel XTi holds true as well. I prefer to have the features, rather than an extra 2 megapixels. Printing 20×30 sized prints is more than enough for me. Matter of fact, I never even considered the XTi, so I can’t say that it didn’t have the features or the durability as the 30D.

Other than the camera, there won’t be a lot of new gear in my arsenal. I wasn’t able to replace the mini tripod that I had purchased several years ago. Instead, I ended up purchasing a Bogen/Manfrotto 676B Digi Monopod. For the cost that the insurance covered for my mini-tripod, this was the closest thing I could find that could handle the weight of the DSLR and lens (10lbs) and compact down close enough to the size of mini-tripod. I just hope I have room for it in my bag.

The 30D also does not have a wireless remote control. I was disappointed to find this out, especially with today’s Wi-Fi technology. So, instead of something like Canon’s RC-1, I had to purchase Canon’s Remote Switch RS-80N3. It’s funny in a way. When I switched to digital, I was a little disappointed that I wasn’t able to use a cable release and had to go wireless. Now that I’ve been wireless, I’m disappointed I have to go back to using a cable. Still, I’m sure there’s a reason why a cable is needed for night photography, but as I said, we’re living in a Wi-Fi age and I can’t seem to figure out the reason. Maybe someone can enlighten me on why we have to be tied to a cable on such a new camera.

The only lens that is new, is the one that came with the camera kit. I opted not to go with the kit that comes with the 28-135mm lens or the cheesy 18-55mm lens. I went with the little more expensive kit that comes with the 17-85mm Image Stablized lens. I’ve had a chance to use this lens at work and I quickly liked how the lens handled. Unlike the 18-55mm that came with the Digital Rebel kit, this lens produces photos that are crisp and not soft.

Lastly, I went for a larger bag to carry everything with. This is the one thing I’m still up in the air about. I purchased the “Professional Gadget Bag”. The 1EG bag. It’s supposedly able to carry 2 SLR’s, 5-8 lenses, a flash and accessories, however I’ve read mixed comments on this being able to hold that much. Still, if it can hold all of my gear, I think I’ll be happy. As happy as I can until I purchase a rugged backpack before my trip to Alaska in a couple more years.

All in all, I think I’ll be happy with the new gear. Time will tell, as it arrives in just a few short hours from now. If you have any comments on the camera bag or monopod, or any of the gear for that matter, please feel free to post a comment.

If you have a few minutes, you should check out what’s in store for linking photos together. Note that this isn’t just limited to photos. Newspapers, books, and probably just about anything you can think of in the future may be linked together, on a world wide scale.

It does make me wonder though, how copyrighted/digital rights material will be protected from being linked with this. With stories like the lady who’s upset with Google Streets with having a picture of her cat on the internet and wants it removed. I imagine we’ll eventually be hearing about how people thought their personal photos weren’t available to anyone surfing the internet when they used sites like Flickr, Smugmug, etc.

You can read up more on Photosynth at Microsoft Labs