Category: Photos

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Full moon, mostly red except for a whiter edge at the upper left.

The evening was hectic, and I almost forgot. I had literally just put my son to bed when I remembered, “The eclipse!” We went out to see if the sky was clear.

Clouds were rushing across the sky, but for the most part, it was clear, and we had a perfect view of the moon looking like a dark brown chunk of rock in the sky.

Update: It wasn’t quite this red to the eye, it was more of a deep brown, maybe slightly brick red. Probably a matter of retina sensitivity vs. camera sensors.

(Then I spent 10 minutes fighting with camera settings while he went back to bed.)

Update: I went back out about an hour later to check out the view as the moon left the earth’s shadow, and caught these two photos, taken about the same time with different exposures so that you can see either the lit portion of the moon, or the part that’s still in the earth’s shadow.

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When I first started paying attention to solar ice halos, I read about tangent arcs. But this is the first time I'm sure I've *seen* one.

A diffuse bright V-shaped light in the sky, slightly redder on the lower edge, with a faint arc of light extending downward from the center.

When I first started paying attention to solar ice halos, I read about tangent arcs. But this is the first time I’m sure I’ve seen one. The tangent arcs appear above and below the sun, branching out from the 22° circular halo (which you can see here, very faintly), and change shape depending on how high the sun is in the sky.

It was late afternoon, and the sun was behind the next building over. I ended up snapping a shot with my phone, wishing I could have grabbed a better camera, but the Pixel 2 caught a surprising amount of detail once I adjusted the brightness to bring it out. (No, the sky wasn’t this dark!). It’s a far cry from the G1’s photo of a very blue (and blurry) set of halos 10 years ago, or even the Galaxy S4’s colorless rainbows at sunset four years ago.

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I suggest that a deep orange moon right before Christmas be called a Pumpkin Pie Moon.

Orange moon in a night sky above a darkened horizon with city lights.

I suggest that a deep orange moon right before Christmas be called a Pumpkin Pie Moon.

I was coming home shortly after sunset, got to the top of a hill and saw this deep orange moon, flattened near the horizon. By the time I found a place to stop, it had risen high enough that it was mostly round.

Composite of a background shot (the moon was waay too bright!) and a zoom photo of the moon. I apparently moved a little bit, so the wire passing in front of it doesn’t line up exactly.

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Four versions of the same photo.

  • One taken with my phone, which has a deep depth of field.
  • One automatically “enhanced” by Google from that phone photo.
  • One taken with my phone in portrait mode, which simulates a shallow depth of field.
  • One taken with my ancient film SLR camera, with a low F-stop to have an actual shallow depth of field.

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We got the negatives and scans back from the two rolls of film we shot with the old manual film camera. Despite the damage to the case, it seems to still be light-proof, as the second roll of film came out about as well as the first.

It was an interesting experiment. We mostly took night/indoor photos with the tripod and handheld photos outdoors in daylight. He’s not used to focusing, so a lot of his photos are blurry. The light meter app on my phone seems a little off in sunlight, so our outdoor photos are all either over– or under-exposed. (The zinc-air batter has since shown up, so with luck we’ll be able to get more accurate light readings with the next roll.) But it gave some of the photos a retro feel.

Here are a few of the better shots, plus one of the light-polluted, smoke-filled skies of Los Angeles with enough stars to recognize Cassiopeia.

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Google has a new camera mode on its Pixel phones called Night Sight, for handling low-light conditions. The short version is that instead of taking a long exposure, it takes a series of short exposures and stacks them to avoid motion blur from hand movements (plus a lot of additional processing). The long version is fascinating. My Pixel 2 already takes better low-light photos than I would have expected, but I couldn’t wait to try out the new feature when I learned about it. When the updated Camera app finally hit the Play Store, I had to give it a try. Two high-rise office buildings at night. This is adjusted slightly to keep the colors from being too light. And it actually isn’t the best example, as it turns out the nighttime city scene already has enough light for the existing HDR+ mode. I’m going to have to try it on some darker scenes somewhere, but it’s still pretty cool. After the cut I’m posting a version with the phone’s regular mode, and the unaltered Night Sight photo. You can see they’re pretty close, but the Night Sight version picks up a bit more of the color, and it’s a little brighter. Continue reading →

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The 7YO was looking through the closet the other day and found my old camera bag. Inside it: the old film SLR camera that my grandfather gave me when I was around 12. It’s older than I am, a Sears camera that appears to be a rebranded Ricoh Singlex TLS from 1967. It’s completely manual except for the light meter.

And I expect it will work perfectly once I put some film in it.

As a teen I used it take photos of family, landscapes, spaceship models, stars, photo essays, monuments, even a space shuttle landing. He showed me how to develop film and slides, and make prints in his home darkroom.

It was my main camera for several years, until I got tired of carrying it around and went back to using a point-and-shoot camera. But I still miss having such effortless control over the focus, exposure and aperture. I keep telling myself I’ll eventually get a DSLR and recapture that.

Exam

Anyway, I showed him how to handle it, how to focus and set the F-stop and shutter speed, how to open it, load (imaginary) film, remove the lens, and see the iris as he opened and closed the aperture. We set it for a long exposure so he could watch the shutter open and close. He also found the tripod I’d given up looking for a while back, and once he was done inspecting this one, he hooked it up to a newer camera.

The problem is, he really wanted to try out the camera, but we don’t have any film. I don’t think I’ve bought film in almost 15 years, since I bought my first digital camera. You could buy film in any grocery store when I was younger, but it’s been relegated to specialty shops and online stores over the past decade. I figured I could find it online easily enough. But whose film is worth getting these days? And where to get it developed?

Tracking Down Supplies

Some of the more serious photographers on Photog.Social (a Mastodon instance focused on photography) shoot film, so I asked for suggestions there. I’m going to have to explore Film Photography Project,, which looks fascinating!

Film was easy to find, but then there was the battery for the light meter. You can’t get the same kind of battery anymore. It turns out that old cameras like this one used mercury batteries because they produce a very consistent voltage instead of starting high and trending downward over their lifetime. But, you know, mercury. Not something you want seeping into groundwater from trash. They haven’t sold them in the US since 1996.

I could use the camera without a light meter. I’d just have to figure out the exposure on my own!

As it turns out, Zinc-air batteries have a similar discharge curve (but a much shorter life), and there’s a size that’s designed as a replacement for this one. OK, there’s that problem solved.

So, film and battery have been ordered, and are in the mail!

This should be interesting…

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