The Polar Vortex - Star Wings

When I was at the Bisti Badlands/De-Na-Zin Wilderness this April, we decided to leave our cameras for star trail images. The location we chose was the Wings, which is an amazing formation. We set up our cameras each in our own way. I chose a horizontal composition with the pole star being pointed at by one of the Wings. My reasoning for a horizontal image was that I could also turn it into a time lapse. I shot 30 seconds exposures on the built-in interval timer in the camera. I used my Tokina 16-28 mm lens at 16 mm, f/5.6 (to get more of the wings in focus) and ISO 1600. The battery lasted for a little over three hours. We left the cameras and hiked back to the cars to have dinner and returned for the cameras. These were extremely difficult to find as in the mean time the moon had set and this place is a complete maze. Finally with some help of a GPS waypoint and the red lights on my friends' Canon cameras, we were able to retrieve them. At home the fun started. I combined all 300-some raw images in Photoshop in batches of 10 using the lighten mode. I cloned out all the jet trails, sensor hot pixels, and a few distracting meteor trails. I then took the 30-some remaining images and combined them in Photoshop, again using lighten mode, but now using progressively increasing opacity. This created the comet effect you see below.

Moonlight illuminates The Wings formation and stars form trails at Bisti badlands.
This image is also on Flickr, Facebook, and Google+.

I also created some time-lapse movies using the individual frames. If you click through you can get to the HD versions that use a HTML5 (i.e. tablet and phone friendly) display. You can see a in the lens reflection from the very bright moon move in the frame. This disappeared in the composite image luckily.

And this is the same thing but without the pan and zoom of the previous.

I find it amazing how many planes you can see come by. The music was "composed" by me using Garageband.

Two churches

The town of Cargèse has a greek orthodox church as well as a catholic church right next to each other. Apparently the town was settled by greek settlers and has a rather interesting history. I took this picture walking back from the conference I was attending to the town.

Two churches. Buy a print. On flickr. On Facebook.
Nikon D600, Nikon 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 at 42mm, f/5.6, 1/13s, Auto ISO at 2500.

Fourth of July Fireworks slideshow

4th of July fireworks from Jao van de Lagemaat on Vimeo.

These are shots I made of our town's 4th of July fireworks. The music is Calexico's Mid-Town from their album Hot Rail.

Earlier I posted the below quadtich on flickr:

The same image is also on picasa/Googleplus.

Evening in London

I recently spent an afternoon and evening in London coming back from a conference. I shot a few pictures that are best characterized as "grabshots". As always, London was rainy and cloudy. The links go to flickr pages where you can see bigger versions. Here is a typical wet street:



Around the corner from Imperial college I believe. Which is around the corner from the Royal Albert hall.



I like the color in both. Here is the same wet street



iPhone at Waterloo station


The old Vic, one of many theaters in London


No nightly trash pickup:


Nelson looking at the moon


Reflection in the water at the river Thames


The London eye


Panorama on the river Thames. 8 or so images stitched together.


Bridge light and reflections in my lens

Moonlight

I took quite a few pictures by moonlight in the park last weekend. The moon was superbright every night. One set of pictures I found interesting was an image I took at sunset (left), which turned out to have a companion taken later at night when only the moon was out(right):

Check out the larger sizes available on flickr to see the amazing detail captured at moonlight and the clear visibility of the snowcapped La Sal mountains in the background.
Another image I took in another location is the following:

The long exposure causes the stars to be streaked across the sky. Unfortunately I didn't think to walk to the other side of the canyon and try to shoot a north star shot. Clichéd, but fun. Another cool shot is the following one of Mozes and Zeus after sunset. The light here is coming from scattered light from the sun that was long below the horizon and light reflected by the moon visible in the upper right hand side of the shot.

More moonlight shots later when I get around to putting them on flickr.