Photo Sharing

Obligatory awwwww for this picture.  

During our trip to the Canadian Rockies in 2015 (Jasper National Park to be exact), we ran into a load of wildlife.  Lots of squirrels and chipmunks and the like.  But also bigger things like the hoary marmot and elk (sadly no caribou).  But by far, the favorite of ours was the pika.  These industrious little critters are only found in a few habitats in the world.  Generally, high altitude rocky locations with grasses or other small plants.  They spend their entire summers gathering bundles of these grasses and plants and stash them away in boulder fields for them to feed on during the winter.  They're about the size of a small grapefruit and have a high pitched "eep" squeak they make as they're darting around in the boulder field.  They're also uber cute, especially when they have their cheeks packed and grasses hanging out of their mouths.  

In order to try and grab a photo of one, my wife and I sat down near the trail in an area with some grass where we had seen a pika earlier that day.  Sure enough, one came running around.  Eventually getting close enough to snap a quick photo before it darted off again.  Right as I pressed the shutter, it let out one of the characteristic "eep!" squeaks, making it look like it was smiling for the camera.  This ended up being one of my favorite photos from the trip.  

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Because it's fresh and Mitsuru posted right away, I'm sharing another pika pic.  Deal with it...

This was a different one than the last photo, there were a couple of them running around the boulder field we were in.  It's funny, they're known to be a little mischievous and steal from each other's food stashes.  When one gets caught, they chase each other around and "eep" at one another.  

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This image is much less cute than a pika.  But impressive none-the-less.  It's a photo of Taipei 101 from the ground, at one point, the worlds tallest tower.  It is in Taipei, Taiwan.  When I visited, it was no longer the tallest (currently #9 in the world) but still touted the worlds fastest vertical rise elevator.  The ride from the 5th floor to the 89th floor observation deck takes less than 45 seconds.  Topping out around 60 km/hr straight up (just shy of 40 miles/hr).  The other really interesting aspect of this building is that Taiwan is a very active geologic area and prone to heavy typhoons.  The engineering that went into every part of this building is amazing.  Chief among them would be the "tuned mass damper."  In short, this is a giant weight (660,000kg, 1.4M lbs) that is suspended high up in the building.  As the ground shifts, the mass dampens those movements to keep the center of mass of the building from shifting rapidly.  The tuned mass damper recorded it's largest deflection just yesterday after an earthquake struck the area.  Photo taken Sept 2014.

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Here's a bit of a unique look at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.  This was taken from Lands End Park just South-West of the bridge itself.  It's a nice park to wander around it.  On the north side, it meets the bay.  On the west side, the Pacific.  There's lots of really nice overlooks and access areas down to the water.  I'd highly recommend checking it out.  Easy walking around the park.  Easy to/from public transportation.  Taken July 2014.  

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I'd love to visit Japan during the cherry blossom but alas, I'll have to settle for US cherry blossoms...  

Having some time to kill in Rochester, New York a number of years ago with some colleagues, we wandered around downtown a bit.  We hit up a famous hot dog place (I have no idea what it was called, hadn't heard of it).  The food was fine but we ended up with an hour or two to burn still.  So we made our way to the George Eastman Museum.  It is located on the estate of George Eastman, founder of Eastman Kodak.  (yes, it's that Kodak)  They've turned the estate into a shrine to the medium of photography and we were hoping to get a tour.  It was mid-day mid-week and very few people were around.  After finding out the tours were surprisingly expensive, we just decided to walk around the beautiful grounds instead.  Many well manicured gardens, nice walking paths, bright sunny day.  

We happened upon a beautiful tree in one of the corners of the property and after struggling to take a photo I was happy with due to the sun and weird shadows, I decided to embrace the light and shoot right into the sun.  The effect was pretty neat with a few fun artifacts showing up.  There's the lens flare which are the orange, purple/blue, and green splotches on the top half of the photo.  These are mostly unpredictable and are artifacts of light bouncing around in the lens.  Then there's the starburst/sunburst that resulted from the sun being partially obscured by the branch/flower petals. 

Fun photography fact, the number of arms in the starburst/sunburst is directly related to the number of aperture blades present in the lens.  I'd love to retake this image with my newer lens which has many more aperture blades and would create a starburst with many more arms to it.  To replicate this effect, "stop down" or shoot with a large f number.  F16+ for example.  Then position the light source directly behind an object.  Now move subtly just as that light source peeks out from behind the object.  It takes some trial and error, different amounts of covering/peeking changes the effect quite a bit.  This can be done for any direct light source.  Sun, street lamps, etc...  You can see another demonstration of it in this post with hundreds of light sources.  (Might need to zoom in to see some of them.)  Fun with cameras!  


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I was in Dallas TX for work a while back.  Mrs. Lurker flew down at the end of the week and we spent the weekend wandering around the Dallas/Ft Worth area.  (Ft Worth is a fun way to kill some time if you've got it, Dallas is boring imo.)  One evening, after grabbing an early dinner, we made our way to White Rock Lake on the north east end of downtown Dallas.  After a short walk around the bustling park, we were treated to what I'm quite sure was the best sunset I've ever seen.  The atmospheric conditions were perfect, the cloud cover was sporadic, and positioned perfectly.  As you'll note in the photo, we had sunlight reaching us from two places.  Direct from the sun (or bouncing off the bottom of the cloud cover) and from above the low hanging clouds bouncing off the higher altitude clouds.  This multi-layer sunset is one I've only ever seen once before and it wasn't nearly as spectacular as this one was.  We stuck around for the afterglow as well which turned the sky various shades of blue, pink, and purple depending on the altitude of the clouds.  In the photo, you can see the skyline of downtown Dallas in the distance.  I have this photo printed as a triptych on canvas hanging on my living room wall.   Be sure to zoom in on the photo...

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Okay I am assuming I can share pics too :P  
So these are part of the lower Himalayan trek I did last summer :)  

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Bhuto said:
Okay I am assuming I can share pics too :P  
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Certainly!  Just follow the rules...

TheCreepyLurker said:
Share your best!  Give us the story behind it.  

Limit, 1 photo per post.  No double posting within the same day. 
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Near my house is a nice little regional park.  It's basically just a watershed full of hills, valleys, and dense trees.  It's a great little nature preserve.  One day (before the little lurker was around), I had some time to kill and wanted to poke around a little deeper into the park.  It's not huge but there is a defined trail system.  I wanted to get off trail.  So I grabbed shoes I'd be fine getting wet and wandered off-trail until I got into some cool spots.  This was one of them.  A simple drainage area with logs, and sticks, and leaves.  Plenty of water around.  I grabbed a few photos of the little waterfall but also saw the cool moss that was growing on the log in the foreground and wanted to find a way to get both in the image.  In hindsight, I wish I had gotten a lower vantage point for this shot.  Oh well.  Next time.  I have no idea what kind of plant it is.  But it looks cool...  Open the full picture to see the most detail. 

I probably could have done a better job with the focus and focus stacked the foreground and background.  I think this was probably a single image with minimal adjustment.  But it's possible to take multiple exposures with focus points at different areas and then stack them together to get a photo that sharp from front to back.  The necessity in doing this depends on the lens you're shooting with, the aperture you're dialing in, and the distance you are from the subject.  These things impact your depth of field.  A larger aperture number (smaller aperture) gives you a wider depth of field but sometimes you need to shoot a bit more open to get more light.  This makes your depth of field shallower making it difficult to have things from the foreground and background in focus at the same time.  </rambling>  Ask me if you want to dig into the specifics.  :)  


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TheCreepyLurker said:
Certainly!  Just follow the rules...
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TheCreepyLurker said:
Share your best!  Give us the story behind it.  

Limit, 1 photo per post.  No double posting within the same day. 
Click to expand...


Even you don't follow the rules anymore. We all like the pictures and stories though so we don't care :D

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A little bit grainy and an old picture but I took this picture in West Palm Beach at the end of the day after passing my SCUBA certification a few years back. A beautiful end to a really exciting and eventful day :)  

 
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TheCreepyLurker said:
Git gud.  Double posting means two posts in a row...  
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Definitely had it in my mind that you meant a post a day...

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A few years back, I had a summer internship in Indonesia working with an environmental non-profit in Indonesian Borneo (Kalimantan). Most of our work was split between a local indigenous village and the protected forest area they were trying to establish. The forest was a part of a larger area they used to occupy but due to increased deforestation locally and the rise of palm oil plantations, what is left of their traditional forest is about 3-4 hours away from the village by car and it is not an easy path for a car to travel. When travelling back down one day, we got stuck while trying to avoid areas of the dirt path that had eroded away from the storms. An hour long walk back to the rangers station and several hours of effort later, we managed to free the car. This is a mid-rescue effort photo, where you can see everything they used to try and give the tires some traction and the ropes attached to the front of the car.

 
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Nizam Adrienne said:
Definitely had it in my mind that you meant a post a day...
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You've now posted several times in this thread without a picture...  wtf? 

EDIT: @Nizam Adrienne, I updated the rules to be more clear...  

Limit, 1 photo per post.  No double posting within the same day.  

Definition: 

Double posting = posting two times in this thread without someone else posting in the middle.  

Translating the above rule: 

You can post as many times in this thread with a photo per day, as long as someone else posts after you.  

If no one posts after you, you can double post as long as it is the next day.  
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During one of my winter adventures a few years back on an ungodly cold morning, we suited up before sunrise, hiked down to Lake Superior, and waited.  The lake was in the process of freezing over (it eventually did that year, they had to bring in icebreaker ships to keep shipping into Duluth open - it only happens once or twice a decade that Lake Superior freezes over).  Overnight, large sheets of ice would form in open water.  Winds would then blow those sheets around and they would crash into the shore/more stable ice.  It would fracture in all kinds of cool ways (with all kinds of cool sounds) and leave an otherworldly frozen landscape.  The sun started coming up and glinting off of the icy shards (see what I did there?).  In the distance you can see "sea smoke" which is basically fog that forms over the lake because the water is actually much warmer than the air temp.  It's a really cool phenomenon that I've been fortunate enough to enjoy often during these winter adventures.  I've titled this picture "Icy Uprising".

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TheCreepyLurker said:
You've now posted several times in this thread without a picture...  wtf? 
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I don't know what you're talking about. You're the only one in here who's posted without a picture 👀

To continue my adventures in Indonesia, here's a picture of an orangutan I was fortunate enough to be able to see while I was there. The rangers there said we were very lucky to have been able to see it as they hadn't seen one in six months. Definitely one of the cooler moments of my trip there, being able to see one of these guys in the wild.

Fun fact: orang hutan (where orangutan come from) means "forest people" in Indonesian.

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Remember that regional park I mentioned in a prior post?  During a different visit to the park, I had gotten there before sunrise hoping to capture a nice shot of the sunrise.  There's a nice overlook about a half mile hike straight uphill from the parking lot.  (Unfortunately it was too foggy and overcast to see the sun.)  While waiting for the sun to come up (between swatting mosquitoes) I watched cars run up and down the road below.  Noticing how their lights were carving out the arc of the road, I decided to try a long exposure shot.  After trying out a few exposures with random cars coming by, I dialed in what I felt most happy with.  Conveniently, as I watched the next car come into frame, another car coming from the opposite direction did the same thing and made it through the frame in the same amount of time as the one I was watching.  A bit of patience and a little bit of luck really paid off.  

For the photo geeks (are there actually any of you out there or am I just doing this for myself?), the details on this image are: Aperture: ƒ/8 Shutter:  25s  Focal length:  194mm  ISO: 100  I was zoomed in using my 55-250 lens to narrow the frame to just this corner in the road.  Knowing my camera throws a lot of noise in long exposure shots, I had to shoot at a low ISO value.  This also allowed me to lengthen the shutter time a bit to make sure the cars could make it completely through the corner.  


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My first Picture in here ^.^

This one is from when i was hiking once, in Eastern Switzerland (Graubünden)

What you see is my view from the top of one of the many mountains there.

Fun fact: 60% of swiss territory is covered by the alps and another 10% by the Jura. So 70% of big rocks to climb on. ^.^

 
My first picture here - mostly owing to the fact that I’ve never taken a good photo in my life.

As many of you know my significant other is French and we regularly go back to France to visit her family. On my most recent trip I was fortunate enough to visit the castle of William the Conqueror and was able to take this photo from one of the towers. The left hand side is a little dark but I love the view towards the right of the picture.

Thanks to @TheCreepyLurker for encouraging me to share :)

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Mostly to demonstrate to @nashnwo0 that you don't need a fancy camera to take/share photos, here's one I took on Feb 12 of this year.  It's a picture of my driveway after I finished shoveling.  Taken with my phone.  

What matters to me most about this image is not its technical perfection (very not technically sound), it's not about the light (it was an overcast day, early in the morning with no clear light source even), it isn't even what I'd consider a good image compositionally (no clear subject).  

But why I do want to share this photo is the story it tells.  You don't need me to write a dissertation to know that that is a shit-load of snow.  That it was a lot of hard work to keep the driveway clear for Mrs. Lurker and I and our visitors.  At the end of the driveway on the left side, you see a dark triangle.  That's the corner of a 68-gal garbage bin hiding behind the snowbank.  On the right side you see the top end of a post.  That's my mailbox.  We had several more snowfalls after this photo was taken.  I ended up needing to climb on top of the piles at the end of the driveway and knock them down because I couldn't throw the snow high enough to clear the piles any longer.  I'm 6' 2" and they were both over my head...  

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EDIT:  @nashnwo0, I'm challenging you to post something.  Tell us a story.  Put an image behind it.

 
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