302/365 - House Reflections

Click the photo to see it on Flickr.

Looking across the portage, a bright house -- or is it a business? -- at night.

288/365 - Quincy Boiler Stars

Click the photo to see it on Flickr.
A contrast to yesterday's photo -- the Quincy #2 rockhouse, as well as its neighboring boiler house, under the stars.

Clear nights when I can stay up late are few and far between, so I jump at the chance to enjoy them when I can!

Starry Engine

Click to view the photo at Flickr.

This is one of my favorite places: the Quincy Mine. Behind the old Hoist Building (where you can tour the world's largest steam hoist), two of the old Quincy & Torch Lake railroad's steam engines still sit, well restored and tended. This is one of them, staying still while stars wheeling overhead.

Stars Through the Rockhouse

Click the photo to see it on Flickr.
Another star trail photo, as I work to refine my technique. These are stars rotating over the ruins of the Isle Royal #6 rockhouse. A massive steel structure once rose above these huge cement foundations, processing rock from the nearby shaft. Trains would pull through the slot between these walls to cart away copper-bearing rock to the mill.

Amusingly, the shaft (safely capped) is currently directly under a major snowmobile route. It's a logical shortcut between the main trail and the highway, and the cap isn't visible under all the snow. I only knew where to avoid it (more out of excess carefulness than actual need for safety) because I've been here in summer so often.

15/365 - Stars Over Houghton

Click the photo to see it on Flickr.
Tonight's photo is being posted late because I've been out all night taking it! This is one in my continuing attempts at startrail photos -- this one is overlooking my current place of residence (Houghton), and my place of employment (Michigan Tech). Two previous attempts were near here, at the Quincy Mine.

This one is a bit different -- somehow, I happened to compose so that there were no bright stars visible on the left, and only a few on the right. I think that the horizontal line is a plane. Let me know what you think!

Technical details: this photo is a composite image (made with Startrails), "stacked" from 136 separate images. Each image was a 30 second exposure at f/7.1, ISO 200. I then edited the image in Gimp, to bring up the contrast in the sky (the brightness of the city drowned out the stars, so they needed a little boost!).

Final thought: the hills of Houghton don't look nearly as steep from this perspective -- but boy do they suck when it snows!

2/365 - Orange Moon

Click the photo to see it on Flickr.
My second photo comes after a full day of traveling and seeing old friends. As Sarah and I pulled in to the driveway this evening, this orange moon was rising from the horizon, with farm buildings in the foreground. It was just as wavy and orange as it looks in this photo (probably from atmospheric distortion). This is a composite, since it's all but impossible to take a clear photo of both the moon, and the (dim) countryside together.

In the meta-365 realm, I did take my camera with me today -- but I left it in my car, after we went with our friends to see some sights. That's kind of contrary to the whole idea -- bringing my camera with me everywhere. Lessons learned...

Quincy Stars - Take #2

Another shot at star trails at the Quincy Mine.
After my first try at star trails over the Quincy Mine, I learned many things about taking long nighttime exposures of the sky. Last Saturday, I headed back up to Quincy to put those lessons into action. In this post, I'll analyze the results, figure out what worked, what didn't, and list some more lessons learned.

Technical Details: This photo was made by "stacking" 144 separate exposures, each taken with these parameters:

• Focal length: 10mm, on my shiny new Nikon 10-24mm
  
• Shutter speed: 30 seconds
  
• Aperture: f/3.5 (which was the maximum aperture available)
  
• ISO: 400

I took the photos using gphoto2 (installation and details), a PTP camera controller program, installed on my MacBook Pro. The laptop controlled the camera via a USB connection. I used the gphoto2 command:

    gphoto2 --capture-image-and-download -I 34

This instructs the camera to take a photo every 34 seconds. Why 34 seconds? Interestingly, this is actually the ideal spot for my computer and camera combination to take photos at the correct rate. There is a bit of a delay when the computer instructs the camera to take the first photo. After that, gphoto2 keeps track of how far behind schedule it is -- and tries to catch up. The result is that the computer instructs the camera to take a photo after about a 1 second delay, just enough to let the sensor cool down.

Improvements and Problems: The purpose of trying this same photo shoot again was to learn from my mistakes last time. Here's a rundown of what I like and dislike about this photo.

• Batteries and time:In many ways, this photo shoot (and the resulting star trails photo) came out much better than the last try. The major change is that my batteries -- both camera and laptop -- were fully charged. This allowed me to get much more than the mere 20 minutes of exposures which I had last time. This time, I got around 72 minutes, leading to much longer star trails.
  
• gphoto Timing: Also, as mentioned above, I significantly improved the timing of the image-taking. In my previous attempt, the camera eventually got out of control (perhaps because of a "backlog" of "take a photo now!" commands), and kept taking photos without the computer being able to download them. The result was "stutters" in the star trails, as I had to reset the camera.
  
• Composition and star trails: The main thing I don't like in this photo is the angle. While the shaft-rockhouse is quite dramatic, the stars are moving in circles -- much less interesting than the big ovals in the original photo. In addition, the wider angle of the star trails in the original emphasized the movement of the stars and made them appear longer.
  
• Inability to take more than 30 second exposures: I still haven't found a way to both control my camera via my laptop, and take photos longer than 30 seconds. No camera control software -- whether gphoto2, Nikon Camera Control Pro, or any others -- will let me operate the camera in "bulb" mode, which allows exposures longer than 30 seconds. The result is that I have to shoot at a very wide aperture (f/3.5) which reduces depth of field, and ISO 400 which adds a lot of noise. Anyone knowing of a reasonably cheap way to take time-lapse photos with a shutter speed of longer than 30 seconds, please let me know!
  
• Colors and clouds: Finally, I don't like the colors as much in this photo: the moon was new, resulting in no reflections on the shafthouse and less light in the sky. As a result, the colors of the shaft house were mostly reflections of cars and streetlights, which resulted in much less pleasing colors. In addition, clouds running through the sky resulted in brown smears in the stacked photo -- be careful to find a truly clear night!

Lessons Learned: Here's a big summary for the aspiring star-trail photographer:

• In gphoto2, use an interval slightly longer than your exposure. This lets the camera keep up with the computer's commands, and also lets the sensor cool (avoiding weird "purple clouds" in photos.


• Charge your batteries! ... duh.


• Use Incandescent white balance. Unless you feel like processing 100+ RAW files, you'll need to choose a good white balance ahead of time. Incandescent white balance makes the sky appear bluer and more natural.


• Shoot when the moon is moderately full. This helps highlight objects in the photo and adds more light in the sky, helping get more natural photos with better light balance.


• Get there early, set up, and focus. Another big problem was that I waited until the sun was mostly down to set up my rig. As a result, focusing was difficult (and sharpness wasn't helped by the large aperture). I also had a hard time composing properly, since the viewfinder was much too dark to see through. Get to your location early, set up your equipment, focus and compose. Then set everything to manual mode and leave it until you're ready to start.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment!

Purple Bridge

The Portage Lake lift bridge at sunset
The lift bridge is always a popular subject for Copper Country photographers, and I'm no exception. The wild colors of the sky and reflections caught me this time -- they're different in every season.

Quincy Stars - Take #1

Star trails over the Quincy #2 - click for a larger size.
I've always enjoyed playing around with long exposures, and for a while I've been working on my star trail photos. Taking a single very long exposure is impractical, because the sensors of digital cameras overheat and add bright purple clouds of color to the image. So, the solution is to take many shorter photos, and "stack" them together into one photo.

In order to take that many photos, I needed a way to control the camera. Some cameras have built-in features to do this, but in my case, I used gphoto2, which I previously used to take some time lapse videos of the Portage Lake Lift Bridge.

This photo is a stack of 40 images, each of which was a 30-second long exposure at f/3.5 and ISO 400. Things did not work out perfectly: my camera went crazy at one point (gphoto isn't perfect), and after 20 minutes my battery died (I failed to fully charge it before!). I've learned a lot, so I'm planning to head out and try again next weekend!

Lift Bridge Time-Lapse (Part 2: Fun with Photo Slicing)

The Portage Lake lift bridge sunset, together in a single photo
Here's my next bit of fun with time-lapse photography: putting it all together in one photo! This photo is made up of 36 vertical slices. Reading from left to right, they span approximately 1.5 hours centered around sunset -- from 8:30 until 10:00 pm. These are the same images that went into my time lapse video of the lift bridge. The sharp edges are a bit annoying, but that could be solved by taking even more photos (something I hope to do shortly).

For those interested -- how did I do this? I can certainly tell you how I didn't do this: I definitely did not slice and assemble 36 photos by hand! Instead, starting with my 36 image files, I used magic -- actually, ImageMagick -- to do this for me. First, I ran the following shell script:

#!/bin/bash
off=$[0]
for ((i=2861;i<=2896;i++)) do
   convert -crop 107x2385!+$off+0 DSC_$i.jpg Crop_$i.jpg;
   off=$[$off + 107];
done

This script runs through the images, which were named DSC_2861.jpg through DSC_2896.jpg, in order. For each of them, it uses ImageMagick's convert command to crop the image into a single slice, 107 pixels wide and 2385 pixels tall. Each slice is 107 pixels to the right of the previous image's slice, so that the slices would all line up. I came up with these numbers pretty simply: 107 is the width of my images, divided by 36, while 2385 is the height of my images. After that, all I had to do was

convert Crop*.jpg +append bridge.jpg

which stitches the images together horizontally into a single image. (That's what +append does. Using -append stacks them vertically, in case you wanted to do a vertical time-lapse photo.)

The Council of Dave

At night, the Council of Dave gathers on Quincy Hill
Lo, the Daves are Legion, and on cloudless nights they appear on Quincy Hill and pass judgment upon those who have sinned against our land. Yea, fear the council of Dave, all ye who throwest thine old washers and dryers down in the Quincy ravine! Beware, spray-painters of ugly graffiti (especially ye who cannot spell very well)!

So yes, I had fun with my new LED flashlight. It took me several nights to get this just right, but boy was it fun! This photo is taken from the scenic turnoff on US-41 near the top of Quincy Hill -- that's Houghton you can see in the background. I probably frightened more than a few drivers, when I was kneeling behind these posts, shining a bright bluish light on my face, in the middle of the night. If you're interested in the secrets of this photo, ping me in the comments -- I'll keep quiet for now so as not to spoil the surprise.

Edit: Having been up for a few years, I suppose that it's only fair to share the secrets. I wrote a detailed account of the taking of this photo on Digital Photography School: The Council of Dave: fun with light painting. Enjoy!

Quincy Ghost

A ghost watching over Houghton in the moonlight.
I enjoy night photography -- moonlight gives everything a wonderfully strange appearance. During the last full moon, I snowshoed out onto the old Quincy rock pile and played around with my camera and tripod. The rock pile has this strange arrangement of stones put together by someone, a lovely place to sit and rest. One of my photos came up with a strange result... this ghostly figure watching the Houghton hillside. Who could it be? What long dead miner or farmer could this be? What does it all mean?

Well, not to keep you in suspense for more than a paragraph -- it means that I was having fun with long exposures. This was one of the results -- a ghostly self-portrait, overlooking Houghton. Look carefully and enjoy!

Centennial by Moonlight

The Centennial #6 rockhouse in the moonlight.
The night after my moonlight outing to Quincy, I thought I'd keep up the spooky full-moon fun. My stop that night was the old Centennial #6, north of Calumet. The Centennial once had the honor of being the last operating mine in the Keweenaw, but it's long since closed.

In the moonlight, Centennial was just as spooky as Quincy. There are fewer ruins there (almost everything is modern-ish frame buildings), but the area felt very isolated. There was also a screech owl hunting for prey whose call kept echoing across the site.

This photo is one of the few I managed to capture before the moon was totally hidden behind a heavy cloud bank (some clouds are great for dramatic photos, too many just block all the light). I think that the muted colors make it look like an old postcard. If you look close, you can see the stars moving across the sky.

Quincy in the Moonlight

The Quincy #2 shaft-rockhouse under the full moon
This past weekend was the (almost) full moon. So naturally -- I went out taking photos at night! I've done this before, in the winter, and it's amazing. The moon was pretty, but the fast-moving clouds were awesomely dramatic.

Also: Quincy at night is extremely spooky. The ruins lit by the full moon are ghostly enough, not to mention the sound of dripping water in the shafts covered by bat cages. Oh, and the bats. But above all else, the old #5 boiler house has a piece of loose metal which scrapes against other metal beams in the wind. It's about as creepy as you can get when you're out, alone, without any other lights, on a very windy night. I loved it!

Next stop: Centennial!