I visited the Snowy Range on Saturday morning and found an angler fly fishing in Lake Marie. It seemed like a perfect time to try some infrared photography. Shot on my modified Fuji X-T1, these are some of the edited shots I liked. Right click on an image to open in a new tab to show full screen.
As I typically do the Saturday before science camp here in Wyoming, I drove up to the Snowies west of Centennial, Wyoming. The light this morning was beautiful and I was pleased with some clouds in the sky as well. It was quiet, calm, and beautiful.
I also think I saw fossilized stromatolites!
All of these images were shot with an iPhone 15 Pro Max.
More to come in the following days as I process images from my other cameras.
We really had pretty good weather after lots of worry about clouds in the forecasts leading up to April 8! Ken and I photographed our 3rd eclipse together and the near solar maximum corona did not disappoint! Here’s a quick 1st pass edit of our star followed by an image as processed by Lightroom’s AI de-noising software.
The third image is one that I took a bit more time thinking about and processing. It’s one of the first images I took during the eclipse with the shortest capture time. Less of the outer corona is visible, but this allows for more details to emerge in the atmosphere closest to the Sun—including some indications of solar prominences!
ISO 800, f/7.1, 1/500 s, Fuji X-T3, 300mm, processed in Lightroom
We’ve been planning to shoot this event together for about 6 years now and today we did it! From Petroglyph National Monument (near Albuquerque, NM) we witnessed a rare event for any human—an annular eclipse of the Sun. Still processing photos and the experience but here are a few early edits of the eclipse and a couple infrared shots of the landscape surrounding us. Glad to experience this with my good friend and fellow photography enthusiast Ken Latman!
I’m spending two weeks in the Chicago area at a physics modeling instruction workshop and I decided to have a bit of touristy fun in the city on an architecture focused river cruise (https://www.architecture.org/). Although I’ll probably work on some more photos once I get home, I thought I’d share this one now.
It’s been a long time since I picked up either of my cameras to use for something other than pandemic teaching, but today I went to the Square in downtown Bowling Green. It was nice to reacquaint myself with my lenses and both cameras. These are a few I shot that I was mildly pleased with. (The B&W was taken with my infrared converted X-T1.)
The last time I saw a naked-eye comet was in 1996, comet Hyakutake. As I recall I was visiting my papaw and his kind spouse Juanita at their home in southern Ohio. They lived “out in the country” and so the skies were particularly dark. It was an amazing sight! That was before my photography days however so I have only memories.
Over the past couple of nights however I decided to go searching for comet NEOWISE. NEOWISE is another naked-eye comet if you are lucky enough to have very dark skies. Here in Bowling Green however, there’s plenty of light pollution. But…since I have a camera and I knew roughly where to look, I went to a local city park and set up my wide angle to see if I could locate the comet. After some newbie Photoshop work to remove some distracting power-lines, I got an image with the Big Dipper (part of Ursa Majoris), the International Space Station (streak below the Dipper) and comet NEOWISE at the bottom nearest the trees.
Once I located the comet, I switched to a longer focal length lens to get a closer image of the comet and went back the next night with another lens to do the same. Manually focusing was interesting, but luckily Jupiter was also up on the other side of the sky and provided a bright distant target to focus on. I happened to grab a shot of it as well with all four Galilean moons. Left to right they are Callisto, Ganymede, Jupiter, Io, and Europa.
Conditions were not ideal…lots of light pollution from the park, the city of Bowling Green, and a bit of leftover sunlight as I was photographing not too long after sunset. (Also, the temperature and humidity were both annoyingly high.) What a sight it must be from a cool, dry, high mountain! In any case, go take a look—you don’t need a fancy camera, just a pair of binoculars should do the trick even if you’re near a town!
I finally did it; I converted my Fuji X-T1 to a dedicated infrared camera. I’ve been wanting to try infrared photography for awhile and now I can use all my Fuji lenses to play with 720 nm wavelength light! The good folks at https://kolarivision.com/ did the conversion for me and I’m pretty happy with my initial tests in Washington, D.C. Since chlorophyll reflects infrared, most plants look white in the IR and landscapes look pretty different. I hope to try some portraits soon as well! Enjoy some of my initial tests!
