Sunday, April 26, 2009

Cactus and Contrails

I'm still working on getting the June '08 photos uploaded to my Picasa web album. It takes a lot of time to go through all the pictures in the collection, select the ones to upload, and process them to add my watermark. The actual act of uploading is the quickest, simplest step of them all. Google's Picasa makes that step extremely easy.

I haven't been out to take any new photos for a couple of days, which usually gives me a little more time to play catch-up. So, here are a few of the photos I've recently uploaded. The first shot here is a rather simple sunset, but I think that the multiple cactus make it interesting.



Two days later, the sunset started out like shown below. I like shots that show the sun as a big round ball, especially when a portion of it is hidden. If you take a close look at this shot, you can see something else that intrigues me - the bushes in the foreground directly below the sun are softly glowing against the mountains in the background. It amazes me that sometimes, even though all the rest of the foreground looks completely black, that plants that are within a very close distance from the ball of the sun, show up quite clearly.

Actually, when I get almost all of my sunset photos onto my computer and examine them, I find that if I increase the brightness of the entire picture, I can see the details in the foreground. So, the camera is actually capturing more details than shown up in the normal picture. Of course, when I brighten the entire picture like that, then the sky and the sun look way too bright. So, I typically leave the pictures darker. After all, I like the silhouette look.



And, here is a shot a little bit later after the sun had gone down. Yup. Those are contrails, which I find rather fascinating when they are glowing with the sun shining on them. My question is, "Where are all those planes going, anyway???"



These last two shots were taken by the side of the road on my way back home yet a couple of days later. The camera that I had with me on this day was the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ75. This camera has always taken great photos, has a 6x optical zoom, is very convenient to keep in my briefcase.





The only down side to this camera, and those like it, have to do with looking into, at, or toward the sun!! The only viewfinder on point-and-shoot cameras like this is the LCD display on the back of the camera. When you hold a camera like this between you and the sun, you find yourself squiting so much that it is very difficult to see any details on the LCD.

On the other hand, the Fujifilm camera that I always carry with me now is quite a bit larger, but, in addition to the LCD on the back of the camera, it has a small LCD built into the viewfinder, that acts like the viewfinder on an SLR camera, except that you are not actually looking through the lens, but only at the LCD inside the camera. Holding the camera up to your face in this way, blocks out the sun, and allows all the detail to be seen in the viewfinder.