cellio | Entries tagged with photos

When I've taken pictures of the chanukiyah in the past, I've usually been disappointed by how blurry the flames look. Photographing flames in a darkened room is apparently challenging -- it's not just me. I asked a question about it a while back on the Codidact photography community and got some interesting advice.

I've been experimenting this season. Here's one from tonight that came out decently well:

photo, 5 candles, window reflection

The camera settings were:

Shutter speed: 1/90
ISO: 1600
Exposure: 0 (I don't know what this means; it's a scale from -2 to +2)

The other settings I have available are named:

White balance: (scale of pictograms of sun, light bulbs, etc)
Interval(s): scale from 0 to 60
Focus: picture of flower, 25/50/75%, picture of mountain

I left those set to "auto".

I can make guesses (based on the scales) about white balance and focus, but "interval(s)" has me stumped.

There is a new Outdoors site on Codidact, and they are run a series of (monthly) photo contests. The theme for May is birds, and there are some really striking pictures there. (I did submit one, but really, most of the others are way better!)

It occurred to me that some of y'all would enjoy these. They also have a bunch of questions about birds. (In case you're wondering about the low scores, data was recently imported and it all came in at score 0, so until people browse and vote on the imported data, even good questions and answers will show with low scores.)

The next site to launch will be Photography, coincidentally.

Day 1:
Neis gadol hayah sham. (A great miracle happened there.)

Day 2:
'Al hanissim v'al hapurkan v'al hagvurot v'al hat'shuot v'al hamilchamot sh'asita l'avoteinu bayanim hahem lazman hazeh. (translation)

Day 3:
Mi yimalel gvurot Yisrael,
Otan mi yimne?
Hen be'chol dor yakum ha'gibor
Goel ha'am!

Shma!
Ba'yamim ha'hem ba'zman ha'zeh
Maccabi moshia u'fode
U'v'yameinu kol am Yisrael
Yitached yakum ve'yigael! (translation)

Day 4:
Ma'oz Tzur Yeshu'ati, lekha na'eh leshabe'ah.
Tikon beit tefilati, vesham toda nezabe'ah.
Le'et takhin matbe'ah mitzar hamnabe'ah.
Az egmor beshir mizmor hanukat hamizbe'ah. (translation and more info)

Day 5:
Ra'ot save'ah nafshi, beyagon kohi kala.
Hayyai mereru vekoshi, beshi'abud malkhut egla.
Uvyado hagdola hotzi et hasgula.
Heil par'o vekhol zar'o yaredu ke'even bimtzula. (continuation of the previous day)

Day 6:
Barchuni le-shalom malachei ha-shalom malachei Elyon,
mi-melech malachei ha-melachim ha-qadosh Baruch Hu. (translation)

(Lighting and posting before Shabbat, so you get Shabbat text today.)

Day 7:
לֹא בְחַיִל, וְלֹא בְכֹחַ--כִּי אִם-בְּרוּחִי, אָמַר יְהוָה צְבָאוֹת.

Not by might, nor by power, but by My spirit, saith the LORD of hosts. (Zechariah 4:6, from the Shabbat haftarah reading for Chanukah)

Day 8:
What is the memory that's valued so highly
That we keep alive in that flame?
[...]
We have come this far always believing
That justice would somehow prevail
This is the burden, this is the promise
This is why we will not fail!

Don't let the light go out! (From "Light One Candle" by Peter Yarrow; elision was to fit in a tweet.)

I wrote about this trip in this entry, but it was getting long so I decided to segregate the pictures. I didn't take a lot of pictures, so these aren't representative of the mix of the whole trip. They're just some pictures I thought were interesting.

( Read more... )

Last year I posted pictures of our new kitchen trailer, but (1) I failed to take interior pictures at Pennsic and (2) we've made some improvements in the last year. So here are some more pictures from this year. ( many photos behind the cut )

In light of today's sad news from Paris, here are a few not-very-good pictures I took in 2014.

( six photos )

I visited our main office for a few days this past week. (Sorry to folks I didn't connect with.) I met our two new team members, one of whom is our new manager, and our intern for this coming summer, and I had lots of productive conversations. I also played one game of Caverna with coworkers.

I wondered what airport security was going to be like given the government shutdown. Monday morning in Pittsburgh the line was probably about 15-20 minutes long, but somebody came by to tell us the alternate checkpoint was open and had no line, so some of us went there. All of the agents I saw were polite, professional, and not acting disgruntled. I and several other passengers thanked them for being there despite the situation. Everybody there understood that the mess was not the fault of anybody there and taking out frustrations on the wrong people would be bad. Yay for people acting like adults!

Thursday night at Logan, the first checkpoint I found was closed but the second was staffed. It took me five minutes to get through. Again, people behaved themselves.

Wednesday afternoon our new writer and I took a walk through a park/wetlands area near the office. We saw lots of ducks and one heron. We later saw the heron catch a small mouse; I hadn't previously known that they ate mammals.

( photos )

We had a short team outing (with out-of-town guests) to the national aviary today.

( photos )

Here are a few photos (from Pennsic) of our new kitchen. We brought it back to Pittsburgh to continue to improve it.

( Read more... )

We have chicks. I think we've had them for about a week, but given where the nest is, it was hard to tell until they got large enough to sometimes pop up over the edges. I first saw small beaks on Friday:

This is from today. I think that's a petal from my tree (there are many shed petals in my back yard), which I wouldn't expect to be interesting food.

I took this one using a step stool in my doorway (limited range because of steps), holding my phone up as high as I could and shooting down half-blind. Most of the results were fuzzy.

Are there three chicks or four? I can only distinctly count three, but even with a lot of zoom and some brightening, I can't quite make out what's going on in there.

I know that robins are ordinary, common birds -- I see many around my house every spring -- but watching this family develop over the last few weeks has been a lot of fun anyway. I wish I had a better viewing angle (and been able to see them hatch).

( photos )

Tonight I looked out to see the nest empty, so I fetched the ladder to peek inside. I came outside (with the ladder) to the sound of a bird chastising me loudly (before I'd gotten near the nest). The bird was perched on my fence, watching me, so I've finally seen more than the head and tail.

Yup, robin:

According to what I found in searching, a robin lays one egg a day to a total of four, then incubates them for 12-14 days. So we should get chicks in a week to ten days. Cool!

That reminds me: have a live feed of nesting eagles in Estonia (visible during their daylight). I've only seen one of the adult pair so far, but there's a fuzzy chick in there.

This visitor showed up last week just outside my back door. (That's a porch-roof support the nest is sitting on.) The first few days she took off as soon as I opened the door to enter or leave, no matter how gentle I was about it, but since Sunday my comings and goings have not disturbed her. I assume there are eggs and that protecting them is more important than fleeing me.

I took that picture this morning and the colors are true (no adjustments), though it was in shade. I took the following one this evening and adjusted for longer exposure because it was in shadows (but this one shows more of the body):

I estimate the bird to be about 8" from beak to tail. I've never seen the wings or belly clearly (just the blur of hasty retreat those first few days).

What kind of bird is this? I looked up some sites that list common western-PA birds and, among the pictures I found there, this seems closest to the downy woodpecker. But it doesn't seem especially downy, and those white rings around the eyes don't match any pictures I found. Some woodpeckers have white stripes, so maybe this is just a variation. The beak looks about right for some sort of woodpecker, as opposed to the smaller beaks on some other birds.

A few days ago I saw a double rainbow while at work -- and just a few days after Noach, the torah portion I chanted last week, too. I can't remember seeing one of these before "in person". The primary was pretty bright; the secondary, less so.

( photo (taken through office window) )

I then learned that the traditional Jewish view considers rainbows to be a bad omen. Why would that be, I wondered? I mean, they remind us of the covenant God made with Noach -- remembering a divine covenant is a good thing, right? It turns out this has been asked about on Mi Yodeya (also here).

Part of the answer is that the rainbow indicates there's cause for divine wrath -- the rainbow reminds us and also God of the promise. There are also sources that say that the rainbow looks like part of the divine form seen through prophecy, and we shouldn't be staring at the divine form.

I was going to ask my question before finding those. In doing some basic research to ask my question, I came across something that let me answer a different question. So my curiosity still managed to contribute to the site a little.

N.B.: Many Jews know this but, in my experience, many others don't or just never noticed: God promised in that covenant not to destroy the world again with a flood. Fire, meteor impacts, snowball Earth, and other calamities are still on the table.

I'm slowly sorting through the pictures from our trip. We spent a couple days in Barcelona, where we took two tours: a half-day tour of Montserrat, and a full-day city tour. The latter had lots of architecture by Gaudi. I've collected some pictures. I don't know why Google decided to make the very last photo the first one, nor could I figure out how to fix it, so...meh. One bit of Gaudi is out of place; people will manage. :-)

The last time I used Picasa it looked different. I don't know if people can still comment there, but you're welcome to comment here.

Inside the church on Montserrat:

Some Gaudi architecture:

Part of a ceiling in Sagrada Familia:

These buildings make me think of Hansel and Gretel:

Our director of engineering paid a visit to our local office today. The meetings were productive and didn't have too much growling and snarling.
( photos )

The view last night:

It looked even prettier in the twilight sky, but I didn't have a chance to take a picture then.

I enjoyed this day-long bus tour. Our first stop was Oxford, where the university is made up of 32 individual colleges. Our guide told us that students apply to Oxford and are assigned to colleges, though I think applicants can indicate preferences. Many lectures are open to the entire university, and according to our guide you can study most subjects at most colleges -- it's not like there's a math college and a fine-arts college and so on. Anyway, he took us to one of them, Christchurch.

The dining hall may look somewhat familiar to some of you:

( photos )

A coworker pointed out to me that if we were going to London anyway, we might consider a day-trip to Paris. I hadn't realized that it was only about a two-hour train ride. So we did that.

We booked a tour package that started/ended in London, so they arranged train tickets and the local guide. That was absolutely the right thing for us beginners to do -- and I would not do it again. Lesson learned: book our own train tickets (and get to choose the times and the seats) and either find a local tour or use the on-and-off tour-bus loop. This worked ok, but I would have allocated the time differently.

( photos )

I'm having some trouble with Picasa tonight, so the other two albums (Paris and Oxford/Warwick) will have to wait, but meanwhile, a few pictures from our trip to London in January:
( photos )

For those who remember this XKCD:

With the following mouse-over text:

The next day: "What? Six bank robberies!? But I just vandalized the library!" "Nice try. They saw your plate with all the 1s and Is." "That's impossible! I've been with my car the whole ti-- ... wait. Ok, wow, that was clever of her."

I saw this in the parking garage at work today:

88BB8BB

In the last two weeks we lost both

merle_ and

pedropadrao. I will miss them both. :-(

And there's no good transition from that to, well, miscellany, so this paragraph will have to serve.

I suppose, technically, if you're not sure if a TV show has jumped the shark, then it hasn't. But, that said, I doubt I'll be back for the next season of "Once Upon a Time", a show that got off to a good start in season one, carried it through part of season two, and then started going farther and farther afield of its original context. In addition to links to "the enchanted forest", the land of fairy tales, they mixed in an Arthurian knight (short-lived), Captain Hook, I think a couple other odd ones, and now, in the season finale, it's clear that Never-Never Land is going to be a major factor. If they were doing the work to tell a Gaiman-style story about all these realms being intertwined or some such I'd be on board for that, but it sure feels like they're just making things up as they go along now. Oh well.

Links:

Full moon silhouettes, a really gorgeous video of the full moon rising over the Mount Victoria Lookout in Wellington, NZ. (Link from Dani.)

Best court sanctions... ever! from osewalrus. As Ose says, best use of the term "Red Shirt" in a legal decision. And you thought court decisions had to be dull...

This is great (given that such idiots exist, which is not great). Bill Walsh was riding his bike and happened to be running a helmet-cam when a cab made an illegal U-turn across the bike lane, after being warned that it was illegal, and promptly got pulled over by an oncoming police officer. The video is short and cuts out before we get to see the expression on the cabbie's face, alas.

Feast of the ravens, a photo with an interesting story behind it. What do you expect to find when a large group of ravens congregates? Not this. From shewhomust.

siderea posted an excerpt from (and link to) an essay about libraries, mandatory internet use, and the very poor that is well worth a read. As more and more stuff moves to "online only", whom are we leaving out in the cold? The ones who can least cope, it seems.

I hadn't realized that 3D printing was advanced enough to make medical implants... a year and a half ago. Ok, this was an airpipe splint, but are plastic organs in our future?

Sad cat diary, a video in the general style of Henri (but not just one cat), from Talvin over at DW.

The experiment: I'm not really interested in increasing my use of LJ for photo hosting, so let's see if I can make Google+/Picasa do that for me without too much hassle. ( photos )

We've been to the vet for some followup stuff. In the two months that I've had them Giovanni has gained two pounds and Orlando has gained a pound and a half. My vet would not object if they gained a little more, but obviously this rate of change is not sustainable. I could tell that Giovanni was filling out some (though my estimate was low), but Orlando doesn't seem much different. You can't tell in this picture, but he's pretty scrawny.

Giovanni may have a food allergy (whee!), so we're currently transitioning to a hypo-allergenic diet to see if that helps. So far they're eating the mix of old and new food, though a little less enthusiastically.

And we hit a new milestone last night. Orlando has, for a few weeks, been sleeping at my feet for a couple hours a night and then running off. Last night Giovanni joined us for the first time, Orlando followed a bit later, and both of them stayed all night. Time will tell if this is affection or a desire for more warmth in these cold winter nights.

I've been accumulating browser tabs for a while, so here's a "misc" dump. (Aside: this new LJ "choose your icon by browsing pictures, and by the way we won't put them in alphabetical order or anything nice like that" interface really stinks. Grr.)

siderea posted The Music Theory Song: Intervals (YouTube). For anyone who's trying to work on ear training to hear intervals, and for those of you who already grok that, this video's for you. Really.

12 letters that didn't make the (English) alphabet. I forget where this link came from.

thnidu over on Dreamwidth posted a link to "Earth as Art", which looks to be a nifty photo collection. The link isn't currently working for me, so I'm linking his entry instead of there for now.

More beautiful photography, from a locked post. Warning: gravity alert -- it wouldn't be hard to get sucked in.

Some time back I noticed that one of the regulars in the Mi Yodeya weekly parsha chat drew a lot on Abarbanel and that it sounded interesting. I asked him if he knew of an English translation and at the time he didn't, but more recently someone else who remembered my question pointed me at this adaptation (not translation). This sounds like something I should check out. (And it's kind of cool that, months later, somebody remembered my asking and followed up.)

When atheism is good: a chassidic story, linked by thnidu on DW again.

From XKCD: an exploration of wise men, stars, and paths. What would the trip look like, depending on what star you were following when? I can't confirm the math, but I found it an interesting read. (I don't know why he has the journey starting in Jerusalem, though.)

A map of every grocery store ever. Interestingly, my regular "big shopping trip" store (as opposed to the "grab a few things on the way home from work" store) recently remodelled and deviated from the norms. Now I can't find anything without effort.

And a funny cartoon from gnomi:( Read more... )

It appears that, sometime in the past, someone either taught Giovanni to be a shoulder-and-neck-sitter or declined to discourage the behavior. That's really cute with a 2-pound kitten. Ahem: they do not stay two-pound kittens forever. This is a terrible picture (Giovanni loves to investigate the camera instead of sitting still if he detects it), but to get an idea of scale:

Giovanni on office chair (blurry)

And here are a couple pictures of Orlando:

Orlando did not go into hiding again after the vet visit, and yesterday afternoon he spent an hour or so in my lap in the living room (yay). Giovanni likes my office, particularly the computer desk, but is reluctant to explore the house much -- coming into the room next door while I was watching TV last night was a big stretch, and he's made some brief late-night forays into the bedroom. So far as I know he has not yet been downstairs under his own power. How do I nudge him along in that? I don't want a litterbox in my office forever.

For all the suitable places in the house, particularly for Orlando, I'm surprised that they both tend to sleep under the same chair in my office, concurrently.

Monica

learning to use the manual camera settings

neat bird pictures

Chanukah in eight tweets

a few vacation pictures

Pennsic photos (mostly of the kitchen)

Notre Dame

visit to Cambridge

aviary visit

Pennsic: new kitchen trailer

chicks!

robin update (pictures)

bird identified

backyard visitor

double rainbow

pictures from Barcelona and Montserrat

an outing

Omer, day 30

day-trip: Oxford, Warwick Castle (and passing mention of Stratford-on-Avon)

Paris day-trip

London trip (a few photos)

license plate

random bits

cats, and LJ experiment

link round-up

short-term thinking

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