cellio | Entries tagged with photos

Someone on my previous post mentioned pictures, so I'll go ahead and record the starting state of the garden.

This isn't the Pennsic entry; this is the "you can see nice things when there isn't city build-up in your way" photo post. :-) Mostly sunsets, interesting clouds, and the full moon. ( Read more... )

We had a storm around dinner time. It passed, and I was treated to a really nifty sky right around sunset. I've never seen that shade of purple, and the "condensed puff" of the clouds is pretty neat.

I took these pictures over a span of about five minutes, starting ten minutes after nominal sunset. There are still bright spots in the sky, where it looks like the sun might be shining through, which I assume is caused by some sort of atmospheric refraction or something. Just...wow.

These pictures are straight off my cell phone, no alterations. ( Read more... )

We recently visited Living Treasures Animal Park, right off the PA Turnpike. It's nearby for us, but we'd never heard of it until we got a recommendation. It's a family-run cross between a small zoo and a petting zoo, with care for the animals being a top priority.

They have typical domesticated animals that kids (and others) can interact with. I call this first one "pet me!" and the second one "feed me!":

friendly goat

They also have some more exotic animals, like wallabies and bison, and some you definitely shouldn't treat as interactive, like brown bears and alligators. (According to their web site, their alligators winter in Florida.) Visitors can feed many of the animals; they sell appropriate feed, and exhibits are labelled with what you can feed them. For most animals they provide a chute (and a few can eat out of your hand); for the small primates they had a bucket on a rope with pulleys, so you could deposit food, send it over, and watch them take it. We didn't do any feeding ourselves, but there were some families there with kids who were very much enjoying this.

They had some miniature horses, which I've seen pictures of but haven't seen "live" before. They're proportioned differently from full-size horses and also from ponies. (They do pony rides for the kids, by the way.)

The enclosures were large and well-maintained, and the animals always had an "escape hatch". (And thus, there were some we didn't see, which is fine.) Even in late morning, those that wanted it found shade.

alpacas (?) in shade

There was also a large pond with ducks, geese, and two black swans. I took this picture at maximum zoom with no other adjustments. Yes, the water really was that color -- never did find out what plant life was doing that.

two black swans, one preening, one getting ready to dunk

During Chanukah I tried taking some better pictures of the candles, as I mentioned then. Here are a few more successes from later days. ( Read more... )

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 )

Monica

garden start (pictures)

skies over Pennsic

neat clouds

Living Treasures Animal Park

a little more photography

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)

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