Of Macro Photography and Depth Of Field

Hiked well into the forests around Mt Wilson today. Quite a trail up there to Chantry Flats.
Caught these little scenes while I was walking around.

Mt Wilson Webcam-A Closeup & Alternate Views From The Cam

Many of us enjoy the Mt Wilson webcam. My wife and I like to drive up there to get up and away from the valley. On this day Donna had great luck with butterflies, and I took a look around at the scenery and the observatory itself. You can see the webcam up top facing away and you can see they have the famous solar telescope working. Next we have views in other directions from Mt Wilson.

Mt Baldy

San Bernardino & San Gabriel Mountains

Looking out to sea

Downtown Ciudad De Los Angeles just poking out of the haze

100 Inch Telescope at Mt. Wilson

I love the look of the mechanism. The rivets, the huge axle in the middle, all the wires. Then of course we do have the sheer history of the Mt Wilson Observatory. I used my Bogen "Magic Arm" to attach my camera to a rail near the viewing window. That let me use a longer exposure. Any flash would have just bounced off the glass.

Hummingbirds Revisited

At Mt Wilson's Cosmic Cafe, the Hummingbirds feed, fight and play. Really fun to watch worth buying lunch just for the show. I just had to put the 7D to the test. Forgive the soft focus, the birds are FAST!

This is a collage of one birds approach to the feeder. I had the camera in manual focus, high ISO, and a very fast shutter, a 4/000th of a second. The camera was set to shoot at it's maximum eight frames per second. The collage was edited and assembled in Picasa 3.8

9/11 Anniversary Edition

Ordinarily I keep politics and religion out of the blog. Neither are subjects I prefer, apart from brief forays into news photography, as when I covered a Tea Party rally and a May Day rally. This anniversary is different. This time we have ethnic tensions and an angry populace. Little to no effort to understand the people.Yet look at the efforts we make to understand the cosmos.

This image is a solar telescope. We met the men who work there had a nice talk.

The theme today is Fire To Renewal

Today was a day of deliberate meditation and contemplation for me and my wife. As I have said, my church has no walls nor roof. I simply choose a place of beauty to think, meditate and relax. Today I chose high ground, at Mt Wilson. Due to road closures the best route was through Big Tujunga Canyon, the victim of the deadly Station Fire about a year ago.

The route goes through countless miles of ashed and charcoal forest and then transitions from burnt and bleak to beautiful and regrowing. I like the inadvertent metaphor the day just happened to provide.