Posts in Category: night
Fleischmann’s Glass Frog
Fleischmann’s Glass Frog: Canopy Lodge, Panama, July 2022 — One of my favorite things to do in the tropics is to go out at night with a flashlight looking for frogs (and whatever else we find). I was particularly eager at the Canopy Lodge in Panama because Glass Frogs live on the property. I have seen a few different species of Glass Frogs in Costa Rica, but only when Cope has brought them in for photography at his place. I was hoping to encounter one “in the wild” in Panama. Tino, my guide at the Lodge, was pretty confident he could find me some around the ponds on the far side of the stream, and indeed he did…three individuals and a couple of egg clusters. Fleischmann’s Glass. Frog is one of the smaller Glass Frogs…at under one inch, the smallest I have seen so far. All Glass Frogs shelter on the underside of leaves in the rain and it had just stopped raining when we went out, so we did a lot of peaking under leaves. These were hiding along the small stream that runs out from the lower swimming pool/pond. The egg cluster was about 20 times as big as either frog. There are fertile eggs in the cluster, and infertile. The tadpoles first meal will be the infertile eggs. The call of this Glass Frog is a sharp “wheeet” and, as you can see from the inflated call sacks, they were calling almost continuously…trying to attract females and defending their small territories. Sony Rx10iv at 330mm to 600mm equivalent. Program mode with my custom birds and wildlife modifications and multi-frame noise reduction. Taken by the light of a led flashlight. Processed in Pixelmator Photo and Apple Photos.
Comet Neowise
I had my first looks at our new comet last night. The sky was not as clear as I might have liked, and the mosquitoes were horrific until it got totally dark, but it was an experience not to be missed. I am not totally happy with any of the photos, but if we have at really clear night anytime before the comet begins to fade, I will put what I learned last night to good use. 🙂 If you are interested in seeing or photographing the comet, I would advise not even trying until the stars are visible. Though it is just barely visible to the naked eye, it is easier to find using pointer stars, which will give you a much better idea of where to look. It is almost exactly half way down to the horizon, in a line that extends down from the lowest star in the bowl of the big dipper…but still much higher in the sky than I anticipated. Sony Rx10iv from 24mm to 300mm equivalent. The first two are manual exposures, 6 seconds, and 10 seconds at f4, auto ISO in the Multi-frame-noise-reduction mode. The wide angle shot is in Auto Low Light mode. Processed in Polarr and Apple Photos. Kennebunk Plains Nature Conservancy, Kennebunk, Maine.
The Mystery! ???
I am not going to tell you what this is an image of. Maybe it is obvious. Maybe it is not. Let’s see. 🙂
Samsung Smart Camera WB800F in Low Light mode. 4 stacked exposures. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.
Vegas Nightview
After a long day at our yearly National Sales Meeting, which we always do in the days before the SHOT Show in Vegas, I came back to the hotel and made video loops for the booth for the show, and processed the few pics I had had time to collect during the day. Yesterday I put my little Canon SD100HS in my pocket and did manage a few snaps on trips back and forth to the hotel during set-up for the meeting. After my processing, I looked out the window, pretty much for the first time, and, of course, had to dig out the SX50HS to try a few hand-held night shots of lights along the west end of the Strip.
This is shot is in Hand-held Night Scene Mode. The recorded ISO is 6400, but it is actually three shots taken in rapid sequence and stacked. The Digic 5 processing engine in the SX50HS attempts to process out some of the noise and and some of the camera motion compared to one long exposure, and it seems to do a pretty good job. No one in their right mind, two years ago, would have believed you get this kind of shot with a P&S, especially without a tripod.
I used –1 1/3 EV Exposure Compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Some work on the highlights and whites.
5/19/2011: Night at the St. Francis, St. Augustine FL
Experimenting with the Night Landscape mode on the Nikon Coolpix P500. Night Landscape uses the fast capture capability of the Back-illuminated CMOS sensor to take a number of exposures in extreme low light and then stack them in camera to produce a single shot with increased sharpness, better color detail, and somewhat lower noise. There is also a Tripod setting, which uses a single exposure and aggressive noise reduction. The handheld mode is more attractive for general shooting, but it does require some processing time in camera.
This old inn in St Augustine was on my way back to the car after the opening festivities at the Florida Birding and Photo Fest. Besides the interest of the scene itself, I wanted to see how the camera would cope with the mix of bright lights and ambiance. The shot did require some additional noise reduction in Lightroom, and some fiddling with shadows and highlights…but I am impressed by the camera’s ability to get this shot handheld at all!
Nikon Coolpix P500 at 23mm equivalent field of view, f3.2 @ a nominal 1/15th second @ ISO 280. Night Landscape mode.
Processed in Lightroom as noted above.
7/25/2010
Night Lights and Intelligent Design
Happy Sunday!
With a 6:46 am flight out of John Wayne International in Santa Ana CA, I was up early and outside the hotel waiting for my taxi. The little ornamental lake in the development, surrounded by the early lights of the buildings and with low clouds behind, catching some of the city light…well…I just had to try. Flash off, camera steadied on a convenient concrete post along the shore, standard Program mode. I took several shots.
Though this could have been a black and white shot…I really enjoy the little red highlights in the water!
Which just goes to show that beauty is where you find it. It does make me wonder though, if the architects of this office and condo development in urban Southern California saw this in their minds’ eye when they drew in the lake? Personally, I tend to take things like this as intelligent design, rather than random chance. I think the architects foresaw the possibility of beauty in the nightscape and planed accordingly.
Which is the way I look at creation itself. If I am wrong…well…no harm done. I get to enjoy the beauty either way. If I am right…well…then there is an aspect of respect…an acknowledgement that a beautiful mind has been at work…and a sense of kinship. After all, the architects only created what they thought others would find beautiful. They counted on my being enough like them to see the beauty they envisioned. Otherwise, why bother? And so it is, I believe, with the creation and the creator. If that adds a dimension to my enjoyment of the beauty, well, I think I am the better for it.
Canon SD4000IS at 28mm equivalent @ f2.0 @ 1/13th second @ ISO 1600. Programmed auto. (This is impressive image quality for ISO 1600 on a pocket P&S! Evidently the the back-illuminate CMOS sensor lives up to its hype. And there is another kind of beauty, as I see it, in that!)
Straightened in Lightroom (balancing on top of a round post is not ideal). Corrected for vertical and wide-angle distortion using the new tools in Lightroom 3. Added Contrast and Clarity. Sharpen narrow edges preset.
From Zeiss Trip CA 2010.
5/4/2009
Night Carnaval Corpus Christi
They put me on the 17th floor of the Omni Hotel on the waterfront in Corpus Christi for the ABA Convention. This is the view from the balcony. This is apparently a permanent carnival.
Image Stabilization and ISO 400. I used negative exposure compensation to save the bright lights. Cropped and pumped up the Saturation and Vibrance in Lr.
Sony DSC H50 at about 120mm equivalent. F3.5 @ 1/30th @ ISO 400. Programed Auto. -1.3 EV exposure compensation.
From Corpus Christi ABA.