Water with a Homemade ND Filter

Saturday, 10 March 2012

While i was out testing my DIY - Camera Polarizing Filter, i also brought my DIY - ND Filter i made from a piece of welding glass. I was really happy with how the pictures came out before when i was at Lake Erie.

Here's a slow-moving river near Flat Rock, Michigan.

The ND filter makes a very calm effect. The blurs in the picture are a flock of geese.

I used my new Manfrotto Tripod and it worked great, it was smaller and a lot easier to carry around.

The same picture as before, converted to black and white.

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Monarch Butterfly Migration

Thursday, 23 February 2012

There's a show on NOVA about monarch butterfly's called The Incredible Journey of the Butterfly's. It's 52 minutes and you can watch the full episode online.
I knew that they migrated to Mexico, but that turns out to be only part of the story.

There is a cycle of 4 generations to the Monarch Butterfly's:

• 1st generation is the start of the return trip, they fly from Mexico to Texas
• 2nd generation flies from Texas to Michigan
• 3rd generation flies from Michigan to Canada - each of these 3 generations live only about a month
• But the 4th is the amazing one. That generation flies all the way back to Mexico. They also live for 9 months, 9 times as long as the other 3 generations.

The show reminded me of when i saw thousands of monarch butterfly's on the shore of Lake Erie. It turns out that the hardest part of the journey is the start, flying over the Great Lakes to Michigan. The ones i saw had just completed that part of the trip. But they still had a 2,000 miles to go till Mexico.

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ND Filter at Lake Erie

Monday, 6 February 2012

On the drive home from Cincinnati i pulled off I-75 at a Exit 5 near the Consumers Energy power plant where i had been working a lot this summer. There's a small parking lot where you can walk to Lake Erie. I've taken some pictures there before when the lake level was way down. I was still a little bummed out with some of the pictures i took in Tennessee, using my homemade ND filter.
I made an ND filter for my camera from a piece of welding glass, but when i took pictures of the rivers and Laural Falls i forgot to set my camera to RAW. That means that i had to spend a long time in Photoshop and the pictures still never turned out very good, the colors were all off.

So i walked along Lake Erie and took around 25 pictures. The exposure times ranged between 4 and 15 seconds. I couldn't really tell by looking at my camera how well they turned out because with the welders glass they all had a green tint to them. Here's what they looked like directly out of the camera.
But when i got home and processed them with Photoshop i was really happy. This time they turned out much better.

This one i converted to black and white.
Here is just a normal photo i took with the ND filter not on.
The ND filter allows you to open the lens for a much longer time then you would normally be able to, creating a glassy effect on the water.
This picture is definitely my favorite.

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Final Lotus of the Year

Wednesday, 9 November 2011

Well as of right now the lotus plants are in the basement for the winter.

I didn't want the roots to freeze so i brought them inside. When it warms up enough in the spring i'll take them back out.
Here's what i have previously written about trying to grow them:
Sprouting Lotus Seeds
Lotus Update
Lotus in the Sun

Anyway going back a few months ... I was down near the Ohio border again for work and saw the lotus fields. Here they are in August, in a channel off of Lake Erie.
A view of all the lotus beds.
There were millions of them.
The view from the causeway.
A view of one of the rivers near a power plant to the north, flowing into Lake Erie.
Here's what the area looks like from above. The water is Lake Erie, the highway is I-75.
Back at my house the hot 90 degree summer days really made them grow big. The sun, heat and humidity outside caused them to take off. Here was one of my first aerial leaves before it opened up.
There were around four aerial leaves per pot.
The lotus effect on the leaf.

Some close-ups.

Back down near Monroe, Michigan i found a place where you can see them up close. It's visible from I-75 but you have to loop around to get there.

The leaves there grew much bigger then the ones in my backyard.
The seed pods which grew from the center of the flower.
By this time a lot of the seed pods had turned brown.
A couple of them broke off their stalks.
But there was a ton of them. If you figure that each seed pod has around 20 seeds on average, you can see how many seeds are here.

Although like i said earlier, seeds aren't the main way that these grow. They spread from the tubers in the mud, like how grass in your yard spreads.
Here they are in September. The leaves are turning brown and starting to go dormant.
The ones in Monroe had already turned brown.
This is right before i cut the leaves off, drained the water and moved them to the basement.
I'm expecting great things next spring. Hopefully all the energy is stored up in the tubers and will cause the plant to shoot up bigger then they grew from a seed this year.

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HDR + Photoshop

Thursday, 3 November 2011

I've tried taking some more HDR photos.

This one i did earlier but i also converted to a vector image.
I'm starting to get a little better processing HDR photos but i still have a while before they look they way i want them too. But i am getting better with Photoshop. Just in changing the contrast, color, saturation, levels....

Here's some old photos that i've recently improved. This photo originally came out very dull looking. I increased the color and contrast to make it appear the way the Grand Canyon really looked that day.
Here's a picture i took in Arizona. I did a bunch of stuff to this as well and ended up changing it to black and white.

My favorite sculpture, The Bean in Chicago.


This one i didn't do a whole lot to. This is actually how Sedona looks.
I've found that after a while i do the same 4 or 5 things to most of the photos in Photoshop. Here's sunrise at Lake Erie
Pictures like these of sunrises or sunsets are difficult because of the huge change in light. Some areas are dark and some are very bright. I tried to use Photoshop to get a good balance.

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