The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Category: Photography & Images

Taking & making images.

Cooper’s Hawks

High atop that tree again:

Coopers Hawks in evergreen treetop

The bird on the right seems larger and may be the female of a mated pair, but it’s hard to tell at this distance. They could be siblings from the most recent nest in the area, but hawks aren’t chummy birds.

Search for hawk and you’ll find many more pix; I think they’re photogenic.

Go, hawks, go!

It’s taken at the usual 12x zoom with the 1.7 teleadapter on the Sony DSC-H5. I can’t justify the kilobucks required for a large-sensor SLR with nice long glass, but it’d definitely improve the picture quality around here. [sigh]

2013-10-19
Monthly Image: Cormorants at Vassar Farm Pond

This pair of Double-crested Cormorants took up residence for a few weeks on the pond at Vassar Farm:

Cormorants at Vassar Farm pond

The rubbery blue feet should be diagnostic, but don’t appear in any of our references. They’re definitely not Blue-footed Boobies, that much we know.

They’re XORed with turtles on the same snags.

Hand-held with the Canon SX230HS at full zoom across the pond.

2013-10-15
Monster in the Mist

We biked to Saugerties for the Hudson Valley Garlic Festival and spotted this monster looming in the morning mist during the ride home:

Excavator on CSX gondola car – side

The end view shows it’s not an optical illusion:

Excavator on CSX gondola car – end

Some Google Maps fiddling reveals the plant, with the excavator atop the first car on the siding, down in the lower-left corner of the image:

Google Maps – Kings Highway at Tissal Rd

A zoomed view, rotated a quarter-turn CCW so it’s not quite so vertiginous:

Google Maps – Kings Highway at Tissal Rd – detail

My search-fu isn’t strong enough to uncover the plant’s name. They’ve obviously been doing something involving gravel and either asphalt or concrete for many years, so it’s not a prank…

2013-10-06
Parsley Worm on Dill

Four of these ferocious Parsley Worms were chowing down on a volunteer dill plant along the garden fence:

Parsley Worm Caterpillar on Dill

Amazingly, they turn into Black Swallowtail butterflies that sometimes visit the Butterfly Bush outside our living room window. Well, maybe not this one, but certainly some of its relatives.

We don’t hassle them; they have a fearsome threat display that apparently works wonders on their natural predators.

2013-09-28
Nasturtium Leaves: After the Rain

The water collected in nasturtium leaves after a shower looks like droplets of mercury:

Water drop in nasturtium leaf

They refract outdoor lighting when seen from the correct viewpoint:

Water drops in nasturtium leaf

These were at the Morse Estate. Hand-held with the Canon SX230HS in low light conditions.

2013-09-22
Turkey Vultures Afield

We don’t often see Turkey Vultures on the ground, so this gathering was unusual:

Turkey vultures on the ground

The depression in the grass suggests something keeled over right there; perhaps they’re rummaging around for leftovers. Although they’re totally graceless on foot, it works well enough for them.

There were two vultures on posts when I stopped, but one joined the ground party before I could deploy the camera. The other bird kept a close eye on me throughout the proceedings:

Turkey vulture on fence post

Look alive!

Pix from the Canon SX230HS, zoomed to its optical limit, and certainly not prizewinners…

2013-09-21
The Hazards of Being a Pocket Camera

I carry the Canon SX230HS in my pocket, so as to have a decent camera ready when it’s needed; yes, it’s in a cloth case. Unfortunately, in recent weeks a tiny hair made its way into the lens stack, where it shows up as a slight blurring just left of center in high f/stop images:

Cheap cartridge heater insulation

With the camera attached to the stereo zoom microscope, the hair becomes painfully obvious:

Hair on SX230HX Sensor

Of course it’s in the middle of the image. [sigh]

A bit of searching turns up a bootleg technique to remove the front lens from the turret (basically, just twist and pull), but neither of the internal lens surfaces thus revealed lie near a focal plane and, in any event, were surprisingly clean. The hair is probably lodged just in front of the image sensor, most likely stuck to the back of the final lens where it casts a shadow on the sensor. If it wandered around you’d call it a floater.

Dismantling the entire camera and opening the lens stack seems fraught with peril, particularly as the camera pretty much still works fine for normal picture-taking. More pondering is in order…

2013-09-18