Photography, Technology, Science, Adventure

Had an awesome experience today. Got to drive 600 head of cattle with everyone at Red Top Ranch. One of the best experiences I have ever had in my life. The ranch is 97,000 acres and has a total of 1,700 cows. We moved about 140 of them to a new section of land so they would have better access to water since one of the wells was having a few problems. The cows are Angus and are primarily used for beef.  The ranch is incredibly beautiful and since there was a lot of rain this year and the prairie is carpeted with has miles and miles of wild sunflowers.  All together there were 5 of us spread out over about a 1/2 mile. After we got all the cows moving and we gradually became closer and brought the herd tother so we could get them through the gate in the fence. We drove them up onto a mesa then watched them go down the other side to the section where there was better water. In addition to us there were about 5-6 cattle dogs with us. The cattle dogs would walk near the horses and wa

TTechnology has advanced a ton in the past 15 years. The picture on the bottom is of the Orion Nebula. I took it when I first started to get into astrophotography around 2002. The picture on top is the most recent picture of the Orion nebula that I took last night. I bought a super old 400mm Olympus lens from Ebay and mounted it on top of my telescope with an Olympus OM-1 *FILM* camera. I also used one of the first autoguiders on the market to guide the telescope while the picture was being taken.  Something interesting (I think its interesting) that not a lot of people know about is something called "reciprocity failure in film." What that means is that film looses its sensitivity to light after 1 second. There is a very sharp drop off in the films ability to expose after 1 second. This means that if you want to take an astrophoto you need to have a very long exposure time due to the problems that film has. This reciprocity failure isn't present in digital sen

Making A Macro Panorama Photo Of A Piece Of Wood To Count Tree Rings My dad is a forester by background and loves looking at wood and counting growth rings etc. This study of counting tree rings is called Dendrochronology . The other day I saw that he had a piece of Eastern Red Cedar that he found on the side of a cliff in Iowa and was trying to count the growth rings on it. The problem was that the rings were so closely spaced together he had a hard time counting them, even with a magnifying glass. He took the wood over to Staples and asked them to enlarge the image 5x but they didn't do such a good job and he still couldn't count the rings. I happened to have my photography gear laying out on the dining room table and thought that I would help him out. I decided to make a macro panorama photo and count the rings in photoshop. Here is how I did it: Macro Panorama Gear Canon 6D  Canon 100mm f/2.8 Ring Flash (It was attached but I didn't use it) Gitzo Carbon Fib

How To Photograph The International Space Station Nope, thats not a Tie Fighter, the International Space Station photobombed my picture of the sun (Actually I was trying take a photo of the space station and actually got it). Here’s how I did it: I was messing around with my telescope the other night and kept seeing satellites fly by. I always wanted to get a picture of the space station and had seen photos on the internet by other people who had managed to do it. The easiest way to get a photo of the space station is by taking a picture of it when it transits the sun or the moon. I started poking around the interwebs looking for a way to predict where it would be and stumbled upon a website that calculates solar and lunar ISS (International Space Station) transits.  Getting into position - The space station orbits Earth about every 90 minutes, so that means in a 24 hour day, the space station orbits approximately 16 times but this doesn’t mean that you can see it 16