Photography, Technology, Science, Adventure

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...