Photography, Image Processing and Java…
Got the urge to take my family’s first digital camera out today. It is a Kodak DC260 with 1.5 mega-pixels from 1998. Not many manual settings exist on the thing, and it often makes people’s skin yellow, but the camera can take pleasing pictures.
Click the pictures to be brought to a larger image if interested.
I had to push back my overnight camping trip to Lake Maria State Park till tomorrow due to unexpected rain today. Cross your fingers for me that tomorrow’s weather is nicer.
My first campout of the year was a trip up to the Border Route Trail in northern Minnesota. I went with Ed and Scott and we talked to Steve the forestry ranger about the tree harvesting which covered the trail, did tread work to define a trail up a small hill, and finally scouted out a half mile trail connecting a portage and another trail.
This hill used to be just a slope with long grass growing on it, and hikers had to just pick a place to walk through it. Now there is clearly a trail.
A Dipper over the Border Route Trail. This picture was created using about 20 pictures taken over 10 minutes.
Marble Church is located at the Shores of St. Andrew Bible Camp in New London, Minnesota. The camp is managed by Green Lake Lutheran Ministries.
Marble Church by moonlight:
The sanctuary:
Macro action today. Over the weekend, I received a Canon 500D +2 close-up filter and step-up ring to convert my 70-300mm lens into more of a macro lens. As an example, I can now take a picture of a quarter and have it fill the whole picture. I’ll post up more thoughts about the 500D close-up lens after I get a chance to use it more.
This isn’t a quarter, but this is a very small part of a cactus. No cropping(zooming in) has been done to this image.
Yesterday I mentioned in my post that I did get sunset photos at Lilydale Park. Here they are.
This first picture was taken looking towards Pickerel Lake halfway down the cliff. I’m going to post a direct link to the park map to check out if you are interested in the location, since the Saint Paul parks site is so unfriendly to get around.
Looking out towards the last turn in the trail that leads towards the bottom of the cliff, the sunset looked great through all the trees again. This was taken right near one of the falls.
One last sunset picture along the railroad tracks. The light was bad at this point, so I tried a few different image processing techniques on the images. I think I ended up with an image that conveys what I thought it looked like out there.
I headed out around four in hopes of catching the sunset at the Lilydale Regional Park and possibly take pictures of the ice falls if they are nicely lit. The sunset was interesting at the bottom of the cliff. Yes, I just descended to the bottom using a very long slippery trail that some of the park users have decided to turn into a super long sliding hill and now needed to get back up. Oh look a really cool looking railroad bridge that needs to be checked out!
As long as I’m at the bottom of the cliff I might as well check out the city at night, right? Yup.
I walked along the river for a ways until I came to the bike path that parallels the river. Even though my legs and feet were sore already at this point I made it up the stairs of the Wabasha Street bridge. It was time to head home now, since I still had about 2 miles. The trip ended up being around 7 miles in 5 hours. A lot longer than I planned.
The ice falls were there at the park. And they can be climbed with a permit. I’ll have to go back later and try to find a angle where they are lit. The park has a bunch of small streams that run from the top of the cliff down to the river, so there should be some good opportunities if I can manage to be good at scouting them out. There were more images were taken during this trip, and I’ll post them up later this week.
Had fun trying macro photography with my lenses today. Here is one picture where I held my 35mm lens backwards to the camera, so that the camera looked through the front of the lens. The rings are 7mm wide in real life.
Went out to take some pictures along a path in Maple Grove, MN and right before I got to the path there was this really cool vertical sheet of ice with tons of small holes and interesting formations. It is a wonder that it didn’t collapse just by a small breeze. Both the shots below are only a very small view of the ice, but the second one gives a good idea of how thin it was.
There are many little suns shining through!
In 2005 my brother and I visited Glacier National Park in Montana for a second time. We had a few adventures and learned some quality lessons about weather in the mountains during the second week of August. The full story will have to wait till my next post on Glacier!
We woke-up at the Glenn Lake campground and were treated to this:
