Sunset and peepers

Last Saturday Steve and I visited Hoover Meadows at dusk. The peeper choruses were wonderful in their frenzy of mate seeking. I'm amazed that such a huge sound can come from such a tiny frog. Amplify that by hundreds and it's an experience to remember.

Cape Town Sunset

Cape Town Sunset, originally uploaded by andiwolfe.

Another photo from Green Point in Cape Town. The sky was so vibrant during this particular sunset. As I recall, I had to lie on my stomach to take this photo from under the rail of the sea wall. Ruined my favorite pair of jeans this evening, but I did get some nice images from the site.

Green point lighthouse at sunset

Green point lighthouse at sunset, originally uploaded by andiwolfe.

An alternative title would be: Learning to use Photoshop CS5. This is the second photo I've processed entirely using the CS5 package. I usually process RAW files in Aperture and with the Nik Software plug-ins. This combination usually works very well and is super fasts for processing "easy" images.

This photo was pretty difficult in terms of contrasts between the foreground and background. I've found that Adobe Camera Raw does a much better job of processing the RAW file to bring out the best of the pixels. However, saving the processed "negative" as a TIFF and bringing that into Aperture is a huge storage hog, tripling the size of the file compared to the RAW one.

So, instead of bringing this image into Aperture, I did the processing in Photoshop. It takes longer, but I'm pretty happy with the results. The key is to make the masks accurately. I've learned a lot about obtaining and refining selections for building masks over the past week as I've been struggling to learn how Photoshop works. It's much more complicated than how I usually process images, but the control of where an adjustment is placed is so much better -IF the mask is made well. I bumped the magnification up to 1200X to make sure I masked the edges accurately. Time consuming, for sure, but the effort was worth it, I think.

I don't expect that I will ever sell this image, but, as a learning exercise, it was time well spent.

Image added 19 Jan 2011:



This is a photo of the lighthouse from the seaward side. That's where the light shines. The street side is blocked off, probably to keep the condominium owners happy.

Winter sunset, and goodbye to 2010

Winter sunset, originally uploaded by andiwolfe.

Every year seems to go by just a little faster. I wonder if that is because I'm so busy, or if I'm losing track of time as the years go by. Probably a bit of both.

It was a very busy year from all perspectives: work, home, woodturning, photography, music, family dogs. Some of the highlights this year include the adoption of our two youngest dachshunds, Luna and Topper. Having three dachshunds in the house is a lot of fun. My field season in South Africa was also a big highlight - especially the opportunity to go camping with Dennis and Gigi Laidler, and that Steve was able to join me in the field for 10 days. That was his first trip to South Africa and my ninth field season there.

I'm always glad to start a new year, though, and I'm looking forward to the opportunities that will come in 2011. I have a lot of interesting research going on in my lab right now, which should come to fruition during 2011. I'm working on some fun sculptural turnings when I have some blocks of time at home, and I'm really looking forward to playing the new set list with Aisling at our concert at the Upper Arlington Public Library in April.

I hope all my online friends and acquaintances have a happy and prosperous 2011. Happy New Year!

Sunset at Jasper-Pulaski

Sunset at Jasper-Pulaski, originally uploaded by andiwolfe.

Columbus Audubon had a field trip to Jasper-Pulaski wildlife refuge in northwest Indiana this past weekend. Thousands of sandhill cranes gather here as a stop-over during their fall and spring migrations. It was so awesome to hear and see thousands of these magnificent birds in one place. Highlights included seeing/hearing the mass take-off after sunset and a couple of hours after sunrise. This is one of my favorite photos from the weekend.

Sunset at Seapoint Lighthouse

Sunset at Seapoint Lighthouse, originally uploaded by andiwolfe (Traveling for a month+).

I'm crazy busy right now with some field work, so I don't know how much video editing I'll achieve for the rest of the field season. Yesterday I went up to Citrusdal to go in the field with Wilhem Hanekom. He's the one who discovered one of my new species, which hasn't been up again since a big burn in 2004. However, he had found some more Hyobanche atropurpurea from a site I've worked before, so I did have a productive day in the field.

Here's a pic from last weekend. This is an image I had visualized after having visited the light house the first weekend of my field season, and so I'm very glad the opportunity came up to capture it. We had been doing a tour of the Cape Peninsula with Trent Bosch and his family - everyone loaded into Binky - the Laidler's land rover, and we hit seapoint just as the sun was setting. Dennis, Gigi and I had just gotten back from the karoo the previous evening, so it was quite a nice opportunity to become a tourist for the day.