Michael Forsyth's News

These are some photos from D.C. that I shot around the middle of May during a weekend visiting my brother. D.C. has a great metro system, so we didn’t have to take a car anywhere, which was really nice. The tunnels are also a neat place to see, and several of my photos are from them.

All I took with me was my 35 f/1.8, as it is a versatile lens for every situation. It was also raining for a while, I just let my camera get wet, its not salt water and I have never had a problem with my camera and water.

Entrance to the actual Star Spangled Banner in the Smithsonian museum. This would have been worlds better if I had snapped it before the two people in the right walked into the frame. (D40, ISO 200, 35 f/1.8@f/2, 1/30s)

Bureau of Engraving and Printing. This is more a photo of strong lines in the Brutalist style than anything else. (D40, ISO 200, 35 f/1.8@f/6.3, 1/125s)

D.C. Metro. I deliberatly closed down the apperature to get 1/10th of a second, about the limit for me to hand hold my 35. This gives motion to the incoming train. (D40, ISO 400, 35 f/1.8@f/2.8, 1/10s)

Metro ticket sales. Again, the person at the window is what makes this interesting. (D40, ISO 200, 35 f/1.8@f/1.8, 1/25s)

Construction equipment in the tunnel. All of the colors on the ceiling are from different kinds of lights, or from bulbs which are different ages. (D40, ISO 800, 35 f/1.8@f/1.8, 1/30s)

I set the camera on a railing above the rail to get this shot, before the train stoped. Then I ran down the stairs and hopped on it. (D40, ISO 200, 35 f/1.8@f/5, 1s)

Incoming train, handheld. (D40, ISO 400, 35 f/1.8@f/2.8, 1/6s)

Metro. Woman on the left and the sign in the upper right make it. (D40, ISO 400, 35 f/1.8@f/2.8, 1/6s)

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. This is all about lines and vanishing point. (D40, ISO 400, 35 f/1.8@f/2.8, 1/60s)

Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport, symmetry with a flag in the middle. (D40, ISO 400, 35 f/1.8@f/2.2, 1/50s)

Pretty self explanatory title.  Obviously everything I shoot for press is digital, and most of what I do for myself is too, just for the convenience.  But there are those times, when I drag out my Nikon F2 and spool up a roll of 36 shots and have some fun.  Recently, I shot some stuff at school and in California, along with my digital camera. In addition to being full frame, the F2 only uses batteries for the meter and will continue to work without them, while any digital camera becomes dead weight when the batteries die.

The film looks better right out of the camera, have a look for yourself. In addition, the film has a different look from digital, which has become kind of blasé. It’s also more contemplative to shoot, something about having to manually crank the lever each frame forces me to slow down and observe more.

So, here they are, with one as a comparison to digital (last two). All film I shoot is processed and scanned at E-6 Lab in Atlanta. The grass stuff was shot on really old (like 5 years at room temp) Sensia 100, and had a nice magenta cast. The stuff from California was shot on new Fuji Velvia RVP 50.

Some grass, Nikon F2, 35-70 f/3.3-4.5. Old Fuji Sensia 100. Shot at school (Milledgeville, GA)

Some grass, Nikon F2, 35-70 f/3.3-4.5. Old Fuji Sensia 100. Shot at school (Milledgeville, GA)

Some grass, Nikon F2, 35-70 f/3.3-4.5. Old Fuji Sensia 100. Shot at school (Milledgeville, GA). I really liked the way the way the lens flare came out in this, and its definatly different.

An old steam vent, Nikon F2, 35-70 f/3.3-4.5. Old Fuji Sensia 100. Shot at school (Milledgeville, GA)

Grass and posts, Nikon F2, 35-70 f/3.3-4.5, Fuji Velvia RVP 50, Old Sacramento, California.

Half Dome, Nikon F2, 35-70 f/3.3-4.5, Fuji Velvia RVP 50. Yosemite Valley, California.

Shot at the same time and place as the shot above, Nikon D40, 18-55 f/3.5-5.6. Converted from RAW file, no adjustments except to set daylight WB.

REI Flash 50 Review

That’s all I have for now. More pictures coming soon.

This is my attempted explanation to the nature of the frazil ice seen occasionally at Yosemite Falls. I am no expert on the subject, but I can back up my knowledge of the formation with four years of combined chemistry/biology studies.  (more below)

The key parts here that give rise to the formation of this unique form of ice are as follows:

• The hight of the falls, 436m
• The temperature of the water
• The temperature of the air
• The low humidity of the area

The hight of the falls allows sufficient contact of water droplets with the cold air. Because the water starts off as melt water and is probably in the 40′s (F) when it goes over the edge. As the water falls, it breaks up into tiny droplets, which have a very high surface area to volume ratio. This means that they will quickly cool to ambient temperatures, say 28 degrees F. The droplets will also evaporate slightly. This evaporative cooling will reduce the temperature of the droplets to below ambient temperature. Due to the relatively short duration of airtime, they will not freeze into snow, but remain liquid water at this point, despite being below the freezing point of water from the long drop. This is due to the lack of a nucleation point for the water to begin to freeze. A similar situation takes place in artificial snow makers, but a nucleating solution is added so that the water will freeze mid air and fall as snow.

If the supercooled droplets contact a physical object, they will likely freeze on contact. You can demonstrate this by filling a spray bottle with water on a very cold night and spraying it in the air, and observing the surfaces that the water collects on. This is my hypothesis on the formation of the ice cone at the base of the falls, as well as the cause of the frosty sides of the falls observed in the morning. These droplets might also flash freeze if they are subjected to shock, such as impact with the water below, although I cannot confirm this.

The water that does not freeze, or melts shortly thereafter, will flow in a river along with the frazil ice crystals. One would expect that these ice crystals would float like ice, but the reality is that they flow along with the water, rather than on top of it. I would attribute this to the extremely fine structure of the ice. They become “filled” with water, like a sponge, and their slightly positive buoyancy becomes insignificant in the moving river, much the way silt will settle in a still lake but not a moving river). If these same crystals were placed in a bucket of standing water, they would no doubt float to the top.

The water in the river at this point is at the freezing point, but it takes an extraordinary amount of energy to be removed from water to turn it from a 32 degree liquid into a 32 degree solid (referred to as latent heat), so the ice stays solid and the water liquid as it travels down the river (or way over the banks)

The real question that I cannot answer is were exactly the frazil ice forms. It is possible that some droplets freeze mid air and fall as giant snowflakes from collisions with other droplets while falling, although I would think the wind would separate the two while in the air, and thus be observable. The only way to determine this would be to observe the base of the falls during the formation of the ice, which would be no small undertaking as it would be at night.

I put up a page on my trip to California. It defiantly took long enough to get it up. The page is here, and if you just want to see pictures those are up too.

Photos of Sacramento and Yosemite

This past Saturday and Wednesday (the 20th and 24th) both the Men’s and Women’s basketball teams played their last two regular season games at home, and won all 4 games. From here they go to the Peach Belt Conference quarter finals this Tuesday and Wednesday.  I tried a bit of a different technique with these, syncing at between 1/320 and 1/500 of a second (yes, the D40 does hit these speeds fine) and boosting the strobes to 1/2 power to drop the background down a little more. I think it worked out pretty well, although the flashes really suck down power in this configuration. Since this was also the homecoming game and the stadium was packed, I spent a little more time than usual between games shooting some of the people and other things going on. The pictures of everything else going on really helps to bring the action and pulse of the game closer. I added this gallery thing here too so things stay a little bit more organized with some of these posts that have a lot more photos in them. Keep an eye on the file names to know when they were shot (all of my photos are named as YYMMDD_[sequence #]

Basketball season is wrapping up, the men’s team is at 20-4 (13-2 Conference) after last night’s game. It has been an exiting year, and its always more fun to shoot a winning game. I have one more game to shoot, the last home game of the season. These are from the game on 1-29 against Francis Marion.

I put a little bit of a high key thing on this to make it snap a little more.

I know I haven’t updated this in a while, I’m finally caught up (almost) on all my work, so keep an eye out for more stuff in the near future.

We got some snow down  here in Milledgeville, kind of unusual for us to get any real amount of snow this far south. It’s funny how everything stops because of the weather, I didn’t even have to work (and I walk there). I set up my camera in my window and tethered it to my old laptop running linux, and used gphoto2 to shoot a frame every 30 seconds (for a little less than three hours). The final video is run at 6 fps. Let me know what you think!

I figured I might as well put out one last blog post before the new year, just for good measure. I have been reading VisionMongers over the break, It’s a great book for inspiration for just about any field were the emphasis is on creativity. Yes, it is based on photography, but I could see almost anyone finding relevance in this book. I have also been reading a few of David’s e-books, which are also a good read. It has given me a lot of ideas for my work for the upcoming new year. I know probably everyone has said something to that effect every year, so I give it about the same chance as a wounded fish around a bunch of sharks. Only time will tell.

I figured that since this is my photography blog and all, it would be pretty useless without any pictures, so here are a few that I have been working on as of recently. I have mostly been shooting a few things around home, playing in Lightroom a little, and trying to relax before school starts up again in January. The one thing I am looking forward to is shooting for the paper again, I really enjoy the challenge of deadlines and assignments.

The photo above is the result of some change in perspective stuff I have been playing around with. The bottom of the camera and lens were actually in the water on this one, shooting through a lexan window on a waterproof housing big ziploc bag. I liked the way it turned out, let me know what you think.

I have a little side project I thought of today that I think I’m going to work on before the end of the break, stay posted for more on that as I work on it a little bit.  I suppose I should back everything up now, you know, just in case… yeah, right!+

I have been enjoying this Christmas break so far, I haven’t got much done at all but I have taken a few pictures while I have been around town. I figured I should update the site at some regular interval before everyone stops reading it.

I snapped this first one of our Christmas tree, I just defocused my lens as far as I could and shot it at 1.8, it kind of looks interesting in a wierd way.  I really like how even the disks of light are.

Christmas lights out of focus at f/1.8.

Other than sitting around, I went to Atlanta a few times. I always find it interesting how fast people drive on the interstates around here. So I basically learned that its better to drive yourself to the hospital if at all possible, as cars were flying past the ambulance on the interstate while it was en route to somewhere presumably important.

Ambulance

Horses. And hay.

This last photo I put in honestly because I found it hilarious to look down the road and see two horses in front of me. The pickup truck also had a large roll of hay on the back, presumably as a snack for the horses. Its not every day you see this on the interstate… or maybe it is, depending on were you live.