Posts in category "Photos"

Sky Watcher

Thumbnail: Moon

Tonight, I saw the moon in my tele­scope. If it was a full moon, it would have filled the eye­piece. I could study the craters, the land­marks, and the pat­terns of dust on the sur­face. I grabbed my cam­era with a mod­est­ly long 100mm lens, mount­ed it on my new tri­pod, and took a pic­ture. Unless I get a lens with a longer focal length, it’s the best I’ll ever get in cap­tur­ing the moon with a sen­sor1.

It was a great night for observ­ing, the fore­cast said, with no cloud cov­er, good trans­paren­cy2, good see­ing3, and decent dark­ness. I had my warmest clothes on, as I was warned that com­fort and moti­va­tion are some of the most impor­tant things in obser­va­tion­al astron­o­my.

I used a crater on the moon to cal­i­brate my red-dot find­er­scope. Then I used the find­er­scope to fol­low the arm of the big dip­per to Arcturus, the curve of which led me to Saturn, just under Denebola and in the con­stel­la­tion Virgo this year.

With the naked eye, Saturn looks like anoth­er bright star, but at 100x mag­ni­fi­ca­tion, Saturn becomes a small and sharp sphere. The rings were clean but indis­tin­guish­able from each oth­er, with the gas giant cast­ing a dra­mat­ic shad­ow across them.

I looked 68 min­utes into the past4, until Saturn slow­ly drift­ed out of view.

  1. I have no plans on get­ting into prime focus astropho­tog­ra­phy — in which the tele­scope is used as a lens — because the astron­o­my equip­ment required is much more expen­sive. [↩]
  2. Calculated from the amount of water vapour in the air. [↩]
  3. Estimated from tur­bu­lence and tem­per­a­ture dif­fer­ences in the atmos­phere. [↩]
  4. Saturn was 8.505AU or 1,272,330,990km away, which takes about 4080 sec­onds for the light to hit our eyes from there. [↩]

Aaron and Ryan: Portrait Test

Thumbnail: Aaron and Ryan portrait

Thumbnail: Aaron and Ryan portrait

Aaron came over with Ryan for break­fast one morn­ing, and it gave me a chance to use them as mod­els to try some of the tech­niques I learned from Sid when I was in New Hampshire. I still had to do some work in Photoshop to keep the mid­point where I want­ed, but it was still quite min­i­mal com­pared to my work with colour late­ly. This type of por­trai­ture is very dif­fer­ent from what I nor­mal­ly do, where instead of using an out-of-focus back­ground to make the sub­ject stand out, I’m using the con­trast of light.

I turned on Chicken Run to keep Ryan occu­pied while we ate, and Aaron kept get­ting dis­tract­ed by it as much as he did. For a moment, I could­n’t tell if it was the son who took after the father, or vice ver­sa.

29 4/12: The Mask

Man can­not cast off this mask; it is a pro­jec­tion of his own flesh and spir­it. He can no longer remove from his own face this mask which has already grown like skin and flesh so he is always star­tled as if dis­be­liev­ing this is him­self, but it is in fact him­self. He can­not remove this mask, and this is agony. But hav­ing man­i­fest­ed itself as his mask, it can­not be oblit­er­at­ed, because the mask is a repli­ca of him­self. It has no will of its own, or one could say it has a will but no means of expres­sion and so prefers not to have a will. Therefore it has left man with an eter­nal face with which he can exam­ine him­self in amaze­ment.

—Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain

Self portrait at 29 4/12

 

I turn 30 in eight months, and I still don’t know if I’m the per­son who smiles, or the per­son who hides behind the smile.

The Turning 30 Series

New Hampshire: Day 3

Thumbnail: Corn chips

Thumbnail: Real tacos

I’m free again after my train­ing, and Dave takes me to his favourite restau­rant in Nashua to meet up with Sid and his girl­friend. It’s a small, fam­i­ly-owned Mexican joint with bright colours and an appro­pri­ate­ly accent­ed wait­ress.

Over din­ner, we com­pare our region­al dif­fer­ences. I ask them what it means when some­one says “A quar­ter of one” (12:45), because they don’t say “a quar­ter to one”. I ask them if they take their shoes off when they get in the house (some­times, depend­ing on the host), because I noticed no one did when I was in a house1. I ask them if they have bub­ble tea (there’s one Vietnamese restau­rant that serves it), because it’s all over Canada now. I tell them New York Fries serves pou­tine (What’s New York Fries?). I pull out some Canadian bills and show them the braille (Oooooooh). At one point, Sid calls me on my “eh”, con­trast­ed from their “huh” used at the end of a sen­tence to empha­size a point.

Thumbnail: Downtown Manchester

Thumbnail: Cross button
Thumbnail: Kelly and Dave.
Thumbnail: Chelsey and Ed
Thumbnail: Greek donuts
Thumbnail: Dave's notes

Dave and I dri­ve to down­town Manchester, the biggest city in New Hampshire, to a bar/café called Republic. Every month, Dave orga­nizes the Collective, a group of cre­ative peo­ple with a cer­tain ener­gy, and a void in their lives when it comes to some­one with whom to dis­cuss their endeav­ors on a prac­ti­cal, non­threat­en­ing, phil­an­thropic lev­el.

I repeat a per­son­’s name after being intro­duced to them, a trick I learned from the client spe­cial­ist course I took in New Hampshire four years ago.

At one point, Ed asks us how we know each oth­er, and Dave explains, along with a sto­ry:

When my sis­ter and I were kids, we imag­ined what it would be like if we were more of us, so we need­ed an old­er sis­ter and a younger broth­er to round out the sib­ling expe­ri­ence. As the old­est broth­er, I need­ed to know what hav­ing an old­er sis­ter was like. And we also chose per­son­al­i­ties to go with them. I think the old­er sis­ter was a heavy­set, strong girl with a deter­mined, moth­er­ing ten­den­cy toward us. Her name was Daphne, and she was the type to play field hock­ey or lacrosse when she went to col­lege had we known what that was back when we were kids. The younger broth­er would be a slen­der, artis­tic type that was a styl­ish and care­ful dress­er; “met­ro­sex­u­al” was the term we’d have used, my sis­ter com­ment­ed recent­ly, had we known the word. His name was Leland.

And when he met me yes­ter­day, he thought, “That’s Leland!”. Now he’s won­der­ing if he’s going to run into Daphne in the future.

After two hours of bril­liant con­ver­sa­tion and exchange of ener­gy, we go our sep­a­rate ways. These are my peo­ple, and I feel the need to start some­thing sim­i­lar in Ottawa.

Thumbnail: Me and Dave

I take a pic­ture of us because I leave tomor­row, short­ly after the end of the course, and won’t have a chance to see him again. I offer my house if he ever wants to get away and change up his frame of mind, and he returns the offer.

In 24 hours, I’ll be home sweet home again, but cer­tain­ly wish­ing I had more time to talk, and relate, and feel as if there was anoth­er kin­dred soul in the world.

  1. Not even in my hotel room, which I found very strange. [↩]