Night light in my room
projects stars on the ceiling
No cloudy nights here
Random Saturday Haiku
Category: night time photography
Snow acceptance
It’s around this time of year that I learn to just accept the snow and the cold which I guess is good because it doesn’t seem like they’re going away soon. I start to notice my acceptance because now, every time I see an untouched snow drift I just want to play in it (which I won’t unless I am all bundled up in my awesome snow pants, etc but still!) and I wonder why it is still untouched… Am I the only one who has these urges?
What do you do to survive winter (or whatever your least favorite season is)?
Picture: Sometimes I do something really crazy, like go skiing at night!
Rest in Peace Severus Snape
Sad days, friends. My venus fly trap, Severus Snape, has died. I got him back in 2008, before I was even in grad school and he’s been with me through all the craziness that has happened since. And now he’s gone. I think he had a pretty good life, chillin’ inside on my window sill while it snowed outside in the winter and sunning himself outside in the summer. Once I had to rescue him during my first year in grad school because my crazy neighbor decided not to notice that her dog was chewing on my plant! :p Last winter though he suffered a fall from my second floor balcony when the wind got too rough for him and I thought he’d pulled through okay but maybe not. Maybe this has been coming for a long time. Saddddd… I loved that plant. Sorry if I failed you Severus but I hope you’re in a better place now. Thanks for being such an awesome friend during some fairly crazy years… :( Last night, Cobalt and I had a candlelit vigil for Severus, pictured here.
Also sorry to you fellow blog readers, apparently planning for a wedding while simultaneously trying to work on getting my PhD is a lot of work! ;) I’ve been so busy that I haven’t really had time to take pictures, besides this one, which Cobalt and I took last night in honor of Severus. Maybe he was sad because his namesake died in Harry Potter 7 part 2 this summer…
Creepy Clouds
We have been getting a LOT of rain here recently (wish I could send it all to Los Alamos, NM) so I snapped this picture one night. I was about to go to bed when I saw the moon all creepily obscured by clouds. It’s one of me and Cobalt’s favorite moons (the cool moon if you ask me or the “Lon Chaney” moon if you ask Cobalt…) so I had to take a picture of course. It turned out really cool if you ask me!
Graveyard Apparition
I looooooove this pic. First of all because it is a bit creepy and second of all because it was taken at 11 pm. No joke. It was daaaaaark outside. You see those white things in the sky? Yeah… they’re stars… So what happened here? Well, this was the night of the epically sized moon that I talked about on Tuesday so it was pretty bright out as far as night goes. And then I was playing with ISO and F numbers with a 30 second exposure time so I could have time to be crazy in front of the camera. Turned out pretty weird I think but I still like it. I like my ghostly see-through appearance.
One fat moon, coming right up!
In case you didn’t know, the moon was HUGE last Saturday. The biggest it’s been in 18 years? Is that right, my astronomer friends? Anyway, obviously this calls for photographic evidence. On Saturday night, Cobalt and I grabbed our tripods and cable releases (best.invention.ever) before heading out to our favorite “take pictures of the moon” spot in Boulder and taking some moon pictures. I’d say this one turned out pretty good. :) I must say that with the lunar eclipse and now this giant moon, I have definitely gotten practice with my moon/night shots. Keep up the good work, moon! :D
Night Ride
Last Saturday night, there was this really cool fog outside. Everything was blanketed in this cool misty atmosphere. I stood outside waiting for Cobalt to pick me up and I just stared at my breath joining in with the rest of the misty fog. It was as if there were a bunch of people outside breathing and our breath just stayed there and turned into an epic fog. Anyway, enough description. So while I was waiting for Cobalt, I pulled out my DSLR and tried to take pictures of the fog blanket. Then as he drove around the corner to pick me up, I snapped this picture of his car. I love the fog in the headlights. Looks so awesome…
Just a reminder – no pictures for the rest of this week (so sad, I know!). I will be back next Monday though. Have a Happy Thanksgiving!
Photoshop
Not much. Cropping and Shadow/Highlights to try to bring out a little bit more of the car.
I See Stars
As Cobalt’s and my anniversary is this Saturday, I decided to post a romantic picture of the two of us for today. Also, I felt like posting another long exposure night shot for your enjoyment. This picture satisfies both. Yay. So this picture was taken this last summer when Cobalt and I made an epic road trip from Colorado to California to visit my family. It took us about 20 hours to get there though we broke it up into two days (we were SO tired that we could barely eat our dinners when we stopped for the night. The waitress probably thought we thought the food was terrible! >_<).
Anyway, once in California, we decided to play with my DSLR/tripod/camera remote in my parents' driveway one night and we ended up trying to take pictures of the two of us with the big dipper in the background. We started out with some crazy surreal ones involving at least two of each of us in each picture before settling down to take some romantic ones. I really like the way this one turned out.
Photoshop
Because we had to stand there forever like that in order to come out at all in the picture, the sky got very overexposed. So I set about messing with the color curves to make the darker things much darker and to make the big dipper stand out better than the other stars. That’s actually all I really did for the picture. I like that the light around us is so red (an artifact from the overexposed sky/streetlights in the distance and my playing with the color curves). So intense!
Wow… Wednesday was a crazy day for me so this is going to be one sleepy Thursday. I hope you guys are all more awake!
Pssst…
Halloween is getting closer… Time for a creepy picture….
On Friday night this last weekend, my boyfriend Cobalt and I went for a drive into the mountains behind Boulder. It was pretty creepy to be driving on the wet, twisty roads with nothing but trees and fog surrounding us. At one point, there was this really neat fog hovering just inches above the ground. Who knew what could be lurking just beyond?!
I find that I actually have a pretty good imagination for horrible things so sometimes it’s nice to just relax and let my crazy mind go wild, coming up with horrible scenarios lurking just beyond the safety of the car. Cobalt and I apparently share this insane love of imagining scary things and so sometimes we’ll go for drives in the dark, listening to music and watching the world go by… Once we actually swapped the horror stories our minds invented and found out that we actually managed to come up with some fairly similar ones. It was madness.
Anyway… the PICTURE, Potassium, the picture…
So on this particular drive, Cobalt and I ended up by the Gross Reservoir. We stopped to take pictures with my DSLR. As usual, we took a few normal pictures of the reservoir and its surroundings before turning to our usual fun task – let’s make some CREEPY pictures… Here is one of our results, which I particularly like as Cobalt is hovering so creepily over my shoulder. And he totally looks like a ghost. Delicious…
Photoshop
Working with Cobalt on picture editing is both fun and challenging. Because both of us have worked alone for so long, our creative muses often end up bickering. Here you are seeing a pretty good compromise though. We first started by cropping the picture (Cobalt liked having those extra trees to the right of the pair of us because it gave the picture more of a cinematic tone and I just wanted it to be of the two of us… but then I looked at it his way and decided it looked more dramatic). Then came the little things: getting the dusk specks off (this was a fairly long exposure), getting rid of unwanted things in the background (stop signs, windows, fences, etc), and playing a little with the lighting on my face. I think that’s pretty much it though.
Happy Tuesday everyone! :)
Potassium Photography 