American in Spain

The moon just after sunset today was really gorgeous, hanging there in the sky next to Venus. The new moon was on Christmas Eve night, so Rudolph’s nose must have been extra important this year. After seeing the pretty Moon, up high in the sky, I told myself to go and look in an hour or two to see if I could catch it approach the horizon. Normally, I would never be capable of such a thing, but I actually did remember, and I caught it just as it was touching the horizon. Unfortunately, in the time it took me to set up my tripod, the tip of the moon went behind the hill on the horizon, but I still got nine shots in the time it took to set completely.
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Strawberry season is about to draw to a close in Spain. Although I’ve consumed several kilos this year, I’m sad to see them go. The thing that most annoys me about strawberries is how long they last after I buy them. In my experience, if I don’t eat them within 48 hours, they all turn to mush and they get all fluffy with mold. This is especially a problem since I normally can’t stop myself from buying a whole 2 kilogram box of them. So I decided to turn my frustration around and use the rapid growth of mold on my strawberries as the subject of a timelapse video.
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Two nights ago, we were sitting in the living room, and Marga exclaimed, “Whoa! Check out the moon!” It was just peeking up over the tree-lined hillside to the east of our house. I ran to get my camera and snapped several pictures during the minute I had when the natural satellite was still behind the trees. Only one of them came out very good.

The following night, I decided that, if the weather was willing, I’d be ready to photographically ambush the moon as it rose over the trees.
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It’s that time of year again, time for wool sweaters and pumpkin carving. Like the previous two years, my friend Andrés hooked us up with a lovely gourd specimen to carve. Nora had a lot of fun with the pumpkin this year. We invited over our four-year-old neighbor, Oscar (who happens to be Andrés’ nephew), to participate in the autumnal festivities. I did get Oscar to put his hand into the pumpkin and feel the slimy innards once, but after that he preferred to play with Nora’s toys, which were all new to him, and watch from afar. He brought over his own little pumpkin to carve too, so Marga got her first carving experience, which she thoroughly enjoyed.
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This week, without a daughter to care for, my mornings have been free. I’ve been taking advantage of the good weather to get some exercise, walking up to 16 km (10 miles) around the neighboring towns. The first few days, I just walked to the beach at Laredo and walked up and down the maritime walkway several times. It occurred to me yesterday that I might have been caught on the yacht club’s webcam, but alas I was not there on the hour or 15, 30, or 45 minutes past the hour on any day. The archived panoramas I was looking through for Monday, August 18, were so pretty that I decided to make a timelapse video out of them.
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As soon as I learned that my friend and grocery store manager, Andrés, cultivates mushrooms, I knew immediately that we had to do a timelapse photography project with his next batch. The particular species he cultivates is Pleurotus ostreatus, the oyster mushroom. He buys preprepared bails of hay wrapped in plastic, to which nutrients, mushroom spores, and water have been added. Holes have been cut in the plastic on the top and sides of the bail. Before you can see any mushroom growth, the whole bail gets warm to the touch, as the nutrient consumption begins inside. When the little fungal sprigs started appearing in the holes, Andrés came to me, with a big grin on his face, and said, “Today’s the day!” So I returned that afternoon and set up the tripod, flash, and intervalometer pointing at the bails of hay in his grocery store’s warehouse right down the street from where I live. And then we waited…
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Nora, twelve days ago, on March 24, 2010, you turned one year old. They were perhaps the longest 365 days of our lives, but your mother and I made it…and are now the proud, if not dumbfounded, parents of a one year old. By a coincidence involving the date your great-grandparents chose to get married, we spent your first birthday in the United States. You showed your shiny new blue passport and grinned as the immigration official took your mother’s fingerprints and mugshot. Mommy only has a red passport. You did better than I expected on the transatlantic hop, preferring your mother’s lap to mine, thus allowing me to watch a few movies. They didn’t have a microwave on the plane, just an oven, so when the flight attendant tried to heat your vegetable puree lunch in a bowl, she only managed to heat the bowl. On the ninety minute third leg of the journey, we were exhausted, and you spent sixty of the ninety minutes crying as loudly as you could. I experienced this in surround sound, because you were to the left of me and a six-month-old (who was freakishly born with two teeth) was on my right failing to harmonize with you. We did not know until our seats were already chosen for the pond hop that it’s possible to request a bassinet on the long flights. We did so on the way back and it made a HUGE difference not to have you sitting on our laps the whole time.
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I’ve been playing around lately in After Effects, which is more or less “Photoshop for Video”. After Apple’s dumbing down of iMovie (Apple dumbed something down? Imagine that!) last year, it’s refreshing to get back to editing videos with an actual timeline and keyframes.

Our little primate specimen decided that everyone should be up and active at 7:30 AM every day this week, so I’ve seen every sunrise so far. Monday’s was beautiful, but I just enjoyed it without recording it. On Tuesday, I actually got out the camera and recorded the area of the horizon where the sun appears. And on Wednesday and today the sky was gray and boring for the sunrise.
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I’ve been wanting to make this particular timelapse video for a long, long time. Oddly enough, it was a Viagra commercial I saw the other day that played a candle burning in reverse (obvious imagery) that made me finally decide to do it. I used some birthday candles that we’ve been using for Nora’s birthday parties, which, by chance, are “sparkler” candles that not only relight themselves when extinguished, but also send off sparks every so often. The camera was set to take a photograph every three seconds, so the majority of the sparks were missed, but several of them where captured. What surprised me about them was the obvious rotation of the burning projectiles, resulting in squiggly lines of fire in the photographs. Behold!
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I’m a bit of a NASA TV addict. I particularly love watching live shuttle launches and ISS docking maneuvers. The fact that we can launch ourselves up out of our atmosphere and rendezvous with a space station moving at 7.7 kilometers per second 340 km above the Earth blows my mind every single time. Yesterday, as I was watching STS-129 approach the ISS, I had to pause the video to do something else, and when I moved the Quicktime slider back up to the live feed, I noticed how much cooler it all looked at accelerated speed. So I saved the feed I’d been watching, sped it up twelve times, and put some music to it.
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