The Moon and Venus

Touching the horizon over the motorway bridge I can see from my house.

My nine shots in a timelapse animation.

Nevertheless, I’m quite satisfied with the outcome. One unforeseen, but obvious in retrospect, consequence was that the lamp immediately dried out the strawberries, causing them to shrink, and also provided the mold with a less than fungi-friendly environment. Oh well. Perhaps next time I’ll try using a flash like I did with the larger fungi.

For full berry-rotting excitement, it can be viewed at 1080p on YouTube or Vimeo.

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.

As anyone who has tried it will tell you, lunar photography is not easy. A moon that looks huge to the eye ends up only hitting a few pixels on your CCD. I’ve tried various hacks, but this was my first attempt with my new 200mm lens.

I should’ve written down my camera settings from the night before. Instead I just made a guess before the moon came up and it turned out that the brightness of the moon was too much to get any crater detail in my video. Oh well. I’ll have to keep at it. After all, it’s just now the start of the season when I can leave a window open for an hour at night.

My best shot from two nights ago.

Here’s my very short video with overly dramatic music:

It’s also available in 1080p HD if you roll that way.

Lobotomy patient.

Definitely not who you want performing your lobotomy.

The look on Marga’s face here is absolutely perfect!

I went with the happy shifty-eye for 2010.

Marga’s jack-o-lantern was much more sinister.

Oscar acting scared of his pumpkin.

He preferred playing with the finished product more than the actual cleaning and carving. His face was banged up from a fútbol match the day before.

I got a pretty good series of shots of Oscar and Nora playing with the pumpkins.

Nora doing her jack-o-lantern face.

While clearly fascinated by Oscar, Nora didn’t really want to spend any time alone with him. He’s had good practice with his one-month-old sister and was very tender with Nora.

Grumpy and Smily.

The Gourdhead Brothers.

The cool halo shot I discovered last year.

This year I had the idea to use my LED flashlight to do some Tinkerbell lighting.

This is just a 20 second exposure with me moving my LED around inside the pumpkin with my hand.

This might be my favorite one.

I love the symmetry of this photo, with the three heads and the three orange orbs.

We had a wonderful evening. It was great to have our neighbor over for a couple hours.

Happy Halloween!!

Because the images are from a 360° panorama, I cut between four shots of different parts of the panorama. It goes by really quickly, so you might want to watch it a couple times. Things to watch for:

1. In the first shot, the tide comes in, goes out, and comes back in again.
2. In the second shot, for some reason, all the boats turn around from facing left to facing right. Wind? Tides?
3. In the third shot, the parking lot fills up quickly in the morning and empties quickly in the evening.

Very worth watching in HD.

The entire process took about 72 hours. After the first batch of mushrooms have been harvested, more will continue grow. Each bail of hay providing four or five harvests. And even then it’s better if you spread the hay in a dank dark corner of your garden, because they will keep growing and growing and growing.

Fresh Oyster Mushroom Recipe

Because these mushrooms were freshly harvested from a clean environment when I cooked them, they didn’t need to be washed at all. In fact, Andrés specifically told me not to wash them because they will absorb the water and then release it into the frying pan later, losing taste as they do. This species of mushroom is fairly common in supermarkets around Spain – they call them setas, which is is a term that encompasses most types of edible mushrooms – but the time between being harvested and the time spent in a refrigerator means they lose a lot of flavor. These were fresh and very flavorful.

1. Cut the mushrooms at their base with a pair of scissors
2. Optionally wipe them off a little bit with a napkin. Do not wash them!
3. Do not cut off their stems. Since they are fresh, the stems are tender and edible.
4. Sprinkle on a little bit of salt
5. Sauté them in a little extra virgin olive oil.
6. Serve.

Some people add a little garlic, but these fresh mushrooms are so flavorful that extra spices are not really necessary. Taste the fungus!!

Timelapse Video

Worth viewing in HD.

Photos

Now on to the photos. More are available in the photoset here.

Andrés looking like a proud father.

Warming up the frying pan.

Sautéing oyster mushrooms.

On the plate.

A hungry timelapser ready to enjoy the fruits fungi of his labor.

Uncle Sam wants YOU!

You really liked the Johnny Jump Up that your grandmother bought you from the baby consignment shop especially for this visit. You are right in the target demographic of mobility and strength. And your fascination for telephones went unabated throughout the visit. With your grandparents’ phone, pressing the two biggest buttons resulted in first acquiring a dial tone and then forwarding the dial tone to the other phones of the house, causing them all to ring.

You seem to look guilty a lot lately, too.

This trip saw your first introduction to something American children have been eating and throwing on the floor for generations: Cheerios. Of course you loved them. Since Spaniards aren’t big cereal eaters, I think I’ve only ever seen flakes in the grocery store, but I will have to keep an eye out for whole-grain tori.

You also discovered the food storage facility located below your mouth. I still use mine sometimes.

Your grandfather is a pinball wizard. He discovered that pinball can console you in ways that no amount of rocking or cooing can. What’s not to like about a shiny ball bouncing around flashing lights and flippers flipping.

On your birthday, we opened two bottles of Nora, a gift from friends Jeff and Jane, in your honor. If only we’d known about it when we took our trip to Vigo last month…we passed right by the vineyard with the most beautiful name.

The weather was wonderful, so we spent the first part of the party out on the deck.

On the Friday before we left from Spain, you and I went to the local grocery store, Susinos, like we always do. They are very fond of you in there. While we were discussing our upcoming trip with your friends there, my friend, Andrés (of politically scandalous fame), came over and said he had a gift for us. He pulled out a bottle of wine inside a plastic bag and said that it was to be taken to your grandparents and opened on your birthday. When I pulled off the plastic bag, I was amazed to discover that he had taken this photograph and painstakingly cut out the background and replaced it with the US and Spanish flags. The amount of work he had put into it out of pure thoughtfulness was amazing. It’s no wonder we go almost exclusively to his store.

My parents loved the gesture as well.

Andrés, even though he mispronounced your name a little, I think you will agree that his gracias is sincere.

As is tradition in the United States, we gave you a piece of cake and let you eat it as you saw fit. I also recorded a video of you eating it, which I will present here. As a result of most of the attendees to your birthday party being baby boomers your grandparents’ age and the fair amount of wine consumed during the meal, while you were eating your cake they spontaneously broke into the 1963 billboard hit, It’s My Party. Thankfully the video camera was still rolling so your reaction to a song about sixties teen angst has been recorded for posterity. Priceless.

After dinner, your parents and grandparents performed a dress rehearsal of some original songs that would later be performed at the Rasmussen Family Reunion later in the week, including the tongue-in-cheek soon-to-be-classic, If My Family’s All Crazy, Why Am I Sane, sung to the tune of I Saw The Light.

You didn’t know your family was so musical, did you?

Then came the presents…

You seemed very fond of this doll.

One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, a tongue twisting classic.

And of course more books. You love turning pages.

Your grandmother gave you this beautiful alphabet quilt that she bartered some work for.

It’s embroidered with your name and birth date.

Eventually the guests had to leave and you came down off your chocolate high and went to bed. It has been one of the most amazing years of my life as I have learned to care for and love you in ways I never understood before. We’ve both changed a lot since I snipped that umbilical cord on the Tuesday afternoon of March 24, 2009. I look forward to spending many more years with you.

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.

What’s interesting is that I recorded two sets of five-seconds-apart shots, stopping the intervalometer for about 45 minutes when the sky turned gray. What’s cool is that I was able to blend between the earlier footage and the later footage in an almost unnoticeable way.

Some of the features of this video that I did not know how to do until I created it:

• Text that follows a curved path
• Animated text that disappears when it leaves a feathered mask area
• Creating a timelapse solely in After Effects (It’s as hard as dragging in a folder containing the jpegs.)
• Panning and zooming within a timelapse video
• A seamless blend between two shots
• Adding a soundtrack in After Effects

The video is frustratingly short at about 12 seconds, but it was just for practice, as I said. It could be the start of a cool video, though. Here it is in 1080p if you have some bandwidth to kill and a hankering for high quality.

It’s unclear to me how the spark on the right changed direction in mid-flight.

More corkscrew sparks.

I suppose that most sparks have angular momentum like this and spiral around as they burn.