American in Spain

When I took that glorious evening walk last week, my photographic attentions were drawn particularly to the street lights that had just come on, and how their artificial light contrasted with the natural light still in the sky. So I set aside the photographs of street lights for this separate post. The whole experience of that night has taught me that I need to do more night photography, actually lugging my tripod out with me into the cool evening air. The play of street lights against buildings and sidewalks and the rest of the urban landscape is a particular itch that I hope to scratch at the earliest opportunity.
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Este post es bilingüe para mis fans locales… Mirad después del inglés.

I’m doing this post in Spanish, too, for my local fans. So bear with me.

On Saturday, when I awoke from my nap, the missus instructed me to make a paté sandwich for my daughter’s afternoon snack, and go down to the town park where she was playing with her Spanish grandfather. I’m still not entirely sure what make me grab my camera on the way out the door, but I think I was expecting to get some cute grandfather-granddaughter playground shots. When I got to the park, they were playing on the swings, but soon there were too many kids at the playground, so we left and went for a walk…and what a beautiful walk it was! The tide was high, the sunset was beautiful and there was the tiniest sliver of a moon. I was so lucky that I’d taken my camera!
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About a year ago, I became a fan of a Facebook page about Colindres, the town where I live. With the exception of one brief spat in which I suggested that perhaps the town hall shouldn’t be sponsoring a bunch of crackpot UFOlogists to come to town and vend their wares, where a few people got offended by my suggestion that extraterrestrials have probably not travelled light years to come visit the Earth and not leave any evidence that psychology cannot explain, the experience has been very interesting. No new meatspace friendships have come out of it, but I can stay up to date with festival schedules and things.

One of the things I enjoy most about following this particular Facebook page are the photos that are posted fairly regularly, taken by a gentleman named Raúl Gonzalez. He has an eye for capturing his town’s beauty. Earlier this week, I was looking up some census data for Colindres on Wikipedia and discovered this gorgeous photograph of the two bridges with a rainbow, taken by none other than Raúl.
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Recently, when I was with my family at a swimming pool, I had the opportunity to use the fast shutter rate of my DSLR camera to take some quick photographs of them. I took the photographs specifically with the intention of practicing a Photoshop technique called motion composition or motion multiplication. The idea is that you make a composite photograph of a subject that is in motion by combining various copies of the subject in different positions.
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For her second birthday, Nora received, from my Godfather and Godstepmother, an assortment of plastic animals. To me, these are way more interesting than dolls. The detail is absolutely exquisite. I applaud whoever designed the molds in China and the factory workers that painted them. I thought they would make an interesting subject for some practice at inanimate studio photography. I used my “tinkerbell lighting” technique of a long exposure and a moving LED point source of light.
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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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Three months ago, when I went on a ferry ride under the Golden Gate Bridge, my shutter finger got a little too excited and I ended up snapping several dozen photographs of the bridge. Part of the reason was that we were lucky enough to take the ferry on a clear afternoon, right at golden hour. Golden hour is a term in photography and cinematography referring to the first and last hour of sunlight every day, in which the sunlight, after passing through a larger portion of the Earth’s atmosphere than normal, takes on a golden hue, which makes the world seem warmer and generally more photogenic. I meant to post these photos immediately after blogging about the trip, but the intense series of four posts about our trip wore me out almost as much as the walk from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Golden Gate Bridge did. Here are just a few of the photos I took on that ferry ride. (more…)

While they are still only fun to her as colored objects and not the mathematical concepts they represent, Nora very much enjoys playing with these foam numbers we bought for a few pennies at the local chinos. The other day I was goofing around with them as she was popping them out of their placemat-sized sheet and handing them to me, and I noticed that they could be interlocked in sequence. It was then that I thought they might make an interesting subject for photography, so I waited until Nora’s interest moved to another toy and went to get my camera.
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Recently I’ve been having a surprising amount of fun playing with some bubble solution that Nora was given by a local shopkeeper. Besides the obvious, the bubbles are my favorite of Nora’s toys. It took her a while to break out of her awe at looking at them enough to intentionally pop them, and she still hasn’t understood the process of blowing through the hoop to create them. But that’s fine; I’m content blowing them for her.

I have more ideas about photography of bubbles than I have time to implement them, but last night I finally got around to my first attempt. For some reason my off-camera flash wireless connection wasn’t working, so I decided to turn off the room lights, set a long exposure, and manually fire the flash. Of about twenty shots, these are the best three.
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