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NIGHT SKY PRINT SALES ABOUT CONTACT |
February 26, 2010: Got a lot of cool stuff the other night. Met Chris in Omaha and we went up to Blair with Mike hoping for light pillars, river steam, etc.. ended up shooting for about 9 hours that night lol. I've got enough good stuff that I'll be able to make a page for all this. Here is a star trail with river steam for now. Those are Chris' and Mikes cameras in the foreground.
February 24, 2010: I about lost my toes to frostbite for this first shot lol. I had to keep shooting thirty second shots back to back to back to back. Unlike the Canons Mike and Chris use my Nikon can't continous shutter while on a cable release. So yeah It's near 0F and I'm out in the snow clicking a button 124 times in about an hour. It turned out alright, though as you can see there are some gaps in the trails, thats probably when I had to run back to the car to warm up my feet. For some reason my feet get cold really easy, and my toes go numb, never this numb though.
After getting that first shot done I went and warmed up in my car for 20 minutes before getting ready for another shot. Now the wind picks up and it's twice as cold, definitely not going to be out in the cold for this one. So I just set up my tripod right out the door of my car...yes, I know not a great composition but oh well. The horizon was almost hopeless, but due to the hazy area just above the horizon I was able to mask a foreground layer over the crooked horizon and get away with it pretty clean. You can kinda tell if you look close, but I'm guessing most viewers don't even read this text so they'll never know! LOL.
My battery died during this too, so I had to take the cam off the tripod because you can't axcess the battery door when the camera is mounted "portrait" or vertical. So I had to adjust a few layers. Never shooting star trails in RAW again... Probably do a few RAW exposures though to mask with in case the white balance sucks. But it just takes too long to process the trails when you are converting all the images to Jpeg before even putting them into layers or a stacking program.
 
February 9, 2010: I just realized I never posted anything about this on here. As some of you know, I'm a college student in Omaha, still living at my parents house. In mid March my parents are moving to Minnesota, although there would be great photo opportunities up north it's quite the distance to drive to chase in Nebraska, let alone Kansas or Oklahoma. The current plan is to stay at my brothers place in Omaha until early July, then possibly live in Minnesota for a few months until school starts again in the fall, and hopefully by then I'll be at University of Nebraska Lincoln pursuing a degree in Meteorology. Should have plenty of chase opportunities from late May through July being able to chase whenever during that time.
Seems like everyone is upgrading camera gear this spring. So obviously I'm also looking into to it, too bad Nikon hasn't put out anything besides the D90 that really catches my attention, and at $800 I'm not sure I can afford that at this time, at least if I want to chase at all. Don't think they'll release anything new before chase season so I guess it'll be up to how much my tax return is lol. The D40 is still doing okay, it just struggles with noise at even 200iso. Plus the 6MP resolution is needing an upgrade. After printing off a few orders at 18x24" I realize that 6MP is really cutting it close at 100dpi and you really need to use 200dpi or better for prints. Needless to say it's not something I want to deal with in the future. 12MP should slove those problems, but I'm guessing by the time Nikon comes out with a new model 15-18 with be the default.
One good note is that solar minimum is over! woo. Now we can actually start paying attention for possible aurora activity. We've had sunspots everyday except two so far this year. Not really expecting much to happen the next two weeks or so. Hopefully March be a good month, only two days from now we can start looking at the GFS for March! Just 19 days away from meteorological Spring.
February 2, 2010: Pretty cool sunset at Lewis and Clark overlook the other night. Got pretty lucky with the Plane going right through the frame. Chris got HD video TL of the sun setting behind the church... we'll see if he can ever get it on the web lol.
January 29, 2010: Well since it's unlikely I'll have anything new for a while, I went back through a lot of 2009s photos and found a few that I should have posted a long time ago, but hadn't. Here is one from 6/17 near Marysville, Kansas driving back into the meso to stay on paved roads and try to get ahead of it again. I was recently informed that we missed a tornado on this storm about 5 minutes after this image.
The rest of the winter looks fairly boring (probably too early to be saying this), but I guess we had that coming after a mostly insane start to winter. Temps look to be average to above average next week...hopefully leading to an early end to winter. 30 days till March!
January 22, 2010: Totally caught up now, Squaw creek, fog/sun dogs, and hoar frost accounts done, just click each one for a link to the page, or look on the recent images page.
January 21, 2010: Got all the photos done of the ice storm, although I may head back up there on Saturday as it looks to get really windy. Either that or thunderstorms here! lol. I need to get all the accounts done soon, probably do two more, one for squaw creek and I'll probably combine the sun dogs, frost, and fog into one. Anyway, the link is here for the ice storm.
January 20, 2010: Major ice storm in western Iowa last night. Over an inch of ice in places on top of a half inch of rime ice, branches were coming down all over. After looking at the radar estimate on precip, noticed the most fell between Soldier and Dunlap, so I drove there. Roads weren't too bad, except gravel roads, which were impassible as they were coated with an inch of ice.
 
Got a lot of images to go through, will definitely have an account for this storm later.
January 18, 2010: Hey I guess 2010 isn't starting off too bad lol. Some new stuff here. Had some thick rime ice a couple mornings ago, sucked that it never really cleared to a blue sky lower to the horizon for a couple of these shots, fog stuck around until 1pm and cleared a bit west of Omaha but then started to get foggy again around 3pm lol. Been Foggy/freezing foggy for like 6 days now, only the first two days were kinda cool, now its just some crappy general fog that visibility never gets below a quarter mile, but its called "dense"... kinda weird to call that dense when compared to the squaw creek trip in the crazy dense fog that limited visibility to 50ft or less at times while driving the hour and a half to mound city.
That is one of the crazy rime ice that covered a TON of trees west of hwy 6, once you get out of the city and trees are more spread out they accumulate a lot more freezing fog. I wish I had better light for this one, it was still foggy and cloudy.
This is from the first night of fog at Platte river state park, there was a shadow cast by some light that shot up into the sky like a light pillar almost. I'll post more later, probably put together a whole page at some point.
January 14, 2010: Had some good snowmelt fog last night, met up with Chris Allington down at Platte river state park. Ended up making fogbows with his new Jeep, lol. Easily the brightest one I've ever seen. It looked very cool when you got below the headlights so there was a shadow underneath each side of the bow.
I've got a few other images I'll get up at some point. There was a cool scene on the tower of the entire river engulfed in fog and a trains lights lit it up pretty eerily. Also a crazy looking light pillar/fog shadow thing.
 
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