Celestia Forums

Hi folks... Let's try this again!

As a sort of diversion from the typical subject matter, I thought it would be neat to have a thread in Purgatory dedicated to the posting of pictures you have taken, yourselves, that you think are worth sharing. These don't have to be images that will wow us into stupification, mind you. They can be interesting shots, favorite subject matter, or unintentional photographic effects.

There are a couple of ground rules, however. Please do not post images that convey religious or political opinions, and definitely do not post anything pornographic or images that might display copyrighted material. Also, please do not use your images to promote advertising, or which can be construed as spam. If you have any questions about images that you want to post, but are not quite sure if they are appropriate, then PM me, and I'll let you know. I deal with this sort of thing all the time at my University, and with a wife moving into the profesisonal photography world I've also had to bone up on what you can and can't publish. If there is anything that I'm not sure about, I'll pass it on to Selden, and he can make the final determination.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the preferred format for the images are thumbnails, as they provide a preview of an image, and are not too taxing for those with dial up accounts. I reccomend Imageshack.com, as they allow unlimited image storage, provided that the pics are 1.5mb or less in size.

Thanks, and I hope everyone enjoys looking and posting!

...John...

Alright, here are the first images that I promised... redux

This is an image looking north from Havre (Montana), towards sunset. Rain was falling over the town, and managed to get caught in the light of the setting sun. The color hues were pretty unusual.

This is an old school house west of Havre, former school of one of our recently retired professors. I'm not certain how old the building is, but it was a one room multi-age school, so I'm sure it is at least 50 years old, if not older. And, of course, the sunset colors, I thought, were great.

Taken back in March, facing west, this was one of the first rain storms to pass over Havre after the snows had, by and alrge, ceased. The filtered sunlight towards the horizon is red due to the setting sun, but the upper cloud deck is a gorgeous silver as the sun has *just* dipped behind the clouds. There are even some hints of cloud shadows in the atmosphere.

This is Donaldson Hall, a former dorm (and one of the oldest buildings on campus) which is now largely storage and alumni offices. It was a brisk but still day in march when I snapped this shot; the reflections were pretty much irresistable, and the symmetry really caught my eye. I was tempted to edit out the cars, to add to the symmetry, but decided against it. Unnless it is for a specific project, I'm not very big into editing images to that degree.

And finally, this was taken last summer during the height of Montana's fire season. the setting sun was blood red because of distant fires (at least 200 miles away or more), and the shafts of light coming through the hedge were caught in the mist of the sprinkler. Normally this is a pretty boring scnee, but the colors and the rays, I thought, made this a great image.

That's it for now. Hope you guys enjoyed them, and I'll post some more in a day or two, depending on what kind of traffic this thread gets. Looking forward to others' photos!

...John...

Neat pictures! I especially like the reflection one and the one with the light rays coming through the trees. A few of my better pictures are to follow...


[Edit]Blah... Photobucket is being retarded and messing with my pictures for some reason. My max image size is set to 1 MB. I'm uploading a 855 KB image. In Windows Explorer it looks just fine, but after I upload it to Photobucket and look at it online, it's totally jaggy looking, like this.

I'll try to figure out what's going on tomorrow, and post my pictures then. I'm too tired to figure it out now. [/Edit]

Very beautiful with the effect of Sun !

Johaen wrote:... it's totally jaggy looking, like this[/Edit]

It's looking pretty good to me....

Dollan wrote:

Johaen wrote:... it's totally jaggy looking, like this[/Edit]

It's looking pretty good to me....

Oh what the hell... now it looks right. It sure didn't last night. It was all pixlated looking. Very much not good. I'm at work right now. Expect something this evening.

Fightspit wrote:Very beautiful with the effect of Sun !

Thanks much! What is really cool is that most of these shots were taken on the fly. My wife is the meticulous one; I just point and shoot.....

Johaen wrote:

Dollan wrote:

Johaen wrote:... it's totally jaggy looking, like this[/Edit]

It's looking pretty good to me....

Oh what the hell... now it looks right. It sure didn't last night. It was all pixlated looking. Very much not good. I'm at work right now. Expect something this evening.

OK... now this is really wierd. When I open that link in IE, it looks just fine. But when I open it in Firefox, it's all pixlated. Wierd. Anyhow, working on my post now.

I used to live on the 3rd floor of a military dormatory, facing west, so I was able to take some really fantastic pictures of sunsets and other stuff like that. All of the pictures were taken by me with a 4.0 Megapixel Olympus Stylus Verve. A few of my more favorite pictures follow...



This picture was taken just after a thunderstorm, right around sunset. The ground is still wet from the rain and reflects the clouds above. This is one of the more 'pinkish' sunsets I've seen.



Another sunset picture. This one is kinda neat because of the obvious cloud shadows in the sky. I wish I had moved a bit so that the parkinglot light wasn't in the middle of the sun. Oh well.



I was messing around with my camera at night, and took thiis fairly neat looking picture. There's a nighttime setting for the camera, which basically makes the shutter speed slow way down to like 4 seconds. And so I set my camera on a tripod and waited for cars to go by. This is the best looking one I got.



This one I took as a severe thunderstorm was headed in my direction. I just sat outside with my camera and tried to take the picture right as the lightning flashed. Out of like 20 tries I got 2 strikes, and this is the better looking one. When the storm eventually got to me, it was really bad. Super windy and lots of hail. It was the biggest hail I had ever seen. I was so worried it was going to damage my car, but thankfully it made it through without any dents.



One last sunset picture, but this one is a little silly . If you look at the top of the picture, above the jet contrail, there's a little fuzzy black dot. IMO, it looks exactly like the pictures you sometimes see of "UFOs". Now I can say I took a picute of a UFO!!! I'm pretty sure it's just a bug, because one of the other pictures I took that night had a similair fuzzy dot, but it had wings and was obviously a bug. It's still kinda neat though. If you're curious, here's a picture of the "UFO" at full resolution.



Note: I'm not sure why, but Firefox is behaving badly with my post. Some of the pictures that I linked to are smaller than they should be, and others are all pixlated. But it works just fine in IE, go figure. Anyway, enjoy, and I hope it looks good for everyone.

That "UFO" shot is great! Not only is the contrail a wonderful contrast to the rest of the shot, but the UFO itself is absolutely classic! You're right, odds are this was a bug flying right in front of the camera when you shot the image.

I also loved the one with the cloud shadows, but then I'm a big sucker for any sort of atmospheric effects.

I was going to wait for a bit, but I might be away from the computer for the weekend, so...

The following images were taken at the Bowdoin National Wildlife Refuge, about 60 miles east of us in north Central Montana. They were taken back in February, however, so there was really no wildlife to speak of as of yet. We also followed that trip up with a stop at the Fort Peck Reservoir, largest earthen dam in the U.S., another 40 or so miles to the east.

In 1938, while still under construction, a large part of the dam slumped away, killing several people. Today there is a monument to those lost, and we caught it just as the sun was going down.

This shot was pure happenstance. The sun was at the right angle, and the car was parked just right, so that the landscape was perfectly reflected in the window. My daughter, Moira, was in the car at the time, out of the cold, and the two images were combined, in my mind, just perfectly.

That's about it for now. I'll do another post in a couple of days; looking forward to seeing more of others' photos!

...John...

I was going to wait until some other pictures showed up, not wanting to appear to be the "hog" of this thread, but I think that when I get back from this weekend trip, I'll post some other images that I have. They'll probably be some that we took during our trip to Yellowstone in April.

...John...

Alright, so I found myself with a few minutes to spare before I need to get ready for our weekend trip. Here we go...

I love this shot. One of my two sons, tossing a rock into the water at Tiber Reservoir, some 60-odd miles east of Havre. The spalsh, and just the one hand reaching out says it all!

This is a cleft in the Little Rockies, an isolated range some 60 miles south of Havre, which is as far as I know a natural formation that the road has taken advantage of.

That's actually all I have for the moment. The Yelloowstone trip will probably be the next post or two, but that won't be for a little while, a few days at least. Hopefully some of you will post more pictures in the meantime! As for me... I'm off to the mountains!

Well, in an hour or so....

...John...

Hey folks...

It's been a while, no doubt. but we had an absolutely awesome sunrise the other day, not long after we fell into our sub-zero temperatures. It isn't often, surprisingly, that I get to see some of the wonderful atmospheric effects that can result from those temperatures.

We had a brilliant sun dog event, thogh the brightness is not as evident as it could be in this shot (it's a new camera, and I'm still learning it). I wanted to load a cool panorama of the same shot, but Imageshack, for some reason, keeps crapping out on me when I try. gads, I can't wait until I get my own server....

Anyway, enjoy!

...John...

Dollan wrote:I wanted to load a cool panorama of the same shot, but Imageshack, for some reason, keeps crapping out on me when I try.

I've occasionally had issues uploading pics too. It might be too big. Anyway, nice picture. I wish I had that kind of view here where I live. That's one of the things I miss about living in the dorms. I had an awsome view. Now I'm surrounded by apartments.

Naw, the file isn't too big (I've noticed that Imageshack upped their maximum file size to 1.5mb). For some reason, on that particular account, most of the time I try to upload a shot, it not only takes forever, but about half the time it wille ventually go to a "page not found". Very frustrating.

Yeah, that's one thing, we do have a nice view from our area. I'll tell you, though, it was a pain getting that picture while stnading in a wind chill of -28! I've been in worse, of course, but I had to have the gloves off in order to properly work the camera. ouch!

Now, if our possible move to northern Wyoming happens, I imagine that there will be a whole new set of image possibilities waiting for us!

...John...

Ice crystals on my roof after a cold night:


I'm hard at work on Celestia, but snow covered mountains are teasing me through my window:


People familiar with Seattle will recognize the 520 floating bridge in that picture.

--Chris

Dollan wrote:Hey folks...

It's been a while, no doubt. but we had an absolutely awesome sunrise the other day, not long after we fell into our sub-zero temperatures. It isn't often, surprisingly, that I get to see some of the wonderful atmospheric effects that can result from those temperatures.

Very nice image of parhelia! When I look at that picture, I can practically feel the cold.

--Chris

I can *still* feel the cold!

BTW, that view of the mountains, from your window, is a lot like the one that I used to have in the Flathead Valley in western Montana. I miss that view of the Whitefish Range terribly...

...John...

In the last days of December, we had some more bitterly cold weather, as well as some high level clouds, loaded with ice crystals. That made for, of course, a great photo-op. This shot I took downtown, while taking my 5 year old to pre-school.



I reduced the amount of light being picked up by the camera in order to bring out the color, but the effect was still very noticable that morning!

...John...