A few flowers and such from the neighborhood.
To see a higher resolution version of the one above:
Flowers and Such
Monthly Archives: August 2020
DeCordova Sculpture Park
Visited the DeCordova Sculpture Park in Lincoln recently. It was a nice day to get out and walk around with the family. Here is a selection of the art we saw:
Some of the art wasn’t:
You can cycle through all of the pictures:
Latest Fleet Additions
Finally got around to photographing and uploading my latest set of 1/2400 ship miniatures. I cannot claim that I painted the ships. That honor goes to gak8346 who has a far better eye for painting small modern ships than I do. I’ll stick to other miniatures.
I played with focus stacking and using HeliconFocus got a number of photos of ships at oblique angles. Some post-Cold War GHQ ships:
I based the Arleigh Burke IIA destroyer as the USS Hudner, which I photographed when it was being commissioned in Boston.
And one from Dutch Fleet Naval Miniatures on Shapeways:
As well as some Cold War era ships:
Some of the mini-carriers nice and based:
Finally finished the Tarawa-class LHA:
Bill’s Models was nice enough to create some ships at my request, so I had to get them, including some USNS RO-ROs:
They are all decent ships, but if you are starting out with adding merchant or RO-ROs to your collection, I recommend getting some of the US ships from Viking Forge such as the Sealift Pacific, Cape Isabel and Algol.
There are more pictures from this upload in my 1/2400 Naval Miniatures photo album as well as pictures I shared in the past. You can just cycle through them below:
NEOWISE
In July, my sons and I went to Danehy Park in Cambridge to see Comet NEOWISE. We got there before sunset to find a good position on the hill in the park.
It wasn’t the best location, even besides the mosquitos that came out after dusk, but it was a good opportunity to try time lapse/astro photography.
It wasn’t easy to find Comet NEOWISE with the naked eye, so I pointed my camera in the right direction, took a long exposure photograph, then checked if the comet was in the photograph. Whether it was there or not, I repositioned the camera to either find it or get a better picture of it.
It was an iterative process.
I played with the duration of the photographs experiencing that long durations at high focal lengths result in star trails. Some had a good balance.
The next day, clad in bug spray and long pants, my son and I tried photographing the comet from the top of the Alewife MBTA stop garage in Cambridge. The combination of the clouds and the bright garage lights hindered my efforts to get decent pictures. It was a good scouting opportunity. Unfortunately, the weather since hasn’t been great so it was good we went out the earlier night.