Earth Explorations

I am learning that one of the things you do as a photographer is chase the light, particularly the golden hours around sunrise and sunset. I know a man who specializes in photographing sunrises. He regularly gets up at or before 4 am to check the weather, make coffee and decide if it's worth a drive to the spots that he knows will yield stunning sunrise photos . I am not there yet, particularly with that getting up before 4 am business. However, I did find myself getting up and out before 7:30 am on a Sunday morning to take pictures of eagles. I feel that this is sort of the same thing. Finding eagles is easy around here as eagles overwinter by the Oahe Dam about six miles out of town, attracted by the open water and cottonwood trees. Eagles are large, photogenic birds that unlike their smaller cousins don't flit. Generally if you are quiet and still they will be as well until something calls them to take flight. In populated areas they move if there is too much human...

When I reread my post below my eyes glazed over from the abundance technical details about background defocus mode. Overall, my post was rather dense and  uninteresting. Lesson learned. I'll keep the technical travails about which button to push when to a minimum. Suffice it to say that I don't fully understand my camera yet so occasionally it will do something and I don't know why. For example, I have managed to change the display on the screen so after I take a photo it flashes not only the photo but also all the info like f stops, ISO, etc. And once I set the display screen so that when I touched it, the camera took a photo. I have no idea how I turned that on but it's mysteriously off, for now at least. Somewhere in the advanced user's guide I'm sure it tells me about these things. I don't know when I will get to it because the advanced users guide comes on a CD and I don't have a CD reader. What I do feel I am learning, a little, is depth of fie...

While I am a very inexperienced photographer I am not a complete newbie. Years ago I saw a Powerpoint on how to take good outdoor photos that talked about the rule of thirds and depth of field when composing your photos.  I've only had very very basic cameras so depth of field was something that I had no control over but I've always installed gridlines on the viewfinder if that camera had that feature.  I'm somewhat proficient at rule of thirds so with this new camera I turned my attention to depth of field. I am using a series by Graham Houghton  on You Tube to guide my learning. He recommends you start out in intelligent auto or IA mode which sounded good to me. The first subject he tackled after setting up the camera  is understanding how to set up background defocus mode and change the focal point of your picture. Knowing how to do this will help you change your depth of field in the IA mode. In peeking ahead at the topics I think he covers this later on in t...

As stated below I have added a new camera to my collection, a Panasonic Lumix FZ300. This camera is in the bridge class of cameras. The way I understand it there is a camera hierarchy with phones and point and shoots at the bottom and digital single lens reflex cameras (DSLRs) at the top and bridges in between.  The hierarchy is based on clarity and quality of image and seems to be directly correlated to price and indirectly correlated to ease of use. This camera which I shall call Lu can function as a point and shoot but also has many buttons and dials if you want to take your photography up a notch. Since the whole point of my buying Lu was to do exactly that I have decided to embark on a self designed, self taught course, consisting of what I hope are credible internet resources and my own practice. Over the next few weeks or months many of my posts will be about learning about Lu. There will be posts of photos with information about f stops and shutter speeds and depth...

Last year I set a goal of reading four science books. And I have! Other Minds Song of Trees Caesar's Last Breath Astrophysics for People in a Hurry. They were all good. And they were all by men. My next reading challenge for 2019 is four science books by or about women, preferably both.

I was a speaker at the STEM Savvy cafe about my polar experience and this Lego mini-fig was my honorarium. I love it. This gift is timely because I recently made the decision to upgrade my camera to more than my phone. I have always maintained that you can be an explorer with the tools you have and for many if not most of us that includes a phone. You don't have to have the $3,000 camera with $2,000 lens. But I've come to the point in my journey as an everyday explorer and explorer educator where I want to do more exploring than my phone will allow. My phone doesn't take good pictures of birds for example and I'd like to add more bird photos to my iNaturalist account. I anticipate that I will continue to use my phone for the every day exploration and the upgraded camera for the more intentional exploration. Knowing myself, and I don't think I'm alone here, I have to guard against new puppy syndrome where once the newness wears off I stop playing with it...

I had the good fortune to attend the National Council of Social Studies conference in Chicago courtesy of National Geographic. I helped staff the booth in the exhibit hall talking about the Educator Certification program and I gave a lightning talk at an Educator Happy Hour. One of the keynote speakers at NCSS was Khizr Khan. You can tell he is of a different generation because he does not have a social media presence as far as I can tell. Mr Khan (I cannot imagine referring to him as Khizr even here in my blog) is a lawyer, Muslim and Gold Star father who came to national prominence giving a pointed speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention about the dark dark tone taken on by the then Republican candidate about immigrants.  We educators gave Mr Khan a standing ovation even before he spoke. The applause was long and fervent. After he spoke, the ovation was longer and louder. More than one of us was crying, moved by his words and his call to be candle bearers ...