The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
Last night, the amazing Aurora Borealis:
This morning, Orion in all his glory:
I took both of these Ophelia (my phone), by the way! As much as I love Miranda, the Lumix FZ1000ii, phone cameras are amazing these days…and in truth, I haven’t really done much at all with Miranda in night and low-light settings. Hopefully this winter!
On mornings when The Wife has to work at the downtown Buffalo site (currently twice a week), it falls to me to take Hobbes out for his morning constitutional, so as to save her some time. Yesterday morning I took him out, looked up at the autumn sky, and saw…this.
So I made Hobbes stop in his tracks (frustrating for a dog on his morning walk, I know!) while I pulled out my phone to do a little astro-and-cloud-photography. (Is cloud-photography called “cumulophotography”? Seems to me it should be….)
I am always happy to see Orion the Hunter high in the sky again. It means the winter stars are returning, and I am here for it.
Good to see you again, Orion! May your hunt be fruitful!
A few weeks ago I spent a morning at a particular spot in Chestnut Ridge Park, about as far into the park as one can get without getting out and walking. It’s a spot most people at the Ridge don’t go to, because it’s so far into the park’s interior, but it’s hardly deserted; it’s just far from the entrance. At this spot, one of the park’s streams–I believe this one is actually the one that goes over the Eternal Flame Falls, farther upstream–drops something like, oh, I don’t know, maybe 20 or 30 feet, over a few hundred feet of stream bed. So there are a lot of short drops, sloped spots, and deep plunge pools.
On this particular day there wasn’t much water–there usually isn’t, in August and September–so there wasn’t much to photograph by way of flowing water. So while I did get in some nice practice with shutter speed and working with the light, I didn’t get a ton of images from the session that I really liked…but I did like this one. It’s almost an abstract, almost impressionist in what it suggests without being able to depict it without enough water to do so.
Also that day, I photographed this wonderful old well house. Chestnut Ridge has a lot of these, and I’m saddened to think that they’re probably going to all have crumbled away within another decade or two. This one, by its surroundings and the way it always seems to be sitting in half-light, makes me think that I’ve entered a Hayao Miyazaki movie every time I see it.
I doubt I’ll ever have the patience to really embrace wildlife photography as my genre of choice, but I have to say that I’m very happy with how these two shots turned out. One nice thing about photography I’m discovering is that you get pretty much immediate feedback as to how you’re doing, which means you know when you’re leveling up a bit.
Bigger versions can be found on my Flickr stream. Sharp photos of moving birds has been a challenge for me…and I didn’t even use burst to get these!
If you were anywhere north of, say, whatever latitude it is that the Pennsylvania’s northern border sits on, you were under instructions to get outside and look at the northern sky because the sun was blasting out magnetic particles that would result in potentially spectacular displays of the Aurora Borealis, or more commonly, the “Northern Lights”. The last time I saw a truly stunning display of the Aurora was back when I was in college; a bunch of us were inside doing whatever and another friend bursts in and says, “You gotta come outside and see this!” It looked like the entire sky was a blue, green, and red swirl of tie-dye. I’ve never forgotten that.
Last night’s Aurora was much more muted, at least where I live; I didn’t make any attempt to drive out into a darker spot, and while my own street is quiet and not super brightly-lit, directly north of my street is a two-mile-long stretch of car dealerships, which are brightly lit. But I went out around 9pm and looked up .The sky was clear (maybe a Karmic make-up for getting screwed on the eclipse?), but there was still some night-glow from the car dealerships to contend with, and initially I thought, “Nope, no Aurora here.” The Big Dipper was directly overhead, and the Moon was a lovely sliver as it is just starting to wax again. I thought about coming back in, but I stayed out just long enough for my eyes to adapt a little, long enough to see a few wisps of cloud directly overhead, making an interesting radial pattern. I’d never seen wisps of cloud in that pattern before, and they were actually shifting as I watched them…and that’s when I realized that I was actually looking at the Aurora Borealis.
A forever-lesson there: when going outside to look at the night sky, always wait at least five minutes. Give your eyes time to adapt!
I took a few photos with my phone, using the “Night” mode, and this one turned out best after some editing in Snapseed. I’m going to try a couple of my other shots later in Lightroom to see what I can do, but the Samsung S21 Ultra’s night mode did come through for me. I made no attempt to use my Lumix FZ1000ii for this event, as I didn’t want to break out the tripod and all of that jazz and I haven’t done any research as to what settings one needs to use to capture the Aurora. But that’s fine! Photographers like to say that “The best camera is the one you have with you,” and in this case, it was my phone.
Last Sunday morning I ventured out to Knox Farm State Park, a favorite local place of mine, to walk and do some photography. I wasn’t all that excited at the prospect, though, because the morning was quite cold and it was the kind of overcast that makes the light just dull and uninspiring. And it was something like the eighth, ninth, or even tenth day like that in a row. I’ll spare my long-time readers my rant about how the worst season in WNY is not Winter but rather Spring, but I did post a whine on TikTok and as a YouTube short about it. Anyway, the walking was unpleasant and dismal, with a constant breeze that was just enough to keep you cold, and of course by this time of year the trees still are bare so you don’t even escape the unpleasantness by going into the woods for shelter from the storm.
In short, I wound up staying at the park less than an hour, and I only took a dozen or two photos, most of which I didn’t even bother editing in Lightroom.
But…
…there was this bird.
Is this the best wildlife photo ever? Of course not. It’s not terribly sharp, and one photographer I follow on YouTube sometimes jokes about the ubiquity of what he calls “BOAS photos”: Bird on a stick.
This little bird (no, I’ve no idea what kind of bird that is, feel free to let me know!) sat in the tree above me long enough for me to get two photos, and then he flitted across the path to a birdhouse on a pole. I watched him there and I was happy to have snapped its photo twice, but then I realized that there was another bird inside the birdhouse, sticking its head out.
It’s nice to step back and look at my progress in photography and notice that I’m reaching a point where even when I’m not really feeling it and am in fact going to pull the plug and go home early, I still stand a good chance of getting something good!
Composer Eric Whitacre, whom I have featured several times in this space before, is an always fascinating voice to return to. I had, in fact, forgotten about him until the week before the eclipse, when I looked up classical music selections inspired by space (that were not Holst’s The Planets, which is a work with which I’ve had a strained relationship over the years). Whitacre’s name came up for a piece called Deep Field, which sounded interesting. It turns out that the background of Deep Field is even more interesting.
If you’re up on your Hubble Space Telescope lore, you’ll recognize the title Deep Field as referring to one specific image: the “Hubble eXtreme Deep Field”, and here it is:
Bigger versions are available here. By way of background:
This image, called the Hubble eXtreme Deep Field (XDF), combines Hubble observations taken over the past decade of a small patch of sky in the constellation of Fornax. With a total of over two million seconds of exposure time, it is the deepest image of the Universe ever made, combining data from previous images including the Hubble Ultra Deep Field (taken in 2002 and 2003) and Hubble Ultra Deep Field Infrared (2009).
The image covers an area less than a tenth of the width of the full Moon, making it just a 30 millionth of the whole sky. Yet even in this tiny fraction of the sky, the long exposure reveals about 5500 galaxies, some of them so distant that we see them when the Universe was less than 5% of its current age.
The Hubble eXtreme Deep Field image contains several of the most distant objects ever identified.
It’s one of the most awe-inspiring images of our Cosmos ever captured, particularly when you realize that (a) this comprises just the tinies part of what we can see from here, and (b) the Cosmos looks like that in every direction. The vastness of space-time captured here and implied by the strange smallness of this specific infinity is utterly humbling.
The XDF image inspired the making of a film celebrating the years of Hubble’s service to astronomy, and Mr. Whitacre was brought in to score the film. The result is an amazing ethereal work that builds and builds and builds with intensity, before subsiding with the entrance of a choir. The work is open and yet dense, peaceful and yet driving…it’s music that stands alongside our images of the depths of our universe.
Grammy® award-winning American composer Eric Whitacre’s symphonic work Deep Field was inspired by the world’s most famous space observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope which celebrated its 30th year in orbit in 2020, and its greatest discovery – the iconic Deep Field image. The film – Deep Field: The Impossible Magnitude of our Universe – illuminates the score by combining Hubble’s stunning imagery, including never-seen-before galaxy fly-bys, with bespoke animations to create an immersive, unforgettable journey from planet Earth to the furthest edges of our universe.
The film is a first-of-its-kind collaboration between Grammy® award-winning composer & conductor Eric Whitacre, producers Music Productions, scientists and visualizers from the Space Telescope Science Institute and multi award-winning artists 59 Productions. The score and film paint the incredible story of the Hubble Deep Field. Turning its gaze to a tiny and seemingly dark area of space (around one 24-millionth of the sky) for an 11-day long period, the Hubble Space Telescope revealed over 3,000 galaxies that had never previously been seen, each one composed of hundreds of billions of stars.
Here is Deep Field, first performed in concert at the Royal Albert Hall, and then the film with the work alongside it. This is amazing stuff.
In Buffalo, the eclipse was simultaneously an astonishingly powerful and deeply disappointing experience. Clouds were in the forecast all along, but for the last several days, local meteorologists were constantly offering up reasons for optimism…which turned to “Sorry, we’re not clearing out until after totality, bummer, but it’ll still get dark and stuff.”
I know these folks don’t control the weather, but for all the technology and scientific expertise they have, it sometimes seems that their ability to offer up any kind of reliable forecast has been whittled down to timeframes measured in hours, or even minutes. I know some people around here were lucky enough to get enough of a view of totality to get a photo or two, but I wasn’t that lucky; all I caught of totality was a brief glimpse, maybe half a second.
Those four minutes or so of darkness, though? They were amazing. Truly, astonishingly amazing. For every cynic out there who has been saying things like “It’s just like at night, what’s the big deal,” I can’t say it any other way than to simply say, “It’s not just like night.” There was something qualitatively different about those four minutes…in how quickly they plunged over us, in how the flocks of gulls in the parking lot across the street went mad, in how everything in my circadian-rhythm loving body was screaming, “This isn’t right.” I can see how eclipses were terrifying moments for humans, for millennia, before we learned what they are and how to predict them and thus rendered them a thing of wonder.
There were other feelings, too. I couldn’t help thinking of Mom and how she would have loved to make it to today. She loved the sky and celestial happenings. I remember going to see if we could spot Halley’s Comet back in 1986, and she loved the Perseid meteor shower. She would often send me emails: “Go outside tonight and look at the moon because Venus and Mars are going to be right by it.” She would have been amazed by today, even if she would have been really annoyed by, as she would almost certainly have phrased it, “all these goddamned clouds”.
Photography, that is.
Last week I was blessed with (a) a clear night, and (b) very little moonlight. This led to a brief astrophotography session outside, where I set up my tripod right in my driveway, set my camera’s focus for “infinity”, bumped up the ISO a bit, set the shutter for various lengths, and took photos.
This resulted in a lot of clunker photos, but…not all! One thing I’m quickly learning is that the formula “take a bunch of photos during a session and maybe you’ll have a few keepers” is quite normal, even for really good photographers. I was happier with my star photos than with my moon photos; clearly I have work to do in that particular department. I still have quite a bit to learn, but for now, these are much better than my first efforts at astrophotography with this camera, last summer.
Of course, there’s a major celestial event coming up in just a couple of weeks that will test my photography skills in a unique way that I’m not likely to get another chance to practice in my lifetime. I’m starting to get excited for the eclipse!
