Archiving my Twitter, Facebook and other social network activity
Lunar #eclipse mosaic, starting around 11:00 and finishing around midnight Pacific time, just as totality set in. #moon #stargazing #notaphone
Four views of the moon over the course of tonight’s lunar eclipse, starting around 11pm and running until about midnight. I actually got some shots at the second stage without the phone line in the way, but I liked the way this looked.
Though I liked this #panorama out in the hills of Orange County enough to make it my blog header. @Flickr
Woodbridge Snow View 1 on Flickr.
Today’s flashback from my archives for Flickr’s Twitter Tuesday theme: Lake.
Woodbridge Lake is an artificial lake in Irvine, California, surrounded by suburbs. On this occasion in 2008, the mountains in the distance were covered with snow – highly unusual since they’re all less than a mile high! Normally, the two highest peaks in this range, known collectively as Saddleback, get a light dusting once or twice each winter, but that year an unusual snowstorm covered the entire range.
This week’s photo challenge is “abandoned” — kind of like this blog was for a few months. đŸ˜‰
A few years back, I explored a disused spur of railroad tracks branching off of the main line into a light industrial area of town. In many places, the tracks had already been ripped out, leaving only gravel paths (and in some cases stepping stones, as seen below) between buildings that no longer needed freight access.
I found this floppy disk sitting on the track, and the combination of an obsolete data technology and what I thought of at the time as an obsolete transportation technology just struck me.
The funny thing is, trains in the form of light rail have made a resurgence in the last few years. Los Angeles’ Metro rail system, started in the 1990s, has expanded dramatically. I actually commuted myself along the Green Line at one point, and while normally that meant driving halfway there to pick up the end of the line, there were a few times I tried picking up a connecting (well, not quite connecting) train from Metrolink, at a station not far from this spot. In fact, the track in the first two photos has since been converted into a footpath connecting a shuttle stop to the commuter rail station.
TODO: Import to K2R, link forward and back to Obsolete (2009).
QUESTION: Import the original 2014 post (with suitable tag/link changes), or update the text and post it as new? Also connect to this Mastodon post (local archive copy)
Cool! A photo I took when I was 8 has been featured on the @Flickr blog!
https://blog.flickr.net/en/2013/12/04/twittertuesday-the-1980s-2/
Long Beach Comic & Horror Con 2013
My photos are up from Long Beach Comic & Horror Con!
On learning that this week’s photo challenge is “eerie,” I started thinking of all the photos in my library that might fit. My mind immediately went to this one, a shot of a nearly-full moon behind ragged clouds taken, appropriately enough, on Halloween last year.
Just about all of my “eerie” shots involve the moon, or clouds/fog, or both. For instance, this view of fog pouring over a hillside at sunset, and the shadows of the trees inside it.
Or this one, a this scanned photo of a lunar eclipse from 1994. I’m fairly certain that the bright splotch is the moon, and the rest, including the ring and the sharper image at upper right, are lens artifacts. It’s been so long that I don’t remember any specifics of taking the photo.
Finally I remembered a series of photos I took at the Thurston Lava Tube in Hawaii, trying to use natural light (with only the cave walls to brace the camera) and picking up ghost images of the other tourists wandering through.
I have some more shots of that cave over at K-Squared Ramblings. That’s also the blog where I’m trying to do NaBloPoMo this month. I started yesterday with a post about yesterday’s shooting at LAX and the spillover it had on the parts of town near the airport: roads closed, constant helicopter noise, sirens, and thousands of stranded travelers leaving the airport on foot, trudging over a mile dragging their luggage in a ragged line. You know, if I’d thought about it and found the right position for a photo, that would have made for a good “eerie” image.
Orange Sky over LAX on Flickr.
Stony path at the office park on Flickr.
Kenneth Hahn Park sits within the Los Angeles basin, half of a cluster of hills bisected by La Cienega Blvd. The western side is an oil field. The eastern side is broken into a maintained city park and something vaguely resembling wilderness, all of it surrounded by suburbs, homes, retail outlets and light industry. Trails run up into the hills, with benches at scenic viewpoints making it possible to have a picnic lunch while you look across the basin to see — depending on which viewpoint and how clear it is that day — Downtown Los Angeles, Hollywood, Santa Monica, the South Bay or the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
This is somewhere along the trail on the western side of the hills, looking north through the valley. I believe the line of buildings in front of the Santa Monica Mountains is Wilshire Blvd.
Beric Dondarrion and Catelyn Stark on Flickr.
More Game of Thrones cosplay. (Thursday at Comic-Con 2013)
I wasn’t going to spend a lot of time looking for a good spot to take photos during the golden hour for this week’s photo challenge late Saturday afternoon. There was an open space with electrical towers nearby that I thought would make for some interesting pictures. But the clouds rolled in as I drove down the street, and I spent the next hour racing inland, trying to stay ahead of the marine layer.
The best shot I got of the bunch, with clouds intermittently covering and revealing the sun, was this one. It’s the historic Pacific Electric Railway Bridge in Torrance, California, which I stumbled across a few years back completely on accident. What makes it an even better choice is that when I first found it, I shot it in broad daylight. You can really see the difference that lighting makes!
At this point, I started heading into the hills, figuring I’d focus on the clouds instead of the lighting, though on the way I spotted this view of a hilltop lit up by the sun. I could see it from halfway across town, and wasn’t sure I’d make it before the sun dipped too low or the clouds rolled in to block the light.
The park I’d planned to go to for views above the cloud layer turned out to be in the cloud layer. The fog was hitting the west face of the hills, moving over, and just barely pouring over the summit ridges. I took my first Instagram video, of low clouds racing across the sky before dissipating.
I finally went to another park on the inland side of the hills, and found myself in a clear space surrounded by a wall of clouds to the west and south. This is the view to the west, with the fog backlit by the sun.
This particular park is a great place to get away from it all for a while, so I stuck around for a few minutes to just relax before heading home for the evening.
I took a zillion photos of last night’s Independence Day fireworks display, but this one stood out for an odd reason: The camera didn’t focus properly. I’m not sure why “fireworks mode” doesn’t automatically set focus to infinity, but it made for a really interesting effect.
Here are ten more highlights from the evening.
I’m fascinated by the interplay of sunlight and clouds, particularly oddly-shaped clouds and optical effects like haloes and sundogs. The trick with photographing them is that you have to take the picture now. You can’t run and get another camera and come back. You can’t wait until you reach your destination even if it’s only 5-10 minutes away.
Lighting conditions will change. A halo might get stronger, or it might vanish entirely. A cloud that looks like a flaming dragon or phoenix right now will be a dull gray in a few minutes. Patterns of rays will fade from view. I’ve missed my chance a lot of times by being stuck on the road, unable to find a suitable place to stop until the moment had passed.
This last shot is a circumhorizon arc formed by ice crystals. It always appears parallel to the horizon, like a flattened out rainbow, and if the crystals cover enough of the sky it will actually form a circle all the way around the sky. I spotted it while walking back to work from lunch and only had my phone with me — and I actually ran the rest of the way to the office so I could get my camera. I was lucky, since these really don’t appear very often.
The last time I went to a comic con in costume, I went as Jay Garrick, the original Flash. I ran into someone else with the same idea. On a related note, I’ve brought @SpeedForceOrg to Instagram for Flashy photos. #ThrowbackThursday #theflash #cosplay #jaygarrick
I couldn’t decide between these two photos for the latest photo challenge. The first is a warning sign at the edge of Del Cerro Park in Rancho Palos Verdes. It’s a part up at the top of the hill, ending in if not exactly cliffs, a steep drop hundreds of feet down as the hills roll toward the ocean.
“Danger” signs are a dime a dozen. It’s the “Don’t even think about it!” that struck me as photo-worthy.
As for this second one, it’s not so much the sign that I found interesting as the fact that the bird looks like it’s staring at it, dismayed.
“Gee, I hope this doesn’t apply to seagulls, too!”
I collect pictures of funny/odd/interesting signs at K-Squared Ramblings, so if you’re interested in more, head over there for a look.
Leaving the Moon on Flickr.
