Experimenting

My Olympus M 1 Mark iii has a couple of cool features that I love. Starry Sky AF. Most Oly cameras have standard options for taking cool longer exposures called LiveComposite. 

When using the  Starry Sky AF, the camera seeks out stars and locks in focus! Amazing. I did that Friday night even with the nearly full moon and clouds moving in. I thought I'd experiment for a bit later this year when I'd like to go to the KVR ponds on a clear night and photograph star trails reflected in the water.  

Here is a crappy shot of the camera doing its thing, taken with the cell phone.

Here is the result.

For camera buffs, the settings were ISO: 1600

f stop: 2.8 

12mm lens

Livecomp settings: 15 sec exposures for a time limit of 15 minutes.

Post process, not much just DxO PhotoLab 4 PrimeNoise reduction.

So the Livecomp basically adds any light it sees to the original picture. I really don't know how it works, however it saves me from having to purchase a program and manually stack star photos taken individually. It feels like cheating, but it also is fun.

Even with the bright moonlit sky, I got a nice star trail. Nothing exciting, but now I have figured out how to do it.

I took the Full Spectrum camera an Olympus OMD EM 10 Mark iii [entry level and damn fine camera] and set it up without any filters.

I was very surprised at the amount of light the FS had!

Cell phone shot:

That was the pasture, so I took the camera and pointed it south.

Settings

Manual Focus [I'm not as good at that as I'd like to be...old eyes?]

ISO: 800

f 1.8

25mm lens

Livecomp settings: 4 second exposures for 4 minutes.

The clouds moving through left interesting streaks. I could have desaturated the ground, but just left it as is. Very little noise in this shot!

Again, it could be fun to try this summer on top of Black Hawk rock shooting the Milky Way or star trails!

I lost track of time while out in the pasture. I didn't walk back to the house until after midnight. 

Morning brought dense fog and rain. Yuck weather.

I made a huge mistake and went shopping for some things we ran out of. The local Walmart wasn't too bad when I walked in.

I got distracted in the craft and paper section. I haven't browsed crafty stuff in ages and I got sidetracked.

I looked up and saw droves of humans.
It was like a weird social experiment.

Some humans trying to avoid other humans. Some humans standing with masks on chins chatting. Some with masks on properly chatting. Others with their noses poking out and glaring at others.

And some humans just ignoring everyone around them.

I got the heck out of there but felt queasy standing in line waiting for a check out station.

I used to have a rule of Never shopping on a Saturday. Damn. I won't break that rule again for ages!

I like doing still life photography but got a bit bored with the choice of layouts. I picked up some paper to use as a back drop. I'd seen an ad for Replica Surfaces and I thought ... Wow great! I could use those!

Yeah. Until I saw the price tag. I searched around and in some cases other surfaces just like that were up to $69 for one foam board with a pattern on it!

So my side trip into the craft section netted me this. Craft paper with patterns on it.

Cell phone photos. The first two are lay flat and terrible lighting. I did those while cooking. The last one is a patterned paper on the bottom and one sheet taped to a board for the back.

The items have to be tiny as the paper is only 12" by 12". 

Well, $5 is better than $69 right? I have about 20 different colors and patterns to use. Now let's see if I can get creative.

Do over?

I wanna do Thursday over. Can I?

The photo above was an attempt at an experiment with AF Starry Sky. Auto Focus Starry sky comes with the Olympus M1 Mark iii. Actually it sort of turned out pretty okay but I can try this on a much warmer night. I stink at this, but will try and get better.

Our hike at KVR was nice. The weather was perfect, the footing was not perfect but we knew that. The trails were a mix of slush, compacted rough ice, and mud. But we took it slow.

All in all, the adventure was very uneventful. Bill checked out some campsites and we just enjoyed the weather and bright sunlight. 

I got home and walked into the house. Rich greeted me with a few problems. He'd taken a glass of water to the table and spilled it on himself and the chair which included the little pad on it. He'd tried to clean it up as best he could.

He then decided to cut up and apple when he saw us parking the car. Instead he cut his thumb.

He has Essential Tremor which gets much worse when he is trying to eat things like soup or work on a project. Both of his parents had issues with it. Some mornings he can't get his own coffee and when he insists, I have a coffee trail on the floor and coffee down the side of cabinets.

So I walked into the door with him dripping blood everywhere and apologies. I grabbed a clean brown colored washcloth and told him to put pressure on the cut after we washed it. It was deep but clean. 

He is on blood thinners enough so that if he falls, I am to dial 911. 

As I was cleaning up blood and cutting up gauze to wrap up the thumb, the Oxygen guy came.

Apparently he called while I was out and Rich just let it go to voicemail.

Blood on the floor, blood on the table, a dog going crazy and the 02 guy coming to check the concentrator. 

I grabbed masks and let him in to deal with the concentrator [maintenance work]. It hadn't been touched or checked on since Memorial Day Weekend last year.

Pressure on the cut, blood seepage.

I shut off the heat and opened the windows. [Thinking to air out the house with a person that is NOT from our household. He was masked with a neck gaiter.]

More seepage and blood spatters on the wall from where the blood was still dripping.

The 02 guy had pulled around my Subaru and into the Dreaded Muck. Now I had a bleeding thumb and a huge van stuck in mud.

I ran out and told him to stop spinning the wheels.

Now he was frantic. But at least I'd finished cutting up Rich's apple and had something soaking up the blood.

I asked the guy if he now understood WHY I'd parked the 'Ru to keep him from going towards the house. 

Um. Yeah.

I walked to the junk pile around the back of the shed an yanked out two large pieces of expanded metal. I set them under the rear tires of the van and told the driver to ease forward and not to stop once he got going.

The metal gave him grip and stability and off he went.

I finally got the bleeding stopped and Rich took a well deserved nap. I finished airing out the house and took the opportunity to also clean the heater before I turned it back on.

I think I got all the blood too. 

Rich and I had a discussion after he got up. I asked if maybe he shouldn't be cutting things up when I wasn't around. He shrugged. 

I'm noting this day. I'll be talking with the CareGiver lady at the VA next week. I might just give them an update.

And then there is this thought. Do I dare leave him alone for an hour or two? 

We'd discussed this very thing last year with his Psych doctor. Rich is adamant about not having a Baby Sitter. He DOES not need watching over. 

And yet....