Colors in the dark… part 3… but maybe I should have called these: ‘lights in the darkness’…

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Is that an alien planet in a starless solar system? No, that wouldn’t be possible. A ‘solar’ system, by definition, has at least one star in it.

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Is that the ghost of Donald tRump’s brain? No, that wouldn’t be possible. He would have had to have a brain to begin with.

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Is that a flying saucer? No, not unless a really small one was flying around my kitchen last night while I was doing experiments with low-light photography.

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Actually, these are all photos of some pretty interesting objects, but that has nothing to do with the experiment.

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But I decided, as long as I was standing around my kitchen in the dark with my camera, trying to use the fact that darkness makes the shutter stay open longer, which, combined with shaking the camera, produces some cool effects when you photograph colored lights, to try taking some pictures of other things…

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I mean, other things than the spinning holographic light disks that I have been posting pictures of in the earlier posts in this series, like the one above.

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So I did.

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And I had fun and learned a few more things.

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For those of you who made it this far down the post, and might even be reading the words, I used that base with the changing colored lights that goes with the glass jellyfish thing my wife bought me on Maui during our second honeymoon, and put some of the projects I made at my glass blowing lessons on it.

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Colors in the dark… part 2…

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Okay, it is time to explain what I am doing here.

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These photo experiments are an extension of those ‘wiggly light’ photos I was taking when I visited my mom in the Bay Area for Christmas. I was taking pictures of the tree. The room was pretty dark. That kept my shutter open longer, trying to find light. And I didn’t hold still enough in a few of the pictures. I liked the way those turned out, so I started playing with the idea.

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So, I have these spinning 3-D light disks left over from my… uh… the… ummm… the days of my less-than-responsible-youth, shall we say?

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If you put them on a flat surface in a dark room and spin them while shining a light down on them, they are really trippy to look at…

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Especially if you are on… I mean ‘in’… yeah… in the right state of mind.

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They make light stand up and dance, so to speak. I figured I could try my ‘wiggly light’ photo idea on them.

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As is usual with my ideas, there were a few problems. The one that has the paperclip design… yeah, I don’t know why they went with paperclips either, or why I got that one… seems to have been worn and scratched to a point where the magic is almost gone.

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I got a few interesting shots with it.

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But it isn’t as good as the other disk. Here was the main problem. What I learned at my mom’s house was that the wiggly pictures work best on colored lights that are not too close and not too far away. They work best at the distance of half the length of my mom’s street, as measured from her house to the top of the hill. And they work best with a zoom lens.

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I was alone, and I had to hold a flashlight over the disks to make the light magic work.

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So there I was, standing in my dark kitchen, flashlight in one hand, camera in the other, trying to wiggle the camera and hold the flashlight at the right height and angle.

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So I didn’t get exactly what I was going for, but as I said in the first post, I may have learned a few things… like waiting until my younger daughter comes home from college to hold the flashlight for me… and I did try some other experiments, which I will share soon. See ya!

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Colors in the dark… part 1…

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I was trying some experimental photography tonight.

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But I am not going to try to explain it to you right now.

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But I will tomorrow, when I share some more of these photos.

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I know, I can’t wait either.

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I mean, it isn’t really that exciting, I suppose.

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But it does tie in with some of the photos I took in the Bay Area at Christmastime.

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And I may have learned a few more things about low-light photography.

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Or maybe not.

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But at the very least…

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I came up with some interesting pictures.

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And the colors are nice.

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What if… part 4…

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What if Dachshunds were really short?

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Fun with the sun… (or); Instead of just showing you the rest of those photos of the sunset over the San Francisco Bay that I took when I went with my mom into the hills above Berkeley during Christmas vacation, what if I intersperse them with copies upon which I worked some digital magic… part 2…

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Sorry, but that digital filter never gets old. Also, ‘groovy rainbow’ sort of sums up the Bay Area, what with its history of the hippy and counterculture movements. Here is the original photo…

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Okay, let’s see now…

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That is a nice version of this…

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What else can I do…

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I do like the filters that make things look alien. Not that it isn’t nice to have this on our planet…

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Let’s try something else, shall we?

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That is what happens when you turn the sky into waves from a famous Japanese painting. Without the waves, it looks like this…

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Now here is one that you can’t even recognize the original image in…

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It did look like this…

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I need to try that filter on some other images. Okay, one more…

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Now that looks like some faraway galaxy to me. That is what you get when you add stars to this…

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What if… part 3…

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What if snakes were short and fat? Would they have to roll around like tumbleweeds??? Or would they just slither along very slowly in an awkward scrunching motion??? These are the things that I wonder about.

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What if… part 2…

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What if hippos were built like greyhounds??? That would be bad. Hippos are mean. They kill more people in Africa than lions or crocodiles. Faster hippos are a bad idea.

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Fun with the sun… (or); Instead of just showing you the rest of those photos of the sunset over the San Francisco Bay that I took when I went with my mom into the hills above Berkeley during Christmas vacation, what if I intersperse them with copies upon which I worked some digital magic… part 1…

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Who doesn’t like a nice green and purple alien sunset?

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Even if it was really quite boringly terrestrial.

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You don’t often see the stars that clearly while the sun is still setting…

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Not in your universe, maybe!

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Smoke on the water…

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And fire in the skies! That filter I used is actually called ‘smoke’, if anybody cares.

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Dang it, I jumped the gun on that whole ‘fire in the skies’ thing.

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Hey, sometimes I get ahead of myself…

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Ooooh… sparkly! I actually remember the Bay Area looking like that, you know, back in the ‘day’, when I used to… well… never mind…

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Family-friendly blog and all that!

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See, now that brings back memories too… HA!

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But don’t you waste any time worrying about my wayward youth. Just enjoy the pretty colors.

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What if… part 1…

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What if giraffes didn’t have long necks? I mean, they didn’t always have long necks. That is just the way evolution works… uh, sorry, religious fanatics. This idea, like most of my ideas, came about thanks to the crack squirrels inside my head. One of them whispered something about a short-necked giraffe.  I don’t know the context that this conversational tidbit came up in, but it bounced around inside the parts of my cavernous cranium that the squirrels aren’t using for crack snorting parties and whatever else they do up there when they aren’t bored and chewing on the wiring.

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As usual, please feel free to add suggestions in the comment box for other ideas for this series. If you leave it up to the squirrels, it is going to get weird.

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So, my younger daughter, Mollie, had an organ removed… and all you got was these lousy and almost completely unrelated photos from my phone…

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Okay, the title is a total lie. These first few photos aren’t completely unrelated to Mollie’s surgery. I took them of a big, thorny tree outside the medical center while the surgery was being done, on Coronado Island here in San Diego. Don’t panic, my wife was in the waiting room. I like to pace when I am freaking out.

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Also, don’t panic about the surgery. She is fine. It was two days ago. She’s 19… the young heal quickly. And it was just her gallbladder.

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If you have to have something removed from your body cavity, might I suggest the gallbladder? When it comes to useless… or almost useless… organs, the gallbladder is right up there with the appendix.

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Also, they did it with robot arms, so there were four small incisions instead of one big one like in the old days.

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We did get four pages of high-def photos from the ‘procedure’. On a personal note, my daughter’s kidney is freekin’ beautiful… but stomachs look like a chicken breast covered with clingy yellow streaks of fat. I will see if Mollie will be willing to let me scan the photos and share them.

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Speaking of photos… when I was emailing my phone camera pictures to myself, I sent a few older ones you haven’t seen yet. That is a little dog one of the security patrol guys rescued in that exclusive gated private community where I am a gate security guard now.

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I have trained the patrol guys to stop by the south gate guard house on their way to the main gate, where they call the owners to come pick up their roving pets, so I can pet the dogs.

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Good doggie!

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And good security patrol guy!

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Because trust me, dogs are much easier to train than the patrol guys are.

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