More Outings with the "Big Six"

I'm now into the second week of ownership of the Canon 6D, and now have a few hundred frames under the belt. I like it a lot, but have still to dive into the owners manual. Sounds like a good exercise while flying back to Tucson in a few days. For now, I'm comfortable using it for macro stuff around the house, and doing some family portraits, so will bring you some of the highlights.

Here be anaglyphs!
A day or two after we arrived, the iris patch adjacent to our house started blooming. Unfortunately, a heavy rain hit a day later and knocked them all to the ground, so no iris images... Fortunately, a few days after that our neighbor Elaine's peony bushes started blooming, so have some flower pictures to post. She has a nice collection of various hybrids with an astounding range of features... I thought I've posted about them before, but darned if I can find them in any searches... In my opinion, one of the most spectacular are these that almost look like tulips, with a large white bowl with a tangle of snake-like structures in the center. I thought that the 3D anaglyphs showed it off the best, so here is a wide shot at left, and one of just the center at right.



Another variety is a 2-tone striking blossom with a pale yellow center, with outer wreath of pale lavender. Then, while understated, there is a pure white one sort of like the tulip outer structure above, but with a shredded white interior. Again, 3D anaglyphs work best in showing these shapes, if not the colors. Sometimes the colors are affected by the red/blue filters in the glasses. The effect doesn't seem too bad for these, but does affect the yellow center in the flowers above...

Ok, enough of the 3D for this post - STEREO MODE - OFF!



Finally one of the last striking peonies of Elaine's collection is a light purple or dark lavender, with an interior of the yellow serpent-like structures of the tulip-shaped version above. Sorry I don't know the names for these varieties, but looking at the thousands of Google images, I'm not unconvinced there may be hundreds if not thousands of varieties! We have a small patch we planted a few years ago, but not sure what variety it is. The picture at right shows the current state - still a ball, with some ants feeding on the nectar leaking out of the bud... Hopefully it will bloom before we take off to remember what kind we have! BTW, the image at right is a 5-frame focus stack with the macro to make sure all the details are in focus...




We made another trip to Iowa on Sunday - I guess it must be a tradition! We had a dinner/pool party at brother Jim's house in DeWitt. It is a great gathering place - besides the pool and what would be called a lanai or lounge area in some places, their entire basement is a "party room" with full kitchen, TV room and large meet and greet area. Sister-in-law Karen came on RAGBRAI with us one year, and gave us a great surprise by inviting our buddy Carl to drive in from Cedar Rapids! What a nice shock to see him walking up. Besides our 20-year RAGBRAI history, he and Melinda are buddies on the Facebook, so we both spent some quality time with him. As he left, we took the snapshot at left - itself a test of the 6D. The TV room is a dark place and here the camera's ISO is set to 25,600, and this shot is a 125th of a second at F/5. This is also a significant crop, so a little noise and sharpness loss is visible in the full-size image shown here, but not too bad...

I spent a little time with niece Sandy and their 16-month-old Natalie. Now when Jeff (Sandy's husband) and his siblings were small, whenever a camera appeared, they went into "performance" mode - always a quick, easy smile, and easy to pose and photograph. While with mom at right she was more interested in eating her snack, at right you can see the start of her "performance" mode teethy grin! Perhaps she hasn't finalized "the look", but she is on her way!






And I've been just hanging around taking the occasional photograph around the house too. I saw a shot across the river from us when we first arrived, but needs a dead-calm river, which we haven't had much of lately. Shown at left is a line of colored chairs that caught my eye. The morning was calm, but not quite calm enough - still some water movement. The 105mm kit lens (the longest lens I've got along) doesn't make it large enough, especially for the full-size sensor of the 6D, but I did what I could.

Another of my activities here is my daily (sometimes twice daily!) bike rides on the recumbent. It has been really nice to get out every day for some physical activity. I still look at the recumbent as a little dodgy in traffic - tough to start from a stop, and with the upright position, I can't see behind me well. So mostly I go to the local Riverbend Park and take advantage of a mile-or-so path around the periphery. No motorized traffic, and only a few dog-walkers and other bikers to watch out for. Anyway, coming up the hill around a little pond with the curve of the path leading to the horizon, I thought it might make a nice picture, and indeed, I like it! So that is the reason for the image at right. The fence at left is a dog run, the fence at left is a small skate park, and I think you can see the small pavilion for all-weather events and playground equipment at center too. A nice, all-purpose place to spend some time...

The Saguaro!

While we're still enjoying ourselves in Illinois, loving the green of a late Spring, I've still got some catching up to do on "posts to be written"! Most overdue is one on the saguaro cactus, recently flowering in our neighbor Susan's yard...


First, for those non-Tucsonans out there, is pronunciation of saguaro. It is a native American word, so is pronounced differently than spelled. Try this - "sah-wah-roh", that should get you pretty close. Some alternate spellings even help out by using the sahuaro spelling, including some local businesses. But most everyone knows what you are talking about - the iconic cacti that is likely a close second to the Grand canyon in symbolizing the State of Arizona. While the plant is a hardy survivor of the harsh Arizona Summers, it is very sensitive to low temperatures and excessive rainfall. As a result, it is not found outside the borders of the state except perhaps Sonora, Mexico. So yes, all those old-timey western movies that were supposed to have taken place in Texas showing saguaros were all filmed in Arizona, as they will not survive outside the state!





It has been over a month already (time flies!) that I posted this year's first pictures of Susan's saguaro. I wrote an iconic post about it 2 years ago, but have more to add this time around... Note that mostly saguaro blossoms (the Arizona State Flower!) bloom at the top of the main trunk and arms, so usually they are located 20 to 50 feet off the ground (note another pair of Susan's plants at upper left). But fortunately, one of Susan's saguaros suffered some frost damage a few years back, one of the arms drooping to head level, this year making the flowers easily accessible. I already posted some anaglyph images of the new buds in the first post above. The lower branch started blooming in early May, the buds popping open just after sunset and lasting into the morning of the next day. Of course, I was there to document it - these anaglyph (3D) images taken on 9 May - the same morning as the Mercury transit across the sun! Of course, you need the red-blue glasses to view them, red filter on the left...

I also took a number of focus-stacked images as with the close-up macro work, it is difficult to get good depth of focus. Here, several or many images are combined with slightly different focal positions and combined in Photoshop to extend the depth of focus much deeper than normally possible. At left is a 9-frame stack that shows the entire flower. In another setup, an ultra-closeup of the saguaro blossom was framed and 13 images combined for maximum depth of field. In that one, I cropped it down to the full camera resolution to retain full sharpness of the flower. Shown at right, you can see the flower anthers loaded down with pollen grains...


Finally, I took some images for making time-lapse sequences of the flowers opening at night. I was fooled several times, checking the buds at sunset and swearing that none of them were going to open that evening, only to check an hour later and finding them well on their way to open! Finally I set up on some of the buds that were likely candidates and had my fingers crossed they would bloom and I got a couple over several nights that way. I'm also looking out for pollinators, but only found small insects on these flowers. I've heard stories of bats pollinating these at night, but never captured any...





This is likely the last of the saguaro posts of the season as by the time we return to Tucson, I'd not expect much activity. But there will certainly be other topics on which to post!

Out And About!

Life has been so hectic lately, I'm way late posting a lot of interesting stuff. Case in point is the adventure I had on Kitt Peak nearly 2 weeks ago. Now I've not been up there is likely over 6 months, and have been long off the payroll with the Nightly Observing Program, since I couldn't commit to working there with Melinda's ongoing condition. So while I love spending time at the place, I just couldn't continue being so far from Tucson.

So I was surprised and pleased to get a call from the supervisor up there on Friday 2 weeks ago, asking if it was possible to help teach an astrophoto workshop on the weekend. These happen about twice a year, teaching the basics of webcam and DSLR imaging with some nice equipment. I usually lead a section on time-lapse imaging applied to astronomy, and my presentation always seems to generate interest. Well, it turned out that we happened to have our friend Donna staying over Saturday evening, so with her taking care of Melinda's needs, I was free to head to the Mountain!

I arrived before 4pm and walked around kind of looking for the group I'd be with. It's always nice to walk around the mountaintop - a magical place, really. But I didn't run into anyone, and since I didn't have keys anymore, I headed to dinner, where everyone met up. After eating we headed up to the "Roll Off Roof" observatory and its classroom for the workshop. My presentation was pretty early - again, pretty well-received - finishing with some of the flowering time-lapses I've been working on lately. My talk finished before sunset, where a break is always taken to observe - this time with the combined group from the Nightly Observing Program. The thin scattered clouds portended a great sunset, and sure enough it was! The sun set into a clear sky and lit the clouds up providing the standard spectacular sunset...

Taking shots of a sunset is always a challenge. The shot needs a foreground, but is sometimes difficult to work in from a viewpoint facing west. The shot of the WIYN telescope above right shows some nice colors even though it was a good 80 degrees from the setting sun. My favorite of this bunch is above left incorporating the couple. I used the head of the boyfriend to block the actual brilliant sun, and used the phone screen to partially show what was going on. It required a small amount of "Photoshop magic" to slightly lighten the screen brightness. At left is my second favorite taken a little later with the crowd just as they were about to leave. Including a few people always helps you "witness" the event with you... Finally, a minute or two later, the crowd gone, I took the most boring version - an HDR image combining 3 exposures of different lengths to record more of the dynamic range. While successfully recording the colors, it is a pretty drab composition...

The crew had the workshop in hand and with my presentation finished, I decided to head back to town. Had it been clear, I might have stayed to image some, but the clouds took their time departing, so headed down the hill about a kilometer to a lookout on the north side of the mountain. I decided to set up my TEC 140 scope to image the lights of Tucson, just coming up from the twilight. Seeing was atrocious, but took some of the city lights. Just for grins, I also pointed it towards Phoenix too. A few years back, I thought I had detected the broadcast antenna array atop South Mountain on the edge of Phoenix. Sure enough, there it was, showing reasonable detail from what Google Maps later revealed was 98 miles distance! Metropolitan Phoenix is just beyond that hill, and I can't imagine the glow from the area if those mountains didn't help block it! I backed off the 1000mm focal length of the TEC scope to my 300mm to shoot some frames of Tucson (note all these images taken with my older APS sensor Canon XSi). Shown at right is a 3-frame panorama taken with 20 second exposures with the 300 at F/6.3, assembled in Photoshop. It shows the main metropolitan area of Tucson from Valencia and the Casino of the Sun at right, to Tucson Estates on the west side of the Tucson Mountains to the foothills up to the Catalinas. All fun stuff, but not particularly interesting with the 1600 pixel limit of the blog. Someday I'll figure out how to show full size images!

I took a lot of images on that pullout, including some time-lapse sequences and more, but I need to think about what I'm going to do with it... Perhaps it will show up here some day, but in all, a fun evening on Kitt Peak...

6D Put Through Its Paces

With a day of practice with the new Canon 6D, it was ready to put to a test at a family event - the Ketelsens at a dinner meeting at Pizza Ranch at Clinton, IA. Some enjoy the pizza, some go for the fried chicken and mashed potatoes, but the food matters little when it comes to catching up on our lives!

I pretty much had the camera out the whole time, trying to avoid getting my fingers too greasy. Stars of the show as always were the 2 great nieces in attendance. At left, Mya provides the smoldering "Ketelsen Look" over the glasses at me. And just to prove that a 9-year-old could operate the 6D, Great-niece Alivia took the photo at right of her great-uncle Dean...




My sister Linda and her husband Lauren had been down visiting us in Tucson last weekend - just returning to their home in the Midwest the day before. About the time we were headed for Chicago, they were on their way to the Grand Canyon and points of interest in northern Arizona. At left, Linda at center shows off photos on her tablet to sister Kathy at right and Melinda at left. They had a great time at the Canyon (Lauren's first trip there), and Sedona on their way back to Phoenix. At left, Alivia makes a cameo appearance between Linda (her grandmother!) and great-aunt Melinda...



So the 6D worked great!  While I was concerned about lack of a built-in flash, it seemed to work well under ambient lighting at an ISO of 6400 as all these shots attest.  The camera was set to aperture-priority, so the f/number was fixes at F/5.6 and chose the correct exposure for the lighting, typically a 60th to 100th of a second.  Autofocus worked fine, and the camera was surprisingly fast and quiet.  At left is another shot by Alivia, this time, of great-uncle Rich (Kathy's husband).

Full Frame, Canon 6D

Full Frame, Canon XSi

So the biggest thing to wrap my brain around and get used to is that the 6D has a much larger sensor that the APS-sized XSi I've been using for 8 years. With a sensor twice as large and almost twice as many pixels, there are a few applications that will affect me, though not particularly the average user. So today I went out looking for some examples of where there are dramatic differences...

I used the macro lens on a couple subjects - first up is a few of the maple seeds that our car (that has been sitting for 6 months) was buried under upon our arrival here. A few seeds were "posed" on a tree stump so I didn't have to kneel on the ground. A tripod was used to hold the camera steady. Note that the setup was exactly the same for both cameras - the 6D and XSi with about 3cm of extension tubes and the 100mm Canon Macro. Lens focus and distance to the seeds was the same for both setups. Both are focus stacks to extend the depth of focus, but that had little effect on fields of view. At left is the full frame of the 6D, and at right the full frame of the XSi. There is a pretty dramatic difference, with the expected result that with the same optical setup, the field would be considerably smaller with the XSi's APS sensor...

Canon 6D - full resolution crop

Canon XSi - full resolution crop

But interestingly, the pixel sizes are not too different. The XSi's pixels are about 5.2 microns, the 6D about 6.5 - about 25% larger. If you look at the above images at the camera's full resolution, they should match to about 25%. Shown here are just that - full-resolution crops of the same area of the above frames to demonstrate the ultimate resolution. At left is the 6D image, at right the XSi. With smaller pixels you would expect a slight advantage in resolution on the image at right, and a little larger scale with the 6D at left which is what is shown. So really for critical work, the smaller pixels of the XSi still give it a little advantage in resolution (though not if field of view!)...

Full Frame, Canon 6D

Full Frame, Canon XSi

Another example came with the full 5cm of extension tubes I have with the macro - the biggest I can make something without new optics or more extension. Here is a dandelion seed pod. At left is the 6D image and at right the XSi - again, distance to the subject and focus setting were the same for both, and both were focus-stacks again to extend the depth of focus. Again, as you would expect, the larger sensor had the larger field of view. Note there are some inherent defects in the image as there was some subject motion in a very slight breeze and the shutter speed of a 40th second, even at ISO 800. With the large extension, this is where having a flash unit would be useful to minimize exposure...

Canon 6D - Full Resolution Crop

Canon XSi - Full Resolution Crop

And similarly, looking at the full-resolution images, the same as above is demonstrated - the smaller pixels provide a narrower field at higher resolution (XSi) as the slightly larger pixels of the 6D.

So I'm loving the camera, though admittedly I still need to crack the manual and learn a few details of basic operations, though at least I've figured out how to zoom in on an image - sure seems a lot more complicated than the earlier generations, though...

The "BIG SIX"!

It happens so rarely that I don't have a label category for "new Gear"! For the first time since this blog started, I've got a new camera - the Canon 6D! I've mentioned before back in January that I was saving up pocket change for the upgrade, and with the Grand Canyon Star Party coming up, it was time to get it and practice before some good opportunities to image came along. What isn't to like - a sensor that is twice the size of my APS-sized Canon XSi. In addition, there are about 3 generations of improvement in noise reduction (Digic 5+ compared to Digic III), and an associated increase in sensitivity from max ISO of 1600 to 25600. Not that the XSi is no slouch - obtained just before our wedding 8 years ago, it has everything I've ever wanted, and likely some features I've never used. I'll still continue to use it as my primary spare, but 8 years of constant use and it was time for an upgrade.
  

I decided to have it shipped to St Charles and it arrived yesterday. It is a hefty camera, a good 8 ounces more than the 1 pound XSi - likely as there is more metal construction over the polycarbonate plastic of the XSi. The 24-105mm kit lens is hefty too at F/4, but in initial tests seems a great kit lens for the new camera. There is a huge learning curve in little things like zooming in on an image you've just taken. There are no doubt features I'll be learning about for months - but for now, I've got a couple dozen pictures taken without opening the manual and like what I see. As illustrated above, the sensor size is about twice that of the XSi. Since most of my lenses will work with the new one, that extends the field of view, with very little loss in resolution as the pixel sizes are pretty comparable (6.5 microns for the 6D, 5.2 for the XSi). So nearly twice the number of pixels provide much more freedom to crop and compose an image once taken... Take the images of the flowers on the bush - the full frame shown at left. Of course, since the blog only accepts a max of 1600 pixels, a LOT of data is lost in reducing sampling for the blog. The image at right is a crop of the same frame, showing full resolution with the same number of pixels as at left.


One thing I'm not enthused about is the lack of an on-camera flash... I use the flash on the XSi A LOT! From night-time time-lapses of flowers and sphinx moths to even daytime macro, the on-camera flash is pretty useful, so that will likely be about the first accessory to invest in... That being said, with the high ISOs the 6D has, it should almost work hand-held in the dark! We were visiting sister-in-law Maj this afternoon and I took the image at left of Melinda by the light of the 40 watt bulb adjacent to her. I've got to admit it worked pretty well at 6400 ISO and a 25th of a second.

The same goes for other low-light level shooting - at right is a shot of some ferns in front of our house when we got home about sunset. Resolution is pretty good even as dark as it was getting with the hand-held shot.

So with the first couple dozen images behind me, I'm thinking I'm a happy camper! I'll likely even be happier when I open the manual and figure out basic stuff I used to know on my other cameras, like zooming in on exposures and using live view. I recall some issues on basic stuff like that when using Ken's 6D for some LBT shooting a year ago. I'm sure it is just a matter of training the operator! And if you think that you would get away without an anaglyph of the ferns out front, you would be wrong! At right is a 3D shot of a fern, hand-held at about sunset, assembled in Photoshop. Not bad, say I!

Fifty Shades of Green!

I'm way behind in posting, but have been too busy to think, let along put down electrons on the computer screen!  We've had a good week of medical appointments and relatives visiting, so have been running for days, but finally time to relax some.  We're travelling now - arrived at "Ketelsen East" yesterday, thus the title for today's post.  We've left the desert, where it hasn't rained in weeks, and more is unlikely for another 2 months, and flown to the Chicago area where it's so green it hurts your eyes!  We caught our noon-ish flight (non-stop!), and fortunately, we had a seat with a good window, in front of the wing this time.  As we taxied to takeoff we witnessed something you don't see often - AZ Air National Guard had four F-16s taking off in front of us, and I caught two of them in full afterburner mode!  Click the image to see the center fuel tank and the sidewinder missiles mounted on each wing...



For those who have flown out of Tucson, you might notice also that the F-16s and our plane too took off towards the NW, another rarity! So had another rare chance to cruise around central Tucson as we circled around to head east. We flew right over the UA, so I caught a few pictures of "my" part of campus, which really holds the national headquarters of astronomy and optics within a couple blocks. My workplace, the Mirror Lab is nestled under the east stands of the football stadium. I've included a labeled version to ID some of the more interesting buildings. My 3 workplaces covering the last 40 years are all included in the image (KPNO headquarters, Optical Sciences, and now the Mirror Lab).



I took a lot of images, mostly stereo pairs of objects I knew. We were sitting on the right side, so facing a little up-sun, not ideal, but it was high enough it didn't cause a lot of problems. Moving at 500mph though, it doesn't take long to run out of landmarks for your location reference. We had some nice low clouds that made for interesting 3D images, and took the one at left of the Lordsburg (NM) playa, and another at right a few minutes later of desert near the AZ/NM border. Note that like the SW in general this time of year, there isn't much green - just LOTS of earth tones in browns and greys... Anyway, after these I was mostly lost in the mountains of western New Mexico. I recognized Socorro, but after that, clouds picked up and saw nothing for a couple hours.


Finally we hit a clear spot and didn't know where we were, but were already descending.  Finally, a river valley ahead - I thought it might be the Mississippi, but was the very busy commercial waterway, the Illinois. Barges could be seen plying the narrow channels. Another clue to our location were the dozens if not hundreds of huge windmills for electrical generation. The fields were still bare brown, as it has been a cool, wet Spring and the crops are just getting in now. In a week or two they will be a totally different shade! At left is shown some bare fields (showing drainage patterns), windmills and likely a hay or oats field. One farm pretty looks like the next through central Illinois, so was lost again for a while.






Finally we passed a good-sized town and what do you know - it was St Charles, our "Ketelsen East" home town! The Fox River, spillways and the town's three bridges made for an easy ID. Given our distance from downtown, it was likely we were passing directly over our house! We often know the flight path is over our house with the planes passing over every minute or so, and such was likely the case. At left is a shot of town, and of course, all it takes is another a few seconds later to get a stereo pair, shown at right.

Very quickly I was inundated with clues for our location - St Charles East High School (The Fighting Saints!), the DuPage airport and Charlestowne Mall, but just as quickly moved beyond my local territory of knowledge.  We flew directly into our runway at O'Hare - no circling the city or going out on the Lake.  But once landing, we taxied for what seemed like 20 minutes to get to our gate...

We got picked up by Melinda's buddy Sally Jo, mentioned and pictured just a few posts ago from her Tucson visit last month. Who drove us to another buddy Carolyn, where we park our car in our absence.  We treated them both to dinner and finally got home about 10pm...

Sleeping late this morning, I finally got to see our surroundings. The camp doesn't cut our lawn unless we ask, so has been so far untrimmed this year. As a result we have some foot-tall red trillium, and while we missed the dandelions, there are some seed pods left. Shown at right is a 6-frame focus stack of a dandelion seed pod with the 100mm macro, and at right a 4-framer of some trillium, both in our "lawn". It would be nice to document a few more of our "flower yard" inhabitants before borrowing the neighbor's lawn mower and hacking it all off.

So it will be nice to relax here for a bit and enjoy the green shades and flowers about to come into bloom. We've missed most of the tulips, but have both iris and peony in our yard that will bloom soon. And you just never know what will show up to be documented - stay tuned!