Wednesday, February 20, 2008

You have to know when to leave.


A ice carving from christophers winter carnival at school today.


Our guest has finally arrived.


Finally cleared the ground.


Half way


Closer


Almost but not quite.


This supposed to be a picture behind me during the full eclipse of the very large over cuatious "dogs" circling me, however I guess it just turned into a nice photo.


Full

Hello everyone,
Tonights mission seemed easy enough, and I chose to accept it, See if I could get any good photo's of the Eclipse. This task turned out to be much trickier than I imagined at the the begining of the night. Although I have never shown any real talent for night photography, you only learn by trying? Right. So I started in my nice warm apartment with my tripod taking shots through the window, nice and comfy like. Then as darknes started to set in I was getting too much light from the streetlight outside our building so I snuck across the hall and started taking pictures from the empty office. One minor problem here was that this room is just above the furnace room and the floor vibrates destroying the stability of the tripod. Okay, location 3, I'm now standing outside on the deck taking the shots but encountering the same light problems as before so I fire up the Ski-Doo and resign myself that I have to get out of town to a nice dark non-vibrating place. I drive about 5 miles out of town between the dump and the sewage lagoon. Nice, Dark, Quiet and cold, now I can get down to business.
After about ten minutes of playing with setting I watch two large dogs cross the road about 100 yards in front of me. More shots without any good results when I see those same two dogs off to my left coming closer through the trees. More shooting, more cursing, temperature dropping and just a little bit of curosity. I watch the road behind me and see the two large "dogs" cross the road about 80 yards behind me. It occures to me, if those are dogs why are they not coming to see me directly and why are they not then heading to the dump, but rather it looks like they are circling me. Oh, well, no worries, probably just triing to get behind me to get my scent then they'll move on. More shooting and the fingers are starting to stiffen up a bit. Then the increasing misnamed and misidentified "DOGS" are crossing the road before me again. Rather than get right back to shooting I think I'll just restart the Ski-Doo and maybe turn it around, why you ask, just cause this is starting to get a little boring. That done back to shooting, I start to question if the camera was the right piece of equiptment to bring if I was going to do any shooting. I glance over to my left, yep, Ski-Doo still running good...and two large shapes about a 25 second sprint from the ski-doo. Oddly enough it was at this time when I realized that this was the full eclipse and I've seen it, so I'd like to go home and have a cup of cocoa. I may be a bad photographer but I'm one hell of a packer as I found myself on the ski-doo driving home in about 24 seconds. Mission accomplished. Hope someone out there got some good shots.
Take Care
CG

5 comments:

Rob, Tina and the boys said...

Were they wolves?

Curtis Groom said...

Well they sure as heck weren't chickens :)

Anonymous said...

So there you are, in one of the remotest habitations in our country, and you are STILL stymied by light pollution? Unreal! The photos you posted look great!

I personally loved the concept that - for that brief period - friends and family all across the contintent were looking up at the same phenomenon at the same time. Sort of a stellar bonding ritual - very heart warming.

T

Curtis Groom said...

Actually its not really light polution per se, night is just naturally lighter due to all the reflected light off the snow. Thats also why the sunset and dawn periods last much longer than in the south.

Terry said...

Hi Curtis,
Our Family will start working for NWC around the 1st of July. We don't know where we will be going yet until closer to the move date. Your site is Great and is very informative. I also appreciate the pictures. Keep up the Great Site. Hopefully meet you and your Family one of these days.

Terry