Thanks sure my family will just look at them on their phone and say thanks for sending nice pictures. They may go far as screen saver. That will be it.
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Knock yourself out!

Ladder Stand by FredMan, on Flickr

Was running the sugar house Saturday. Nice early morning then a small storm passing through. Gave me the chance for before and during the snow.

Taken with cell phone. Galaxy A51.



In the first pic. the you see the bill of my hat. I didn't bother to crop.

EBR

Five years ago today I found myself with a once in a lifetime professional opportunity; managing spray operations on the Big Island of Hawaii. We were closing out a lease on 10,000 acres of eucalyptus plantations, and had to spray down the 2500 acres of timber that had been harvested.

The evening of 2/21/17 I found myself back at the hotel at sunset and caught this shot of a breaching humpback and the low sun.

Sunset 20170221 Humpback Breach by FredMan, on Flickr

Very nice!



She Burst His Bubble

In keeping with the theme, 2/22/17

Sunset LZ 20170222 by FredMan, on Flickr

2/23/17. This road is eerie; it’s an abandoned road built as a bypass when HIDOT was repairing the main road that had washed out. It ran through our eucalyptus plantation. You’d expect a dinosaur to come walking out of the woods at any moment.

Hamakua Road That Time Forgot by FredMan, on Flickr

This shot, a few days later, gives a better sense of scale.

Hamakaua Road to Nowhere with FS by FredMan, on Flickr

The day I left for home I went out there before dawn to get a final shot

Midnight On The Road Of Good And Evil FS by FredMan, on Flickr

It does look a bit creepifying

2/24/17.  My work site.

D2B Top Pano by FredMan, on Flickr

Today you get one from today.

Dey oghta call me Br'er Rabbit, cuz dey done put me in da briar patch today!

Selfie Briar Patch by FredMan, on Flickr

Millie's Birthday

Nice lighting.  A little tweaking of the highlights in LR perhaps?

Today, you get 3 shots.

Grave marker out in the woods for Andrew White

Andrew White Grave Marker by FredMan, on Flickr

Next, two shots of a pine stand running 340 sq. ft. of basal area.  Basal area represents the "surface area" of all the stems in the stand.  One way to think about is, go out and cut down every tree on an acre but leave stumps 4.5 feet high.  Then go out and measure the surface area of all those stumps.  THAT'S basal area.  It's useful to us as foresters because for a given species and site, basal area gives us a quick number to determine how well stocked a stand is; that being how many trees are out there relative to how many that site can support.  

Basal area as a decision tool is independent on how many trees are out there, or how big those trees are.  From a growth standpoint, we don't care if the basal area is contained in 191 12-inch trees per acre, or 430 8-inch trees per acre, because both stands will produce about the same amount of wood volume every year, as they both have 150 sq ft of BA.

As a rule, in southern pine stands, we want to keep basal area (BA for short, even though it's really basal area per acre) between about 70 and 160-ish.  We grow the stand until it gets up towards 160, then we thin it down to somewhere around 70, grow it to 160, thin to 70, etc.  This regime is keeping the stand density on the steep part of the growth curve, optimizing wood production.

Once loblolly pine gets to 340-350 BA, it will eat itself alive.  This stand is getting ready to fall apart due to inter-tree competition for light, water, and nutrients.  Then again, it's going to fall apart when the saw-head hits it sometime in the next year, after I sell it.

BA 340 by FredMan, on Flickr

Notice how open that understory is?  There's a reason for that.  Those pines are snatching up all the light and most of the water and nutrients, and have choked out everything else.  The big thing is the light, though, trapping all those sweet sweet photons before poor old understory vegetation can snatch a few to make some sugar.


BA 340 Canopy by FredMan, on Flickr

This series needs some work with the highlights and star trails, but the first hack at it shows some promise ...

Attached File

Thanks. A little feedback is my reason for posting it. You think pulling highlights down a skosh in LR? It does look different at full-res in LR on my bigger calibrated monitor than it does down-res'd and posted online. Something gets lost somehow in translation.

Yes. To my eye reduce the highlights on the left side, and maybe adjust the luminance and saturation of the candlelight on the right side.

And I’m a sucker for minor vignetting, a little falloff around the edges pushes my buttons.

Cedar Stump by FredMan, on Flickr

A color space issue, maybe?  I don't think Smugmug handles AdobeRGB properly.  But, that said, what I've noticed with the LR files from my tablet that I've transferred to Smugmug, is that highlights tend to get dimmed down a bit.  When I do the file in Photoshop on a real computer, and do the proper color management to sRGB, what I see on Smugmug is an indistinguishable match to the image on my monitor.

5 years ago today I left Hawaii to return to local duties. I spent the morning before my flight touring the north end of the big island, here’s Maui from across the water.

Maui by FredMan, on Flickr

Good point, but I export the edited .NEF's as .jpg's in the sRGB color space. Something else I noticed also is when I embed images from my AR15.com media storage, they lose a significant amount of sharpness. I wonder if I should be resizing images in PS before exporting a final .jpg?

The Arf media server does a lot of compression and stuff to your files.  It's ok for photos guns on tables, with hairy knuckled feet in the background.  But, it's not the right tool for the job to display a photo you've spent time editing, especially if it's a dark photo.

Yellowstone doing Yellowstone things

20220303_YellowStone_006 by Carl Peters, on Flickr

Mine Pit by FredMan, on Flickr

The steam does a great job of enhancing the starlight of the brightest stars.

Do you have any frames of that shot at a lower ISO, like maybe ISO1600?  In the exposure range around down around 20s/f2.8/ISO1600, I think you'd be able to get some color detail out of the Orion nebula.

60seconds at ISO2000,  didn't come out at all like I planned.  It was overcast most of the night and I didn't really get what I wanted.
20220303_YellowStone_005 by Carl Peters, on Flickr


When I gave up on stars I tried some composites.   I thought about focus stacking the segments, before stitching them but I didn't go that crazy... yet.  When I get time I'm going to go around taking test photos in different spots,  then once my computer picking which ones to redo with stitched focus stacked photos so you can just keep zooming in and in.   I am not a good landscape photographer and that's a lot of time investment for a composition I might not like when it's on my computer.
20220303_YellowStone_004_Comp by Carl Peters, on Flickr

20220303_YellowStone_001_Comp by Carl Peters, on Flickr

24mm f/2.8 13s ISO1000; 11 frames stacked for noise reduction
GSDNP; partial moon maybe 15º elevation in the western sky

If you expose to see as many stars as you can, the detail in the Orion nebula just gets washed out in a white light.  If you resist the temptation to have a satisfyingly bright image on the camera monitor in real time, and expose shorter/lower than you think you need, you can pull reasonable color and detail out of the nebula, even with wide and ultrawide lenses.



I'll see if I can pull up a 100% crop around the nebula...

Much nicer than how mine turned out.

Apparently this good lookin' fella can be found between the NE gate and Mammoth Springs pretty regularly,  just hanging out lookin' majestic af.


20220304_YellowStone_002 by Carl Peters, on Flickr

Spring Pond Aft by FredMan, on Flickr

Ahh, springtime in Virginia.  You never know if it's going to be a blizzard or a crisp spring day.

Snow 2022-03-12 by FredMan, on Flickr

Sun 2022-03-13 by FredMan, on Flickr

New "toy" finally arrived, charging the battery now.

Parted ways with my trusty D850 and D810, along with a few lenses.  I'm now fully mirrorless with the Z9 and Z6II.  I also may have placed an order for the new 400mm F2.8 back on release day...my poor bank account.    

Jealous.  My D3100 suits my needs for now.

I'm waiting - impatiently - for the next-gen Z 7 or rumored "Z 8" to see what features of the Z 9 roll down before I decide whether/when to part with my D850. The -9 is an awesome camera and proves (again) that mirrorless is the future.

I also note that the battery life of mirrorless models is still woefully less than that of DSLRs, but that's been improving.

Very nice.

Gobbler Strut Profile 2022-03-17 by FredMan, on Flickr

Snow Fight by FredMan, on Flickr

Wary Tom 2022-03-17 by FredMan, on Flickr

20220324_006 by Carl Peters, on Flickr

Very nice. Some sort of magnolia?

Oops!

FS Yak1 by FredMan, on Flickr

Sorry,   it contrasted with the hair,  no idea what kind of flower lol.

Older pic with a D850.  Weather has been garbage, going to try to get out tomorrow with the Z9.

That’s not a moose, is it?

Try Elk.

EBR

Aye, a young bull elk.  This is a moose

20220325_008 by Carl Peters, on Flickr

From October of 2020.

I had lost a lot of really good photographs from my trip into the Bistihi Wilderness in New Mexico.  My gloves had hit one of the alternate function buttons at the front of my D850 and changed the capture from a 3x2 aspect ratio to a 4x3 aspect ... something that isn't readily identifiable in the viewfinder if you aren't specifically looking for it.  As a result, my framing was off on some wide angle portrait-oriented photos that had some key aspect in the foreground during the day hike, like lone rocks and things like that, as well losing some sky, and pushing some objects at the top of the frame at or beyond the edge of the frame.

I didn't realize this until morning, when reviewing my photos from the night before, wondering why my framing was so far off for some night shots.

Really sucked to have lost some good shots to that mistake.

To compound matters, my lenses iced over during the night, resulting in completely fogged over images as twilight and dawn approached.  Both cameras.  The 20mm on the D800 and the 14-24mm on the D850.  Iced.

For a year, I was rather dejected by it.  When I was out there this past Fall, I happened to be passing into New Mexico when the moon was waxing, so another trip into the Bisti/De-Na-Zin just didn't seem worth it, as I really wanted a moonless sky to try to do some Milky Way photos, knowing how the moon had washed out much of what I had tried to do the year before.

Driving back east, I wish I had made the effort to swing back in, but I had already covered too much ground to turn around, and that was that.

Until yesterday.

I was looking at a really lackluster star trail photo from the 2020 trip, and had a different idea to approach the series.  I chose a series of about 100 frames, but chose to treat the last frame a bit differently, over exposing it by 2 f-stops to exaggerate the star diffusion in the gradually fogging/icing lens, right around moonset, and a foreground just prior to that last frame, where the moon was painting the hoodoos in some faint, reddish light, still visible through the icing lens.

I like this image.  It wasn't what I was after at the time.  But, I think for all the problems, those problems may have left me with a more interesting finished product than I would have, had all the things gone the way I had planned....

[The Dipper is rising above a group of hoodos right/center, but perhaps more interesting are the stars Tania Australis and Borealis, the orangish and bluish star pair near the right of the frame.  I'm not sure I've ever really noticed those two stars in the sky.  Not until reviewing a bunch of throw away images, where an iced-over lens brought them into prominence.]

Is that the Z9?    Thought they were almost impossible to get yet.

Yup, it is.  Took 3.5 months to arrive at my local camera store.  I think tons of folks that ordered online (B&H Photo) are still waiting.   You can keep an eye on Amazon and Best Buy and land one in a few weeks if you are quick.

I've been volunteering and shooting for our football team for a few years now.    Funny how u get attached to the kids, and being a small town, we all kinda know each other anyway.

The QB and 2 other guys from last fall got scholarships at Alma, so gonna try and make a few of their games this fall as well.  QB was a 3 year starter and was fast as hell.    Decent arm.    Think Alma will use him at wide receiver.     Really great bunch of kids.

Nikon D750 and Tamron 70-200 G2.     f/3.2  1/800 and 4500 ISO.