Sunset Silhouettes

Well…another rough couple of days at school, but at least the weekend’s almost here! I’ve been going back through some of my older shots over the past few days and stumbled upon these. This is a series of shots I took back at Tech for my Photography colloquium in November 2010. The topic of the week was Silhouettes.  I think I posted another shot from this afternoon back in October, but these are pretty good ones as well.  The camera stayed in the same spot for all of these photos, but zooming in gives some pretty different effects to the shots.

I do miss having a place like the duck pond so close to wander around at all hours of the day and night.

-Ben

Rising From the Mists

Here are a couple of shots from a hike I took with a few friends last December at Mount Pisgah. We decided that we needed a break from studying for finals and were able to find a nice hike not to far away from Eugene.  We climbed up the trail through some pretty dense fog, but as we got closer to the summit, we broke out of it and were able to see the sun for a little while (before the fog caught back up with us). These are a few pictures from that boundary area that I thought turned out pretty cool:

Clear Skies

Another view of Odell Lake, though in the day this time. The weather up there was so nice, and I’ve been missing it the last few days, which have been cloudy and occasionally rainy here in Eugene.

This week was a little rough, trying to catch up with grading and homework from the weekend, but I managed to get it all done in time. I also had a big midterm in my Differential Topology class today, which I think went surprisingly well. I’ll have to wait to see if I did as well as I think I did though. After all of that, it was nice to go out dancing tonight, and just kinda forget about all of the pressure from classes and everything else going on at the moment.  There were a couple of awesome performances from a group that came down from Corvallis.

Tomorrow should be a lot of fun as well. I’m heading to a “Microbrew Festival” with a couple of friends, then going out for another night of dancing

-Ben

Treetops

Whew, the last few nights have been pretty rough trying to catch up on all the work I didn’t do this past weekend. Here’s another pair of pictures from the trip to Odell Lake:

It’s not often I catch the moon close enough to the horizon during the day to get a shot of it with anything but sky in the picture. My moon photos usually don’t come out this clear either, so I’m happy on both counts.

This one was taken on one of the cross county ski trails around the lodge. I really like the way the clouds turned out in the top left corner. They contrast very nicely against the dark blue sky from the polarizing filter. I would have liked to have gotten the entire sky that dark, but it didn’t work out with the sun at the time. I also like how the dead tree left of center kinda matches up with the leading edge of the clouds in both shape and color.

-Ben

Experimenting (Take 2)

In my last post, I talked about playing around with my new graduated neutral density filter, but I didn’t have a great example of what the effect really was. However, this weekend, I went with a large group from the math department up to Odell Lake, up in the cascades. It was a gorgeous place, and it was nice to get away from Eugene and work for a few days (though I’m making up for all that missed time tonight…). Saturday afternoon, I went down to the docks at the lake at sunset, and had a chance to play some more with the filter. Below are two roughly identical shots, the first without the filter, and the second with it

Notice that the surface of the lake is exposed about the same in both shots. The difference between the two is the exposure of the sky, especially on the left side of the shot (where the sun was going down). Overall, I’d say it was a fairly large improvement in the shot.

I’ll post more about the weekend adventures (and some more photos) next time. But for now, it’s back to work…

-Ben