Guest Contributor – Glenn W – 16APR2024 – Photo-Expedition – 2024 Eclipse

photog Glenn W, Guest Contributors, Photography , , ,

Editor’s Comment:

Glenn was kind enough to allow me to publish a private e-mail he sent me.  As some of the regulars know I set up this website originally because I resented the left-bias that permeated most if not all of the photography websites.  So I am always excited when someone on the site has a photography-based post to share.  And going on a trip to get a special photographic shot is near and dear to my heart.

 

Hi photog,

 

Since you were kind enough to give me photography advice for the eclipse I wanted to get back to you and let you know how it went.

First off, I purchased a Tamron 150-500mm f/5-6.7 lens. Rather than buying brand new I decided to buy a “good as new” lens from MPB. I think it was a good choice and I like the lens. I don’t know what reputation it has in the photography community but the non-solar images I’ve taken seem really sharp and I like it.

Leading up to the eclipse I was practicing by taking pictures of the sun. I felt like I was having problems getting sharp focus (you can’t use auto focus when using a solar filter, there’s not enough light). I found a tip by a solar photographer that you can get a good focus for solar photography by going out after dark and focusing on a far away star at the f-stop you will be using for the photographs. I did that and marked the spot on my focus ring using a marker.

I took a lot of photos of the eclipse but in the end I am disappointed in my photographs. I am not surprised that they weren’t as good as I hoped but I wouldn’t have missed the opportunity for the world, I still had a great time. I made a newbie mistake that I only found out about after the eclipse. I had my shutter speed set to 1/30 sec in order to get good color and detail. Well, I found a page on reddit where some experienced folks were chatting and they say that the minimum shutter speed for photographing the sun should be 1/250 sec otherwise motion blur will be induced. Sigh… I never imagined the earth and sun could move that much relative to each other in 1/30 of a second.

I still had a blast and enjoyed trying my hand at the photography. My wife and I sat on a berm on the edge of a Walmart parking lot in Decatur, IN. We ended out chatting with a bunch of fellow eclipse watchers and had an all around good time. The sun moving from partial eclipse to full eclipse in the blink of an eye was one of the most dramatic things I have ever witnessed. It was sudden and dramatic. Many people in the crowd let out a gasp when it happened. I witnessed a solar prominence moving with my naked eye from over 90 million miles away. It’s one thing to read about such things and another thing to see it in person.

Once again thank you for the help!

 

photog’s reply:

Hi Glenn. Thanks for sharing your experiences during the eclipse. The point of totality must have been very impressive. Very exciting.

I’ve always wanted to see a total eclipse. But life intervenes.

I know what you mean about photographic mistakes. A couple of years ago I went on a river trip to see bald eagles. I had the right lens and the camera was adequate but what I failed to notice is that I had the exposure set too slow for the focal length and it introduced too much shake into the shots. Out of more than a thousand files barely a handful were truly sharp. But you live and learn.

I don’t know all the latest tastes in lenses but my feeling is if the lens allows you to get the shots you want and provides a quality you’re happy with, then it’s the right lens. 500mm is a good long focal length. Birds, other wildlife and landscapes and cityscapes fit right in with such a lens. As you can probably tell from my daily photos I have a 90mm macro lens on my camera a lot. But when an interesting project presents itself it’s good to make sure you have the right lens.

Recently I was talking to a friend about a “walk-around” lens. He was enjoying a 24-105mm zoom. I told him that I used to have a 28-75mm f2.8 zoom that had been described derisively as kind of plastic-y. And it was made of a lot of plastic. But what it was good for was a walk-around cityscape lens. It was plastic so it was light but the images looked excellent to me. Now that was an a-mount lens so I sold it when I bought into e-mount. But I never forgot how much fun it was to have this light, versatile lens when I was walking around Manhattan for hours. So it’s great to learn all the places where different lenses serve their purposes.

Thanks for sending this message. This was the original reason I started the site. I was tired of the liberal bias on most of the photographic websites. They would ruin the fun of talking about photos by saying something stupid about politics and then because the moderators were also liberal they’d punish only one side for arguing. Very annoying.

Small Towns, Politics and Life

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner ,

I like to mock my small town with my stories of Dunwich.  And it’s true that nowadays even small towns are caught up in the awful consequences of the blue state policies that reach down and afflict us with all the bad practices and crazy programs that are out there.

But small towns at least have the advantage that you are forced to see who it is that has to try and make the machine work regardless of the craziness of the system.  And the funny thing is that face to face with individual people they tend to look a lot like human beings.

And this is not saying that some of them aren’t crazy.  They most decidedly are.  The woke ideas that they’ve been steeped in for their whole lives has rendered a goodly number of them certifiably mad.  They advocate for the worst programs and ideas and claim that it all makes perfect sense.  Everything about them is backwards and upside down.

And yet, they’re still demonstrably human.  They have families and friends and they have tragedies afflict them like everyone else.  And when you hear of these things it reminds you of your own brushes with mortality and fate.  And unless you’re implacably driven you can’t help but feel empathy.

So, it’s a little harder to hate people so very entirely in a small town.  You have to see their faces and talk to them when you want to argue.  Your kids and grandkids go to the same schools and fairs and kids sports with their kids and grandkids.  And sure, you also go to the budget meetings and zoning meetings and disagree about taxes and school programs and road work but it’s hard to see them as the same as Joe Biden and the FBI and the IRS.  They’re not Goerge Soros sprinkling billions of dollars to corrupt justice.  They may want to waste thousands of dollars and fund projects that you think are wasteful and possibly harmful but they aren’t trying to destroy your family.  They vote for the people that are trying to destroy your family but they don’t think these things up themselves.

And when you get the chance to talk to some of them, they’re just as distressed as you are about the price of bread and meat being up forty percent in just four years.  They’re worried that their kids can’t afford to live in their own places because rents and real estate have skyrocketed.  They know that kids have been proselytized into believing that they can never achieve a middle-class existence on their own.  They’re scared for the future too.

I mention all this because during the day-to-day existence of reading the atrocities that the Left perpetrates on us, anyone can imagine the “civil war” erupting all around us and neighbors at each other’s throats.  And maybe in a big city it’s already sort of true.  Nobody knows anyone and random violence is a regular feature that goes hand in hand with anonymity.  But in a small town you even know the “devil” himself, the leader of the progressives.  And what does the devil look like?  It’s a middle-aged woman who volunteers on two or three town committees and wants to hire an extra librarian for the high school and get a new ambulance for the EMS crew.  Not precisely Klaus Schwab.

None of this changes the fact that we disagree diametrically with the things these people vote for.  In small ways, day after day, these people are contributing to the destruction of normal life.  They are a big part of the problem.  But when they are also your neighbors and you have to work with them to keep the town going hate is a lot harder to muster.  Annoyance definitely, and even anger, sure.  But hate is a stretch.

Kinds of Direct Action

photog Current Events ,

Following up on yesterday’s post, restoring sanity to our society is the only way to avoid the collapse that the Left is busily hastening.  And as far as I can see the only strategy for accomplishing this is direct action.  So far, the only examples are those actions being taken by a few red state legislatures and governors who have begun to pass laws to prevent the worst of the corruption from damaging their children.  Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida has been especially busy preventing schools from exposing young children to sexual indoctrination about things like homosexuality and transgenderism.  But he hasn’t been alone.  Other states, especially in the south have been active in setting up a framework of laws to prevent the progressives from establishing their propaganda in the schools and the social welfare institutions.

And in the colleges DeSantis has also taken the lead in rooting out the pernicious DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) programs that replace merit with quota and affirmative action criteria.  In fact, he has mandated that the whole Florida State University eliminate both the policy and the hierarchy of DEI.  Hopefully that leads to a great number of people in this discipline becoming unemployed and hopefully unemployable.

But much more needs to be done to begin to roll back the damage that has been done.  From my point of view the quickest way of dealing with the problem is for the states to provide vouchers with which, parents can pay for alternatives to the public schools for their children’s education.  This way the present generation can get in front of the problem.

So, what is this saying about the path forward?  What needs to happen is these states and their citizens have to work together to provide parents with pathways to raise their children to be normal people.  This will not save everyone.  Parents are going to have to wake up to what’s going on.  They have to be aware of what the public schools are like.  They have to educate themselves about what alternatives exist for their children’s education.  And they have to start paying attention to who runs their communities and states.  None of this is an automatic solution to the problems.  It’s a beginning.

What it should be is a starting point for further action.  Beyond the schools are the other community resources.  The hollowed-out churches need to be replaced.  How that is done I don’t know.  But it has to be done somehow.  Our communities are ghosts.  There is no actual community.  All of the institutions, the Town Hall, the Library, the Churches are run by leftists and we let them take over.  We were all too busy.

Now the rest of this is wish fulfillment.  Will these red states stand up to the inevitable encroachment from the federal government when they attempt to counteract these red state initiatives?  That’s the gazillion dollar question.  So far nothing has done more than slightly dent any of the progressive incursions that the Left has initiated against our lives.  But maybe there has finally been a reaction to something so horrific that it will stick.  Transgendering children may be that thing.  And if the people rallying around to oppose this atrocity play their cards right maybe a lasting and effective campaign can be initiated.

The Scandinavian countries and the UK have reversed course on pediatric transgender treatment.  The claims that “affirming” therapies produced better outcomes for children are false.  At best the studies are inconclusive and newer evidence points to the dangers of hormonal and surgical interventions.  As more and more studies are done, I’m sure what will come out is that these therapies are valueless and actually demonstrably harmful to the long term physical and mental well-being of these children.

Some direct action is finally being taken by politicians and regular people to protect their families from the most dangerous policies of the Left.  What is needed now is leadership to grow these individual efforts into a coalition that can build a large consensus and then take it forward to provide more protection for families and hopefully build communities around these families.

Recovering Sanity from the Past

photog Current Events ,

Following up on yesterday’s post, solving problems like the energy sources we use to maintain an advanced civilization are not hopeless barriers.  Human understanding of the physical world is already incredibly advanced.  The fact that a hundred years ago we figured out that radioactive elements were a potential source of enormous power is a startling insight into how far we’ve come in our understanding of nature.  Now granted things have degenerated quite a bit in the last century but there are many genius level intellects in the world around us and we have computing power available to us that would have astounded the men who invented modern computing.

So, I am more than confident that the future for human technological progress is more than bright.  Even something like solar electric generation will certainly be improved in ways that will make it not only more efficient but also much more economically desirable.  It only requires that the true costs of production and the life cycle for the hardware is honestly figured into the economic equation.

And there are so many other obvious sources for growth in our world.  The resources of the oceans haven’t begun to be explored in a meaningful way.  Geothermal energy is something I harp on just because it’s so obvious a resource that no one has seriously studied.  Modern farming techniques, innovations in home building, competition to provide better teaching methods for children; and on and on and on.  The world is filled with solutions to problems we don’t even realize we have.

But we’re not going to make any progress if we allow mentally ill people to run our institutions.  The fact that people in charge of medical societies, universities and government agencies say unashamedly that they can’t define what a woman or a man is tells us all we need to know about why our society is literally crumbling before our eyes.  The fact that a man who calls himself Rachel Levine is US Assistant Secretary for Health and walks around wearing a wig and women’s clothing is all we need to know about what’s wrong with our society.  The fact that several states will take children away from their parents because these young children have been convinced by their teachers that they are not the sex that their bodies prove they are.  And then these states will allow medical atrocities to be committed against these children to try and warp their bodies into a horrific semblance of the genitalia of the opposite sex.

What has gone on in Western Civilization is the radicalization of “freedom” to the point where we not only condone but actually celebrate delusion, destructive behavior and outright insanity.  And the most destructive aspect of this behavior is we have allowed young children to be exposed to it and even groomed to accept these perversions as healthy and normal.  And the result is a generation is being formed that will be emotionally and mentally harmed.  This training will make it difficult for many of them to form normal relationships and will lead to anguish and failure in their personal lives.

No progress will be made on the physical problems associated with our environment and technological challenges until we get a handle on the mental health crisis that has grown up in our midst.  As long as the courts and legislatures attempt to force normal Americans to treat transgenderism and other dangerous sexual deviancy as normal, we will fail to bring order to our world and end up sinking further into the madness we see all around us now.