7 days

7 days left, and counting! Our first Herc should be in today, hopefully.

Almost done

12 days until I am scheduled to leave Pole. Must not think about not having a job, must only think of my vacation. My vacation that will destroy my savings...nope can't think about that either.

sigh.

Hmm

I just walked outside in a sweatshirt, shorts, and crocs with no socks on. Have I lost my little mind, or am I officially immune to the cold? I thought it was funny that I saw and walked past Logan who was in boots, carhartts, hat, and parka taking out trash as well. My feet did get a little cold when I was walking through snow drifts. Crocs, apparently are not meant for winter travels...

It was only -45F out there witha 15kt wind at -80F.

A bit worried about how I will handle the insanely warm weather of a New Zealand summer, followed by the hottest month in the Australian summer.

100F in no way sounds pleasing to me at this point. I think that -40F is warm...

Forgot

Forgot to say that I won one of the flags that surrounded the ceremonial pole all last season the other day at the video teleconference . I didn't go to it, but my name was selected in the raffle afterward. It's a pretty cool flag, it's the Argentina flag. The cool thing about it is that it was the flag that I placed back outside around the ceremonial pole when we placed the new flags out when the sun came up.

Pretty cool flag.

That's me on the far right placing the flag. Lee took this photo from inside the station. Talk about irony...

Twin Otter

Well it's still here. It's a good thing that Krissie and I got moved out of our room when we did since the pilots had to spend the night here. The weather is not looking so hot right now, and I have no idea where they are in the repair process, so they may be here a while.

I finished a few photos from yesterday. They are watermarked like crazy and small because I don't want them walking off, if you know what I mean. I will eventually be putting them up on deviantart, sans the watermarks. until then, the couple of folks who read this thing will have to just suffer ;}

Here they are:

Robert, one of the science techs.

We had to tow the plane to the Otter Pits


Poor little plane :{

In my opinion, this is the best photo I have ever done down here. I absolutely love this thing!

WOOT!

First planes of the season!

Pics tonight, maybe. First plane in was a bassler. Second plane in twin otter (twotter). Number of planes having left 1, number of planes still here with engine problems 1... GET OFF MY CONTINENT!!

The twin otter is having engine issues currently and has tried 3 times to leave with no avail. It's not the weather, those things are rated to fly at -90F, so dunno. It would be weird to have guests...especially since there are supposed to be women on the plane. 6 months of no physical contact with the outside world, 30+ males who have not seen any other women-- this could get interesting...

More Pics

First off, let me say I've been having upload issues so I've made many of these smaller than normal, and I've compressed them far more than normal. So they may not look so hot, the colors are atrocious seen on a browser...Anyway moving on to the post.

More HDRs. I thought I would show an example of a real HDR. This image shows a normal exposed image next to the HDR. I like it.

You may notice that the HDR seems a bit blurry in many spots. That's because i didn't use a tripod and I ended up moving slightly between the three photos. Normally it would be very crisp.

Now this next "HDR" was made from a single raw file, so technically is not a true HDR, just like the majority of my other "HDR"s. I did no editing to touch this one up like I normally would to show a sort of default look. It's still pretty cool.

Notice Krissie's feet in the shot. How adorable can get she get? I mean seriously. She has to stand on her tippy-toes to shoot this shot. She's a keeper. Also notice that you can actually make out the yellow foosball players in the background in the HDR.


Okie dokie, now for another "How It's Made". The following three shots were used to make a true HDR.
Normally exposed shot, blech

Underexposed shot, kinda cool.

Overexposed shot, blech

Now combining the 3 exposures produce the following true HDR:

Very cool. Generally speaking it's a lame shot, but the balls sure look fancy-smancy!

Also, I've been playing around with textures in post processing of my photos. I've made a few photos of Krissie and I at the pool table. I hope you like em!

Look at that pool shark! Okay, Krissie stop reading here, move on to the next photo. Shh, don't tell Krissie but her face does not line up properly. I tried to blend in one of the normal photos to this one because she moved a bit during the 3 shots. Doing so made her forehead seem larger than it really is. Oh if you only knew how much time I spent on this photo you would understand why I just accepted it. Make sure she doesn't find out...

Oooh purdy

Mhmm.

And to my favorite:

Absolutely love this photo. Probably going to make a print of it and frame it when I get home. I think I'll get the print done on canvas to boot!

That's it. I don't know how much more I will be posting. I have a ton of stuff to do in the next few weeks, and not much time to get it done in. I have huge problems sleeping. In fact I'm currently running on another 24 hour period so far, two days ago it was 36 hours. The sun has totally screwed my sleep cycle up. That and I'm quite anxious about all the things I've yet to do. The problem is I've pretty much stopped caring about this job, which makes getting the things I need done incredibly difficult. Only a few more weeks and my replacements will be here. Phew!

Winterover Photos

Yesterday we took a few more photos of the majority of the group for our winterover photo. We've never had everybody show up to the photos, which seems odd to me. But whatevs. If folks don't want to be in the photos then so be it. The final batch of photos we took I decided to bring my camera with me. We were going to be taking the photos on Dome Ridge; I don't know if it was named this prior to one of us naming it or if it's a unique name for this winter. It's just a nice spot behind the dome on a bit of a ridge that is nice for taking photos of both the dome an the station. One of my panos in the previous post was taken from there. Anywho, back on point. I decided to take the camera because I needed to take some photos inside the dome, and figured why not kill two birds with one stone. So while we were preparing for the photos I was taking the "Behind the Scenes" photos. I got some pretty nifty stuff, most of which I will be doing HDRs of, naturally. Here are a few I've completed thus far.


With this photo I feel like I'm getting closer to what an HDR typically looks like. I used the settings from this image and applied it to the others and it seems to have worked out pretty well, though I need to do a bunch more tweaking to see if I can improve upon this.

I hope to some day create images that are even half as good as the inspiration for my HDR photography, Stuck In Customs.


Every standing there looking purdy with Cully preparing to sprint over to join us for the photo. When I saw Cully run, I ran up to the line as well.


I LOVE this photo, the lens flare is insane and absolutely authentic. I couldn't photoshop something like this, I've tried and it always looks retarded. Such a cool effect.


Folks heading out.

Oh and I took a 360 degree pano while standing out in front of the dome. Kinda interesting I suppose.

The large corrugated? metal structure you see there in the middle is the LO Arch, the structure with the large T shape is the VMF Arch, and well the dome like structure is the dome!