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!

Sunrise Photos

Well I still haven't completed the couple of photos I've been working on, though I may not get them finished. I'm far too much of a perfectionist, and as such I keep trashing the work I've done. I doubt I will be getting any more sunrise photos, as the sun is pretty high above the horizon right now, and since we've been in a freaking storm the past week again there hasn't been much to take a photo of.

Anywho here are some more photos for your pleasure. Cully and I were asked to get some photos of the dome since this will be the final sunrise it ever sees. If all goes according to plan the dome will be torn down this summer. Though things rarely go according to plan down here...

First I though I would show how the HDRs are made, well at least what the images that it is comprised of look like:

This is the "properly" exposed image. I'm sure it's nowhere near correct, but it is the base from where I start.

Now I need an underexposed image and an overexposed image.

This is the underexposed image, which brings out the sun and clouds as they should look.

This is the overexposed image that shows what the dome and snow should look like.

Combining the above images creates the following "HDR"

None of the photos I have made that I call HDRs are true HDRs, but they emulate them well. I don't take multiple shots, i just create the photos from a single RAW image. Though to make things easier I will continue to call these pseudo HDRs, simply an HDR image.


A decent image, I'm not too happy with it but i got sick of working on it.

Another HDR

now when creating HDRs you have to be careful that you don't over do it. Though sometimes you want to overdo it to give it a more artistic feel to it. The following HDR was created in an over the top manner that turned it into a pretty cool image imho.

It looks like a pretty cool painting to me, so I kept it in this form.

Okay that's enough HDRs for one post, onto some plain photos.

This is a shot of ARO


This is a shot of a random antenna, I have no idea what it is used for.


Simple sunrise, nothing special here.


Another simple sunrise photo.

Off of the ob deck, meh.

Now for some I do like...

Very purdy, but it's cut off on the bottom. I forgot to add the other pictures when I stitched this image, oh well. Some other time.

A picture of folks removing the Scott Tent. I really like this one.


I love the colors in this one.


This is probably my favorite 'sunrise" photo, even though the sun is not in the image at all.

The following picture is also pretty cool, it is freaking huge. It is a pano made from 62 images. Yes 62 images, it was a pain in the tush to take because my hand kept freezing while waiting on the frozen camera to process the photos. It kept blinking at me "busy". Grrr.

That's the entrance into the dome. This is actually the only photo I have thus far of the complete dome. I couldn't actually post the full size image it is just too big, and I won't be able to put it on my flickr page because the file size is too large (I think, I could be wrong on that one). So to give you an idea of the scale of this picture I have made two 100% crops from the original. You'll have to click on them to see the actual full size of the crop.


This is just one of the diamonds on the dome...


Try and find this in the full picture!

Well that's it, I'm working on a couple of other HDRs but they are becoming a pain and I am getting sick of working on them. So they may never make it up here. We'll see.

Hawaii

Well my grandparents should be just getting on the plane in Denver for their week long vacation in Hawaii I got them for their 50th anniversary. I hope they have fun!

I haven't completed the sunrise photos yet. Though after tonight they should be finished and put up tomorrow morning!

Snow

There sure is a lot of it around here, sheesh. I haven't finished processing the sunrise photos that I have thus far so I thought I would throw up some recent photos of the sastrugi (essentially snow drifts). I will eventually get to the sunrise photos...Speaking of sunrise that dang fiery ball is intense. It was up in full force two nights ago around 2am while Krissie and I were in the galley: holy cow it is bright. For whatever reason I couldn't stop staring at the sun. It was the first time I had seen the actual sun in months, and boy was it beautiful. It was really beginning to hurt though, all the constant staring. Later on in the evening I was even able to see the full circle of the sun through some clouds. It was just surreal.

Back to the sastrugi:


Very cool.


I love this photo, it doesn't look like snow to me. If i were to change the colors and turn this into a dark greyish black you would think it stone (well I would anyway). Notice the layering that occurs, I also like this photo because it reminds me of the huge 3-4" everlasting gobstoppers that looked like this with the colorful layering as you worked your way through it.


Just purdy.

Well that's all! Hopefull I'll get some of those sunrise pics finished and posted tonight during our test satellite passes.