sunrise, 1/29/19

sunrise, 1/30/20

dawn, charlotte airport

When I flew to Norfolk, Virginia for the LADEE launch last month, I took a redeye flight with an early morning layover at Charlotte, NC's Douglas Airport, because it was US Airways and basically all of their flights connect through Charlotte. Taking the jump of 3 time zones into account, this meant that I was navigating an unfamiliar airport at about 3am my time, after a few fitful hours of trying to sleep on the plane.

The sun was just starting to come up as I waited for my connecting flight from CLT to ORF, and since the airport's due west of downtown Charlotte, there was a nice view of the downtown skyline with a multicolored pre-dawn sky behind it. I will freely admit that these are almost certainly not the best sunrise-in-Charlotte photos ever taken. I'm just pleased (and kind of surprised) that groggy 3am me thought to take photos at all. So here they are.

Updated: I just realized I accidentally took a short video clip, too, so I've added it to the post. It's not any worse than the photos, I'll say that for it.

The other thing I should point out is that most of the tall buildings in downtown Charlotte are headquarters of horrible megabanks, companies that bear a big chunk of the responsibility for detonating the global economy in 2008. Nobody's been held accountable; in fact they've gotten even bigger after getting bailed out at taxpayer expense. Grr.

sunrise, encore las vegas

daybreak, hawthorne bridge

The main problem with sunrises is that you have to wake up early to catch them. If you go back over the nearly five (!) year history of this humble blog, the vast majority of sunrise photos I've posted have come from cold and clear (or at least only partly cloudy) days in midwinter, when the sunrise occurs latest. If you see sunrises any other time of the year, either I'm on vacation, or some idiot (other than myself) scheduled a meeting at 7 or 8am and I snapped a few quick shots while trudging resentfully to the office. Which is basically what happened this time. You're welcome.

You might have noticed that there haven't been a lot of posts lately that involved a quick pre-work expedition to some local bridge or city park or obscure statue or something. That was before the advent of 9am meetings. Which are an only slightly more civilized practice than 7 and 8am meetings. And then only because a.) we have a machine that brews up a semi-palatable quad espresso, and b.) the jug of aspirin on my desk is never empty.

I should point out that, for an engineer, complaining about meetings is not the same thing as complaining about work. Meetings don't count as Real Work, they're something that interrupts Real Work, and sometimes makes you go back and revisit the Real Work you did last week all because some PHB had a new whim.

So, in short, I do realize this humble blog's gotten a little monotonous of late, and I'm trying to figure out what I can do about that. It could be that I just need to take more vacations, and take more vacation photos when I do. And I can always post more kitten photos. That never seems to get old.

december sunrise

Longtime readers might have noticed that winter sunrise photos are far more common here than summer ones. This is because winter sunrises occur later. There's a lot I'm willing to do for a (hopefully) good photo, but getting up that early is really pushing it.

assorted sunrises & sunsets

Yet another batch of photos from my ongoing geek-out over old cameras. It's kind of an inconvenient time of year to take up a new hobby, since you can only take so many photos of dark-n-gloomy winter stuff before it gets prohibitively depressing. At least the sun still rises and sets, and occasionally it's even visible.

Not a big fan of winter, I have to say.


So more than anything these photos are test shots, just to see what my various bits and pieces and widgets can do. But I figured, hey, they turned out ok, so I might as well share a few of them. I mention this mostly in case you're wondering why I took so many photos of the same thing. Ok, I was also trying to use up various rolls of film so I could get them processed. Once you're in digital-land, you forget what a pain film can be. And that's before we get to the cost of film, developing, and scanning. In the long run it's probably cheaper to just shell out and get a DSLR and use the lenses on it instead. I'm sure I'll do that eventually, but right now I'm waiting until the end of January to see what goodies arrive at the big PMA 2008 trade show.

Updated: This isn't my first batch of sunrise photos, by any means. It just occurred to me to go rifle through the archives, and -- surprise, surprise -- I was stuck doing sunrise photos last December, just like I am now. Earlier, in October '06, I posted some photos from the preceding January. More recently, here are sunrises from March and October of this year. I never seem to end up with any during the summer, mostly because I'd have to get up too damn early, and in the summer there are lots of other things to take photos of that don't require you to be awake at such an unnatural hour.

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So first, here's a recent sunrise, taken with a Pentax Spotmatic SP + Super-Multi-Coated Takumar 135/3.5. Mostly Mt. Scott, with bits of Mt. Talbert and the South Waterfront district.

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A couple of Sears TLS photos, the first with the standard 55/1.4 lens, and the second with a monstrous Vivitar 75-260mm zoom lens I found at Goodwill. I'd be exaggerating if I said it weighs a ton, but I wouldn't be exaggerating by all that much.

I'm actually pleasantly surprised by the construction crane photo. Everybody badmouths old zoom lenses all the time. I'm sure technology's improved and so forth, and a present-day equivalent would certainly be a lot lighter and smaller. But this particular lens, or at least this particular photo, seems reasonably sharp. Sharp enough to use on the interwebs, at any rate.

After buying the lens, I was surprised to discover it's a T4-mount lens. I was playing with it and twisted a ring at the base, and the M42 bits at the end came off in my hand. WTF!? Turns out that was actually a good thing, since the lens's aperture mechanism wasn't working correctly, which might be why I got such a good deal on it. Turns out flaky aperture stuff is a congenital defect among T4 lenses, but the problem area is inside the body-to-T4 adapter, not in the lens itself. So buying a new adapter makes everything peachy keen again.

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A batch of sunrise photos, this time with a Mamiya 1000 DTL + Vivitar 135/2.8 telephoto lens. These are from a few minutes later than the Spotmatic+Takumar pics, so already the sky's a bit different. Note to self: If you want to compare & contrast two similar lenses, try taking photos of something that generally stays the same. Sunrises and clouds don't count.

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More pics from the Mamiya, this time with the stock Auto Sekor 55/1.8 lens.

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And last but not least, a couple of Argus C3 photos.

an unusual sunrise, fwiw

Or, Additional Adventures in the Blogo-Doldrums.

I happened to be up at dawn the other day, something I usually go to great lengths to avoid. The sunrise looked a little odd, so I took a few photos, and here they are. Are sunrises always like this? I ask, because I don't see them very often, and when I do, generally the caffeine hasn't kicked in yet. I'm curious now, but not quite curious enough to get up early on a regular basis, so I was hoping maybe someone out there on the interwebs knows. And then I can just say I'm sure it's true, because I saw it on the interwebs. Or something.

I also took a few photos with the "antique" film SLR I bought recently. But you won't see those photos here because I managed to ruin my second roll of film in a row. Last time I just didn't know how to thread the film into the sprockets properly so it didn't advance. The second time, I forgot it was 24 exposures, not 36, and tried to advance the film anyway, and it broke clean off. I blame both mini-calamities on bad habits I picked up with my last film camera, an 80's era fixed-focus point-n-shoot. It's not a great camera, by any means, but it did protect you from shooting yourself in the foot, which is something, I guess.

I did manage to get a third roll exposed and rewound without incident, and it's at the photo shop as I write this. I'm curious how it turned out, and I suppose a bit nervous too. I really shouldn't be nervous, since M42 SLR gear is extremely inexpensive these days. I'm having the pics put on a CD too (a medium only slightly less obsolete than film itself, if you ask me) so if they don't completely suck I'll post a few when I get 'em back. I might post a few even if they do suck, just for kicks.

I figured I'd post the sunrise pics anyway, since I'm kind of short on material at the moment. I do have one batch of mini-roadtrip photos I still haven't posted from way back in June, and I've seen a few bad movies recently, so I might write about those. But overall things are in something of a rut right now, both blogwise and otherwise. I'm not sure what sort of action is called for, however. Maybe we'll move overseas for a while or something. That would certainly shake things up a bit. This humble blog might even become interesting again, if I'm lucky.

Anyway, about that sunrise: It started out innocently enough...













As the sun came up a bit more, it got weird:











At the time, I was sort of thinking these might be mammatus clouds, but they weren't quite that dramatic, and we didn't get any severe weather afterwards. Unless you think 50 degrees and drizzly is severe. Which I sometimes do, if we get it day after day for weeks on end.







Things eventually tapered off...






... and ending in a perfectly unremarkable October weekday. Sigh....