EMPS: Gone the Rainbow

When Carly announced that this week's Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot was about Rainbows, I thought, "Great timing! The monsoon has started, and it's raining almost every day here. All I have to do is keep my camera with me and watch the sky on my way home from work."

Then the monsoon weather in Arizona went away for a bit. Today there was not a cloud in the sky. Foiled again!

So here are two rainbows from past monsoons, as found in my files:


Jun 26, 2009. A Double!


Jul 16, 2010

As best I can tell, I've never posted either of those shots before, although I did edit them at the time.

If the monsoon comes back by Sunday, I'll add something new. I really did see a rainbow just the other day - but I was driving and it was gone two minutes later. D'oh! It was a really faint one anyway.

Meanwhile, there's this variation on the theme:


Air Show - Mar 17, 2010

This is one of the shots I took while trying to photograph planes as they flew over Calle Mumble during an air show in 2010. The planes I'm trying to follow with the camera frequently go "climbing high, into the Sun," as the Air Force Song puts it, with colorful results!


Air Show - Mar 17, 2010

And this is the next shot I took that day. At Carly's suggestion, I've put an SFX frame around it.

Karen

EMPS: A Barrel of Rainbows

For Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot #40: Rainbows, Carly has set us a pretty problem. Real-life rainbows probably won't be turning up here until July when the monsoon hits, and my attempt to find sunlight refracting through running water was a total failure. Fortunately, she's also allowing for photographing rainbow designs, and I lucked onto just that Monday afternoon.

From EMPS

I've wanted to write about the trash bins of Reid Park for a while. They are all covered with Reid Park Zoo banners and colorful painted decorations by children. I've seen ones with animals, a volcano and all sorts of other cool things. This one is placed just outside the entrance to the rose garden.

Up close you can see that the kids have signed their work. It's kind of too bad that the bin liner covers it up. But at least you can see through the plastic!

The theme continues on the other side of the bin, with a vertical prism design.

Carly also asks what colors give us the most trouble in our photography. I love color, all bright colors, that is. The only troubles I seem to have are preserving color in low light conditions, or getting purple to read true, or photographing actual rainbows. Too often the camera seems to wash them out so that they are barely visible, and photo editing can't entirely compensate. But we'll see what my new camera can do when the rainy season arrives.

Be sure to check Carly's blog Ellipsis every Monday for the Ellipsis Monday Photo Shoot, and for links to the previous week's participants.

Karen

An Evening in Pictures

My brain is in revolt tonight against my wicked, sleep-deprived ways, so I'm going to upload and explain a few photos and then go to bed. That's okay with you, right?

One thing I don't have a photo of is an incident from church this morning. I usually have my camera handy in church, but not today, and I'm not sure I would have taken the shot anyway under the circumstances. During Father Smith's sermon, a little tiny lizard dashed out from behind me somewhere and across the Oriental carpet in front of the altar. I'm not 100% sure that it wasn't a chameleon instead of one of the local lizard species, but if so it was unusually small, bigger than the red-backed salamanders of my youth but not by much. As Connor (who also serves at Mass nearly every week) and I tried not to laugh too loudly, the little creature ran along the bottom of the sanctuary step, straight toward Reverend Angela. When she saw it coming, she stamped her feet to scare it off, lest it run up her leg. That sent the poor critter back our way. He stopped in front of the altar, and stayed there until Connor tried to catch him during the Sign of Peace. Eventually several people got involved in the lizard hunt, and it was successfully captured and put outside. I doubt that most of the congregation ever noticed what happened.

We went to see the new Harry Potter movie today. I enjoyed it, but have nothing in particular to say about it. Afterward we stopped off at Borders, where I noticed that displays designed to steer Potter fans toward other fantasy and sf including two displays of books by Madeleine L'Engle. Yay! There's a lot of YA fantasy about these days, which of course isn't news but cheers me nonetheless. A number of them are good, thick books, too.

Now, the thing about the Mâvarin books is that they're in the overlap between young adult and adult fantasy. They have teenage protagonists, but also some adult POV characters. There is no high school vibe to the stories - even the sequence of Darsuma at the College of Magic only takes up part of one chapter - and there is cannibalism in one of the books. So is it YA or not? Beats me. But if it is YA, then I need to get serious about finding an agent, because kids' books are even harder to place without an agent than adult ones.


I haven't checked whether the monsoon is officially here yet, but we were expecting rain tonight and oh, boy, we got it. As I headed out to buy pizza, it was raining very lightly, the sun had not set, and there was a faint rainbow in the sky.



When I came out again it was dark, and pouring, and so windy that the flooded parking lot had waves. I tried to photograph the waves, but the wind died down just then and the camera was more interested in focusing on the raindrops.



This is a rainbow shot from the other day, from a little smudge of a rainbow over my house. It wasn't nearly this bright, but I like this saturated, pixilated version.


And tonight my old computer, the one on which I play Doctor Who DVDs, reminded me why I replaced it in the first place.

I've finished Chapter 10 in my Heirs edit. I'm just starting Chapter 11, page 403. Progress! Good night!

Karen

Guilt Relief

Another rainbow shot, because it's there.

Today having been Saturday, I suppose you are assuming (if you thought about it at all; and really, why should you?) that I slept in until sometime past noon, and then spent the rest of the afternoon, evening and night messing around on Wikipedia.

If that's what you thought, you were half right. I did managed to sleep past 2 PM. But I've hardly done anything with Wikipedia today. Basically all I've done there is correct a typo or two, delete some duplicated info from the Snoopy article (and move one sentence), try to explain to someone why it's not a good idea to purge the term "lovable loser" from the Charlie Brown‎ article or claim he's a very good pitcher, and write a paragraph on the Back to the Future timeline talk page about whether traveling forward in time in Doc Brown's DeLorean creates a new timeline (not in and of itself, no).

(Amazing how my brain and fingers conspire sometimes to type nonsense. Just what is a Bach Time the Future timeline?)

Other than that, I went to Applebee's and brought a L'Engle book along, did a few dishes, and in between spent quite a few hours trying to get caught up with my church obligations. That included uploading five sermons in audio form (and one in Word as well), consulting with Father Smith in IM, updating the schedule page for the first time in a month, updating the seasons page for the first time since summer, posting a photo and some announcements, and updating the Sermons page several times over.

That was a fair amount of work, and especially time consuming on dial-up, since the sermons are several megabytes each. One of them couldn't be uploaded at all, because it was over 7 MB and Yahoo's limit is 5 MB. So John found a Windows program that let me edit the darn thing. Turned out that it included parts of the Mass from both before and after the sermon itself. I managed to trim off the Gospel, the Nicene Creed, the Prayers of the People and so on, but then the program wouldn't let me save the result. I eventually managed to save it as a Wave at 2.something MB. The mp3 version have been 18 MB!

And my computer was mean to me. The audio editor's installer froze up and wouldn't let me quit by any means. The upload page kept resetting instead of uploading. A sermon AOL insists I downloaded is nowhere to be found. The schedule page didn't want to be edited. Even a search window refused to go away, and my desktop icons disappeared, and this was after I'd rebooted one already. Phooey. I so need a new computer.

But the church web pages and blog are much better, and people can finally listen to all those long-delayed sermons. It's a start. And Monday I have a meeting to get started on the church directory. (Oh, joy.) I can start feeling a little less guilty now, and I can face the congregatio0n, sort of, when my name hits the ballot for the church vestry at the annual meeting in two weeks. Not that I want to win, but at least my iniquity in the form of neglected web pages is no longer as obvious and pervasive.

In the past week or so I've said encouraging things in comments to a few people who needed and deserved them. I especially remember saying that guilt is not a good and helpful thing. It paralyzes instead of inspiring change, and it reduces your confidence and sense of worth. I truly believe that. I certainly find in myself that guilt makes me not face my obligations. Unfortunately it's not easy for me to take the advice I glibly dish out, to dispense with guilt and just get on with it.

But today, at least, in one small ahead of my life, I got on with it.

Tomorrow, the gym. Maybe.

If you really loved me you'd give me
the rest of the turkey and dog biscuits.

Technorati Tags: Church, Guilt, Ain't Technology Wonderful?

Got to be dark to be bright

I will explain. But first, look at some pretty pictures I took today.



Yes, it's winter in the Old Pueblo, a more wintry winter than we usually get around here. I'm sitting in my office in a shirt, a sweater and a jacket, and I'm still a little cold. I should switch to my pink robe; it's right here on the chair.


Anyway, as you can see, there was snow on the mountains again today, and the sky was impressively cloudy. It didn't snow in the city, as far as I know, but there was a light sprinkling of rain. And this: the thickest band of rainbow I've ever seen, and quite possibly the first one I've seen over the Santa Catalina Mountains (north of the city of Tucson) instead of the Rincon Mountains (at the eastern edge of Tucson). That's in 20 years of living here.

I took all of these a little after 2 PM as I came back from lunch. No, it wasn't this dark outside. Not remotely. The problem in capturing the rainbow in a digital photo was one of too much light. To make the rainbow reasonably visible in the three photos above, I either reduced brightness and boosted contrast or darkened midtones - a lot. That's why you can hardly see the cars in this shot. But if I lightened the shadows, that looked odd, too.


From the parking lot. For this one I tried to lighten up the cars again after a brightness and contrast adjustment, and ended up with kind of an interesting high contrast effect.

And this is the same photo with no adjustments. All I did was crop and rotate.

How did all this look to the naked eye (or eyes wearing glasses)? The rainbow was considerably more visible than in this last photo, but the snowy mountains weren't all that obvious in the glare of a cloudy white sky. Sure did clean up pretty, though.

Karen

Technorati Tags: Photos, Rainbow, Winter, Tucson