Randall's Photo Blog

A collection of memory modules from old computers. I shudder to think how much I paid for these...

For the 4th this year I was in Albany. I decided to find a spot on the other side of the river and shoot the fireworks from there. I settled on the Rensselaer Amtrak station. Lots of other folks had the same idea. I took a few lenses (18-55 and 100-400) and a tripod but it turned out the best lens was home in my photo backpack. I wound up using a lens that was slightly long (100mm) but it did work (70mm would have been ideal). I took a lot of shots (about one second exposure) and here I have combined four of them into one image using Photoshop:

Getting home took a while as there was a lot of traffic but a nice evening, though.

We went on a short Caribbean cruise recently and what I mainly wanted to do was some snorkeling. I had the mask, fins and underwater housing for my old Sony W1 camera but haven't had the chance to use them for quite a while. The cruise ship was supposed to spend a day at an island and I thought that this would be a good time to get in some underwater fun. Unfortunately, the winds picked up and the tenders that were to take us to the island couldn't safely transfer passengers. So we spend the day at sea and the only pictures I had with the waterproof camera were taken in the hot tub.

The next day we docked in Nassau, Bahamas and we went out on a small boat to snorkel. I really don't know a lot about the areas around these islands but I have the feeling that where we were taken was not exactly the best spot. We were limited by how much time we could take and wound up just outside the harbour. They also had us wear this inflatable life vest and it made diving down to get a closer look a challenge. Still I got some OK shots:

I'm not really sure about this case. It cost $250 - quite a lot of money and makes the camera bulky and very hard to use. However, it is supposed to be good down to 40 meters which is a lot deeper than some of the newer underwater cameras. On the other hand, I didn't get below 3 meters on this trip...

It was hard to use - a lot of the time I was pointing the camera and pressing the shutter while unable to see anything on the screen. I use it so rarely though, it doesn't seem like I can justify a new camera.

On the flight back from Florida we flew over New York City and up on the east side of the Hudson river. I was able to get some nice shots as we descended into Albany.

Lower Manhattan.

Central park.

GW bridge

Tappan Zee bridge.

Looking at the Catskill mountains from the east - where I grew up.

A nice long view of the Hudson.

This last one is Delaware Ave. - our street. This is the view from Albany looking towards Delmar. The Delaware Plaza is on the left.

For those of you fortunate enough to have a new 27" iMac you know that the screens on these beauties are pretty large. It takes a 5 megapixel image to fill the screen! My old 4 MP digital images are too small. I am posting an image that I found on the web a while back. It is a new image of the Orion nebula taken by the Visible and Infrared Survey Telescope for Astronomy (VISTA) in Chile. This new telescope is part of the European Southern Observatory consortium. The link to the original is here. I turned and re-sized it for the native screen resolution of the 27" iMac (2560x1440) - enjoy:

I don't post up my own higher resolution images as wallpaper images anymore as theft of the images would be all too easy at these resolutions. Since this image is available free of charge and I link back to the original (and I'm not charging anything) I hope this is OK. It is a stunning image!

Last year we went for a hike at the Plotter Kill Preserve near Schenectady. We went back last Monday and shot some more at the upper falls and surrounding area:

The photos of the falls look a lot like the one I posted last year:

For the next two shots I leaned over the falls with my camera at the end of my tripod to get a different angle:

This is a vertical pan of two shots:

I still have to climb down to the base...