Cape Cod, August 2009

I spent a few days on Cape Cod, and managed to take some wonderful pictures.
I have a [relatively] new camera, a Canon PowerShot SX10IS, and that proved
to be essential in taking some of the pictures and movies that you will see
below. The Canon has an optical zoom of 20, which allowed me to take some
of the close-up shots of the setting sun. The image stabilization helped me
take long exposures and movies with little or no camera shake. And the
ability to take stills while taking a movie was also wonderful. In the end,
I set the camera to manual focus, focused at infinity, and took all of the
whale pictures in that mode.

Note: on my computer, you have to hit the browser's "Back" button after you
view each movie.

Sunsets

Here are some sunset pictures, taken the first night I was there.
I was amazed at how the image of the sun changed as it descended into the
ocean. Note the boat in front of the sun in the 3rd image.







Kinetic Sculpture

My friend, Bob, has a wonderful kinetic sculpture. Here are some movies
that make it appear to be quite mysterious. Turn the sound down:
there is nothing useful to hear, and the noise is irritating.

Kinetic Sculpture (15 MB)

Kinetic Sculpture (20 MB)

And a few pictures of the same thing:





This movie shows the thing in a less mysterious light:

Kinetic Sculpture (37 MB)

Whales

Here are some stills of the whales we saw off the tip of the Cape.
All of them have been cut in half, or more: there is a lot more
detail in the original images.









This movie shows a single whale diving:

Single Whale Tail (10 MB)

And this one shows four whales diving!

Four Whale Tails (12 MB)

Low Level Images

The stars were amazing at night, and I tried to take some long exposures
of the night sky. As you can see, that did not work out very well:



If you look closely, you can see a star or two in there.

I enhanced the image using some software that I wrote myself, and this is
what resulted:



I don't know about you, but I kind of like the image, partially because it
was dragged, kicking and screaming, out of the original, that showed no
hint of what lay hidden beneath the surface.

Here is another similar image:



I then tried to take a picture of a small outdoor lamp: here are the two
resulting images:





I then took an image of the door to the inside. I really like the second image, below.