A non-flowery Friday

A week and 2300 photos later. Zoom, but you've already figured that part out. The majority of the photos were from yesterday, shooting a kid's circus camp with Green Fools. Lots of photogenic active kids, leading to lots of photos. The hard part is deciding which photos to show them.

This was the first camping trip for me in many years. I went semi-luxury, with a Karma Campervan rental. They are pretty sweet. Totally painless pickup service, a fully equipped van I can stand up straight in, queen sized bed, a cooler, an additional rented mini-fridge, and pretty well all the accessories for comfortable camping. The van has a solar panel on the roof and an inverter to keep camera batteries charged. It all worked really well. I think if I were to do it again, I'd bring along a sunshade to expand the living area a bit. I'd consider a plug in site if I knew I'd be going through a lot of batteries, and wanted to run a laptop with an external hard drive. Mostly I hung out with the other people I was camping with, bribing them with wine, bison risotto, blackberries and dates, more wine, my charming personality, more wine, well, you get the idea.

The idea was to get away from the city to some dark skies. That part mostly worked out. The smoke went away, but as it seems whenever there is a good astro event, the clouds wanted to participate too. The order of these photos has been scrambled a bit.

1. Sunset the first night looking west.

2. The same sunset looking east across the little lake.

3. Neil giving some of the campers a refresher on night shooting.

4. The opposite of the galactic core, with some campers doing some light painting.

5. My first Perseid metor! Looking straight up.

6. And another, by the light of the core and a gas plant.

7. A photogenic but abandoned building in Rowley, pop 11. We took a day trip over to check it out.

8. The last meteor I got.

9. When calm, the lake had some wonderful reflections. Here some campers are contemplating the clouds and reflections.

10. This was later and more broody.

11. Earlier and reflective.

12. Neil is photobombing or checking out the settings one of the campers is using.

13. Another sunset looking west. You'll all be happy to know that nobody hurt themselves running for this.

Of the Day

Driftwood

Flower

The lady of shalotte rose. Linda has it guarded by an iron fence.

Peony

Lily

Celina

Bee

Dragonfly

Retro?

Done properly, star trails look like this. I was hoping for more of this from the weekend, complete with meteors, but, clouds. There is a sequence that might be able to be assembled into such a photo, but I don't think it's really long enough. I'll have a look. The diagonal lines are probably aircraft.

And to finish off, a serendipity from the retro photo. This is from Aug 2017, trying to learn how to photograph the Nightshade lilies.