John & Anne Wiley

2012/06/11

Housing Geometry

Filed under: Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,People,Random,SB Region — John @ 01:52

Some homes explore geometry beyond the rectangular shapes most of us live in. This collection is between Carp and Ojai.

1882 Country Geometry

1882 Country Geometry

I like how the angular buildings complement the round landscaping in this first one. Also the contrasting colors of the trees. Next up is a hillside fortress with sloping walls.

1883 Slope Shapes

1883 Slope Shapes

The complex geometric shapes mix well with the sloping stone walls and wandering paths. This last one is massive, and though there’s a clump of rectangles at the core it has some other shapes mixed in. There’s a well-tended estate around it extending beyond this pic. Imagine floating in that indoor/outdoor pool and paddling out to the edge to take in their marvelous view.

1899 UnSquare Feet

1899 UnSquare Feet

2012/06/09

Rock, Water, Life, Time

Filed under: Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,Nature,Random,SB Region — John @ 07:02

When I fly the hills here, the rocks never cease to sing their stony stories. Maybe a geologist would benefit from scientific understanding of every nook and cranny. To me, there’s sculpture wrought by water, life and time.

1852 Tangerine Falls

1852 Tangerine Falls

Not just the rain and waterfalls, but every life form that has touched these rocks makes a mark. Sometimes I see the rocks moving in slow motion over eons to catch a play of light that simulates shapes in my imagination.

1855 Fantasy Shapes

1855 Fantasy Shapes

Talking amongst themselves, they speak to me. When I walk or drive among such shapes they speak, but from the air another sort of language emerges somehow.

1857 Detail

1857 Detail

Maybe the same details would emerge looking across a ridge or down a ravine. But maybe the combination of a fleeting whim to snap a scene combines with the ease and freedom of flight to produce what I experience as unique. I don’t recall a single snap from the ground that evokes what these views do for me.

1860 Add Air

1860 Add Air

When I add air to the rock, water, life and time, another dimension emerges.  An expanded context. Somewhat like when I first met The David in Florence, Italy. I walked around the shape several times, and was startled by how much more powerful it is in three dimensions. I wanted to float around it to see every angle Michelangelo did. I wanted to add air. Is this part of the fascination I find in flight?

2012/06/08

Fly Envy

Filed under: Flying,Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,Nature,Random,SB Region — John @ 01:15

As a kid, I had fly envy. Watching them whiz around and even land upside down on the ceiling made me want to do that. Now my fly envy arises when we haven’t flown for a week or more and I hear a distant plane. Well, just now it nudged me to share some flying pix. I chose the place nearby with a scary name (in Spanish), Diablo nuke plant, because Edhat ran one of my pix from that flight today. That’s it in the distance in the first shot of course, but check out how beautiful that whole area is.

9281 Diablo Area

9281 Diablo Area

That big offshore rock at the right is the subject of the next pic, and if you click to see the larger version you can make out lots of seals and some birds hanging out there.

9289 Seal Rock

9289 Seal Rock

Locals will know I was approaching Diablo flying along the coast toward Avila and home to Santa Barbara. That route offshore gives a nice safe view of the nuke plant, and the reassuring sight of the gravity-feed core cooling water reservoir above the plant. It’s sure situated in a beautiful area. I sighed deeply just now remembering that flight. My fly envy is temporarily eased. 🙂

9292 Diablo Hills

9292 Diablo Hills

2012/06/07

Bowl Of

Filed under: Happiness,Has Photos,Inner World,Nature,People,Random,Relationships,SB Region — John @ 05:57

Life is a bowl of cherries. Some add a comment about the pits, but I like to focus on how sweet life can be. Playing with a new camera at the farmer’s market it was fun trying to capture the essence of cherry.

0007 Bowl of Cherries

0007 Bowl of Cherries

As she was about to sample one, I caught the sweeter essence of a cherry with the fingers of my favorite human.

0006 Free Sample

0006 Free Sample

Later we paused passing Alameda Park for a very different mood. Light slanting among the chorus of trees and a couple in quiet company sing a different harmony of life’s fleeting sweetness.

0017 Tree Song

0017 Tree Song

2012/06/06

Excuse Me?

Filed under: Happiness,Has Photos,Random — John @ 09:13

I hope you can pardon my enthusiasm, and this somewhat techie detour. See, snapping pix from a plane taxes the ability of cameras to produce acceptable results. Mostly it’s about motion. Lots of it. So the shutter speed has to be fast to eliminate blurring due to motion. Well, my old camera could get 1 clear 8 MegaPixel (MP) aerial pic out of every 3 shots with its max usable speed setting of ISO 400 (pretty fast). Well, this new Nikon D5100 gets comparable results with an ISO 3200 speed setting, eight times faster! So what would look much less clear than this 5100 pic if taken at ISO 400 on the old camera:

0091 New 5100, IS0 400

0091 New 5100, IS0 400

Looks like this at ISO 3200:

0095 New 5100, IS0 3200!

0095 New 5100, IS0 3200!

Not much difference, right? Of course these are reduced a lot and have been corrected for contrast and color (though actually much less than what’s required on pix from the old cam). Let me show you something larger. Here’s a sample from the same ISO 3200 pic above, corrected and reduced to 8MP size. This sample is cropped at full 8MP resolution:

0095 ISO 3200, 8MP Crop

0095 New 5100, ISO 3200, 8MP Crop

Most of the lumpy effect is due to heat waves, and you need to click each pic to see it full-size for a good comparison. The flag is about 800′ away, and the hillside maybe a couple of miles. This is about a sixth of the width of the full 8MP image. So this pic could be full-size on most computer screens and still look pretty good, right? So what? Now I can get vastly better aerial photos and for me it’s a really big deal. I can even snap sunset and moonrise from the air. And it’s not just ISO 3200.

0056 Anne, ISO 12800, f5.3 1/10s

0056 Anne, ISO 12800, f5.3 1/10s

I can also get indoor snapshots at night without blinding friends and family with a flash. Night pix taken at the D5100’s maximum of 25600 (f3, 125/sec.) are usable portrait snapshots! But reducing to the next-slower and still remarkable setting of ISO 12800 yields pix like the one above cropped from half the width of a 1200×795 reduction that was snapped using just very dim room light and the glow of a computer screen at f5.3, 1/10 second. That’s 32 times faster than my old camera, and it cost only 5 hours’ flying time. Now maybe this is all gibberish to most people and photographers already have better cameras, but I’m ecstatic about meeting my need for (ISO) speed while preserving some of my flying funds. 🙂

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