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I was bored in the lab today. Though, starting tomorrow I get to fill these tubes up with green goo and hydrochloric acid (to remove any carbonate material found in the algae). YAY! The extraction is a slow process, but it's better than reading journal articles or writing my research proposal, blech.

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I was bored in the lab today. Though, starting tomorrow I get to fill these tubes up with green goo and hydrochloric acid (to remove any carbonate material found in the algae). YAY! The extraction is a slow process, but it's better than reading journal articles or writing my research proposal, blech.

organic chem class?

organic chem class?

Nope, my work for my thesis. It's a cross between isotope hydrology and paleolimnology (the study of inland waters). The really condensed version is that I am removing all of the crap from the periphyton as well as surface sediments from various lakes in the Old Crow Flats up in the Yukon Territory, stripping it right down to cellulose. This will then be tossed into a mass spectrometer to determine the oxygen-18 isotope levels. The values of deficiency or enrichment of O18 are typically used as proxies for water levels, but never before done with periphyton. So I am seeing if it's a better technique to use than the surface sediments, or the same. Plus, can determine seasonality of biological growth in these lakes. There are other applications such as bio-monitoring, but yeah... That's the main portion of it.

If that floats your boat, check out this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope_hydrology

I'm also doing C and N analysis, as per http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotope_geochemistry, because the C/N ratio is a telltale of terrestrial vs aquatic organic matter (though, with periphyton, this is obviously 100% aquatic).

The stuff is already dated, so I don't have to worry about Pb-210 dating, haha. I have enough lab work to do as it is.

Edited by Napalm Frog
awesome pics crazy.. i love the one with the pigs.

Thanks, but your kids always kick my photos' butts :(

Haha, no, some really nice shots there in both posts, don't worry. Though I'm not a fan of horse racing. :p The cute chicks make up for that though. :D

I was like "whoa there's cute chicks in my photos!?" and I scrolled up. Ooohh... the ducks. :p

Sorry about the hugeish size, but dont have anything to resize photos other then paint at hand now. Also couldnt get the number of pics down to any less then 6.

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Shot with ancient Canon 350d as raws and then lots of experimenting in Adobe's Camera Raw.

Awesome pics, Freeman! That's the stuff I try to strive for when I go to the local forests, but I fail horribly at finding a balance between light and dark. My pics always end up washed out. I'm referring to pics 1 and 2, and the last is pretty sweet, too. Have any advice on that? I looked at the EXIF data, but everything just seemed standard.

Well, yeah. I shot them in semi-drunken mode :p Basically in those high contrast situations I shoot some 3 or 4 pics at different shutter speeds so that atleast one looks good on the "big" screen as well, and then it goes thru adobe bridge and camera raw, where its just lots of experimenting. And if your shooting in raws thers quite a lot of what you can do in post as well. What helps alot is "Recovery" to remove the blown out white. Thers probably better and more advanced techniques in practical photography for that, but some good post processing is what works best for me.

Well, yeah, and whats most important - decide what you want to be the main part of the photo - sky or trees/whatever. You cant have both - either trees are going to be mostly silhouettes and shadows, so you must compose taking that into account and sky stays like the object that grabs attention first, or sky is going to be pretty blownout and whatever is left should be composed as the center object. Blargh, hope that made some sense :)

Edited by John Freeman
Thanks, but your kids always kick my photos' butts :(

dude are you kidding me. When i post my pics i think they are "ok", knowing that whenever you, moonman, mrchuang or pandya post that mine are gonna look like crap..lol I can take pics of my kids, i haven't really had the chance or time to be challenged with anything else, it's you guys that can make a picture out of nothing, or in your case a few pigs racing and make it look great..lol

Soo good in fact that upon first looking at it, for a good minute i starred and thought it was fake, i thought it was part of that toy replica stuff, until i finally noticed one of the pigs kicking up dirt in the pic.. I'm always impressed with how some people can make something outta nothing :p

Well, yeah. I shot them in semi-drunken mode :p Basically in those high contrast situations I shoot some 3 or 4 pics at different shutter speeds so that atleast one looks good on the "big" screen as well, and then it goes thru adobe bridge and camera raw, where its just lots of experimenting. And if your shooting in raws thers quite a lot of what you can do in post as well. What helps alot is "Recovery" to remove the blown out white. Thers probably better and more advanced techniques in practical photography for that, but some good post processing is what works best for me.

Well, yeah, and whats most important - decide what you want to be the main part of the photo - sky or trees/whatever. You cant have both - either trees are going to be mostly silhouettes and shadows, so you must compose taking that into account and sky stays like the object that grabs attention first, or sky is going to be pretty blownout and whatever is left should be composed as the center object. Blargh, hope that made some sense :)

Yeah, I get ya. I usually get too blown out of a sky when I try to look "through" the trees. I just need to play around as you said. And shooting in RAW is something I should start doing in these ambiguous situations. Currently I only do RAW for sunset/evening and night pics, so I can mess around with the white balances (I don't see the need for fully lit/day shots for what I do). The thing is, I HATE post-processing, and even worse, I suck horrendously at it. I've slowly started getting comfortable with adjusting the standard things such as lighting, contrast, sharpness, hue, saturation, and curves, but anything more that that I swear I'm allergic to. Plus, I have so many hobbies as it is, I just don't want to waste even more time in front of my PC. I like the outdoors, which was a reason I bought my D50 in the first place, lol, to get me outside taking nature pics.

A friend and I went to the Orange County Great Park for their one year anniversary. There was an airshow and a bunch of Military, Marine, and Navy planes / helicopters / trucks / artillery. It was also my first time using my new GPS receiver to put coordinates in the exif. (Y)

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More on my Flickr

Wow, nice pics, Crazy... I've been playing with reverse lens macro, but have been doing everything hand-held (e.g., holding the lenses together manually, haha). I should get something, it should come in handy.

In the mean time, I'm slowly becoming more comfortable PPing. I'm still messing only with colour, but baby steps... Eventually I'll move out of the Quick tab in Photoshop to Full... One day...

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EDIT: Now that it's posted, it seems a bit too saturated in the grassy portion... Oh well.

EDIT2: Cleaned it up a bit... Still a few blemishes at the tree/grass border, but meh, better than neon grass.

Edited by Napalm Frog
dude are you kidding me. When i post my pics i think they are "ok", knowing that whenever you, moonman, mrchuang or pandya post that mine are gonna look like crap..lol I can take pics of my kids, i haven't really had the chance or time to be challenged with anything else, it's you guys that can make a picture out of nothing, or in your case a few pigs racing and make it look great..lol

Soo good in fact that upon first looking at it, for a good minute i starred and thought it was fake, i thought it was part of that toy replica stuff, until i finally noticed one of the pigs kicking up dirt in the pic.. I'm always impressed with how some people can make something outta nothing :p

nah I have to say, the photos you do with your kids, it's absolutely mindblowing work. seriously, impressed every time; you have great kids and a great eye for them. keep up the good work Bubba!

Tewkesbury Festival, Tewkesbury. I had some cracking and rather advantageous locations over the couple of days I was shooting there. Got a splitting headache and my hearing will take a couple of days to recover from the cannons...some of my locations had me about ten feet away from those things.

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