Michael A. O’Neill

Category: Photography

  • Away from the crowd

    After being on my feet for six hours this morning, my knees were killing me, and I was just generally exhausted. But with hours to kill and a strong desire not to pay another 50 quetzales for a morning hike tomorrow, I went back in (I had noticed one nature trail outside the ticket-check area that I can take tomorrow morning). Instead of heading into the main area of the park, though, I took what looked to be a remote route to isolated Templo VI.

    For the first 15 minutes, all I saw were mosquitoes and tiny tree toads. I picked up one of the tree toads: it was cool.

    I noticed after while that the mosquitoes wouldn’t bother me if I kept moving, even at a slow, Joe-in-his-his-last-six-months-pace stroll. They just couldn’t keep up, and would hover in a cloud behind me. But stop for 30 seconds, and they were all over me.

    Actually, the walk was pretty boring. A few times, I heard the snapping of branches and some small items falling to the jungle floor, but after the pounding rain, a lot of twigs and nuts were loose, and I couldn’t spot any monkeys.

    That is, until I was about 30 minutes in. Then, I spotted a pair of good 150 yards from me–too far for my zoom lens, but I was so bored, I hung out watching just in case they got close to the trail. I’m glad I did, because five minutes later, that pair was joined, first by five or six more spider monkeys, and then by another dozen. It must have been at least 20 individuals in total, and they just kept jumping back and forth between two sets of trees on either side of the past.
    I even found a little past into the jungle that went right under one of the trees they were feeding it. After 15 minutes, my neck was near numb with pain from looking up into the canopy with a six-pound camera rested on top of my face. But the opportunity was incredible. There was always at least one spider monkey a mere seven or eight feet above me and not blocked by intervening foliage.

    Spider_monkey3_1 Spider_monkey1_4
    Spider_monkey5
    Spider_monkey6

    [click any picture to enlarge]

    I left eventually, but I didn’t give in to the pain in my neck. I gave in to my flash, the batteries specifically. After I don’t know how long, the flash began to take a minute to recharge. I had three fresh batteries in my pack, so I opened up my flash to replace three of the four. They were actually hot to the touch. Not warm. Literally hot. Just a hair below too-hot-to-handle.

    So, I didn’t talk about my new flash when I bought my new camera. Well, my old flash wasn’t compatible with the 1d Mark II N, so I bought the top-of-the-line Canon flash. But I didn’t read the manual or experiment with it before arriving in Guatemala. I just took the old batteries from my flash and put them in the new one. To be honest, I was a little disappointed with the new flash the first couple days. It wasn’t any different from the old, from what I could tell. Basically, I paid $500 for compatibility. Damn Canon and their proprietary systems.

    But with three fresh batteries… oh man, I could snap off three shots in succession without waiting for recharge. Incredible! I can only imagine what it will be like with four fresh batteries. Why does this matter? Well, in this case, the monkeys are distracted by the flash, and look right at you after you nail them with the strobe. I’d seen this before in Costa Rica, but by the time my old flash recharged, the monkey was looking away again. Now, I shoot one to get the monkey’s attention, and once more for the real picture.

    Of course, I had to rotate the four drained batteries every few minutes, since the flash would start taking minutes to recharge again, but hey! Anyway, when the four drained batteries couldn’t help the other three charge the flash anymore, I was done.

    Fuzzy_white_caterpillar
    After that, I took the long way home. I was utterly exhausted, but there was one more set of ruins close by. Might as well check ’em out. On the way, this European couple showed me this ridiculous, furry white caterpillar.

    By the time I got home at 7pm, my knees were in agony, my back on strike, my neck in open revolt, and my stomach growling more loudly than a howler monkey. I don’t know, maybe I won’t have the energy to take that morning hike after all.

    Still, a good walk for shooting. The pictures of the spider monkeys were fantastic.

  • The Zoo, Review

    River_otter_pairMost irrelevant, pointless blog entry yet:

    Spent a good part of today and yesterday reviewing the 400+ pictures I took at the zoo (SOOOOO excessive). I posted pics in the Zoo gallery on my photosite.

    Reviewing photos on the computer, as opposed to slides in a projector, is PAINFUL! Oh man, it sucks. Polar_bearThe photos take forever to load on my old box, as opposed to a fraction of a second on my parents’ far-older slide projector. And you can’t reorder them, to put similar pictures in seriotem for easy comparison.

    Plus, storage of the not-quite pictures is more costly than with slides–I need hard drive space, so either I throw out pictures instead of saving them, or I buy more space. Slides I just put back in the box, and put all the little boxes inside a bigger box. Yeah, I could just throw the not-quite slides away, but I always think that, maybe when my eye is better, I’ll find gold in some roll of film I shot six years ago. Like I’ll ever go through 1.74 cubic feet of slides, or about 10,000 slides. That works out to about 44 gigabytes of scanned slides, which isn’t so much, come to think of it.

    Why would anyone but me care about this? You shouldn’t! I’m just fascinated by the things I didn’t think would be a factor in going digital.

  • First run with my new toy: The Zoo

    One of the first photography books I bought suggested two things for finding great places to take pictures: postcards and the zoo.

    Postcards? I mean, why try to find something unique in a place with which you’re not familiar? See what the pros took shots of, and use that as a starting point.

    Nose_pickerThe Zoo? Finding wildlife in the wild can be well nigh impossible. But the zoo, they’re right there, and they can’t go anywhere.

    So I went to the zoo to try out my new camera.

    The weight wasn’t as much of a problem as I thought it would be: it was only when I tried to hold it up for five or more minutes, waiting for a meditating gorilla to bat an eyelash that my arms got tired and my wrists threatened to hurt (yes, I can tell before they start to hurt that they’re going to hurt). But the wait was always worth it: I mean, look at that uncouth gorilla above (click to zoom)! I’m sure you can guess where that finger went next… ummm, yummy!

    Angry_tigerThe speed of the camera was unbelievable. And I’m not just talking about the auto-focus, which wasn’t just super fast, but had 45 focus points! It was so *&$#ing accurate! No, the speed was really about the shutter speed. Big Factor. I haven’t figured out how to take eight frames per second yet, but I was definitely in the four or five range just clicking the button. Amazing, and there’s no way I would’ve captured this snarling tiger without it  (click to zoom).

    Still, the shutter speed had some drawbacks. When a critter was in great lighting (they’re not dumb: it was hot today, and they were almost always in the shade), I’d start firing away even though the critter was totally still. Or doing the same thing over and over again. I took dozens of nearly identical pictures of that same tiger gnawing on a rabbit carcass. I never did that with my old, slow film camera.

    Somehow, I spent six hours at the zoo. My stomach told me when to eat lunch, but I was blown away when I looked at my cell phone and saw it was after 4pm. Fun day.

  • A New Toy

    1d_mkii_n_586x225_1
    My new toy arrived today. A few thoughts from friends and family on this:

    Max: Of course you buy new stuff when you’re unemployed. That’s what you do when you’ve got no money coming in…
    [when I bought my first cellphone in 2001, right after EmployeeService went belly-up]

    Brian: Which do you need more, rationalizations, or sex? Answer: Have you ever gone more than a week without a rationalization?
    [when I pointed out that I’d just have to buy more film before my trip next week to Guatemala, and then I wouldn’t be able to scan it until the movers dropped off all my stuff in early September, so I might as well buy a $3,500 digital camera body instead]

    Heather: I think we’ve hit the truth that women spend more frequently but in small amounts; while men spend infrequently but in huge amounts.
    [From a conversation that requires pages of back-story]

    Mom: Oh, don’t ask me. Just buy it.
    [From a woman who is still recovering from the financial roller-coaster of losing a spouse, and has joyously embraced a tiny dash of fiscal irresponsibility for the first time in a decade]

    My new Canon 1d Mark II N arrived today. It’s insanely large. It weighs five pounds with one of my new lenses on it. It’s supposedly weatherproof, which should prove useful in Seattle. It’s more camera than I need, and even though I’ve been saving for six months, I still won’t have the money to pay for it completely for another month or so.

    But it’s glorious. Tomorrow, I think I’ll go to the zoo, take it through its paces.

  • Scooter Rage XX

    Patrick_doug Scooter Rage XX was the weekend before Pride, and I came specially equipped with a new L series zoom lens (70-200). I bought the new lens because of feedback from Brian about my pictures at High Rollers (gallery): Brian wanted more pictures of scooterists, less of scooters, and he was dead-on. I am often too shy to ask people to take pictures, and I prefer unposed, candid shots to boot. At High Rollers, my longs lens locked up with grit and sand, so I couldn’t use the autofocus, and without that, I couldn’t take those surreptitious candid shots quickly enough. I only half-captured the scooter sub-culture that Brian, Kevin and Dennis find so fascinating (albeit vicariously through me) and exemplified by Patrick and Doug above right.

    April1 This rally, I planned to ignore the scooters entirely, and focus on the people. Oddly enough, this isn’t hard–very few people come up to bother me with conversation, because I don’t really interact with the scooter crowd. I don’t fit in, and I don’t want to try to fit in. In fact, I stay so aloof that very few people even notice me (April, to the left, being a notable exception), so I can just plop down in a corner and snap pics.

    Patrick actually commented that I "lurk at the fringes" of scooter rallies, but that the end result were fantastic pictures like the ones I took at High Rollers.

    But something I ate on Friday didn’t agree with me. My GI tract revolted Saturday morning. I thought everything was flushed out by the first Saturday ride, so I loaded up my gear and headed on out. By the end of the ride, I thought I was just a little dizzy from hunger. When I got off my scoot, though, something was wrong: I couldn’t stop burping despite the empty stomach, and I felt like I might sick-up.

    I handed Patrick five bucks for a rally patch, and drove directly home. Well, almost directly. I ran into two lost scooterists on 3rd Street. There was no way they could find the brewery where everyone was meeting–the industrial bayshore southeast of Potrero Hill is my home territory, and it’s a maze. So I led them all the way back, then went directly home. By five pm, I had a fever of 102.7, and everything came up.

    I missed the second Saturday ride, the Sunday rides, and all opportunities to take pics. But I shot half a roll on Friday, and added some of them to my SF Scooter Rallies gallery. They’re OK. No flash with a long lens, so a little dark. But I think they capture some of the human side of the scooter community.

  • “Oh, this is SO gay”

    This_is_so_gay_1
    I didn’t say "Oh, this is SO gay!" The fellow to the right in the black/red leather teddy, fishnet stockings and hip-high red PVC boots said it, when the dance music on his float started pumping just as it turned onto Market Street to join the Pride parade.  Everybody at the corner of Market and 1st Street busted out laughing: San Francisco is a beautiful place.

    I was supposed to be on a date Sunday, 25-JUN-06, but she cancelled at the last minute. So I loaded up my photo-vest, hopped on my scoot, and went to Pride for the first time in six years in the Bay Area (the gallery won’t be complete for a couple of days–check back after 04-JULY-06).

    Photographically, I had the same challenges as at Carnaval: a blaring sun almost right overhead, with everyone in the staging area facing north away from the sun. I remembered my flash this time, but even then, it could only do so much.

    The real challenge wasn’t taking the pictures, though. It was reviewing them afterwards. Well, maybe it was a bit of both. I know what a gorgeous woman looks like: I worship the female form in its infinite and wondrous varieties, and when I see one in a fantastic costume, I can’t help but take a great picture.

    Strapon
    Balloons_4
    Men, though… that’s… that’s hard. I look at these pictures, and… I just can’t figure out why gay men and straight women
    are attracted to men. OK, interesting bits, I can identify: like this woman wearing a strap-on, or the fellow with balloons (to the left, click any photo to enlarge).

    But is the "grizzly bear" to the left good BearRed_tightywhiteyslooking? Or the skinny guy in black wig/mustache wearing nothing but boldly colored "tighty
    whiteys?" I just don’t know.

    [I should acknowledge that I appreciate the skinny boy more than the grizzlie bear, but only because I’ve got the same body, minus two hours per day in the gym. But that could be my body if I really really really wanted it. Which I don’t. Even though I’d like it. I just don’t want to put in the effort.]

    I guess I see two points to Pride:

    1. Celebrating the beauty of the human form in all its varieties and imperfections.
    2. Saying, with pride, "This is me, this is my life, these are my friends, this is my family."

    The second I understand in my marrow, because, while it’s not me, and it’s not my life, it IS my family, and these ARE my friends.

    But the first, well, I get it with women who don’t fit the Maxim/Playboy mold–beauty takes so many forms. But… C’mon! Is that grizzly bear attractive? I mean, nice expression, interesting picture, but dude, he’s uber hairy and he’s a guy!?

    I had no idea how to capture Pride on film. But the energy was intoxicating, the clothing (or lack thereof) was liberating, and it was just fun.

  • Photos from Carnaval

    Demure_smile
    My photos from Carnaval came in this Friday, and I got my first glance at them Saturday night after dinner with Susan, Anya and Christine. (photo gallery)

    My favorite shot (click to enlarge) of the entire parade was of this woman to the right. Her warm smile, shy turn of her face, and the brilliant feathers of her costume were simply breathtaking.

    The lesson of Carnaval? Fill flash. The sun was bright, so I knew I didn’t need to worry about shutter speed and camera shake. It was early (9am), though, so I brought my flash in case the shadows from the buildings were deep. They weren’t, so after 30 minutes or so, I took my flash gun off and just started shooting.

    It was only around 11:00 am that my mistake finally registered. It wasn’t shadows from buildings I should have been worried about. It was shadows from noses, hats, eye sockets, feathers, you name it. So many of my pictures from Carnaval are marred by shadows and high contrasts. If I had left my flash on the entire time, those contrasty shadows would have been softened.

    Praising_sunGreen_bikini_1 Take, for example, this photo (click to enlarge) of the woman in the green bikini: most of her body is facing away from the sun. Makes the picture dull. Her abs are the only part of her body with full light, and they draw the eye. While she does have magnificent abs, that wasn’t my intended subject.

    In contrast, the second photo (click to enlarge) of a woman arms raised to the sun gets a full, brilliant glow of sunlight highlighting her skin. No bad contrasty spots.

  • Last bits of Vegas: Ice Box Canyon with Dennis

    Icebox3_640x480
    It’s been ages since TheServerSide Java Symposium (TSSJS) in Las Vegas, but I have a last bit of photography to record.

    The final day of the conference, Dennis and I took a hike in Red Rock Canyon (photo gallery), specifically Ice Box Canyon. Yeah, we were supposed to be at TSSJS, but Java Jeopardy was over, and neither of us was up for much more tech babble.

    So we went to Red Rock, and spent a couple hours hiking through the high desert into a narrow canyon. Ice Box earned its name: The temperature must have dropped by 15 degrees in the hike up. It was almost too cold for my short sleeves. Dennis didn’t seem to notice, though. One of the advantages of not being a human twig, I guess.

    About halfway in, we heard water, and the remainder of the hike required criss-crossing the creek every forty or fifty feet. Every five or ten minutes, there was a new little waterfall which I had to stop at to take a picture.

    Of course, waterfalls require slow exposures–1/20th of a second will get you a bit of streaky water, but slower is better. The longer the aperture is open, though, the greater the camera shake, and I didn’t bring my tripod. So I tried to wedge my camera between pebbles to keep it steady. This took time, and Dennis started tossing rocks into the pools in front of my camera, partly out of boredom, but mainly, I think, because he thought it was quite clever and funny. Probably was–he couldn’t hide his chuckling–but I was not amused at the droplets of water landing on my cheap-ass camera. I’ve never had much of a sense of humor about my photography.

    Grinning_madly_480x640We kept wondering when we would hit the end of the canyon. The trail map said you’d hit a waterfall where you couldn’t go any further. We thought we hit that point twice. But each time, we found a way around the little waterfall by scrambling over the massive boulders. (We were also egged on by a couple ahead of us that was a good ten years’ older and hadn’t yet turned around).

    The end of the canyon was obvious. An almost sheer wall, probably 100+ feet high, with a narrow waterfall cascading down the rocks. There was nowhere else to go but back.

    The person in the picture is Dennis. If you know him, you won’t need to zoom in to identify that wild, mad, face-splitting grin of his.

  • Mash-up: Google Earth and my photos

    Map_mashup_2
    My photo hosting provider, smugmug.com, has added a new mash-up with Google Earth. I can set lattitude and longitude points for every photo I’ve taken, and they show up on a map on my photo site.

    Now, the way it’s supposed to work is that you get a GPS card for your digital camera, and the geographic information is stored in the photo’s EXIF data, along with exposure and camera data. Not many cameras include GPS functionality, though, so you may have to use your camera’s only memory card slot for the GPS card, which limits your options.

    Of course, I still use film, so I have to find the spot where I took the picture using Google Earth, which is a bit of a pain. Smugmug.com hasn’t quite figured out how to make data entry easy, either, so I have to update one picture at a time, even though I may have many pictures taken at the same location.

    Also, Google Earth doesn’t have detailed photos of every place on earth–it’s mainly just North American and European cities, so I couldn’t create the photo maps of Guanajuato, Costa Rica and the West Bank that I’ve been thinking about, let alone pinpoint National Park locations in the US.

    Lastly, smugmug.com hasn’t quite figured out how to deal with domain mapping when combined with Google Earth. You have to register your domain with Google for the mapping features to work. I registered photos.spymyshadow.com, but my site can also be accessed via mao.smugmug.com. Now, If you drill down into the map on photos.spymyshadow.com to see the pictures, you switch domains to maps.smugmug.com. When you click on a picture to get back to my photosite, it returns you to mao.smugmug.com. Since I can only register one site with Google (and that’s the spymyshadow site) the map breaks at mao.smugmug.com.

    Still, pretty cool feature.

  • A new lens (and the endowment effect?)

    Lens_1My brand new Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L USM Standard Zoom Lens arrived
    yesterday. It is my first pro-class lens, and it is beautiful. The
    autofocus is super-fast, the filter mount doesn’t turn with either
    zoom or focus, it’s an f/2.8 rather than an f/4 (that’s two stops!), it’s sealed against
    moisture and dust. Even better, I can manually focus when the lens is set to auto-focus, the focal length perfectly matches my flash gun (the old lens’ focal length went too far), I don’t have to push a switch to go on macroscopic focus, I can go macro at any focal length (not just the longest), and it’s just satisfyingly heavy. I can’t wait to use it.

    As to the endowment effect, keep reading via the link below…

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