Michael A. O’Neill

Category: Photography

  • The Strip

    Mandalay_bay_smallI uploaded the photos I took of the Las Vegas strip today. A bit disappointing. Lesson number one was about timing. I mean, I think pictures of Las Vegas have to be taken at night. Daylight and Las Vegas just don’t fit together in my mind. But I didn’t plan my time properly, so I didn’t take a single picture in that ideal hour immediately after sunset. To give you an example, compare this picture of Notre Dame de Paris and of Mandalay Bay Hotel.

    You see the difference in that midnight blue? The picture from Paris I took just a few moments after sunset–maybe 20 minutes max. It’s so funny that that deep blue is called midnight blue, when the sky at midnight is just black and flat.Notre_dame_midnight_blue_1
    Anyway, you get the idea. I got some interesting pictures, but not quite as artistic as they could’ve been.

    I also spent a lot of time on Fremont Street–that’s downtown Las Vegas and the historical center of the gambling industry in Las Vegas. You know, the cigarette smoking cowboy in neon? That’s on Fremont Street, where few high rollers go. The challenge with Fremont Street were the supports holding up the archway above the pedestrian area (not that anyone else will catch this, but this reminded me a great deal of the covering over the main shopping street in Damascus’ old walled town). While the supports were quite artistic, and almost natural looking, they really got in the way of my shots. It was easy enough to get a picture of one bright neon sign’ but to get two to provide a little bit of depth and perspective was damn hard.

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    What made it even more annoying were the security guards. Why do people assume that a tripod makes a professional photographer? Photography is perhaps the most popular hobby in the United States. I’ve seen estimates that 80 million households in the United States own a 35mm camera. If the average household is comprised of three people, that means that 80% of households in the United States has a camera. I’ll grant you that only a small proportion of them own expensive tripods that are over eight-feet tall when fully extended. But I was approached twice by security guards on Fremont Street informing me that commercial photography was prohibited. One of them actually threatened to sue me. Talk about a wonderful welcome from Las Vegas.

    Judging by a tripod is actually pretty stupid. Judging by the size of the lenses on my camera–now that’s using your noggin. One of the best factors for determining the price and quality of a lens is the aperture width. The aperture, in case you didn’t know, is the opening inside the lens that lets light in to hit the film. The wider the aperture, the more light gets in, meaning you can use slower, higher-quality film with less light. But to have a wide aperture requires a wider lens, and that means more glass. Lots of expensive, photo-quality glass. but for a dumb security guard, paying attention to how big the lens on the camera body is will tell you either that the photographer is really rich, or is a pro. Needless to say, my long lense has an f-stop of 4.0 (5.6 at 300 mm). A pro would have an f-stop of 2.8 or below and a lens twice as large.

    Okay, I should explain the switch between aperture width and f-stop. The f-stop is the focal length divided by the diameter of the aperture. So an f-stop of 4.0 with a focal length of 70 mm means that the aperture width is 17.5 mm. So why use f-stop rather than the actual aperture width? It’s just a matter of normalization. Each ‘stop’ represents a
    halving of the light intensity from the one before, and hence a halving of the area of the pupil. in other words, it’s an effort to present a common measurement of light reaching the film (and the requisite shutter speed and aperture width) that is independent of the length of the lens (since the greater the magnification of the lens, the less light that reaches the film).

    Anyway, to get back to the size-of-the-lenses issue, a long lens requires more light (the object is farther away), so the aperture has to be wider (where f=focal-length/aperture-width, as the focal-length increases, so must the aperture width to reach the same f value). So pro is likely to have a really big fat long lens. I realize that none of this made any sense.

    The high-end hotels were actually much more accommodating. None of them bothered me with my camera at all.

    But enough of my rant about the warm and accommodating security guards on Fremont Street.

  • High Rollers Weekend

    The High Rollers scooter rally claims to have the largest scooter ride in the nation: a ride to the Hoover Dam that supposedly involves close to a thousand scooters. I have no idea if that was the case. That ride was all about going as fast as one possibly could on desert roads that stretched well over 100 miles without stop signs or stoplights. Considering that scooters have top speeds ranging between 45 mph and 90 mph, it should be no surprise that the ride quickly deteriorated into dozens of individual clumps of scooters with similar top speeds, rather than a coherent group of hundreds of scooters. Which is what it should have been, at least in my humble opinion.

    Actually, all of the rides were like this. Disorganized, long and at top speed. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy zipping along in the desert at speeds varying between 60 and 70 mph. It’s just that the pictures I had imagined taking–of a tight pack of a hundred scooters or more weaving around an S-shaped pair of hairpin turns running down the slope of a hill with the rocky crags of desert mountains in the background–just weren’t there. Yeah, I could get a shot of three scooters coming around those hairpin turns. But the group broke up so quickly, there just weren’t any options.

    Stella So instead of trying to capture the feeling of being in a pack of scooters, I spent most of my photographic efforts zooming in close to parked scooters. The details were wonderful: see for yourself. And it didn’t hurt that High Rollers seemed to have a high proportion of blinged-out scooters.

    Like every scooter rally I’ve ever been to, of course, I felt completely out of place. There’s this hipster/mod-ster/rocker style that just doesn’t match with my crunchy-yuppie hybrid thing. Of course, I barely even tried to fit in this time. Instead of trying to find interest in what ever it is some individual has done to their scooter recently, I just spent the entire trip with my camera. I was completely and utterly exhausted, but the nine rolls I took turned out relatively nicely. I even got some decent pictures of the Strip and of Red Rock Canyon.

  • I caught the ball

    So TheServerSide.com‘s parent company, TechTarget, has taken some of us folks at Oracle out to the ballgame. Twice. The first time, I mainly went to hang out with Dennis. I figured we
    would have decent seats, but I had no idea how good they would actually
    be. They were dugout seats, right along the first base line. We were separated from the dugout where the sports photographers sat by nothing more than a chain.

    So the next time we got the invitation, I brought along all my photographic gear. Much to my disappointment, I was not allowed to use my tripod. So I spent the entire game with my camera braced up against the metal fence separating us from the field, because, with the low light, it would be hard to get steady pictures with a long lens. Besides, I had planned to use slower shutter speeds to capture the blur of motion. But the inconvenience and discomfort of being twisted at odd angles actually turned out to be a good thing: I was so worried about camera shake, even with the extra stability from the metal fence, that I pushed my film up two stops to guarantee that I would catch something in focus.Watching_small

    What I did catch, in two pictures, was a long, thin white streak. The baseball. I’ve always wanted to catch the blur of a baseball leaving a pitcher’s hand, or bouncing off the end of a bat. If I’d had my tripod, I would only have pushed the film up one-stop–which I did for the first roll of the game. No streak at one stop. The shutter speed was just too slow.

    Pitcher_small
    Okay, I’ll admit that the pictures aren’t so great. They’re super
    grainy, and they’re too dark to boot. But they were fun to take.

    I also discovered a useful feature of my scanner: calibrating the auto-focus. I wish I’d found this feature years ago. Every picture I’ve scanned is just a hair out-of-focus, even when the slide is razor sharp.

    Oh, I should also point out that I took these pictures six months ago. The photo development service at Oracle can only push process up 1.5 stops. So these two rolls have been sitting on a counter, waiting for me to find a place to develop them all this time.

    The gallery for the entire game is here.

  • Revival of photography

    This new year, I didn’t make any resolutions, but I did set my
    priorities for the year. 2005 was perhaps the worst year of my life,
    between my father passing, six months of emotional and psychological
    abuse from my manager, and a roller-coaster relationship with my
    closest friend.

    Monkey_3So I decided to focus on a five things, from grieving for my father to getting back into my old hobby of photography. I have picked up my camera again, focusing on the area around my home:
    Potrero Hill, Hunter’s Point, SOMA, Bayview… Not necessarily my best,
    but a start. I have also made an effort to flesh out my photographic
    efforts of prior years, scanning shots from the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta (taken at least four yeas ago), the San Francisco Zoo (including this one), and the Golden Gate. Soon to come: Las Vegas and the High Rollers weekend.

  • The cloud forest

    The cloud forest itself was less photographically interesting to me. Though I was fascinated by the fill-me-ferns and the… shoot… I think it was a kind of bamboo. No. Shoot, I’ve forgotten but it has orange and black fruit the size of cranberries, the orange being unripe, but used to attract birds, while the black were edible.

    The thing about fill-me-ferns was how they retained water. There were just these huge droplets of water held in place, not evaporating, not falling. I must have wasted two rolls. I even tried the flash, just to see if I got some extra light play.

    I went back in the afternoon yesterday, too, but didn’t see anything of interest. I had one hell of a hike, racing against the light with my damned tripod over my shoulder. Didn’t want to get lost in the pitch black. No road like the first night.

    Today, I went on a canopy tour with zip lines. It was a good deal of fun. I went early, so the group was small, just four others–newlyweds from Manhattan and a mom with her teenage son. They were pleasant. I mainly kept to myself, but the disingenuousness of the new wife was cute, the son was pleased with himself, and since his mom was being dragged along against her wishes, he didn’t seem embarrased, even when they took the last zip line together. It was sweet, actually.

    I stuck around for the canopy walk, which was a little disappointing. I got, I hope, some decent shots of a dung beetle with little yellow antennae, three-pronged like a pitch-fork.

    Just as I reached the last and longest suspension bridge of the walk, I heard the rumble of a howler, just ahead. I started to move cautiously across the bridge, eyes peeled at the canopy below and beside me. Nothing. Then I heard that low-throated rumble again, even closer ahead of me. I kept moving, prowling the trees with my binoculars. Nothing. And I wasn’t close enough to the source to traingulate. So I waited, staring into the canopy, probing, wishing. This was my only shot at getting a photo of a howler. I waited at the far end of the bridge so I could triangulate. I waited. And waited. Over an hour. In the sun. At noon. Without sunscreen. I got a burn, surprise, surprise. And never heard the howler again, let alone spot the critter. What a waste.

  • Monteverde

    John, the proprietor of La Colina Lodge, set me up with a guide named Ricard. "Muy tranquilo" John assured me. John said Ricardo was a descendant of the first Quakers who settled at Monteverde.

    Ricardo was muy tranquilo. Posiblemente un poquito mas tranquilo que yo prefiere.

    But he sure could spot the birds. Right by the hotel we spotted two male resplendent quetzals and a couple of females too. I got a quick glance of a three-wattled bell bird. It was funny: I read the section in The Lonely Planet guide about the bell birds, how the author thought the wattles were worms. Guess what my first comment was? "Are those worms in its mouth?" Duh.

    Ricardo also spotted some toucanettes. I may have gotten a couple of shots. The flash wouldn’t work with the tele-extender, so that was limiting, and for some bloddy reason, I didn’t bring the tripod. That big old tripod is great, but sometimes, I long for one of the cheapies that I used to use. The cheapos are so easy to handle, and so damned light. That woman I took the lessons from at Bodie had made fun of me for using the cheapo, arguing that most of the time you’re shooting from your car. Which is true, but those times when you hike…

    Anyway, the long and short of it is that I don’t have the equipment to do what I’m capable of. My lenses don’t allow in enough light. That’s the bottom line. But those low f-stop lenses are expensive, and they’ll just add more weight to my kit. Which means I push the film. Bloody hell.

    So, back to Monteverde. I’m not sure the shots I took are going to turn out well. The shutter speeds were too slow, the camera too heavy with the flash. Hell with it.

    Ricardo was an interesting bloke. He talked like a Yank, and while I’m sure he’s fluent in Spanish, his accent made him sound like a Yank. But he grew up there, was raised there. Spent some time in Indiana, yes; and had been out to the Grand Tetons, but… Here’s the thing: he was a Yank in my eyes, so therefore as an ex-pat he should be better off than a tico, yet he didn’t own a car even though the town stretched for miles, and was even more miles from anyplace else! How could he live without a car out in the sticks? I mean, he would be stuck there with his wife and three kids. No way to get out or move around!

    Which is when it hit me. He’s not an ex-pat, he’s a tico, living in Costa Rica’s economy.

    Sorta like Kim and John, the divorced co-owners of La Colina. John "fled" England in the 70s for LA, and had spent some years up in the Bay Area as well. Said how he was a working class Brit, university education, and because of the class structure, he couldn’t get much better of a job than construction. So he left. Found his cockney accent made him socially upper-middle class in the States (hell if we know–Michael Caine sounds distinguished to us). Kim was an Angeleno, but I believe they met in Australia on a biking trip. Anyway, I think they’d been together for twenty or so years, and had a three-year-old. They had managed a successful business together near Arenal for seven years, but Kim implied they were putting too much of themselves into the work and were in an even more isolated area than Monteverde. Hell, point is, Kim said it was very hard to make a living, and then I realized again, the ex-pats don’t make US wages and live like kings. They live in the same "developing" conditions ticos live in.

  • A critterless day

    34461046m
    Had a frustrating Manuel Antonio experience. I spent four hours hiking and only saw an agouti. For maybe six seconds. Most interesting thing all morning were the spreading roots of a tree.

    It was so amazing, the place was totally dead–as compared to yesterday when I was bumping into critters every few minutes. I did find the same pair (I think) of capuchin’s near Playa Gemala later in the morning, as well as a huge tribe of squirrel monkeys on the Punta Catedral trail just before I left the park. But damn what a frustrating day.

    Still, it’s magical to see those monkeys so close to you, jumping from branch to branch, scrunching up those all-too-human faces.

  • Manuel Antonio

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    Good hunting in Manuel Antonio today. Right off the bat I encountered squirrel monkeys. Had some trouble with my Better Beamer and flash. I thought the flash only worked on "A," but today it needed to be on TTL. So much for practicing in my apartment. The Better Beamer kept falling off, and I had stick coins in between the flash and the beamer to keep the lens from bending.

    I took shots with a variety of options: flash, flash w/ Beamer, no flash, and camera flash. God knows what’ll work, but I needed to shoot at 1600, and even then, the shutter speed on TTL felt slow, so I was really worried about camera shake.

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    But back to the hunting: I saw

    • Central American Squirrel Monkeys
    • White-faced Capuchin Monkeys
    • White-nosed Coati

    I may also have seen:

    • Green iguana, green basilisk lizard or ctenosaur
    • Roseate spoonbill or white ibis
    • Paca or agouti.