Here's a quick view of sunset through a moss covered oak tree, shot the same day as most of the bird pictures I showed you today. This was over a month ago, but I'm just now getting around to sharing the pictures. I think I take way too many pictures, since it takes me months sometimes to find time to sift through them. Hope you enjoy the sights, though.
I want you to look really close at the picture above. I snapped this last year on Memorial Day, then forgot to post it. It's the sun setting, just moments before it sinks below the horizon. It's that little spot just to the left of center. It should be orange, but if you look closely, it's not. Here, let me blow it up for you.
Here's a way-zoomed in view of the picture above, way bigger than I should blow it up, but I want you to see what's there. The sunset has actually turned green. It's called a green flash, and it's a rare by-product of some interesting atmospheric phenomena. Some people claim to see it all the time, some folks claim it doesn't exist, but here's the photographic proof that I shot with my own camera. Note how the image of the sun seems to hover above the waters' surface, not actually touching it. That has something to do with a temperature inversion near the surface of the water. It's causing an optical illusion, channeling the light in odd ways, and scattering all the yellow, orange and red light, leaving only the green.
This is a detail from the next frame I shot, showing it's still green, only there's less of it.
The frame after that, still green, but nearly gone. There was nothing at all in the following frame. These photos all show a timestamp within one second of each other, and my camera can take about 8 frames per second, so I suspect this series of pictures runs less than a second. I don't recall if I had it on high-speed capture or regular. I usually leave it on regular because it gets touchy on high-speed and I end up with a dozen picture of the same thing.
And this is the frame that precedes all of them, before the sun reached that critical spot where all but the green colored light is scattered into the atmosphere and lost. If I were just throwing a green filter on it, then this shot would be green, too. For the technical minded, I shot these handheld with a 7D and a 400mm lens (626mm it says, with the EF-S sensor). Whenever I've been at the beach hoping to catch a green flash with tripod and all, it never happens...
Here's another picture I took Friday night at the beach. Nothing fancy, just some seagulls standing int he wet sand, but I think the reflection of the sunset makes the shot.
As expected, the sun went down this evening. And I happened to be there with my new 7D, my rented 400mm lens and a monopod. The only thing I was missing was sufficient memory for said camera. This camera uses compact flash memory, same as the camera before last. Back then, at 8 megapixels, 10.5 gigabytes seemed like a lot of memory. Now, at 18 megapixels, I think 40 gigabytes is going to be closer to the mark. But I did put what little memory I had to good use, and caught these two great blue herons as they enjoyed the sunset.
Not much of a sunset this evening, I'm afraid. I expected more, since it is Halloween and all. This is from Fort Desoto and that's Egmont Key out there on the horizon. And the little spot of light would be the lighthouse on Egmont Key.
I don't think I showed you any pictures of sunset last night. This is how it looked from Boca Grande.
I couldn't find as good a spot to shoot sunset tonight as I found to shoot the rainbow earlier in the afternoon. Shame, because it was a nice sunset. Those big dark clouds out on the horizon mean it's probably going to rain some more overnight. I shot this from the Best Buy parking lot up in Tampa, in case you can't read the sign.
Not much of a sunset tonight, I'm afraid. Too many clouds at the horizon. Shame, too, because I happened to be passing near a cool spot with some nice vistas you don't get every day. Looking west into where the sun should have set, above, you can see the distant skyline of St. Petersburg. Looking north, below, you can see the skyline of Tampa.
And looking back east, you can see the Big Bend Power Plant. So that must mean I was in Apollo Beach.
As the sun was going down tonight, there were some thick storm clouds back over the mainland. But I was out on Anna Maria Island, where it was somewhat sunnier. Maybe ten minutes before the sun hit the water, it found a hole in the clouds and nicely illuminated the Anna Maria City Pier. I thought it made a great shot against the dark stormy background. This one is worth your clicking on it to see the larger image. It's pretty cool.
There must have been ten dolphins in the water today, each one tempting me by coming up for air for a second or two, then diving back down to pop up a minute later at a random spot. Some of them were pairs, and one of the fins in the pair was smaller than the other, so I have to assume they were mother and baby. But the only shot I got with a recognizable fin out of the water was this one. That's the Rod 'N Reel Pier on Anna Maria Island in the background, and as you can tell, it was pretty close to sunset tonight. Actually, I added some of that color in ther after the fact, but not all of it. It was a pretty grey sunset, unfortunately.
Thought you guys might want to see the sunset from Anna Maria Island this evening. This is about 20-30 minutes after the sun had actually set, but you get the idea.
Here's a shot of the sunset over Lake Erie when I was in Ohio a couple of weeks ago. This is actually a very tiny crop of a much larger picture, but I wanted to show you the mirage effect that occurred out over the lake. That's not a cloud in front of the sun creating that line, it's layers of different air temperature over the water, creating odd reflections and refractions (same things that cause the not-mythical Green Flash!). I wish I'd been able to get better pictures of it, but there was a train going by behind me, and I wanted to get pictures of that, too. So this was about the best I got of the sunset. This was shot with that fancy lens I rented, and it's cropped to well within an inch of it's life and it still doesn't look too bad.
No, it's not the fourth sunset of the day or part of a series or anything, it's just the sunset from the fourth of July. I couldn't even see those pesky power lines from where I was at, but the long lens I was using didn't have any trouble picking them out. Oh well.
In a rare feat that I don't think I have ever previously accomplished, I shot both the sunrise and the sunset today. The pictures aren't spectacular, but just the idea of getting both is pretty cool. The picture above was taken out the window of my hotel in Macedonia, Ohio. The window only opens about 5 inches, so I was crouched down trying to shoot from a quite uncomfortable position. The shot below is the sun setting over the hills on the west side of the Cuyahoga Valley. I was standing on a stone outcropping in the Virginia Kendall Ledges, a beautiful spot in the Cuyahoga Valley National Park. It took me a while to find a clear view of the horizon, and I was shooting through a 300mm lens to be able to squeeze between the trees. More pictures to come from not-so-sunny Ohio. Although how can it be not-so-sunny if I saw both the sunrise and the sunset? Long story, and a long day in-between...
Here are the other two calendar pics for the month of November. The shot above is the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio. I didn't actually go inside on the trip I took this picture, but I caught it on a later trip. It's pretty cool, but I don't know if it's worth a special trip to Cleveland. Something that might be worth the trip is the beach below at sunset, or, if you prefer, at moonset. It may be hard to see in the small version below, but if you look close, you'll see a tiny crescent moon following the sun to the horizon. I shot this a couple of years ago in Nokomis, Florida, while waiting for the annual Christmas nighttime boat parade. This shot was far better than any of the pictures I got of the boats.
Continuing on with more calendars for March, here are the wall calendars. The one above shots a great sunset at Boca Grande, Florida. The lighthouse is doing it's thing just after sunset, and the moon is about to follow the sun to the horizon. Sometimes, you just have to be in the right place at the right time. Ditto on the shot below. I was at a restaurant called Shooters in the Flats district of Ohio City, which is really just the West side of Cleveland, Ohio. The sun was setting to my left as I shot the bridge over the Cuyahoga River. Just beyond this railroad bridge is where the Cuyahoga empties into Lake Erie. Look closely and you can see little lighthouses on either side marking the ends of the breakwaters.
These two pictures are pages from my CD-sized desk calendar that I first described to you yesterday. Both are for the month of March, the one above for Florida, the one below for Ohio. The shot of the pelican above is one that I've always been proud of. You've got to just hope that something like that turns out for you. I pointed, shot, and kept my fingers crossed the whole rest of the evening. The land you see out on the horizon is Ft. De Soto, an old military base south of St. Petersburg that's been turned into a recreational area and is consistently rated as the top beach in the continental US. I shot this from what used to be the north approach to the Sunshine Skyway, but was turned into a giant fishing pier after the old bridge was destroyed in a freighter collision. The new bridge was built slightly to the East of the old one, so they could keep what was left of the old span open during construction. The shot below is the skyline of Cleveland, as shot from the Hope Memorial Bridge. This was my first time wandering alone in downtown, and I must have spent hours walking for miles and miles, back and forth across the whole town. By the end of that day, I was just happy to get home and fall asleep, I didn't care how my pictures turned out.
I seem to be pummeling you with sunsets and sunrises lately, so here's another one to totally overwhelm you. This was last night off the coast of Ft. Desoto, which I've talked about at length before. The stench from the red tide and the dead fish was almost overwhelming, but I stuck it out long enough to get this shot, and left.
About that tower, I'm not sure of it's exact purpose. There's a lighthouse on an island to the left of this shot (the sunset was in the wrong place this time of year to capture it) that aids in entering and exiting Tampa Bay, so I have to assume the tower performs some of the same functions, only electronically.
