It’s Halloween, and that means it’s time for some dark, moody pictures. I’ll start with one of my favorite sinister shots of Little Corona Beach in Corona Del Mar:
Who just came ashore in that lone boat? Why do so many of the houses have no lights on? And is that a thin layer of mist creeping in over the oddly-still water?
And, of course, what would Halloween be without spiderwebs?
This spider web was covered in dew on a foggy morning at Crystal Cove State Park. It looks creepy to me, especially since the droplets look like they have little eyes in them.
Or a misty trail, heading off into the unknown?
A trail winds off in the distance behind scraggly foliage into a fog shrouded unknown up a hill. Taken in Crystal Cove State Park on a foggy afternoon, just before sunset. I love the creepy feel of this.
Or a giant spider?
A large orb weaver spider sits in the center of her web, just waiting for some prey (you, perhaps?) to come along and get stuck in her web. And if you say "Squee!" to this instead of "Eeek!", you're my kind of person 🙂
And, as a special Halloween addition, I saw a ghost while photographing the Occupy Orange County camp last night (gallery here). He was just a wisp of a man in a hat, holding a sign:
A long exposure shot taken at dusk shows just the outline of a man in a hat holding a sign next to an empty lawn chair at Occupy Orange County - Irvine. Is this a ghost of protesters past?
Do you have any scary, creepy, or sinister pictures to share?
Have a spooky day!
[Updated to add the ghost picture on Oct. 31, 2011, with thanks to Alpenglow Images for the inspiration.]
It’s fall here in coastal Orange County, CA1, but determining that it’s fall can be difficult since we don’t have trees filled with yellow and red leaves. Around here I find that there’s no better indicator of fall than seeing one of these hanging around outside2:
A large orb weaver spider (genus _Araneus_) sits in the center of her web, just waiting for some prey (you, perhaps?) to come along and get stuck in her web.
These orb weaver spiders come out every year in late summer and early fall, building webs at dusk that are frequently more than a foot across and can have individual lines of silk running more than 10 feet from attachment point to attachment point. They’re amazing animals, and I love to see them every year3.
This year a few took up residence close enough for me to try out my new macro lens. And, since it’s almost Halloween, it’s a perfect time to post up some spider pictures. Here’s one of the spiders just hangin’ out:
An orb weaver spider (genus _Araneus_) hangs upside down from a portion of its web.
In this profile shot you can see how the spider has a small strand of silk attaching herself to the web as a safety-strap:
A large tan orb weaver spider (genus _Araneus_) hangs down from her web in this side-view (profile) of her. She's hanging from intact strands of her web, but the strands above those (that are all coiled up) are from a portion of the web that was damaged.
The attachment points of all eight legs onto the bottom of the cephalothorax is a fun feature to focus on (and probably the last view of many a doomed insect):
A gray male pet mouse stands on all four paws and looks just past the camera, seemingly ready for anything.
Recently I got the opportunity to photograph a few fancy mice, and I just have to share the cuteness here on the blog. I had rats or mice as pets for more than a decade before getting my current cats, and I dearly loved them; in fact, I’d still have rodent pets if it weren’t for their horribly short lifespans 1.
Editor’s note: I’ll try to add commentary throughout these pictures, but I should probably just say “SQUEEE!” after each picture, because that’s what I’m really doing inside when I see these.
A gray male mouse with black eyes peers over the top of a clear plastic cage. He's just poking his nose over, and looks like he's hesitantly wondering what, or who, is out there.
Mice are incredibly fun to watch, especially in large groups. They’re always exploring the boundaries of their cages:
A gray male pet mouse jumps up on the side of a clear plastic cage and holds himself up by his front paws, peering over the edge into the vast unknown beyond the cage. I like how the whiskers are fully three-dimensional: you can see how they extend around the face in all directions - front, back, top, bottom, and sides.
or poking their noses out of tubes:
A white and black patchy male mouse sniffs at what's outside his green tube. The focus is right on his adorable pink nose!
One of the things I love about photography is how seemingly small technical details can dramatically change the feel of an image. A few months ago, as I was taking sunset pictures at Newport Back Bay, I stayed until nearly the end of dusk, trying to capture the feel of the warmly-lit houses surrounding the cool bay. I ended up having to use exposures of more than a minute, eventually capturing the feel of the evening in this image:
Taken well after sunset, this 70 second exposure of the western bluffs as clouds roll in at Newport Back Bay (in Newport Beach, CA) has an ethereal glow to it.
While I’d always known that long shutter speeds allow you to blur motion, in that evening I discovered just how much they change the look of large bodies of water: the water changed from a choppy, dynamic fluid into a silky smooth, calm body 1.
I was hooked. I quickly added a 3-stop (8x) neutral density filter to my wishlist, and was lucky enough to get one as a present recently (thanks mom!). To experiment with using long shutter speeds and bodies of water, I headed to Little Corona Beach (Robert E Badham Marine Life Refuge) in Corona Del Mar three times over the last month.
With the sun still out, the neutral density filter stacked with my polarizer let me extend exposures to a few seconds, allowing me to capture the feel of the water crashing over the rocks, with waves diluted to mist in the air:
A long-exposure shot taken just before sunset at Little Corona beach in Corona Del Mar (Newport Beach), CA. The water almost looks like fog, and I like how you can see the water cascading over the middle rock.
And water in the somewhat protected rocky areas smoothed out to be a shimmering, reflective surface:
Water turns into a silky smooth sheen in a long-exposure shot of the rocky intertidal at Little Corona Beach in Corona Del Mar.
But the real fun came after the sun went down, and I could use exposure times of a minute or longer while capturing the ethereal, post-sunset glow:
On the recommendation of a good programmer friend I’m using WordPress to host this blog, and I’m extremely happy with it so far. I ended up using the default theme (WordPress Twenty Ten 1.2) with fairly little customization. To post pictures I upload them to my Photoshelter account, and then use the awesomely-easy Photoshelter WordPress plugin to put them in the posts.
But one minor annoyance I’ve had is that the maximum image I could post was around 600 pixels wide, which is a bit smaller than I’d like. So, I talked to my programmer friend, and she told me how to make the theme wider. I thought I’d share the changes here, in case anyone else wants to do it:
