daily slice-of-life photo blog of a Gen-X dad
Photography-related posts. I talk about inspiration, settings, gear, other photographers, etc.
こんにちは. How’s it going?
Today’s photo is of the sunset and clouds that I enjoyed as I drove back to Austin from Houston. Often when I make this drive, it’s already dark, but today I left a little earlier which worked out nicely! I even set up the GoPro to take this “TimeWarp” video:
I hope you had a nice day! またね～
Today I bought a new camera: the GoPro Hero9 Black. I’ve owned a cheap action cam for a couple of years, but the poor quality of the stabilization made it pretty much unusable. I only paid $35 for the Victure AC600 and the old adage “You get what you pay for” certainly applies here.
The GoPro Hero9 Black cost $399, but the quality is amazing. The stabilization is unreal! I’m going to have a lot of fun using it to record my bicycle and motorcycle rides.
Take a look at the video I made while wearing the GoPro on a chest mount:
And below is the $35 Victure for comparison. Apologies if you suffer from motion-sickness, but I even applied Warp Stabilization using Adobe Premiere Pro! You can imagine how bad it is straight out of camera.
The GoPro cost 10x as much as the Victure, which is quite a jump, but because I never use the Victure, it’s basically worthless (however, it did include various action-cam mounts and hardware which I can use). Also, the GoPro has timelapse capabilities which surpass my Fujifilm X100T, so my timelapse videos of clouds will see a big bump in quality.
I’m very happy with the GoPro Hero9 Black. I haven’t bought a decent quality camera for myself since 2015, so I’m really enjoying that new camera feeling!
Tonight the International Space Station (ISS) was very bright as it passed over Texas, and I had my camera and tripod set up to capture it. I didn’t really know what kind of settings to use, so I just went with a typical exposure that I normally do. Unfortunately there were a lot of clouds obscuring the view, but I think the photo turned out okay.
I made a series of 10-second exposures, then stacked them in Photoshop to create the composite image above. You might notice that there appear to be double stars. This is because I hid a few layers in the Photoshop stack when the ISS was passing behind the clouds so the overall cloud coverage would be reduced, and this resulted in the star trails having a gap in them.
FYI, this website is a fantastic resource to see when satellites will be flying overhead. It uses Google Street View to show you exactly where to look from your viewpoint! Just make sure that your watch is synchronized to the atomic clock so you know when to look up.
It’s nice when interests converge. For instance, I love bicycling, cameras, and clouds. So when I get to combine the three, it’s so nice! Of course, I can take care of the bicycling and camera aspect myself, but need a little luck with the clouds. It’s nice to be prepared, though! What’s the saying? “Luck favors those who are prepared”? Something like that. Anyways, one good thing to come out of the pandemic is that I spend more time bicycling than other activities to relieve the stir-crazy feelings.
またね～
こんにちは！
I decided to shift my Instagram account subject matter to just pictures of the clouds (and sky), since I am pretty convinced that they are my favorite things to take pictures of. My Instagram has been a mix of clouds, travel, and food, but I think I’ll just focus on the one subject. I’ll keep all my old photos, including my earliest where Instagram meant spontaneous snapshots, just for history’s sake.
Anyways, we’ll see how it goes! I’m not very active there, with the main effort being this blog, and then my daily photo post on Flickr. But Instagram is still fun to browse and see what friends and family are up to!
またね～
