ROTISSERIE INAUGURATION

This is the "night before Labor Day" pork roast.  Dinner for two.  One whole garlic head stuffed in piercings and the roast was rubbed all over with prime-rib seasoning.  Grilled russet potatoes, mushrooms, broccoli, peppers, onions and what-not in the drip pan for self-made gravy.  There was some left over for tonight.  :-)  :-)  :-)  I felt compelled to give the rotisserie a try on the fairly new Weber BBQ replacing one that finally gave up after the burners were refurbished three times.  The box on the top is a smoke-chip gadget.  Throw in some wood chips and sit it on the "flavorizers" and copious quantities of smoke is emitted.  Actually works quite well.  I "cold smoke" (warm) something on the left grill area with the box on the far right with that burner on as low as it will go.  An hour later you have smoked "whatever" and everything smell delicious.

HALF-and-HALF

It was a long day.  Carolyn (wife) had an echo cardiogram (ultra-sound).  I got to sit and watch her heart beat and listen to the whoosh, click, swish, blurp of valves operating and blood flowing.  We went to the Smoke House for dinner and I had my usual half-and-half.  She had smoked chicken pasta and I had country fried chicken.  We have enough left overs to see us through the rest of the week.

RIBS FOR DINNER

Here we are about half way through.  I got a package of Swifts back ribs at Costco yesterday.  Three slabs.  I cut them into 3-rib hunks and made up a dry rub of brown cane sugar, onion and garlic powder, chili powder, coriander, cayenne, powdered chipotle, ground black pepper and what-not.  I dusted each chunk of rib and put them into two rather full gallon zip lock bags and dumped the rest of the dry rub on top.  I let them sit out at outside temperature for a few hours and refrigerated them overnight. 

I am going to allow at least four hours for the ribs.  That means I need to start about 14:00 to have them ready by 18:00.  (Advanced math.)

 

Cold smoke (warm) comes first for a couple of hours until the meat pulls back on the bone by an inch or so.  I will turn them and spray with water.

 

After they are well along I will place them on a strip of aluminum foil on the top platform with BBQ sauce, loosely close up the foil, turn up the heat just a bit and let them simmer slowly for another couple of hours.  I will sprinkle them with celery seed and open to finish.  I should have about 80% of them left for another day or to freeze.

Chips for smoke on the right.  This is the third refill.

IMAGE SIZES ON BLOGGER

How are the image sizes adjusted?  Hmmm.  I will try something and see what happens.  First select an image.

The image file did not change.  Is there a way to make it wider?  Yes there is.  Just click on the image and select X-large.  Whoo Hoo.

This is the Waco that flies out of Fullerton, California airport.  I need to take it for a ride and get some pictures.  Now I wonder if there is a way to edit previous posts to change the image sizes.  Hmmm.

MORE LITTLE FIGHTERS

I put up the carbon fiber tripod and gimbal head.  Had to adjust the legs to three different levels.  The focus is now working better.  I selected "continuous" with 9 points so it is not as likely to grab the background.  If I keep this up long enough I will be able to capture some of the frequent "dog fights" as two dozen hummingbirds vie for spots at the feeders.  I can take two dozen pictures and not get the same bird twice.  It also appears that this is the time of the year for new feathers because some of them are less than perfectly groomed.  I am getting images with as much as 3,000 pixels across a bird so they would print well.  No "diddling" here other than getting the exposures right.  Perhaps some NIK treatment would do better.  If I did this all day, I would have perhaps two or three hundred pictures to sort through.  The background is a wood fence about 30 feet from the camera.

THE MORNING CRITTER-SHOOT YIELD

The hummingbirds are skitish today.  Won't tolerate me.  The problem today was keeping the target in focus.  The auto focus wants to pop to the background and won't re-acquire because the target is too close.  After a little bit I get arm weary from holding up the D800 plus 70-200 plus 1.6X teleconverter.  The teleconverter is over-kill but I am avoiding taking it off because of dust.  I use it for other subjects as well.  I really should set up the 400mm on a tripod and gimbal for shots like this and shoot from back inside the family room.  The tripod would be very crowded and so would I.  Can't win for losing.

F-22 AT CHINO

There is a lot of similarity between shooting hummingbirds and aircraft.  Both give little opportunity to think.  Here is an F-22 taking off behind the flight line at the Chino Air Show.  No time to think.  Both eyes open so I can see the scene shaping up and then pop the trigger.

HUMMINGBIRDS OF THE DAY

It took me longer to put a fresh battery in the camera than to take the bird pictures.  When you get to view these little guys and dolls in pictures you can see that their feathers are not perfect.  Today one of the visitors was missing a couple of major flight feathers.  Probably time to grow some new ones.  They also (like people) don't want to look into the sun so they manage to shade their "buttered side" even when in bright sunlight.  I can get better angles at the birds but then there is background clutter.  Hard to get everything at once.  Following my own advice I raised the ISO to 1600, lengthened the focal length and managed to get a decent shutter speed at a small aperture for better depth-of-field at the expense of some additional crop.  This could easily be a career.  When I took typing in high-school we were told to double space at the end of a sentence.  Has everyone noticed that G+ single spaces so justification is not always right if you type with a double space?  I guess it is the "modern way" like deleting commas after three zeroes in numbers ... I guess so it is hard to read.

Today the Adobe Creative Cloud made me log in four times to enable PhotoShop and the ability to select in bridge and then open in PhotoShop.  It was obvious to anyone that this would happen ... except, of course, to
Adobe.  Then, after that, CC crashed (not unusual) and dumped all of the work I had done on 13 images.  It DID open recovered files ... but only after I groveled to Adobe to please let CC run by logging in yet AGAIN.

This will be my first "real" blog post on Blogger.  I have a lot to learn

We have a lot of hummingbirds.  We have been feeding them for about 40 years.  Maybe a little more.  We often have a dozen or more at a time.  They are not an easy subject.  Now, I know that most of the people on G+ or that read Blogs like this know all about this but ...  The trade-off between focal plane resolution, focal length, lighting, ISO setting, shutter speed, depth-of-field, etc. is not exactly aligned with getting razor sharp images of flying hummingbirds.  Yes, there is a lot of light available in my location but I have been using a 70-200mm lens at 200mm and with a 1.6X teleconverter.  The box in the parameter space is pretty small to get a really sharp image.  Today I sat flat down on my butt (after falling on it) while struggling to get a steady camera hand-held and did some experimenting.  Yes, I will be able to get some decent images ... particularly with a tripod and gimbal head.  The depth-of-field is pretty thin.  The camera shake filter in PhotoShop is quite useful.  Here are my humble results from a 10 minute shooting session ... all I could tolerate in my cramped position.  More to come.

I have done considerably better with hand held standing shots in the back yard while stalking the critters.  They become reasonably tolerant after chasing them around for a few days.  These were shot at ISO 800 with a D800E.  The high pixel density has considerable advantages for cropping. No, it is not pixel-pride ... just a fact.  It appears that higher ISO is appropriate for this situation to get the depth-of-field a bit larger.  It is also going to be a matter of luck to get the critters to pose with the entire body more nearly in a single plane and to catch them in those very brief instants at the peak of a wing sweep.  They do alighn their body plane at right angles to the "look vector" quite naturally when they look over the photographer which makes the depth of field as good as it gets. Shortening the focal length will also help.  However, that means a higher crop ... which may look good on a screen but won't print large.  Another trade-off. 

Don't these little creatures have magnificent tail fans?  I guess the ones with the brighter tail feather colors are the Rufous variety (or Allen).

A friend took this study of the Rhyolite ranch in the Super-Moon moonlight last night.  I added a NIK treatment while fighting all of the garbage that goes with a CC update, etc.  MY WORD.  Will Adobe EVER figure this all out?  I truly doubt it.

GETTING STARTED

I have tried my own hand made blog.  I tried WordPress (ugh!!) and others.  Nothing pleases me yet.  Bosque-Bill has inspired me to try Blogger.  Maybe I will learn to cope with this.  Wish me luck.