I love the color of the sea anemones on the Oregon coast. What do you call that color? Me, I’m just going to call it sea anemone green. I guess it’s kind of a light jade? I care more about the names for colors now than I ever used to do.
Hmm. My conversion from scientist to artist is nearly complete. Instead of talking about the amazing biology of the anemone, I just spent a paragraph discussing the color.
I had heard horror stories as a kid about the size of slugs in Oregon. The climate is just right up there for them. I’d seen slugs of the thumb-sized variety before. But I had never seen a six inch long monstrosity until Multnomah Falls.
By the way, I speak invertebrate, and here he is saying, “IF I WERE 1000% BIGGER, I WOULD DEVOUR YOUR WORLD AND EVERYTHING IN IT!”
Slugs are all talk, though. Nothing to worry about.
Now these jellies turned out to be a little bit easier to photograph, primarily because they moved much slower than the others. Their tentacles look remarkably delicate. They remind me of microscopic hydra, almost. The transparency and the blurry ones in the background just add to the sensation that I’ve captured this through a microscope. In reality, they’re a little smaller than the palm of my hand.
These aquarium jellyfish are surprisingly difficult to photograph. The lighting conditions are very poor, and they move just quickly enough that a slow shutter speed fails to freeze the action. Even with a tripod, there’s motion blur in places. Out of a dozen shots, this is the one I was most happy with, although I got a couple of okay shots of another jelly species as well I will probably share with you tomorrow!
Well, the slideshow I embedded last night stinks, so here’s one of the photos I was trying to show off as a group. I have a whole set of these up on Flickr right now. HDR is great with grungy, industrial stuff. Unfortunately, I had to make these with single RAW files probably more due to my ignorance than anything else. But I mostly adjusted for noise and such and they look alright to me. I really liked this boat in particular, but click through to Flickr and you’ll see more.
Here’s a set of single-shot HDR images from the fishing boats docked in Newport. The multi-exposures weren’t turning out right, but these look not bad. I really like the HDR effect, but I am going to try not to over-use it.
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.
We made it to Lincoln City safe and sound. We’ve eaten good food, skipped around on tide pool rocks, and Sarah took $50 and turned it into $150 at the Indian casino here in town. Tomorrow, we’re going to look for sea lions just south of our hotel, and then some whales near a lighthouse, and finally, we’ll tackle the aquarium in Newport.
Early today, taking the advice of Jay Lake, we made a bee line for Ecola State Park. Jay promised that we would find a goodly number of starfish in tide pools there. What do you think, was he telling the truth?
As promised– your flower palette cleanser. These were not much bigger than a dime. I had to break out the true macro to get good shots of them. Sarah was hand-holding my umbrella reflector overhead and I would aim the flash on camera up at it. We got some very nice light that way.
It was hard to pick exactly which Multnomah Falls photo I should make today’s photo. It’s really hard to screw up a photo of such an impressive waterfall, so I have quite a few that I like. I’m settling on this one because it’s the closest I come to showing the full experience of the falls. Kind of sad though that I forgot my neutral density photo, so I wasn’t have to slow the shutter down and see what a waterfall looks like at 1 second exsposures. I’ve got it on me today, and there is a waterfall at the Japanese Gardens… and of course at the ocean, I can take one of those awesome long exposures as the sun goes down and get a sea of smooth silky foam. I just don’t get to take many pictures of water in Colorado.
My story “Groob’s Stupid Grubs,” a story of a goblin’s hopes for his idiot children, is available in Black Gate 15.
I recently finished the first draft of a YA novel called Takedown Notice set in the net-mage universe of my stories “Captain Blood’s B00ty” and “One Click Banishment.” What happens when the Magical Association of Atlantis finally gets the upper hand against the net mages in the spell program copyfight?