Ok, today just was perfect and one of the days where I love my job because I get to work out side to document the weather. This time of year I should be wearing snow pants, big heavy coats and living in cold weather survival gear. Today, I was wearing shorts and a T-Shirt outside while getting footage in Minneapolis, MN of people out in the record warm temps that made it feel more like April then the heart of Winter.
I know this won’t last long but it sure was nice just to get out and enjoy being outside with the hot sun keeping me warm when I should be freezing my arse off.
Warm weather in Minneapolis, MN 1/10/2012
We shot the video at the Stone Arch Bridge in the heart of Minneapolis, MN and over at Lake Harriet in South Minneapolis. While shooting the second part of the video, Neva spotted someone looking up at a bird in a tree. The bird turned out to be a Red-tailed Hawk which let us walk right up to stand almost under the branch it was perched on. Neva said it just ate a whole mouse. After it looked around for a minute, it let out a shriek at us from about 10 feet away and then flew off right above us and then circled back to give us a show to photograph.
Every time I do photography near the Mississippi or when I lived in Burnsville of the Minnesota River, I always had the saying “One world, one soul, time pass, the river rolls” run through my head from a song.
Tonight I was working at the office and killing time while waiting for some footage to encode. Yes I finally have private office space that I rent to keep the business out of the home and the work out of the home to try and have a somewhat normal life.
Right behind the office is the Mississippi River and when I say right behind, I mean you walk about 50 yards down a dirt path and you are at the rivers edge. I explored the path a few months back before the first snow fall and thought it would make a great walking path and photo opportunity one day. Well that one day, or night was here and my editing computer told me it would take about 45 minutes for a video to render before I could start the upload to my agent and go home. What to do for 45 minutes? I could watch infomercials at two in the morning but I thought what could I do? That is when I remembered it was a full moon out and I had the path down to the river right behind the studio.
After a short phone call to Neva to make sure she knew I would not be doing anything stupid like walking out into the middle of the river on thin ice to get a photograph, I was off to the rivers edge, to walk on so so ice that was only a couple of inches thick to get some great photographs.
The scene was perfect along the river for the photo that I have pictured in my mind before walking down to the spot. The moon was lighting up the area and the river was calm with a nice ledge of ice to walk on along the side of the river.
(Note, click on the image to see the larger image on all of these photographs)
Mississippi River in the dead of winter with full moon light.
I was using the new 10mm lens at F5 with a thirty second exposure at 400 ISO to get a ghostly like image with the stars out but looking like daylight out at the same time.
Mississippi River in the dead of winter with full moon light.
I used my red head lamp to fill the white sow to make the scene look blood red. This is some old school burning and dodge while the camera was taking a 30 second exposure at F5 with a 10mm lens. While taking this photograph, I could hear a bird on the other side of the river or on the island calling out. It was pretty spooky because it sounded like an Eagle calling out in the middle of the night.
Below is the same shot but without me filling the scene with the red fill light. That is correct, the photo above is filled in during the photo, not after with Photoshop.
Mississippi River in the dead of winter with full moon light.
The level in the camera said it was level but it is still higher on the right for some reason in the photo below. This is also at F4, 10MM for Thirty Seconds at 400 ISO with the full moon just a little behind me over my head.
Mississippi River in the dead of winter with full moon light.
And the last photo is right at the rivers and ice edge looking out towards an island in the middle of the river. The ice was a few inches thick here but the river was only a few inches deep here so it was safe to get this shot.
Mississippi River in the dead of winter with full moon light.
Yesterday, Jan 4th, 2012, Earth passed through a stream of debris from shattered comet 2003 EH1 which is the source of the Quadrantid meteors.
While not feeling that great, I went out in the cold weather and hung out in the uber secret spot that I use when I need to be in almost total darkness just north of Saint Cloud. I say almost total darkness as in no traffic, no street lights and no light pollution in the field of view.
Below is the only photo that I was able to get of a fireball. The 3/4 full moon made it hard to see the fireballs and meteors as the light washed out the sky.
Fireball from Quadrantid Meteors
Just below the north star is a fireball, the only one that I was able to document. The Quadrantid Meteors was not what it was hyped up to be and that may be due to the fact of the bright moon. It was not a total waste of time as it did make a great proof of concept for doing another project which is to do a 8 hour exposure of the stars in this spot to get a true star trails photograph.
Happy New Year Everyone. One of my New Years resolutions is make sure I update my blog on a more timely basis. It’s not my fault, it’s that freaking Facebook, it makes it too easy to just update a status and move on.
So, lets see what I have been up to since I last forgot to update my blog. Well, not much. The weather here in Minnesota has been pretty boring, ok, its beyond boring and there has not been much to write about. Just been working on the behind the scenes stuff and finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on massive archive project. The YouTube channel now has over 2,000 videos on it.
Other than some test photos I did with the ultra wide camera gear I picked up I have not even picked up the camera gear to shoot anything since there has nothing to photograph of video tape. We just got the first real snow up in Minnesota this past week and even that was about an inch. The forecast shows that should melt off this week with temps in the upper 40s this week.
There is a bright spot to the lack of weather in Minnesota if that means I don’t have snow storms to document. The heating bill will be lower, the number of cars in wrecks are way down this winter, and I’m able to focus at the new office on getting my work done and everything caught up.
Here is a test image with the new lens the other day. I can’t wait to get out and shoot some Texas sized super cells in the next few months. The field of view is insane. Right click on the image to view the larger image.
Testing out new camera gear.
Oh there is the other thing, BNVN, Breaking News Video Network, Inc. It was bought out by StormChasingVideo.Com last month. 2012 is going to be a good year.
While I have been busy working in the new office getting things ready for the web updates, I still love to go out and see some weather even if it is winter weather. Only one problem, there has only been two major storms of interesting the past month. One I did cover and the other one was in southern, Minnesota well south of the metro area that I did not cover since it was a non story event.
Looking at the the NOAA snow cover analysis for the North America as of last night, almost half of Minnesota does not have any snow cover. The eastern half of North Dakota does not have any snow cover and Fargo, ND has not even seen an inch of snow since the start of this winter.
What gives? Is it Global Warming? Could it be Sun Spots? Maybe it is Harp? Nope, it’s just the weather setup. Tipton, TN has received more snow this fall than Fargo, North Dakota.
0730 AM SNOW ATOKA 35.45N 89.77W
12/07/2011 M4.0 INCH TIPTON TN TRAINED SPOTTER
A TRAINED SPOTTER REPORTS THAT 4.0 INCHES OF SNOW HAS
FALLEN IN ATOKA...TIPTON COUNTY TENNESSEE AS OF 730 AM
CST.
The setup has pushed everything to the south so far this season. Looking at the latest GFS forecast, southern Minnesota might be in for a decent winter setup later this week. It will be decent but it won’t be anything like what we had just a year ago with the winter storm that caused the Metrodome to collapse after the 12/11/2010 storm.
Check out the video from one year ago that I shot
12/11/2010 Massive winter storm hits the Twin Cities metro area.
Well I have been busy working on a ton of stuff behind the scenes for several tv shows and keeping out of trouble since the weather has been pretty lame, er scratch that, very lame for anything all fall. We have had one winter storm and some decent Aurora Borealis photo ops but nothing extreme, nothing crazy, almost dare I say, boring.
Last Friday we did a video for the crazy shopping on Black Friday and even that was not too crazy.
Here is the footage we shot around the Twin Cities of people in line for Black Friday sales.
11/24 – 11/25/2011 Black Friday Shoppers B-Roll
Last night I was able to find a location for a Aurora Borealis shoot
that I have been looking at least 7 years for. I was looking to find an
old windmill in the middle of a field that was near a road but not near
any lights. Well I found it and while it is a long way from home
and it is worth the drive to just northwest of Fergus Falls, MN.
Here is the video from the Auroras last night and if I can get one decent Aurora event before the snow pack cuts the location off, it will make the long search for this location all worth it. The only down side is that the lights from the city of Fargo, ND are just over the horizon.
A winter storm hit the central Minnesota area of Stearns County with some areas receiving almost a foot of snow.
A narrow band of heavy snow hit the area this afternoon and caused hundreds of accidents.
The heavy snow and numerous accidents caused Interstate 94 west of
Saint Cloud, MN to be closed for several hours this afternoon.
At one point the road conditions were so poor that in order to open up the interstate, a Minnesota State Trooper had to guide a Snow Plow through the traffic jam just to get to the major wreck the shut down the interstate.
Been
busy working at the new office for the last few weeks trying to make a
dent in all the new stock footage and the new video company that I’m
working on. More details about the new company will be out soon but for
now, its still under wraps.
It’s been pretty busy here trying to catalog and edit all the new
footage. I have about two more terabytes of stuff to review before I’ll
be caught up but I’m pushing to get it all done and then start working
on the new photo from the last year to get all of them on line and
cataloged. It’s just a lot of work.
Speaking of work, My brother Greg reminded me while joking with some
people about crazy stuff that people do about our dad and one of his
many great invention (other than us).
Crazy eh? He told us he did a lot of crazy stuff when he worked for
Sperry and he worked there for over 35 years. I’m going to have to
print this thing out and show him his name is finally on the internet.
Well, I need to get some computers on auto pilot and working on encoding video while I sleep so I better get back to work.
