Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

How long is a photograph?

According to my back of the envelope calculations, each of these images is about 4.5 miles long. That's roughly how far the plane I was in travelled during each 30s exposure.

But why was I taking such long exposures ten miles above Canada, in the middle of the night?

The answer's quite obvious really: aurora.

I've seen aurora once or twice before, shimmering sheets of green fire in the sky. But this display was something else, bright and spectacular, huge curtains of light hanging from the heavens, glowing gases in a geomagnetic storm. It shimmered across the north, miles long, flickering from green to blue to red and back again, one moment huge whorls of cold fire, the next a long line of light as it rippled in the teeth of one of this solar maximums' most ferocious storms.

How to capture the splendour of the skies?

I've used long exposures for stars, with a manual infinite focs, to some success, so I decided to give the same technique a try. Using a few pillows I cobbled together some semblance of a tripod, stuck the camera into the window frame and clicked the shutter.

The results aren't perfect, after all, the plane was vibrating and moving, but they do capture something of being in the middle of the sky in the heart of a geomagnetic storm...









Beautiful.

But nothing like the real thing.

Sometimes you're in the right place at the right time, with a camera pointing the right way.

Standing on the cliffs of Palos Verdes, I watched a red-tailed hawk speeding to and from its nest, hunting for lizards and the like to feed its chicks. It moved fast, a swept wing bullet in the sky. But I did manage to capture one shot, as I tracked the bird along the cliff face with a 300mm lens.

If I'd been prey it would have been the last thing I saw...


The Rabbit's Eye View
Palos Verdes, California
May 2012

Time to fill in the travel meme for 2011, as I've finished this year's round of travels (2012's starts bright and early on January the 2^nd...). So, the usual list of places I've stayed at least one night in the last year, with a little * for those that have had more than one night. The list is in approximate order of the first time I stayed there, so some, like Las Vegas, which had multiple trips, were visited several times throughout the year.

This year had fewer long road trips, but a lot of time in the US. Which reminds me... I really must sit down with spikeiowa and plan the road trip fanzine we've been noodling for a while...



Santa Monica, CA^*
Palm Springs, CA^*
Las Vegas, NV^*
Mojave, CA^*
Paso Robles, CA^*
Campbell, CA^*
San Jose, CA^*
Orlando, FL^*
Barstow, CA^*
San Francisco, CA^*
Passe-a-Grille, FL
Anna Maria Island, FL
Bradenton, FL
Atlanta, GA^*
Santa Barbara, CA
Laguna Beach, CA^*
Santa Clarita, CA
Dearborn, MI^*
Redmond, WA^*
Anaheim, CA^*
Bellevue, WA^*
Los Angeles, CA^*
Ojai, CA
Lake Isabella, CA
June Lake, CA
Mariposa, CA
San Francisco, CA^*
Pismo Beach, CA
St Clement, Jersey
Benidorm, Spain

Airlines flown: Virgin Atlantic, Virgin America, Delta, FlyBe, Alaska Airlines, British Airways, Iberia
Aircraft flown: Boeing 747-400, Boeing 737-800, Boeing 777-300, Boeing 767-300, Embraer EMB 195, Airbus A340-600, Airbus A320-200, Airbus A321-200
Ferries taken: Washington State Ferries (Anacortes-Friday Harbor)
Road trips: Los Angeles to San Jose (via Ojai, Lake Isabella, Mount Whitney, June Lake, Yosemite, Mariposa, Fresno, Paso Robles), Orlando to Orlando (via Passe-a-Grille, Anna Maria Island, Bradenton)
Conferences attended: CES, Parallels Summit, MMS, MIX, Data 2.0, Web 2.0, BlackBerry World, Google IO, FIRe, Maker Faire, Velocity, Forward with Ford, TechEd, BUILD, AppUp Elements, MAX, BlackBerry Devcon, NokiaWorld, CA World, BlackBerry EMEA Partner Summit
Countries: USA, Spain, Jersey
Shuttle launches watched: STS-133
US States visited: California, Washington, Nevada, Florida, Georgia, Michigan
US National Parks visited: Yosemite, Joshua Tree, Mount Rainier, English Camp
Airports: LHR, LGW, LAS, SEA, SFO, LAX, MCO, ALC, MAD, JER, ATL, DTW

And now on to the next year. Where will it take us? So far it's starting with the usual January US trip for CES, Amsterdam, Florida and Jersey in February and then... Well, it'll be fun whatever, and wherever!

I don't normally photograph people - they move around to much, and they just don't catch my interest as much as landscapes or wildlife. But occasionally something just catches my eye, like this girl fire-dancing in Seattle at an Intel event last October. It wasn't the usual torch or poi dance, instead she was using a pair of sculpted metal frames to hold several burning torches.

Illuminated by her flames, in the dark, she stopped moving for a moment, enough time to fire off the shutter and capture a simple portrait.



The torches were like extensions of her hands, reaching out into the night, while she was lost in her movement and the fire.



Fremont, Washington
October 2011

There's a fountain in the garden of our friends' house in Silicon Valley, and we've taken to sitting outside under the canopy where we can work and listen to the trickle of water. It's refreshing there in the shade, in the slight breeze of a California afternoon.

We're not the only critters that like that fountain, and it's regularly visited by all manner of birds that my European ornithological skills regularly misidentify (like the grey bird with a rose-red head that isn't a linnet but instead is the remarkably prosaic house finch). However one bird that's easy to spot is the tiny nectar-fueled speed-freak that is the hummingbird - and they too treat the fountain as a filling station.

This afternoon one came hovering by, whirring like a clockwork steampunk drone, and made its way to the fountain, glistening green in the summer sun, darting first this way, then that, before settling to drink its fill...

My camera (as always) was ready, and I managed to capture a sequence of the bird first approaching and then landing on the fountain.







Such cuteness.

(But inside it's an angry Aztec warrior)

Willow Glen, California
June 2011

In more Californian ornithologicalness, here's a quick shot of a hummingbird feeding in Laguna Beach, in all its iridescent beauty. A couple were flitting from flower to flower in the hotel gardens, so I skipped away from lunch to take a few photos.

Those tiny wings, they beat so fast. Even my camera can't capture them...



Laguna Beach, California
May 2011

Driving north out of LA can get tedious. Take 101 and blast through the interminable suburbs to Ventura, or 5 up and over the Tejons and onto the eternal flatness of the Central Valley? So why not do something different instead?

That's why we found the Mount Pinos route, up 5 to Frazier Mlountain Park and then climbing to 6000" and along a north western ridge of the mountains, before dropping down the curving slopes to the Cuyama Valley. That last part of the drive is the most scenic, as you roll along the top of the ridge, following its sinuous curves from peak to peak, and rock to rock.

We were driving that route a week or so ago when we saw a white pickup and a ranger carrying what looked like a small TV antenna. Wondering what she was doing we pulled into a layby with a magnificent view over the slopes and hills to the north. Then we saw what she was tracking: first a handful of dots in the sky, and the bigger and bigger, the wide wings catching the afternoon updrafts from the slopes.

California condors, five of them.



As one swooped closer we could see its tracking beacon, a whip antenna protruding from one enormous wing.



They spiraled over us, higher and higher.



And then they were gone, off into the mountains on their evening patrol.



What a wonderful sight, some of the rarest large raptors in the world.

Tejon Mountains, California
May 2011

So we're in the US again, following the conference trail from Orlando to San Francisco to Atlanta to San Mateo to Laguna Beach to Santa Clara.

Between the end of BlackBerry World in Orlando and the start of Google IO in San Francisco we had a free weekend, so we rented a car, and headed off west, to a couple of favourite places on the Gulf Coast keys, Pass-a-Grille and Anna Maria Island, stopping off at Fort deSoto in between. As always the islands were ideal places for photography, especially of birds and sunsets.

Here's one I'm especially happy with, taken at on the beach at Fort deSoto, of a snowy egret in flight. Such a beautiful bird.



Oh, and have a bonus shot of my favourite sea bird, the black skimmer, err, skimming the sand.



Fort deSoto, Florida
May 2011

I blogged about the iPhone location log in another place, but here's the video I made of some of our recent US travels, as seen by my phone.

It's been a few days since the news about iPhones (and other smartphones) storing device locations came out again. This time, however, it hit the mainstream press, rather than staying in the more refined heights of the computer forensics world - and simple tools for exploring the data followed quickly.

Here's a YouTube movie of some of my data, from a recent trip to the US attending a bunch of technology conferences. What's interesting is that even though I turn off my data connection while I'm abroad thanks to egregious roaming charges, my location's still being recorded.

Quite surprising, really...

...well, almost.

I fly to and from San Francisco several times a year (and I'm in the Bay Area right now, dosing up on those California lumens after a long cold London winter), and I'm often leaning back looking out the window watching the landscape drift below.

So I know the first few minutes of this stop motion video intimately, the steep climb out of SFO as the plane skims San Bruno Mountain, then the curve out and around the Golden Gate, before the cruise over the Sacramento Delta and on up over the Sierras and over Lake Tahoe...



SFO to Paris in two minutes. It takes a little longer in practice...