Posts

San Antonio's Saga in Lights

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While in San Antonio for Pittcon, an instrumentation conference, I stayed across the square from San Fernando Cathedral. The parish is displaying a work by light-show artist Xavier de Richemont that depicts the history of the city.  The first night, I guessed wrong that it would look cool from the rooftop restaurant at the AC Hotel. It was thoroughly dull from there. Lucky for me, the next night a crowd was gathered again and I took the time to sit there on ground level. What an amazing show! A weakness is that it assumes more existing knowledge of San Antonio than most tourists have. A more generous way to say that is that the piece is most targeted at the people who live there and know their city's story. I think that subset of the audience must walk away amazing and affirmed.  It lingers here for a long time, both in the main show where everything is moving and in the epilogue where it shows several stills for about 15 seconds each. Who is she? For actual Pittcon cover...
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Lunar New Year 2026 at Peabody Heights

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Happy Lunar New Year! Peabody Heights put on a quite the party February 21 with a full flight of Chinese elements along with representation from other parts of Asia. Photos they posted from last year's celebration made it look fun, and 2026 did not disappoint.  If anything, this undersells how many people came out. Tutors helped attendees make custom bookmarks with Chinese characters Sparkles, gold and red The decor was on point. As far as I know anyway. I wonder if it's good for vendors when the crowd is almost as thick as a mosh pit.  The crowd was thick as the lions made their way around Peabody. Wassat? Snacktime Lion indigestion Down! Good lion. Cool to see how it's done, but it does feel a little like looking up someone's pant leg. It's the Print Pact box! Right now, finding the right ones of these around town is the only way to get prints from me. Ok fine, you can contact me for bespoke prints. My photo habit is rubbing off on the kiddos
Location: Baltimore, MD, USA
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In Orlando with the cleaning crowd

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  Japan in Florida (infrared 720nm)  The cleaning industry is fun to write about as a chemistry journalist. Of course, cleaning is a very chemical endeavor, and the companies that make cleaning products are more chemically savvy than most other consumer product firms. But it’s also a consumer-facing market for chemicals, so it has to respond to the changing and sometimes capricious trends emanating from the broad cultural zeitgeist.  That doesn’t quite mean the industry is blown in the wind. It has this demand floor built in, folks will only let their homes and businesses get so dirty. As a result, the cleaning world has some resilience even when economic conditions are hard, as they are now for several regions and economic sectors. I wrote about all that for C&EN here.  It’s a busy conference, but I snuck in some time to take photos too. I had my infrared-modified Canon M2 and a Canon M50. I want to like the M50, I love its small size and capable video capture. ...
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Snow lasers

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As I type this, Baltimore is getting its first big snowstorm of the year. As of noon, about 5 inches has accumulated. So far, I'm chickening out from going out to take photos. A handful of days earlier, we got a preview though, just a light dusting. The leadership of my church had a meeting, so a 10-block walk was in the cards anyway. I brought my most weatherproof camera configuration, a 5D Mark III with a 100-400mm L lens.  That lens was kind of a splurge at about $500, but it has been great for photographing my kid's soccer league and it is weather sealed. There may come a day when my photography is cash neutral or even profitable, but at this stage I'm underwater by about $1,500. Which isn't too bad, I suppose. Snowboarding, automobiles, even golf would add up much faster.  That said, six of my art prints have now sold through the Print Pact, which is exciting and validating. Six actual humans have seen my prints in among art for sale and decided, "That is art ...
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Infrared - filters and color swaps

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What you're looking at below is four different color renditions of the same scene. Three out of the four were shot using an infrared camera and a 720nm filter. Development programs like Lightroom default to assuming the image data is in normal human color, rendering everything in red and not showing much of the color differences. It's just data. By giving the software different instructions about how to interpret the colors, we can get the color and tone separation we want.  Infrared - 720nm filter with colors straight from the camera But as IR photo expert Rob Shea says, color isn't real. The choice of what rendered color the program maps onto the image data is arbitrary. I can pick what looks good for the scene, the vibe I want to convey, the textures and shapes I want to explore.  Here's a normal-color shot of the same scene One that I've been liking recently is to take the wavelengths reflected by chlorophyl, coming off of plants that would be green in normal vi...
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Slothrust at Ottobar, May 2025

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