Erik's Blog

Here are a few photos from my summer vacation in Extremadura that fell through the cracks. As the title implies they are mainly of grass and pigs.
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During our evening walks in the Extremadura summer heat, I enjoyed taking my camera along and capturing the beauty of the sunsets across the huge horizon-to-horizon sky. Here are a few pictures that didn’t make the cut for my previous HDR post.

One of the cool thing about taking an entire fortnight of vacation and spending much of it outside in the evenings for an astronomy enthusiast is that you get to see one complete half of the moon cycle, from new moon to full moon.
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The point of high dynamic range (HDR) imaging is to, via post-processing, more accurately capture the wide range of colors and tones that the human eye sees as it saccades around the scene. Current camera photon sensing technology is just not as good as the human eye at capturing a wide range of light levels. The typical procedure involves taking three or more photographs of the same subject, with minimal camera movement, at various exposure levels, e.g. one where the shadows are underexposed, one where the highlights are overexposed, and another middle range. Then, using a computer program, the images are aligned and the detail from the shadows in one exposure is combined with the details of the highlights of another exposure, thus giving you detail across a wide range of light levels.
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On the penultimate night of our summer vacation in Extremadura, we went, at my insistence, to a local restaraunt that we call El Cruce because it’s at a crossroads, but that is really called Hotel Trajano. The food was excellent, as always, but so was the company. My camera got passed around the table, and my sister-in-law, Belén, took several portraits of the attendees. She’s a good portrait photographer.
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The following is a document written by my father, Paul Rasmussen, about his recent trip to visit us while we were vacationing in Extremadura, Spain.

On one of the trips that Betsy and I had taken to visit our son, he told us that we would have to experience vacationing in Extremadura in order for us to really understand his life in Spain, so in December we traded all of our airline miles for two tickets to Madrid in August of 2009. After spending Wednesday night, August 5th, in Madrid, we grabbed a taxi to the bus station that serves the southern part of the country, and took a four hour bus ride to Don Benito. We arrived at 8:35 pm, and were promptly met by Erik and Marga, Marga’s parents Juan and Marce, and Nora, our four and a half months old granddaughter. I was surprised that they had all made the 45-minute trip from their home in Higuera de la Serena, but I really shouldn’t have been. To Spaniards, family is very important, and we were family.
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The part of Spain we go to in the summer is very, very dry. In the summer, it can go for months at a time with zero precipitation. 2009 was my seventh year going there, and I think I’d seen it rain twice, never for more than an hour, in previous years. One day this year, August 13, it rained all morning long, bringing the temperature from 28° down to 22° for a few hours. By lunchtime, however, the ground was dry and the temperature was back up to its regular 33° or so.
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We made it back today from our annual pilgrimage to my wife’s family’s ancestral home in southern Extremadura. This was an extra special year, not only because it was the first time we were there with a baby in the family, but because my parents got to visit and experience the small town life of Extremadura first hand rather than just reading about it on my blog. Having Nora with us meant not taking many touristic day trips as we have in previous years, so we spent most of our time walking around town wearing a path in the cement from bar to bar. Since my energies were focused more on translating and hosting my parents, I didn’t take quite as many photos as previous years, but my parents did bring over a new HD video camera that I purchased just before their travel, so I have some good video to share…if I can only figure out how to clear enough disk space to properly edit it.
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Ever since learning about their existence, I have been looking to spot some anticrepuscular rays. Every sunset and sunrise I’ve seen in the last few years, I have looked to the opposite horizon, but not until this month have I witnessed the phenomenon first hand.

Anticrepuscular rays are visible sun rays that converge on the anti-solar point in the sky, the point exactly opposite the sun on the horizon. The fact that crepuscular rays appear to diverge and anticrepuscular rays appear to converge are merely tricks of perspective due to viewing them pass through our spherical atmosphere. It’s a natural optical illusion.
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To finally wrap up my coverage of this year’s trip to Extremadura, I’m including some photos from an evening walk we took on the last day. There’s a rural park that we walk to sometimes.

Warning: This post contains broken glass, lambs, and wood carving. (more…)

2008 was my sixth year going to Extremadura in August. One tradition that happens every year down there is picking higos chumbos (prickly pears). I used to think they were called higos chungos, which would mean "terrible figs" (chumbodoesn’t mean anything outside of American Spanish colloquialisms). According to Wikipedia, this particular species, Opuntia ficus-indica, is native to Mexico and was introduced to Europe and the rest of the world by humans.

Officially, the cactus plants we harvest them from are on someone else’s land, but the owners don’t seem to do any prickly pear picking themselves. But we add a shifty-eyed clandestine atmosphere to our harvesting expeditions to make them more exciting. e.g. "Here comes someone walking their dog! Hide the metal tongs in the bucket and pretend like we’re just out for a stroll!" Fun. (more…)