A couple days ago, I heard a low rumble in the distance. When I heard it a second time, I knew what it was, so I rushed to the balcony to retrieve the clothes from the clothes line (yes, that’s how we dry our clothes in Spain). The sky was a turbulent dark [...]

On Tuesday of this past week, we went to a free concert on Laredo’s beach. The main act was El Arrebato. The name of the band means ecstasy or rapture. Indeed.
The opening act was a band called Mario San Miguel. The lead singer was quite entertaining, making jokes, etc. They [...]

During the first few days of my summer vacation, I spent some sleepless nights. To take my mind off my troubles, I spent quite a bit of time outside in the corral (an open area behind the house) gazing up at the cloudless night sky.
The following photo is a one-hour exposure looking towards Polaris [...]

We didn’t really have any plans this weekend. On Saturday it was drizzling all day long, so we didn’t leave the house much. But on Sunday we decided, “Heck, the biggest party in the world right now is only 2 hours away. People travel from literally the other side of the world [...]

Over the past weekend, I took three different timelapse videos of my flowering cactus over three separate evenings. The results are quite lovely. Each frame was captured as a 5.7 MiB, 1944×1296 pixel, “small RAW” file, I sized them down to the maximum HDTV dimensions of 1920×1080 before loading them into iMovie. [...]

Now this is a timelapse flower movie! Four hours and thirteen minutes, one photograph every minute. I’m so pleased with the result! The animation is smooth and perfectly captures nature’s beauty. What’s rather amazing is that there is motion between every single frame. The cactus never spent a full minute [...]

For whatever reason, cramped space, climate change, low rainfall (aka. negligent watering), etc., the cactus is flowering late this year. In anticipation of the flowers, I took my photography up to the next level by purchasing a real professional tripod. One of the problems I saw in the Cactus Cam videos from 2007 [...]

Those of you that follow my blog regularly know that I have somewhat of a fascination with timelapse videos and that I live in a town with a huge tidal basin that fills and empties with water twice a day in one of the locations on Earth with the largest difference between low and high [...]

Recently I’ve been playing around with a pretty cool software package called Apple Motion. Follow that link and check out the intro video to see the kind of professional graphics it can produce. One really impressive trick that it can do is to stabilize shaky video. That’s what we’re going to be [...]

Last Saturday, I was looking out the window at the full moon and noticed another unusually bright celestial object near it. Curious what it might be, I dashed to the computer to fire up Stellarium, the quickest way to identify objects in the night sky. It turned out that the bright object I [...]