Sunset Storm

My student and I dared the Mountain top again to photograph lightning. Here's mine . . .

The Sky is falling

First image hot out of the camera for the Perseid meteor shower over Mount Lemmon, Arizona.

A gathering of planets

This evening four planets (Venus, Mars, Saturn and Mercury)and the Moon bunched together in the western sky - a conjunction. I had a front row seat for the presentation, being atop Mount Lemmon hoping to get some shots of the Persied meteor shower peaking tonight. If I don't succeed in the later - the show in the early evening was reward enough.

Sky Lights

Finally! A distant thunderstorm almost worthy of photography. Man, Tucson monsoons have been pretty lame this year!

Image details:

Location: Mount Lemmon, Steward Observatory 60" Telescope (9,170 feet)
Camera: Canon EOS 5DMII
Lens: Canon 24-70 F/2.8L @ 35mm F/11
Exposure: Composite of 11 images with exposures between 20 and 60 seconds.
ISO: 100

Desert Icon

Student got some new lenses yesterday and just HAD to try them out. So, after much pestering from him, I finally gave in to a sunset outting to the old standby - San Xavier Mission. You really have to try hard to take a bad image of this monument to Catholicism.

We were only there an hour - here are a couple of my captures. Because of the late summer light - with the sun behind the face of the mission I used the HDR technique to better display the enormous dynamic range I was dealing with. The technique involves taking several images at various exposures bracketing the optimum and combining the images into a single "High Dynamic Range" (HDR) image.