Home - Baseball Season

Home.  That's the Photochallenge 2013 theme for week 19.  I took a seasonal approach this time.  My son is in the middle of baseball season.  This is what Home means in the spring of the year across much of the US.  And, this is not only Home on the little league field where my 11 year old son plays, this is also where I played when I was his age.  Many of my friends that grew up in our town also played here.  Home!!

Photographer's Resource for predicting the Moon and Sun

The Photographers Ephemeris, or TPE is a really cool app I found that helps me plan a photo outing when the goal is to get sunrise, sunset, or moon photos.  Using either your current location, or a location you search for as a base, it will tell you the time, and location when the sun will rise and set.  It will also tell you the time and location of the moon's rise and set, and the phase of the moon.

It is available for iOs, or Android mobile platforms.  The Android version I just bought was $4.99 on the Google app store.  You can also download a free desktop version for Mac or Windows based PC's.

From the TPE web site: "The Photographer's Ephemeris (TPE) helps you plan outdoor photography shoots in natural light, particularly landscape and urban scenes. It’s a map-centric sun and moon calculator: see how the light will fall on the land, day or night, for any location on earth."

So how do you use it?  Say you arrive at your photo destination at 4:00 in the afternoon.  Where do you set your tripod?  Well, open up TPE on your mobile device, and put it in compass mode.  It will point out exactly where the sun will be setting on the horizon.  Or, put in tomorrow's date, and it will tell you exactly where and when you will see the sunrise.

If you're planning a trip, you can see what the phase of the moon will be when you get there, and when it will be visible in the sky.  Or you can look for the date of the next full moon.

If you have places you visit frequently, you can store those locations as pins.  Then you can quickly and easily check the times of sunset and sunrise.  And it will let you see how the sunlight and shadows will be showing up later in the day.

This is a fantastic little app, and is already helping me to plan a trip to Gettysburg, PA later this month.  Looking forward to the extra help this app will provide in planning our locations, and setting up our shots.

Upstate NY Agriculture

The majority of Upstate NY Agriculture has historically been based on dairy and beef farming.  The number of farms in the area has been dropping in recent years, but there are still many fields full of cows.  And many of the crops raised are for feeding cows.  Hay, corn, and oats. The   photos below are for the 2013 Photochallenge from Photochallenge.org.  The Week 18 theme is Agriculture.

A Legacy of Music

Photochallenge.org week 17's theme is music.  Some of my earliest memories of music are of my father playing his harmonica in the evening after the farm chores were finished.  In later years, when he lived in a nursing home, he played every day for the other residents and the nurses.  We lost dad last November.  He left me this harmonica, and a life long love of music.

Spring Planting on an Amish Farm

It's spring, and the farmers are begining the planting process.  Many of the farms in our area were shutting down.  Family farms where the kids are going off to college, then getting jobs other than farming, so when the owners retired, the farm just shut down.  But with the recent migration of Amish families into our area, a number of these farms are coming back to life!

As a history buff, I love watching the Amish working the fields.  My grandfather worked his farm with horses when he first started.  And the Amish families, using the old ways, are a form of living history.  No tractors, no modern equipment.  Just horses and hard work.  I love watching them, and seeing how my grandfather, and great grandfather worked the fields around my house.

NYSW Railroad

Driving home today on Route 8, passing along beside the NYS&W tracks, I was just thinking I hadn't seen any traffic there in months. No sooner had the thought crossed my mind then I saw an engine north bound with a couple of cars in tow. Coincidentally the week 16 theme on photochallenge.org is Railroad!! So I had to give chase and get some photos. I got a few shots on route 8, then got ahead of the engine and met them at a crossing in Clayville. These two shots are from that crossing.