Had a visitor in my neighborhood today. I’ve already professed my fondness for gunpowder, but hydraulic anything is pretty neat too.

I spent some time a while back watching a tower crane assembled and I finally get how they add sections to make them taller; but now I have another crane mystery. How do these things work? I know how hydraulics work, but these big telescoping booms make my head itch. I know there’s not one big hydraulic ram inside the boom, that won’t work. They have to be integrated into the sections somehow. Where are the rams and lines and what do they look like? What’s pushing against what? If you know of a good cut-away illustration, please link to it as a comment, I need to know this.

I asked the guy working on it and he started explaining hydraulics. After trying to explain my question I felt like I was asking a squirrel about how a tree gets water up from the roots and he keeps showing me the acorns. Besides, I didn’t want to pester a guy with ten-pound wrench in his hand working a crane that probably costs $500 and hour.

Back to the picture: what did I do here? I centered the subject because I wanted to show the weight of the tackle — you don’t get to see this end of a crane much either. By centering an image, it makes it a little jarring, which is bad for nature & people, but it makes sense here.

This crane has seen some use. The industrial scuffed-up nature influenced me to give it a “direct positive” look: that’s the torqued-out contrast and saturation. I think it reminds me of Legos, so the color processing goes with the giant-toy appeal of the crane. I took it a step further and gave you a larger image than I usually do as well to add to the effect I’m going for. I’m trying to recreate for you the experience I had when I wandered out for my walk and found this massive machine jammed into my narrow little street & hemmed in by trees.

I hope you’ve been inspired to get some serious work done this Friday. Hop up into that big gear and crank — ’cause tomorrow’s Saturday!

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It’s the biggest full moon of the year (seriously, it’s 14% wider and 30% brighter). Make sure you get out and see the “Hunter’s Moon” come up! I managed to get up early this morning and catch it before it went down. No better way to start your day than fumbling with a telephoto lens in the dark on a 38° morning without mittens (true Minnesotans don’t wear them ’til it’s at least 10°).

All lunatic blogger references aside, I was out last night and was amazed at how bright the moon was, so I looked it up and found out why. This morning’s picture isn’t the best moon shot I’ve taken, I was using my 70-210 Nikkor that I’m starting to not trust. It’s doing some weird stuff that looks like chromatic aberration, but the guy at National Camera said it was a good lens… I guess I’m going to have to spend more, oh well. I might set up the spotting scope tonight and mount the camera on it and try again. Now that the sun is coming up and I’m enjoying my dark roast at Caribou, sanity is sweeping lunacy from my mind and the fruits of clarity suggest otherwise — everyone knows what the moon looks like. We’ll go look for some more colorful things to shoot today and get back on track with daylight, after all, there’s less and less of it everyday.

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I’ve lived in Minneapolis for a long time, but as usual, it took having someone from out of town to get me to see the sites in my home town. The TFTTF Photography Workshop expedition to Fort Snelling gave me a chance to chill out with some heavy field artillery. No matter how old, boys will be boys and a bag of gunpowder the size of a kitten is a rollicking good time.

The deafening blast of the cannon was a true dude delight, but my experience there had an additional geek delight sound added to it. A small contingent of us photographers were gathered together to record the cannon fire and we all had the same idea and technique. We watched the soldier on the left bring the golf-club-sized matchstick down to the back of the gun and when he got close, we all held down the triggers on our DSLRs — a chorus of 3, 5 and 11(!) frames-per-second cameras clicked away hoping to capture the blast.

This weekend is the last of the season for the fort to be open, so I might head back. If you get a chance, the cannon is fired at 1:00pm and 4:00pm. If you don’t think that’s worth the price of admission, then go check out the old-time cooking at the commander’s house and leave the marching field for us boys and our toys…

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AAAAGH! It’s all coming to an end! Just like the fireworks grand finale, the best colors mean the end is near. Stiff wind and crisp air send a biblical shiver down the spine of any good Minnesotan. Remember 35 below? Yep, not far off. It’s time for us proud citizens of the most Northern Metropolis to start thinking about snow tires, new car batteries and the high-tech members of the crowd to ponder the lithium batteries in our cameras. Will Mitchster.com survive the winter? If the batteries hold out and I can find my snowshoes.

Until then, enjoy the colors, because soon there will be only one.

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A beautiful crisp fall morning awaited me today as I headed out to Lake of The Isles again for my walk. This elm on the North Branch of the lake was reaching out it’s perfectly yellow boughs under the clear blue sky, begging for it’s cameo.

Something I have discovered is that the colors of leaves are very dependent on their background. Bright red leaves against a gray sky are very bland and unsaturated. Shooting up against the early-morning-dark blue sky (and a little post-processing) brings out the colors. Another way to do this is to find colorful trees against the darkness of a grove or forest. The black area between the leaves. The theory behind this is that colors of the same luminosity lose their impact when placed next to each other. Adding a dark line forces contrast into the colors and making them pop.

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