Adventures down Rt. 36

To celebrate the beginning of my vacation from the "day job", my wife and I headed down to Newcomerstown at the southern end of Tuscarawas County to visit the Cy Young Days Festival.  Cy Young was a baseball player born in the late 1800's in southern Tuscarawas County and spent his later years in Newcomerstown.  While we were there, we took in an oldtime baseball game.  If you have never seen an oldtime game, they are a lot of fun to watch.  There are similarities to modern baseball, but the players don't wear a glove.  Also, there is a higher level of sportsmanship among the players which is something you don't see a whole lot of in today's sport.

After we were done watching the game, we decided to continue our day out by heading west to Coshocton County and the canal boat rides on the Monticello III.  Having lived on this side of Ohio for 30 years now, I've always heard about the Ohio-Erie canal and it's importance to the area, but never really was able to associate with it until we took a ride on the boat today.  Riding on a canal boat is a very tranquil experience.  Well, now it is.  Back then living and working on the canal was a miserable experience and was no where near the pleasant one we had today.  Our guide, Fred, gave a good history of the canal system in Ohio and it's importance to the economy of the state before the rail system took over.

40mm of Cedar Point

Yesterday was spent at Cedar Point enjoying the company picnic for "the day job".  I'm not much of a ride person, with the exception of the train, so there wasn't much else to do except wander about with my camera.  And bugging my son at his job as he is employed and living there for the summer.  

With the exception of the night shots, I stuck with my 40mm pancake.  Another 40mm challenge day! 
I wanted to use just that because I wanted some examples to share with my nephew as he just bought a new body and was looking for a good lens to go with it.  I've always loved using this lens for landscape mainly but haven't been using it much since when I'm out on an assignment I never know what environment I'm going to have to shoot in, so the 28m-135mm comes into play the most.
Was a gorgeous day at the park and we couldn't have asked for better.

After the sun went down, I switched out the 40mm for my 10mm-20mm and played with some time exposures just for fun

The curious case of wavey lines in creating star trail images

For the past couple of weeks I have been, as my wife puts it, obsessed with trying to learn and utilize the technique of creating star trail images using Photoshop CC, Bridge and lots and lots of images.  I've been spending about two hours at a time taking series of 30 second exposures and merging them in Photoshop.  But was I started to notice was effects like this showing up in the images:

  It was really bugging me because after spending a couple hours outside at night, I was hoping to have something that looked good and not like someone threw a pebble in a pond.  So I started working it our what it could be and I found that when I don't make ANY corrections to the images in Bridge using Camera Raw, it works just the way I want it to!

So there you have it!  If you are doing star shots and you use Bridge to edit the images before importing to Layers in Photoshop and you get that odd results, the editing before hand is what's causing it.