Puerto Rico Views

Greetings from Puerto Rico! I arrived here yesterday in the rain. It proceeded to rain off and on for the remainder of the evening. Today however, was much improved, with mostly sunny skies and only a drizzle in the afternoon. Not much of a post here, but I thought I'd share some scenes from that past 30 hours or so.


View looking along the beach near the hotel. The water was a nice color, but due to the rains and problems with urban runoff, getting in it wasn't advised (at least for a couple of days after heavy rain).


This afternoon we toured the Bacardi rum plant. From atop the main distillery building, the view of Old San Juan's fortifications across the bay was impressive.

Goonies and Cameras

Over the past couple of days I've been trying to experiment with the new camera and begin the process of figuring out how to manually take photos. The Canon has several "Creative" and "Zone" settings that automate all or portions of the photo taking process, while at the same time allowing the user to change some specific settings to tailor the camera to capture the image desired. I've been trying to keep my camera set on "M" mode, meaning full manual. At this setting the user must specify aperture, ISO speed and shutter speed. The only component remaining automated at this point is color balance / metering and focus (which can be switched to manual mode). So far keeping the camera in M mode has been pretty fun - but it doesn't really allow for reliable quick snap-shots. Instead it means taking a picture, looking at the result and then fiddling with the settings to reduce blur or darker / lighten the image. In other words, the "keep to delete" ratio of images right now is still very low.


One of the concepts I've been trying to figure out and achieve results with is 'bokeh'. Bokeh means fuzziness or blur and is often used to describe the degree to which portions of an image appear out of focus. It seems very much tied into the concepts of depth of field (DOF) There are a number of different methods of creating this effect in an image, but basically it helps to keep the aperture low (wide open), with a short focal length and some distance between the background elements and the subject. It also seems to help to have pin-point light sources in the background. If you search Flickr for Bokeh you'll find some really fine examples of what I'm talking about.

Canon Digital Rebel XTi

After pricing, studying and shopping for a new camera for over a year, we finally broke down and got one. Key word here is 'broke' as it was quite a chunk of change for our budget. The new machine is a Canon Digital Rebel XTi, which came from Amazon.com. The package included the 'kit' lens, an 18mm-55mm non-IS lens, which has variable reviews among photography journals and websites. However the cost of a lens upgrade was simply out of the question. For now, it is already evident that this camera is capable of taking photographs far beyond my current abilities. I am excited at the possibility of improving my technical skills and taking better photos. I took the photo below while trying to learn how to manipulate the different shutter speed functions on the new camera.


My old digital camera is a Sony DSC-P72 CyberShot 3.2 mega-pixel point-and-shoot. The Sony has served well for about 4 years and has never had a problem - in spite of the hundreds of miles it has bounced along at my waist while backpacking and hiking. As a point-and-shoot, the manual options available within the camera are limited as well as the focusing options.


I'll be taking the new Canon with me next week to a conference and will hopefully be able to post some (decent) shots from the area.

Starting Something New

All blogs start with an idea, a photo or a story to share. Once that's been established, the next step is to choose a title - and this may be the most difficult part of the entire process.

I have been considering starting a blog and giving it a test run for quite some time now. This blog will be an experiment in blogging that I'll let run for about a month or so. After that time I'll evaluate the results and see if I desire to continue on with it.

Back to the introductory sentences, the title of this blog is somewhat related to my academic and professional interests. I'm am a graduate student studying fire ecology, particularly in the southeast United States. I expect that this blog will be a collection of my unsolicited comments, reflections and stories and travels. The content of posts may or may not be directly tied to fire ecology, but I expect at least a few of the posts will be related to the topic.

So, without further ado, let's begin.