Camp Cone Oasis

We are staying at Camp Cone Oasis, just north of downtown La Feria, surrounded by farmland. We had a change of plans last night and we won't be going into Mexico until Friday, so I took some pictures of the stars at camp last night instead. I took this panoramic shot of Cone Oasis' commons area with six horizontal exposures, all at ISO 800 with an aperture of 2.8 and a six-second shutter-speed(I wanted as short a shutter-speed as possible that would still expose the stars because the tree branches were waving and I didn't want to motion-blur them too badly). I put them together in photoshop.

La Feria, Texas

Just a quick update...

I managed to make it to McAllen at 10 p.m. last night after a large number of different problems caused eight hours of delays. I am at the camp where we stay in La Feria, Texas, and today we've been gathering interns from various airports. Tomorrow we will start orientation and drive in to Mexico to familarize ourselves with where we're going. I will try to have pictures from that up tomorrow night.

Stranded In Tulsa

I am currently in a jet parked somewhere in a concrete desert in Tulsa, Oklahoma. My flight from Nashville to Dallas was delayed for one hour once we boarded and before we took off due to weather. Once we did take off, we had to head north and circle around to avoid the storm, which we were told would add more time to the flight. Then, the storms refused to leave Dallas alone, and we were forced to land in Tulsa, where we are waiting for the all clear.

A rather funny though environmentally unfriendly story: In order to land in Tulsa, the plane had to be a legal weight to land. Because the plane had enough fuel to fly halfway through Texas, we had too much fuel and weighed too much to land. We had to stay in the air an extra 45 minutes or so and burn off 5000 lbs. of fuel before we could land. No word on what has happened to my connecting flight to McAllen.

We are being told now our plane is being given a gate so we can wait inside the terminal. Translation: I have several more hours of wait ahead of me.

While I wait, here's what I can see out my window of the Tulsa airport.

Cumberland Falls and the Moonbow

Once a month when the moon is full, the light reflected off of it catches the mist rising from Cumberland falls and creates a "moonbow." The spectrum of light appears as a white curved beam of light to human eyes. To a camera exposed for over 30 seconds, it looks like a normal rainbow. We went out to see the moonbow three nights in a row. I took the shot above on the first night. I wanted to take a picture in black and white to see if the moonbow would appear as it does to human eyes, but clouds prevented us from seeing it the next two nights. I still got some cool monochrome exposures.











The last photo is actually four photos merged together into one, creating the panoramic effect of a much wider angle lens.