Work – Page 29 – Michael Stephen Wills Photography

Weathered Lava

Spheroidal weathering of Basalt

June 14, 2020May 29, 2020 MichaelStephenWills8 Comments

In preparation for our Ireland tour I woke before work to research each location, filling a leather bound notebook with facts and observations. Faced with the Giant’s Causeway I was woefully unprepared to comprehend the sights.

Walking down the Causeway path, the cliffs rise on the right, at the foot are these strange deposits. The Causeway is part of an enormous lava plateau formed during eruptions 50-60 million years ago. This lava was at bottom, eventually exposed to weather. As eons passed, the basalt reacted chemically with rainwater, the outer rock flaking off like layers of an onion to reveal these strange rounded forms.

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Being here is like finding the abandoned workshop of a giant. The place lives up to the name.

Copyright 2020 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Volcanic Dike

A Bactrian Camel (?)

June 13, 2020May 27, 2020 MichaelStephenWills

The entire northern Antrim coast is the remnant of an lava flow hundreds of feet deep, the depth corresponds to cliff height today. It made a great location for a defensive fort, or dun, featured in an earlier post. I say today because on a time scale of 50 million years the late Bronze age, 3000 years ago, was yesterday.

Here is another view from the Giant’s Causeway walk, wonders presented at every step. This lava dike, now surrounded by water, formed when flowing lava entered a crack though a layer of basalt from an earlier eruption. The lava cooled, over eons the surrounding material eroded, leaving a wall of rock. This formation has an irregular surface that resembles a two humped camel from some angles.

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Copyright 2020 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Labrador

2,400 miles distant

June 12, 2020May 25, 2020 MichaelStephenWills1 Comment

Next stop Labrador, Canada, North America in this view from the Giant’s Causeway Walk.

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The attraction has miles of footpaths, every inch with stunning views such as this.

Copyright 2020 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Broken

Enormous and Personal Scale

June 11, 2020May 25, 2020 MichaelStephenWills13 Comments

Volcanism formed much Ireland landscape and can be credited with a huge tourist attraction near Bushmills, Northern Ireland, UK (Click me for another post of volcanic Irish landscape). The opening of the mid-Atlantic rift and movement of continents dwarfs the origin story of a roadway built by giants to connect Ireland to Scotland.

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On a prosaic scale, the granite curbs stones proved my undoing. On the walk out of the Causeway, in the falling light of dusk composing a shot, eye to the viewfinder, I fell off the curb. The camera fell, breaking the mount on both the flash and camera. To this day, I need to hold the flash in wireless mode when using the Sony.

Copyright 2020 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Marvelous Rocks

a ghost story

May 22, 2020May 9, 2020 MichaelStephenWills2 Comments

Weathered granite boulders greet visitors to the Triangle T Ranch.

Your imagination roams among the natural forms.

A tableau of figures keep silent watch with the ghosts of Texas Canyon.

Copyright 2020 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Mouse Collection

Happy Mother’s Day

May 10, 2020May 9, 2020 MichaelStephenWills12 Comments

Here is a project completed for a “Fundamentals of Photography” refresher course. The task is to use a variety of lenses of my choice to document scene from my surroundings. These photographs document a family heirloom, mouse figurines collected by my wife, Pam’s, mother, Patricia Crist, assembled by Pam into two display cases with assorted figures created by Pam’s daughter, Denna.

70 – 300 variable lens used for macro photography

Copyright 2020 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Torr Head Photos

My latest photos accepted into Getty IStock

May 8, 2020April 25, 2020 MichaelStephenWills2 Comments

Click me to view the latest batch of photos accepted into Getty….these are from Torr Head..

Copyright 2020 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

Bullet Dodge Series 3

Not quite murmuration

May 2, 2020April 27, 2020 MichaelStephenWills1 Comment

Today, enjoy two videos of shorebirds taking flight at once. Starlings can flock and swarm in clouds of birds, called murmuration. My videos of a shorebird colony taking fright, at something unknown as the beach was empty, are from my IPhone 7.

This is a still image, high resolution, similar to the view of the second video. A repeat from yesterday.

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With a tripod it is simpler to achieve a level horizon….

December 3, 2014 President Obama warned of the coming pandemic and passed along plans and a team to the incoming Trump administration. By December 2019, the pandemic unleashed in China, Trump gutted this capability and, while Pam and I were planning out January 10th Walt Disney World trip, hid the truth from United States Citizens.

We were keeping an eye on China, by January 10th the Chinese communist government was lying, “there is no human-to-human” transmission they told the WHO (World Health Organization). Knowing the truth, our plans for that day would be different.

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Sunrise, January 109, 2020 Cocoa Beach, Florida

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Copyright 2020 All Rights Reserved Michael Stephen Wills

References:

CNN YouTube, “Hear what Barack Obama said in 2014 about pandemics.”

Daily KOS, “How the Obama administration tried to save us from what Trump is doing right now.”

FOX News, “WHO haunted by January tweet saying China found no human transmission of coronavirus.”

Bullet Dodge Series 2

Shroomed (Happy May Day)

May 1, 2020April 29, 2020 MichaelStephenWills8 Comments

One week before January 10, the dawning of the day photographed here, “the CDC Director Robert Redfield was notified by a counterpart in China that a “mysterious respiratory illness was spreading in Wuhan [China]”. Redfield notified HHS Secretary Alex Azar shortly thereafter, who shared his report with the National Security Council (NSC). According to The Washington Post, warnings about the virus were included in the President’s Daily Brief in early January, an indicator of the emphasis placed on the virus by the intelligence community.” December( and maybe October/November), 2019 through January, 2020: COVID-19 was spreading across the USA as visitors from Wuhan disembarked from planes.

The following images compare IPhone 7 to a dslr mounted on a tripod.

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With a tripod it is simpler to achieve a level horizon….

I heard the word “shroomed” (as a verb) used in Episode 1, Season 6, of Bosch. As in “the Federal Government treats us like mushooms”: grown in excrement and kept in the dark.

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Sunrise, January 10, 2020 Cocoa Beach, Florida

Want to see more? Click me to visit my Florida photography on Getty IStock.

Reference: the quote is from the Wikipedia article “Timeline of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic in the United States.”

Bullet Dodge Series 1

First of a looooonnnngggg series

April 30, 2020April 29, 2020 MichaelStephenWills4 Comments

One day after my “Sunrise Texture” series as the sun rose on Cocoa Beach I was waiting with the same photographic kit. It was perfect weather for a visit to Walt Disney World, planned for that day: unsettled.

This image couple demonstrates the effect of long / short exposure without using filters. I changed the ISO and F-stop to achieve these effects.

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With a tripod it is simpler to achieve a level horizon….

I turned around to observe the colonies of shore birds…..

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Want to see more? Visit this my “Sunrise Textures” series on Getty IStock.