Musings of a Babylon Lurker

Hugo Awards 2012

Sunday, August 5th, 2012 | awards, scifi, Uncategorized | No Comments

Last year I went to China, spending about 4 weeks on the trip – some of them will appear in my “A-Photo-a-Week” project. This left very little time to read the Hugo nominees.

This year I have stayed home – well gone to a few conventions, so I had a bit more time to read.
So – I took the supporting membership to the Chicon 7/Worldcon 2012, so I could vote.

I got a limited amount of reading done, but voted what I could :
Best Novel :
A Dance with Dragons by George R.R. Martin
Best Novellette :
The Copenhagen Interpretation by Paul Cornell
Best Short Story :
The Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu
Best Dramatic presentation, long form :
A Game of Thrones TV series
Best Dramatic presentation, short form :
Doctor Who : The Doctor’s Wife written by Neil Gaiman.

Tags: 2012, Hugo Awards

Photos . . .

Sunday, August 5th, 2012 | photos | No Comments

For some years I have dabbled in photography, and got some decent images over time.

I have decided on an experiment :

A-Photo-a-Week : In an attempt to revive the activity of this blog I have decided to publish one photo per week, except in my holidays, in some cases a small series.

The photos are accompanied by a short description of the situation and technical aspect of the photo(s).

Here comes No. 1, 2012, week 13.

Today’s image of the week actually contains two images of the same phenomenon.

During a trip from The Netherlands to Denmark I took the ferry Puttgarten/Rødby, it was near sunset, and the windmills at the coast near Rødby were turning yellow, then orange’ish. I thought this could become an interesting photo opportunity, so left the ferry and went to the first parking place along the highway. This is what I saw :

Quite an impressive sight. This is called a Sun Pillar, and occurs near sunrise or sunset when the sunlight is reflected in horizontally oriented ice crystals.

I decided to drive on, and on the way to the next parking I could see the sun pillar in the rear mirror, slowly developing, so I decided to stop once again for a second photo session I had to move a bit around to get the correct framing, see the next image below.

Both photos are taken with a compact 3 Mpixel camera, a Canon S1IS, indicating to me that the camera is less important than the photographer for getting interesting images.

While the technical quality of this image is not perfect, I have a 20x30cm (8×12″) print is hanging in my living room.

This is, a relatively early attempt of creating a beautiful image, done in 2006.

This project is intended to include all kinds of images I like, so you can expect anything in this series.

All posts in the series will be marked in the category “photos”.

You can click on each image to get a larger image.

Tags: photo, sky