The FACzen Image

Going to the Dogs!

2012-01-25T11:00:00.001-05:00

I hate being sick. It puts such a crimp in your plans. I'm reminded of my grandmother's expression, "if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans". OK, my grandmother never said that but it sounds like something she might have.

So getting the flu (again! Twice in one year. Damn) last week messed up a dental appointment, and more to the point, the field trip to Niagara Falls (slowly I turned. Foot by foot... I had to say that. Knee-jerk reaction. If you don't know where it comes from, Google it. And tell us which version you like best!). I haven't heard back from any of the participants, but it had to be a great trip: hotel suite for a weekend, lots of stuff to photograph, good friends, good food... FWIW I was able to re-book the hotel for mid-February but not a suite. At least I didn't lose my payment.

The flu also slowed me down. I really didn't do anything for a week. I spent a lot of time napping in the computer chair or bundled up in a blanket in front of the fireplace. By Saturday I was bored out of my mind and although I was still congested and coughing, I had to get out. Then I remembered that the Niagara trip had conflicted with another event: the Haliburton Sled Dog Derby. So I bundled up warm in my down jacket and snow pants, and went out to see what's what.

I didn't stay all day, although I shot from 3 vantage points: the staging area, the start/finish line and out on the course. I shot a bunch of images of sled teams running away in the distance, into the setting sun but I didn't like any of those shots. One thing I DID do was to stick to one lens (except for a brief swap to my 70-200 because I wanted to use the shallow depth of field). All of the other shots were with the 120-400mm lens and all at 400 mm.

For you technical types, I set the camera to shutter speed priority because I don't get good results with that lens over 1/500 second. Keeping the ISO at 400, I was able to shoot at f/5.6 with one stop of exposure compensation dialled in (snow should be white, not grey). I was using a monopod which helps but if I'm going to use one, I need a better one. The issue I'm having with that lens is that I like to focus, then recompose the shot, but shooting in continuous focus mode (moving subjects), that messes up the focus and the exposure as well.

In talking to a friend who shoots birds and wildlife and action, he says the trick is to stay on the subject with the focus point, don't worry too much about composition and re-frame the image (crop it) later. That goes against what I've been trying to do, so I need to practice more. He did tell me one encouraging thing: he (and other action shooters) bang off a lot of frames and have a much lower success rate. I have to learn to hold down that shutter release and bring home 800 images instead of 200.

Why am I telling you all this? Because I'd like to hear back from others about how to shoot this stuff.

Anyway, here are some pictures from Saturday. I hope you like them. None of them are HDR's, they're all from single images but they've all been toned and sharpened in post processing.

This is that one shot with the 70-200 at f/2.8. It's cropped and toned. I find the extreme effect of the toning makes it interesting.

He's one of the race organizers. Toned again, of course. I use Topaz Adjust 5, mostly.

Team on the last leg to the finish line, about 1 km to go. These dogs are exhausted and the driver is encouraging them to run. But they're athletes and you can tell they love doing this. Picture a human athlete in a race, totally pumped!

Sometimes they don't make it. This dog collapsed in the harness a couple of hundred meters from the finish and was being dragged along on his/her side by the rest of the team at full speed. The driver had to stop, unhitch the dog and load him/her into the sled for the rest of the way.

This dog was running in a ski-joring event: two dogs harnessed to a cross-country ski racer. Wild eyes! They actually looked like that but I had to clean them up because they were too noisy.

The dogs are gorgeous. I shot this in the staging area just before the dogs were harnessed up for the 8-dog team race. The Huskies and Malamut's sometimes have such compelling blue eyes!

This was my favourite shot of the day. Again in the staging area, you could tell that this dog was aching to get out there and run!

The races continued on Sunday but I thought it was a better plan to stay indoors and continue to recover from the flu. I did have a good time and I was glad I was able to get out for at least a couple of hours over the weekend.

— 30 —

Winter marches on...

2012-01-20T15:50:00.000-05:00

I was in Toronto last week and the temperature broke 10°C. You could see brown grass. Not here!

When I woke up this morning it was -28° and it's warmed up to -9° at 3:00pm. The sun is shining through broken clouds and everything is covered with a blanket of fresh white snow — we got about 10cm (4") yesterday. There was also a brief freezing rain the other day so the trees are coated with crystallized ice. It's really beautiful out so you may ask, why no pictures?

Well because I'm trying to get past this nasty flu that I picked up somewhere. I ventured out today to clear the snow (and my snowblower broke. Bad, this time I'm afraid!), bundled up really warm and I have to admit I enjoyed it, but my congested lungs did not.

A couple of days ago, I had to go into Minden, to drop something off at the post office and because I ran out of Advil. Now there's a spot on Highway 35 where you're driving directly into the setting sun, so oncoming traffic, trucks more so, are surrounded by a backlit halo of white spray. Every time I see it, I want to stop and try to take some pictures, and I gave into temptation. So there I stood, outside the car, in -10° C or lower temperatures, alternatively hacking away, wiping my runny nose, and hoping a Northbound truck would appear. I was there for almost half an hour, waiting for the sun to peek out. Probably not wise, given how I'm hacking and coughing.

I did NOT get the shot I pictured in my mind. I wanted spray coming up, backlighting... but I did get this one. I have a less extreme version of it but I really like how this looks like a painting.

By the way, I did NOT get the dog I pictured last week. Someone else adopted her. Also I'm missing the camera club outing to Niagara Falls this weekend due to this flu but i rebooked the hotel for mid-February so I'll get there.

TTFN...

— 30 —

Ice Fishing in Northern Ontario

2012-01-15T19:22:00.000-05:00

It's been warm up to now, and open water abounded until a few days ago. Still, there were foolhardy souls who ventured out onto the shifting, thin ice to try their hand at catching lake trout, smelt, whitefish in the Highlands lakes.

I was in Toronto and it got cold on Friday night — so when I drove back North on Saturday, I knew the ice fishing huts would be out on the new ice.

Not without problems, though: the Inn across the road, who put 7 huts out every year, had two of them stuck halfway out in the slushy surface, and two more still staging on the shore waiting for harder water.

Last year I saw some portable huts out there, this year there will be more. Costco sells a 6-man shelter for under $300 which is very well thought out. It's a pop-up and one person can put it up in a minute or two. The red one in the pictures below is a 2- or 4-person version.

Here's a visual story of a group of two guys and two girls who took one of these out on the ice and set it up. Too bad this doesn't end with a picture of a caught fish!

It was cold. The overnight temperature dropped to -24°C and it felt damp and chilly as well. I dressed for it — snow pants, down jacket, fur hat. I wasn't cold because of the exercise hiking out about 1 km across the ice.

Here they are on their way out to a spot over deep water.
The shelter is in that red bag.

Ice fishing means drilling a hole in the ice with an augur. By the way, it turns out that there was already about an 8" thickness of ice today.

Setting up the shelter. That's a propane heater in the milk crate at left.

A minute later, the pop-up is ready to go

Now to drill the holes. One's already done and one of the girls is fishing. They didn't all go in the shelter, as you can see they're dressed warmly.

With the shelter set up, you can see the effect of the heat rising from it on the background across the lake. That's not a Photoshop effect, the long lens accentuates the heat mirage effect.

Here they are, enjoying their afternoon on the ice. These people spend every weekend and otherwise free day out on the ice. I have to admit that I don't see the attraction, but there are hundreds of them out there all winter!

I ventured out again late afternoon but everyone was gone. It was too cold to hang out and shoot more pictures so I did the right thing: scooted back inside and threw another log on the fire. Watch for more additions to this story later in the season.

— 30 —

A visit to Bala

2012-01-08T10:56:00.000-05:00

Bala is a small town in Muskoka cottage country North of Toronto. Here's a picture I took yesterday in the centre of town.

Bala is known for its cranberries. It's also significant for me because one of the best motorcycling roads in Ontario ends there, Muskoka Road 13. I haven't been there in about 5 years, though. I was there yesterday to visit a yellow lab that was rescued from the Sudbury pound a few days before her scheduled demise and I'm considering adopting her. I probably will.

The Bala River runs through the town and is criss-crossed by bridges. I'm not sure what this building is, but I'll find out next time I'm there. Winter is the only time, I think, that you can get this shot because of the trees. It's fast water, and judging by the lawn signs that abound, Hydro is looking at building a power station, something many residents don't seem to favour.

The Ontario Historical Society has put a few plaques in Bala. One describes the Pre-Cambrian Rock geology of the area. There's also the Lucy Maud Montgomery museum in Bala. Apparently she visited the town in 1922 and wrote a book called "The Blue Castle" based on that visit. It's a bit of a stretch, it seems to me, to have a museum for LMM there, since she's best known for her book "Anne of Green Gables" and is PEI born and bred. She did live in Ontario, but nowhere near Bala: in Leaksdale which is some 200km away over in Uxbridge township.

Enough history lesson? I think I'm going to do more of this background research, telling the story behind some of my pictures.

A couple of technical notes (I know, I'm running on at the keyboard!): 5-shot HDR processed in Photomatix with saturation turned completely off and the shadow saturation turned up. Interesting effect. I wanted to emphasize the building so I used lens distortion (horizontal) in LR to change the perspective and I cropped and straightened it a bit before syncing the 5 images and exporting to Photomatix. I used Nik Sharpener on the building and grounds and Dfine to reduce noise in the sky. I turned off de-ghosting in Photomatix to retain the detail of the river. I used the Vignette preset in Nik Color Efex Pro to focus the scene a bit more. I think this would make a good watercolor subject if I ever get around to picking up a paintbrush.

PS: here's a shot of Miss Dixie, the dog I'm considering adopting:

Her name is "Dixie" and the foster parents have dubbed her "Miss Dixie". She's a "she" despite the blue collar (that's all the foster home had). Apparently she was picked up wandering in Sudbury and they traced some history. She's about 6 years old and she was used for breeding in a puppy mill. The number tattooed in her ear implies she's a pure lab. She has a great disposition and really needs a new "forever home".

— 30 —

A bright light is gone

2012-01-07T17:34:00.000-05:00

My dear friend Frances Goodman Pellatt passed away last night.
She was 65 years old.

Fran was a bright light in my life and I'm really going to miss her.

My thoughts go out to all of those she loved and touched,
especially to her family. She leaves a very big hole in our hearts.

Bye, Fran. Love you.

— 30 —

This is about FACES

2012-01-06T10:39:00.000-05:00

On Scott Kelby's blog today, the topic was, "I've got nuthin'". Me too, sort of. Nikon announced the D4 today, so that's newsworthy but this blog isn't about that. People will still be reading this down the road when the D4 is not big news, so I don't really want to focus on that kind of info. If you do want to read about it, here's a link. The features on this camera are incredible. Sure wish I could afford one!

Faces
I uploaded my "Faces" images to the Richmond Hill Camera Club a couple of days ago. The club runs half-a-dozen competitions a year and this one called for people or animal faces with interesting expressions that connect with the viewer. I keep saying that I'm a "Rocks & Trees" photographer but I actually had too many "faces" pictures to choose from! I'm only allowed to submit two. I chose two of the following shots, but I thought I'd share the group with you.

Question is, which two would YOU have submitted? Remember, pictures are not only judged for content, but also for technical quality. The only time technical issues are not really considered is in journalism categories. So here are the 5 shots I considered for the competition:

What are YOU lookin' at?
I'm finally learning how to use the 400mm lens. I did do some post-processing (ya think?), primarily with Topaz Adjust 5 which you can purchase here. The image is cropped quite tightly, it's only about 1/4 of the frame.

The YaBaby's in Concert
This is a composite of two images shot under wild concert lighting at an outdoor event last July. I was contracted by these guys to shoot the concert but they refused to pay me so I guess the images belong to me! Toning was done with Topaz Adjust 4 (not 5, it wasn't out yet).

You want me to do WHAT?
At Humber College, we teach motorcycle riding to all kinds of people, young and old. This gentleman was, I believe, 86 years old and he took and passed the motorcycle course. Can you say "Bucket List"? Again, toned with Topaz Adjust 4. I guess I like the grungy look!

You are what you wear!
I took this candid shot at the Byward Market in Ottawa last May or June. I love how the facial expression matches the shirt. Too bad about the bystander, although it adds some mystery and colour to the image.

Yahooooooooo!
In the open canoe competition on the white water at the Minden Wild Water Preserve during the Ontario Championship series in September. Do you think they were having fun? I actually shot this with a borrowed lens: Les and I swapped lenses for a short time. This is almost full frame with a 300mm lens, no post-processing to speak of.

So which two would you have entered? I'll tell you later which ones I did, and how they fared when the competition judging is done later this month.

— 30 —

Happy New Year!

2012-01-02T14:52:00.000-05:00

How does that expression go? A day late and a dollar short? You still have 365 days to enjoy because 2012 is a Leap Year, so get with the program!
I had an enjoyable holiday. Rosa was here and I spent less time than usual Behind the Camera and In Front of the Computer (™ and ©. Can you sense a book title coming?). So I missed my 50 blog posts in 2011 by one. My bad!

The photo above was taken early in December, just as the sun broke out of the clouds and illuminated some of the trees, as you see. When I wanted to participate in a thread on the NAPP site asking about your best photos in 2011, this is one of the two 'finalist' shots I decided upon. The other one was the aluminium boat with the red stripey design that I posted here last time. I couldn't choose, so I posted them both.

What's interesting about this picture is that it's almost exactly as it came out of the camera, with no photoshop edits to speak of (I straightened it and tweaked the exposure a bit). When I put the text on, I noticed some power/telephone lines that I got rid of but didn't really need to. I did try an HDR of this scene but the original single photo is more powerful. I hope you like it as much as I do.

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

As I said, I spent some time enjoying the outdoors in the last week or so. Although I'm bothered a little now by the cold, winter is really a nice time up here in the Highlands. As I said last time, it would be nice if winter would make up its mind, though. We got about 12cm (5") of snow one day and it was enough to unlimber the snowblower.

I felt like Tom Sawyer. You know, the 'whitewashing the fence' thing? Rosa begged me to let her blow the driveway, so I reluctantly allowed her to, while either taking pictures or sitting in a lawn chair watching (I love work: I could watch it for hours!).

Now I ask you: does she look like she's having fun?

This is what I was shooting behind my house while she was working! An HDR, of course. Some might consider it overdone but I love the texture and detail of the foreground especially.

I even let Rosa use my camera! She took this shot on Saturday morning when we were enroute to Toronto for New Years.

I took this picture a couple of minutes later from the same spot. By the way, the first picture (the New Year's one) was shot about 200m down this road, where Scotch Line Road meets Highway 35. It was taken a few weeks earlier, though.

Sunday morning was a lot warmer and when I drove back up it was about 4°C (about 40°F) and everything on the trees had melted.

I think this is a Asiatic Lily but I'm not 100% sure. It was in Valeria's kitchen at her house near Bancroft — Rosa and I spent one night visiting there. I tried to focus-stack this shot but it didn't work so this was manually blended.

Here's another shot, with Rosa looking a the same flower

I should have taken more pictures of it. The backlighting produced a great effect. By the way, for you budding photographers out there, ambient lighting from a window is the best you can get! A North-facing window would have been better (this one looks East, and it was still morning) because the light is gentler. I will be talking a bit about how to use it in my book, which is on Chapter 4 right now, thanks for asking!

So up until yesterday's thaw, it was a winter wonderland up here. It's snowing again today but it's too cold and the snow isn't really sticking to the branches but the clean, bright white blanket of snow is so invigorating: that's why I moved here from "The Big Smoke".

See you next time! Feel free to comment or share some pictures with us!

— 30 —

Procrastination

2011-12-26T19:24:00.000-05:00

I want to start an online group for people who can't figure out how to connect to the Internet. I've also been meaning to write about procrastination, but somehow I never seem to be able to get around to it.

Sort of old jokes, but "many a truth is said in jest". It's the time of year when people think about their New Year's Resolutions which is another name for a list of to-do items that you'll write down again 12 months from now because you won't do them. But it gives you that warm and fuzzy feeling that at least you're thinking about them.

I've given up on some of them. Take weight loss, for instance. Today I spoke with a friend who said, "I'm going to lose 40 pounds in 2012". And I said, be careful because next December you'll look down and say, "I still have 35 pounds to go" and of course you won't make it. And he said, "funny, that's exactly what I said this December". I might lose weight this year. But only if I really want to because you can do anything if you really want to. I lost about 15 pounds this year, we'll see what happens in 2012.

But that's not why you're reading this blog. By the way, you're not alone: by the time you read this, the hit counter at the bottom of this page will say more than 10,000 hits! Not bad. No, you're reading this because you enjoy my photography, because it might give you some ideas and because you want to be able to say "I was reading his blog before he became famous!".

So from a photography perspective, here's what I have on my To-Do list. These are not New Year's Resolutions, I've been avoiding these items for a long time now, hopefully I'll get around to actually doing some of them.

I love teaching. I was born to teach. I've taught such varied things as Morse Code, Pistol Shooting, Motorcycle Riding, Creative Writing and yes, Photography. Why am I not actually doing photography workshops on a regular basis?
Many people ask me "why are you not selling your photographs"? They tell me my pictures are better than most they see out there. That's a good question, why aren't I?
I had such a great time when I went to Newfoundland with the purpose of shooting photos and I brought back so many great images. That was in 2006. It's going to be 2012. Why haven't I done something like that since?
More than one or two people have commented that I'm really good at writing, why haven't I written a book? Another good question.

So in the next 12 months I plan to run some photo workshops, get some of my pictures sold, take a trip somewhere really nice just for the purpose of taking pictures, and write a book. Some of these are in the planning stages, some are just resolutions and guess what? I'm on Chapter 3 of my basic photography book! I've blocked it out, written abstracts for all the chapters and now I'm writing. Damned if I'm not going to do it.

I'm 65 years old. If I don't do it now, then when?

I've written this down and 10,000 people are going to read it. If I don't get to this stuff, then I'm going to look mighty silly, aren't I?

My intent here was to perhaps push some of you to get off your collective butts and do some of the things you've been meaning to do but never seem to get around to, before it's too late. Stop Procrastinating!

OK, off my high horse, and let's look at some pictures.

I shot these next two images a couple of weeks ago and mixed together some of the techniques I talked about in my blog(s) (tech blog included). They put some Christmas Lights up on the footbridge in Minden and I got a couple of different shots. Here:

5-shot HDR with a little line-art technique mixed in. I painted the details of the bridge back in using layer masks in Photoshop.

Similar technique but more extreme, and I added a vignette effect using Nik Color Efex Pro.

As you know, I got a new lens a couple of weeks ago: a Sigma 120-400mm f/4.5-5.6 with OS (that's 'sigmaspeak' for Nikon's 'VR' or Canon's 'IS'). I'm not that happy with it yet, but I think it's more to do with the nut holding the camera. I get sharper pictures when I'm handheld than when it's locked down on a tripod. Why is that???.

I need to resort to some desktop magic to make the pictures as sharp as I want them. I'll get it, but I need some practice. Here are a couple of shots from this week:

Once again, I used the line-drawing method of adding in sharp edges. And some Topaz Adjust 5.

This Chickadee on my bird feeder was shot from on the tripod. 1/400 sec at f/5.6, ISO 1000 and it's cropped about 50% of the full frame and rotated. I admit to some enhancements in Nik Sharpener, Photoshop, and Topaz.

So finally, here's a Christmas Day shot of my neighbour's lights just before nightfall. If I were the "Christmas Card" type, and if this were my house, I know what I'd use the image for! But I'm not, and it's not...

Interestingly, I shot a bunch of HDR prep shots, including a few 9-shot bursts but I like this single image best of all. I didn't do much to it, other than toning back everything but the lights. I'd like to make it look like it was snowing (it actually was, but not enough to show up in the image); I'll see if I can figure out how.

That's all for now. I'll try to put one more post up before the year end but if not, well, see you in 2012!

— 30 —

It's Winter (sort of...)

2011-12-20T14:15:00.000-05:00

I wish it would make up its mind. The temperature keeps varying between -10°C and +10°C which means we have snow, then we don't, then we do, then we don't... Rosa asked me, when I grew up in Montreal, what was the difference?. Well we had a lot more snow than in Toronto (or maybe it's because I was smaller so the snowbanks were higher!), it was colder and, after some prompting from her I realized we actually had 4 distinct seasons. When it was winter, it was WINTER. When it was spring... even here, up in the Highlands of Central Ontario, spring could be 4 whole days long, then we jump right into summer. Or maybe this global warming stuff really is happening. I'm not thinking year-to-year, I'm going back 50 or more years to when I was a kid. Technically, it's not winter yet, until tomorrow, though.

I saved the best picture for last in this post, so don't go away without scrolling down! Your comments are very welcome: click the word "comment" at the end of this post.

I have taken my camera out for a walk several times in the past week and especially, I took the new lens out for a trial or two. Since I bought it for shooting wildlife, I thought I'd give it a shot at some rare birds, seagulls at the dump! It turns out that although I was trying to be facetious, this bird is a Glaucous Gull (Larus hyperboreus) which in fact is theoretically a rare bird! I dunno, there are hundreds of them at the dump!

This guy is not in my bird book. Some immature gulls are mottled brown but the book says the babies of this species have dark eyes and black bills, and this one has a yellow bill. Maybe it's a new species, Larus springerensus!

It's hard to shoot birds in flight. I'm going back today to try again.

Both of these shots were taken with my new (new-to-me) Sigma 120-400mm F4.5-5.6 DG APO OS HSMlens. Both were cropped about half a frame, and both were shot at f/8, shutter speed 1/1000 or faster. ISO was 400. I didn't have as much success with this lens shooting in a hockey arena (my grandson Ryan plays for the Uxbridge Stars). In fact the only really good shot that day was with the Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8. The lighting was so bad that I had to shoot at much higher ISO — this excellent goal (the Stars are in white/green) was at 1/800 sec, f/2.8, ISO 2500.

He shoots, he scores! Young Mr. Anderson scored the other goal as well, less than a minute earlier. I did capture that one too, better isolation on the shooter and the goalie, but no puck in the shot. The Belleville goalie kept the Stars off the scoreboard otherwise and won the game 3-2.

In this really badly lit arena, the best I was able to do with the slower Sigma lens was at ISO 6400. Incredible that they came out, but nothing to write home about.

This month, one of the assigned topics in the NAPP challenge rally was "Knifes, Forks and Spoons". I wasn't being very creative, but had fun with this shot anyway:

"One of these things doesn't belong here. One of these things isn't the same!" which comes from a kid's song on Sesame Street, I think. I mixed in some line-art processing to add visual sharpness and merged them into drop-shadowed layers in Photoshop. These pictures were shot in my light tent using ambient light (no flash).

Here's an HDR I shot when out walking.

I like the vignette effect. This is the door latch on an ice fishing hut, waiting for hard water before going out on the lake. Processed with Photomatix Pro, toned with Topaz Adjust 5 and the vignette was done in Nik Color Efex Pro. I do like my plug-ins! I think this image looks best on a white background, but if you're reading my blog with a normal browser, it's black. Click the picture itself to open it in a separate (white) page.

I saved the best for last. The same day, I shot this:

Again, I created the HDR with Photomatix, toned with Topaz and vignetted with Nik Color Efex. I went a little further though, notice how the horizon on both sides is the same. I cleaned up some background and I stretched the image horizontally to give it a more pleasing proportion.

This is a killer shot. I will be printing this as a limited edition art print and if anyone is interested in purchasing a copy, email me. Generally many of my images are available in print, let me know.

Oh yeah: speaking of print! My "Michipicoten River Light" image from Gales of November 2010 was published in Photo News! It's available online as a .pdf, click the link here and scroll down to page 11 to see my picture!

That's it for now. I'll try to get one or two more posts in before the New Year — I actually made almost 50 posts to the blog this year!

— 30 —

Cool Product

2011-12-08T12:04:00.001-05:00

Well actually, "warm product"!

I just thought I'd tell you about a good product I found.

Background:
Last January, I paid over $600 for heating oil. I vowed that wouldn't happen again, so (1) I'm burning more wood and (2) I'm keeping the house cooler. I set the temperature back to 64°F (16°C) overnight but it's warm once I'm in bed. In the morning it goes up to 70°F (19°C) but I set it back to 66°F (17°C) during the day.

It gets cool sitting at the computer. Instead of heating up the whole room, I found this radiant heater at Costco for about $60. It heats ME, not the room. It's only 1000 watts but it's only on intermittently so it costs about what a few light bulbs cost to run, and the radiant heat is nice — it's like sitting in front of the fireplace. Here's a picture:

Odd looking picture? I thought you'd never ask! It started as a photo, then I converted it to line art and painted the colour back in by using a mask in Photoshop. Want to know how? Have a look at my technical blog here.

STUDIO STUFF STILL FOR SALE

I still have a bunch of studio strobes and stuff for sale that I don't use. It was worth over $5000 new but we all know that means little: the market value should be around $1000-1200, but I really want to get rid of it so I can buy a new lens, so I'm seriously willing to dicker for a quick sale. Everything works. This is your chance to get a complete turnkey setup for next to nothing, so let's talk.

Included are 3 strobes, two with umbrellas. 3 Manfrotto stands, one with a boom arm. A backdrop stand. Two boxes full of muslin backdrops in various colours and assorted other stuff. Even a Gossen lightmeter (twist my arm...). Here's some pictures. CONTACT ME

— 30 —

It's HDR Thursday

2011-12-01T13:49:00.001-05:00

For those of you who really hate HDR's, there's nothing to see here, move along.

OK, well just for you, here's a non-HDR shot to look at. I try to have something for everybody.

The lights outside the Red Umbrella Inn, out of focus. I recently participated in a competition where images had to be out of focus and it gave me this idea.

Groupon link
Do you know what Groupon is? They're active in many countries including US and Canada, you get some phenomenal deals from companies who are looking for new clients or to fill quiet times. Often they have to have enough participants to activate a deal, but when they do, you get some crazy prices. The latest deal I read about is $115 worth of printing at Photobooks Canada for $39.

It costs nothing to join and use Groupon. Click this link for more information and to sign up. BTW, I get referral credits if you use that link (nothing but full disclosure here!).

Have you ever used Extended ASCII (ANSI) characters?
So, like, what are they? Well suppose you wanted to put in your 2¢ worth. Or you really want to use the © symbol instead of typing out "copyright" or "(C)". Or you want to write about the temperature outside (it's -4°C in Bancroft as I write this). Get the picture?

It's pretty easy, especially if you're on a regular keyboard (a little tougher on a laptop but do-able, and I'm really not sure if it works on a Mac — someone write me back and tell me if it works.

I wrote up how to do it on my tech blog here. And I created a pdf page you can print out and put it in among the rest of the clutter on your desktop so you can find the codes when you want to use them. I like this one, by the way: ■

Now, it's about HDR's.
I'm stretching my memory to try to recall who used this analogy: it might have been Rob Stimpson, or maybe Dr. Ron, but I can't remember. Anyway, consider that you're a carpenter, and you've just acquired the world's greatest hammer. It doesn't mean that everything you build needs to be done with a hammer and nails — sometimes you can use screws or glue — but from time to time, a hammer and nails is the best solution. So it is with HDR's.

Some pictures scream out to be processed as HDR's. Sometimes, you need to do extreme processing, sometimes you can be subtle. And by the way, I include toning single images with packages like Topaz Adjust 5, or any of the HDR programs that allow it. The shot inside Gwartzman's shop a couple of days ago is an example of a single toned image. Where was I???

Oh yeah. Yesterday, I was driving to Minden (with a stop at the Subaru dealer to fix a slow leak in a tire), and the light was spectacular. There was a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow (song lyric!). Just as you come into Minden, there's a footbridge over the Gull River that called to me. Here it is:

This literally SCREAMED "HDR" at me. I ran it in Nik HDR Efex, then added some sharpening and detail in CS5.

Actually, on the way into Minden, I saw this scene and needed to stop and shoot it.

Although this is technically an HDR (5-shot bracket), I didn't do much to it, I just accepted the default "Compressor" preset in Photomatix. Then I tweaked it with Topaz A5, just a little tad to add a bit more detail.

What's interesting about this shot is that I changed the White Balance from "Auto" to 9000°K and it made the picture really jump off the screen at you (well, at me, anyway. You have to tell me if you agree or not).

At the Subaru dealer, I had some time to kill while waiting for my car. The light was spectacular, as I said. The sunset was golden on the trees and the fresh snow was beautiful (I won't think that way a month from now!). Here are a couple of images I did. This lighting really works in HDR

One last shot. Again, although this is a 5-shot HDR, it really only added the detail to the sky, the trees looked pretty good in a single individual image. The only other thing I did was some hi-pass sharpening to bring out some of the detail. Look how the setting sun hits the ridge in the background! It really did look like this:

So to those who thought I was going off in new directions, I am… but I never said I was going to give up shooting the kind of images I love, especially now that I have a new and wonderful hammer!

— 30 —

Gather 'round, it's story time!

2011-11-29T16:47:00.001-05:00

I have a couple of neat stories for you today. But first...

Interesting lighting?

You can easily tell where the light is coming from: behind the subjects, off to the right. It's actually my SB-600 flash, mounted on my camera, with the Gary Fong diffuser attached. But how can that be?

I shot this image in an unusual way. In a mirror! I couldn't get a good vantage point in front of them so I shot from behind, but at their images in the mirror! I love the way the light falls on their hair, especially. Just another trick I'll file away for future use some time...

First Story: it's about the artist A.Y. Jackson
When we were up in Wawa, we learned that A.Y. Jackson used to own a house there. Right on Lake Superior, on a place called "Sandy Beach" by the locals. Here's the house:

the blue part is a recent addition. The actual house stands in front and the outbuilding on the right
was there as well, as far as I know.

If you don't already know, Jackson (1882-1974) founded the Group of Seven Canadian artists in 1919 and is arguably the most famous Canadian artist ever. His passions were landscapes and he painted in the Georgian Bay, Algoma, Algonquin Park areas among others. An original A.Y. Jackson painting, if you could find one, would sell in the $1 million dollar range.

Somewhere along the way, he sold this house, but still frequented the area. He was an avid outdoorsman and ventured out frequently by canoe with his friend Tom Thompson and others. The story is that he was stranded by bad weather out on the lake and went back to the house for shelter, and the new owners obliged. According to the story, to thank them for their hospitality, Jackson painted a scene on a piece of birchbark, which they treasured for many years. Imagine, if you would, what such an original painting might be worth today.

Some years later, the teenaged son of the owner of the house came home from school and found it cold in the house. Apparently, the legend says, he used the piece of birchbark as kindling to start a fire in the fireplace. I don't care who you are, that has to make you cringe!

Other artists are enamoured with the area. Not 100m from this house, we met the renowned Canadian artist Valerie Palmer, at work on a current canvas. I didn't talk with her out of respect for an artist concentrating and hard at work, but here's a shot I took of her.

Second Story: Toronto's Best Art Supply Store
Three quarters of a century ago, Spadina Avenue was the centre of the "Shmatah" or lady's fashion business in Canada (some would argue that the real centre of the business was in Montreal, but I won't quibble). Every shop, every factory and building in the area was somehow related to that industry. Apparently, the Gwartzman family business was no exception, and they had a fabric store in the area. Mr. Gwartzman (I think his name is Paul) was working there and people — artists — used to come in to ask for canvas. Soon, apparently, an area was put aside for artist's canvas and over time, more art supplies were brought in. Some 70 years ago, Gwartzman's Canvas and Art Supplies was born, at 488 Spadina.

I read some reviews online — not all of them were glowing with praise. Mr. Gwartzman is apparently sometimes short with customers ("yes, that is a stupid question"!) and the quality of some of their products have occasionally been questioned, but there's no doubt that their prices are the absolute best anywhere and to my unpracticed eye, I can't imagine a wider variety of products.

Here's a picture inside the store last Saturday. Mr. Gwartzman himself was there, but not in the photo.

This image was toned with Topaz Adjust 5. I actually did 5 bracketed exposures intending to make an HDR, but the shutter speed was too slow and there was too much camera motion. Rosa is the customer at the counter.

I shot a quick high-key shot looking North along Spadina, on the streetcar tracks. After cropping and some artistic filtering in Photoshop, this was the result:

See you next time!

— 30 —

Now THIS is a new direction

2011-11-23T10:55:00.001-05:00

But before I tell you about that, let me update a couple of things.

The great Carrot Mystery unmasked

I finally spoke with a local who told me the true reason behind Xmaxxxx I mean behind the Carrot Pile. I knew it anyway, but I was just stringing you guys along (if you believe that...)

It's obviously for feeding deer. Apparently the Prentice boys and some other locals got a couple of dumpster truck loads of carrots and put them out in strategic places. I said deer don't eat carrots: how do they dig them up? The person I was talking to first laughed, then asked, "was there a shovel around"? Well, yes: some blue rain barrels on their sides under a sheltering tree with a shovel sticking out. During the winter, they come out and unearth (well, "unsnow") some of the carrots so the deer have something good to eat during the hard winter.

Eventually I'd like to get hold of them and find out whether they got any good pictures on their Carrot-Cam.

While I was up there, I shot a couple of self-portraits, laying the camera down on a rock or stump and setting the self-timer (once almost on a pile of raccoon poop which I didn't notice until the last second!). Anyway, by cropping me out of the background and overlaying the image back into the milkweed shot background, I came up with this greeting card concept and eventually the new Blog header. I'm reproducing it here because if you're reading this blog on an RSS feed, you might not be able to see the header.

Greeting Card?

New Departures

I've really been meaning to do this for a long time and finally got around to it. I'm about to show you an image I created...

There was NO CAMERA involved in the making of this image.
And if you think it was entirely computer-generated, read on!

Yes, loyal fans, for the first time in my life (well since kindergarten 60 years ago), I picked up a charcoal pencil and some paper, and did a sketch. I actually drew something!

Well then I had to enhance it with the computer, doncha' know? So for my tekkie fans, I scanned the original sketch, and opened it in Photoshop. I scaled it vertically about 10% (the original face proportions were not exactly right), I drew enhancements to the eyes, and added some white in the beard then I used Topaz Adjust 5 to tone it and add some colour, and of course I cropped it.

Here's the image before colorizing it:

And here's a final cropped version that I actually like:

A Portrait of the Artist as an Old Man

Those of you who are actual real artists will laugh at these images. But it was my first attempt at actual drawing, and I'm pretty proud of it!

I had emailed the sketch to Rosa and had a funny telephone conversation with her that I want to share. First of all, she told me she likes the original charcoal sketch, (on the wrong kind of paper but what do I know?) and doesn't like the computer enhancements, but she's a real artist and doesn't get computer stuff (yet!), so I don't mind.

She told me that I was like a little kid. I get all excited about stuff I create and can't wait to share it. Photos, computer art, books, music... and now drawings and eventually paintings! I realized that she's absolutely right, and it's the reason that in some ways I'm 65 going on 100 and in other ways, I'm 7. I hope I can stay that way for many years to come!

By the way, if you think I'm going to be famous some day, this, my first pencil sketch, is available to an astute collector for a price. What am I offered?

(I never told you the A.Y. Jackson story, did I? Wait for it... in an upcoming blog!)

'til next time!

— 30 —

A New Look!

2011-11-21T12:43:00.001-05:00

I've had the same header picture up on my blog for a few years now, and I decided it was time for a change. The original "Canoe in the Mist" image was shot in the fall of 2007. The new picture draws from a consistent palette of colours that I really like. The original shot was of a milkweed pod in a meadow near my house, but I replaced the plant with me (narcissistic, aren't I?)! I hope you like it.

So: on to some "stuff".

NAPP is giving some good deals. But they all happen on Monday, November 28th which is supposedly Cyber-Monday (what do we know in Canada? That's like our "Boxing Day", I hear!). They have 30% off stuff, but for me, the biggie is the extra 6 months membership with a renewal or a new membership. And I was about to expire! If you go to the NAPP site, please use the link at the right so I get my 'brownie points'.

If you don't know NAPP (The National Association of Photoshop Professionals), they're a huge resource for those of us who spend time at our computers making our images look pretty. And they're our advocates against the seemingly unfair policies of Big Business — take the latest one from Adobe where many of us won't be able to get upgrade pricing when CS6 comes out... details on these and other stories after these words about your dirty clothes!

The quote from the last post comes from an ancient George Carlin routine, mid 1960's. The character was "Al Sleet, the hippy-dippy weather man". He said, "...Russia and the United States are at war, missiles have been fired by both sides. Details on these and other stories after this word about your dirty clothes." He was a funny guy.

If you're not a member, click this link to find out more about NAPP. If you are a member, click it to renew, but wait 'till Monday to save some big bux! Go to this page to see the codes you need to use to get your discounts.

What else? Oh yeah,

The Alien Carrot Mystery

I got a lot of feedback from the last post. Some people suggested that someone was baiting deer. Another person thought it was an attempt to outfox the "carrot marketing board". Someone else thinks Santa has lost his reindeer and is trying to get them back. Or that my neighbours have a secret bunny farm in their basement and got a year's supply of food... but I got a bit more insight yesterday when I visited the Carrot Pile again. Here's what the pile looks like, in context:

See? In a meadow, in the middle of nowhere.

And here was my clue: a new addition to the site:

A "Carrot-Cam". I think this camera is fired by a motion sensor, which probably means I'm on Candid Carrot! But why? I stand by my original premise: they're trying to capture photos of the aliens!

Topaz Adjust 5

I've been using Topaz Adjust 4 for some time. Version 5 just came out and for registered users, it's a FREE upgrade and it's a real step forward! For new users, there's a discounted price of $35 until end of November (Code: "ADJUSTME") and then $50 after that. Topaz makes some phenomenal products and if you use Photoshop or Lightroom you really want to have their plug-ins. It's cheap, and upgrades are FREE! Click here to go to the Topaz site to see what they've got.

Here's a picture I worked on yesterday. It uses some of the new features in Topaz Adjust 5, but I also used Nik HDR Efex to produce the original HDR image, and Nik Color Efex for the vignette.

This was also taken yesterday, up in the carrot field

I'll be doing some analysis and some how-to's about Adjust 5 in my Tech blog, but not today! Give me a few days and come back. There are some things I haven't figured out yet. But go get your copy before the special offer expires!

One last picture for today

The Gull River at Norland. This is NOT an HDR. It is exactly as it looked when I shot it. It's a 2-shot pano with the wide angle and covers close to 180°. It's a huge wide image and I could probably print it 3 meters wide.

For the record, I did try an HDR but I didn't like the artifacts I got. Merged automatically in Photoshop CS5. I did tweak this with Topaz Adjust 5 and I removed some dust spots, but that's all.

Oh yeah, dust spots!

I almost forgot. I had some very persistent dust spots despite my best efforts to remove them. Mark (from RHCC) told me about a great place in Toronto to get my sensor cleaned, so I went there on Friday. Great experience!

For the record, Nikon wants $80 to clean the sensor, but more importantly, they want to keep your camera for up to 2 weeks! Not me. These people apparently do the service work for a large retailer who shall remain un-named, but their name starts with "H"... they're an authorized Canon service shop but they do all brands. They're located at Steeles/Keele. I brought in the camera around 11:30 and picked it up 2 hours later. $60. If you're in Toronto, give them a try: Sun Camera Service, 2150 Steeles W, 905 669 6355, info@suncameraservice.ca. www.suncameraservice.ca, Nick. Tell him I sent you.

Apparently my mirror bay was full of dust as well, every shutter actuation released a cloud. I really should be more careful.

Next time!

— 30 —

Aliens have landed. It's the only explanation.

2011-11-15T07:57:00.001-05:00

We'll get to the aliens in a minute. "But first, these words about your dirty clothes." Anyone know where that line from a comedy routine comes from? Comment below or email me!

Glenn's Cheap Tricks
Larry Becker from NAPP has his "Cheap Shots" blog where he tells you about inexpensive stuff he's come across, or DIY things you can do on the cheap. I sent him this one, but he didn't publish it, so it's my turn! By the way if you come up with similar things, drop me a note and maybe I'll publish it and give you credit! Or my undying respect. Or whatever.

I came across this product at Walmart (colloquially known as "Wally World"!).

Microfiber (or "microfibre" if you're Canadian or British) is phenomenal stuff. I first started using these to clean the visor of my motorcycle helmet. You know the ones you get from glasses places? They're smooth and after a while all they do is smear stuff around. These are textured like a towel and work better.

They don't scratch. OK, YMMV, but if they're clean and not carrying a bunch of dirt around, they don't scratch. Even lenses. I use these for my glasses (nothing better!), my lenses (well I always have a filter on the front), my computer monitors and keyboard, my TV, the inside of my car windshield... a million uses!

They claim they can be machine washed. I haven't tried that yet because... well I'm cheap but these are under $6 for three big (16" square) cloths and I like a fresh one, especially for the lenses.

I found them in the section with the cleaning supplies, like sponges and mops and stuff. I have to assume that they're available in Wally Worlds everywhere. Oddly, I haven't seen them in the Dollar stores.

Still waiting for the aliens? Hang in there...

On our trip up to Lake Superior, I had my point-and-shoot camera with me and took a few odd shots. Here are a couple that I found interesting.

Hmmm. What was Linda doing while driving?? Bob? You let her drive the Sprinter? Hmmm. BTW, you need a graduate degree to program the onboard computer/sound system/GPS/rear camera/... in that vehicle.

Whenever I've been out shooting with Ron, I've noticed a common activity on his part. Somehow, he's always taking a nap... This was at Pancake Bay on the shores of Gitchigumi (you know that's the Native name for Lake Superior, right?)

In fairness, I think he had a second camera and was shooting the rocks while his other one was doing a long time exposure out over the lake. But he could have been taking a nap...

Rosa and I went for a walk the other day, in the fields down the road from my house. I've mentioned her but I don't think I've posted a picture of her yet, so here's one!

OK, now the ALIENS.
Occam's Razor is often summarized as "simpler explanations are, other things being equal, generally better than more complex ones" (Thanks, Wikipedia!). In other words after you consider various possibilities, the simplest, most logical one is usually the right choice. You be the judge. I couldn't come up with another one...

To set the scene, Rosa and I were walking (can't really call it 'hiking') on top of a hill behind a couple of rural houses, but probably 500 meters (sigh. 1/3 mile) away from anything. We were in a meadow that had once, probably 50 years ago, been farmland because there were the remains of an old stone fence and the rusty remains of a 1940's vintage truck overgrown with weeds. The only sign of human activity were some snowmobile or ATV trails and one rutted disused cowpath leading, it seems, back behind the houses. Even my property, supposedly, used to be a horse farm but that goes back half a century. There are no farms in this area. None. We're in a recreational, rural, lakefront area with a mix of cottagers and full-time residents.

As we walked through the forest/meadows, there was something orange in the distance. As we approached it, picking our way through the undergrowth, here's what we found, in the middle of the meadow.

Yes, it was a giant pile of carrots. Again, this was in the middle of a meadow, in the middle of nowhere. No farms around anywhere. Where did they come from? Why were they there?

They weren't decayed, they weren't bad or infested with insects, they were just piled there.

Shot with the point-and-shoot (the other one was with the DSLR and processed as a single image HDR).

Try as I might, the simplest explanation that I could come up with is that an alien spacecraft, populated by bunny-rabbit-like beings from a world that has to be at least 10 light years away, deposited these here as a cache that they intend to retrieve later, which perhaps would serve as a food supply for an invading force of creatures who are intent on wiping out the human population of the Earth or turning us into slaves to fulfill their goal of expanding through the galaxy as they take over world after world and turn them into sources of food for their exponentially expanding population (we know what bunny rabbits do, right?).

There were no more logical explanations I could come up with. How about you? Send me an email with the words, "Alien Bunny Rabbit Plans to Exterminate the Human Race and turn the Earth into a vast food supply World" in the subject line. I'll publish your suggestions, provided the aliens don't get me first.

— 30 —

The Gales of November, 2011 Edition

2011-11-13T14:32:00.001-05:00

As many of my faithful readers know, this is the second year that I've attended the Gales of November workshop up in Wawa, Ontario on the shores of Lake Superior. The workshop is facilitated by Rob Stimpson — kudos to him for putting on this, the 11th edition of the event. Also to the Rock Island Lodge for hosting the group, their wonderful facilities, great food and attention to detail. Thanks go out to David, Megan and Judy — and we mustn't forget little Xavier and the ever-faithful Luna (a beautiful Pyrenees Mountain Dog).

My goal again this year was to get out of my comfort zone and capture some different images from my usual. Yes, I shot some HDR's, but only when it was the appropriate tool. I wanted to do more in-camera composition and less pixel-pushing on the desktop; I wanted to create images that could be considered as art. It was frustrating at times — once I went out for an afternoon shoot and looked around for 45 minutes before taking any photos. Sometimes I backslid, but again that's when some awesome picture opportunities presented themselves.

When I look at the 45 selected images from the trip, only 4 of them were taken with my new 10x Neutral Density filter. Changing directions is a slow process. Am I happy with my results? Somewhat. Are there images I missed or messed up? You betcha. Are there any killer shots? You decide.

Here are a few images from the trip. The 45 pictures that I selected out of the 1779 shutter actuations I did are on my Smugmug site, in the November 2011 gallery. Have a look and enjoy, and feel free to comment or critique!

We travelled in style! Linda's husband was kind enough to let us use his Mercedes Benz Sprinter van. You can stand up in the thing, and it has enough space for just about everything I own! It only tipped over once, Bob, when we crossed the river bed where the bridge was out (just kidding!). I have to get one of these one day!

Shannon kept saying, "we have to find a grove of birch trees". Well, we did! This was just South of Sudbury on Rte. 69 and is a fantastic spot. I programmed it into the GPS for the next time I'm up that way.

This was my room at the lodge. Fantastically comfortable, great view over the lake... what more could you ask? (this, BTW, is what HDR is for!)

On Friday morning we went to Sandy Beach. I shot the same boardwalk and beach grass last year, but this year`s shot is better!

`Ron`s Tree`. Ron shot this tree last year and got an outstanding image. My turn to try! The tree is real: I created the leaves and the fog from scratch on the desktop. FWIW...

I was up really early on Sunday morning and took this shot looking Northeast in front of the Lodge. Could this be the Aurora Borealis? I didn`t see it but the camera did...

As I said, there are more images on my Smugmug site, including a couple of Art Deco prints I created. Hop on over and tell me what you think!'

— 30 —

It's all about RESPECT

2011-10-31T13:25:00.001-04:00

Today I want to talk about respect for those who do difficult shots. We all have our comfort zones, and sometimes we step outside them to shoot subjects and situations we're not used to. Every time I do that, I learn a bit more respect for people who shoot in different venues than I do.

I was going to talk about concert shoots first, but I got sidetracked by thinking about other challenging subjects. The first one that came to mind was sports. I've been following Scott Kelby's NFL and NBA images and I'm awed by the technical excellence in his images (how DOES he get them so sharp!!!) and by the challenge of capturing the moment. I did some hockey last winter, at the Ontario Senior Winter Games: that's a tough gig! Dodging pucks and sticks and trying to get the action at the right instant.

You've seen this before if you've been following my blog for a while.

... and this is called "making lemonade out of lemons".

Then there's portraits. I worked with Ron a couple of weeks ago (look back at my last blog post for an image of Kim and her family), and I've done some 'headshot' portraits, actually while playing around with some ID photos I used to shoot. Here's one

Shot with the Gary Fong diffuser on the SB-600 flash, off-camera.
And a lot of post-processing, mostly in Lightroom.

I don't see a ton of emotion in this shot. However last week, shooting at a concert, I took this image of my cousin Steve just as a test of the lighting levels.

Talk about making lemonade! Yes, there's some special post-processing (Nik Color Efex Pro 3 — Polaroid Transfer preset), but I really think this captures Steve. I admit this is luck, not planning!

Concerts. Well I've done a couple: In July I did one up here. I had a dispute with the band who said, "what do you mean you want us to pay you??", so I guess I own the pictures. This one was over the top but I thought it would make a good poster

Crazy lighting and some creative image toning using Topaz Adjust

OK, now check this out: this is Francis Martin of FOG in concert at Hugh's Room last week

Here's where you need to have the right equipment. This was shot at F=24mm, 1/60 second, f/4, ISO 3200. Yes, I said ISO 3200. Nikons are incredibly good at holding the noise down at high ISO but having a faster lens would have helped! Nik Color Efex Pro 3 vignette blur applied.

How DO they do it? Get quality concert shots in lousy or weird lighting? I have great respect for photographers who can do this. Other than "making lemonade" by doing weird post-processing, I don't know how to get good concert shots.

Anyway, I'll leave you with one more image, then I have to get going! Two more sleeps (one of them a short one because I have to leave at 5 am!) and I'm off for the Gales of November workshop with Rob Stimpson up on the shores of Lake Superior. Back after the weekend and I hope to have some good images to share with you.

FOG, onstage. With their signature hat!

Oh yeah! I forgot. I got a chance to shoot with a phenomenal lens this week and wrote about it on my technical blog. Check out the writeup and the pictures there! TTFN...

— 30 —

Sad, is it not?

2011-10-26T21:00:00.001-04:00

I'm ready. The house is prepped, the tarp is in place on the roof (hope to avoid ice damming this year), firewood is stacked, the gazebo is stored, screens are down, perennials are trimmed and dead overhanging branches are gone. Thanks to Rosa for helping with some of that! I found my boots, coats, gloves, hats... and then to the garage!

The lawnmower is prepped and I started the snowblower. Then the motorcycle was readied -- stabilized the gas, lubed the chain, connected the battery tender and covered it with an old sheet.

Today I had the snow tires put on, oil changed, the cold weather kit readied to go in the car.

Scary, isn't it?

{sigh}. It's here. The forecast is for snow on Saturday.

For those of you who live in California, Florida, Africa and Australia, "eat your heart out". Get ready for some outstanding winter pictures! Starting with "The Gales of November" up on Lake Superior next week!

The garage shot is from yesterday. The others from last year -- a reminder of things to come!

-- 30 --

Just because it's night...

2011-10-23T12:01:00.003-04:00

Shouldn't stop you from taking pictures. I fell asleep on the couch in front of the TV. When I woke up at 1:00 am, I decided I didn't feel like sleeping, maybe a short walk outside. When I saw what it looked like, the shadows created by the lights at the inn behind me, I went back in for my camera (and tripod!)

The light in the sky is the light pollution from Minden about 10km away. It works because there were clouds, you don't see them on a clear night. The foreground is lit by the lights from the Inn behind me but I CAF'd out my shadow and the tripod's shadow. 15 seconds at f/4 with the 12mm wide angle, ISO = 2000. I used Nik DFine to take some of the noise out of the sky.

Playing with a flashlight! Same spot, this one's a 30 second exposure. I went running around with a flashlight while the shutter was open!

I think this is my favourite. I don't know if it renders well at this small size/resolution. I tried lighting things up with the flashlight, needed several attempts because the sign was too bright. I dodged the lower right foreground and used Content-aware scaling to reduce the width of the dead black area between the sign and the tree on the right. What would have made this image would have been if a deer had stepped out on the road to the left and posed for me! As if!

This is where the light was coming from. It was a busy-ish night at the Inn but still I wonder why they keep all those lights on all night. I had to burn in the lights (too bright) and I waved the flashlight around on the beach to give it some foreground structure. Same exposure.

The trick to shooting at night: set everything up before you go out. You can't adjust much — especially focus — in the dark. I put the camera on the tripod and basically levelled it. I put the wide angle lens on, focused it almost to infinity and turned off autofocus. I attached the cable release. I set the camera to manual and started with a 15 second exposure at f/4, ISO 500. It took a couple of shots to realize that wasn't enough. I should have brought a cloth with me (or my black hat) to cover the viewfinder, especially if I wasn't staying with the camera (running around with a flashlight).

It was fun. I'm going to try it again when there's snow on the ground (too soon!).

— 30 —

Who's on Google Plus?

2011-10-22T13:01:00.001-04:00

I just opened an account there. I haven't figured out how to find and add people yet, other than searching for them by name. Anyone know how?

Google Plus looks like a much more professional way to share photos and news than Facebook.

If you're on Google Plus, search for me and add me to your circles! Or tell me how to find you. Email me or leave a comment here. If you're not on Google Plus, drop me a note the same way and I'll send you an invite.

BTW, here's the picture I used for my profile. Thanks to Les Palenik for shooting it and letting me use it.

Another question: do you have an iPad? What app do you use for reading Blogs and for RSS streaming?

I've been using BlogShelf but it doesn't seem to come up in the app store any
more. I'd like to look at other options. Drop me a note.

-- 30 --

Different Stuff

2011-10-22T01:34:00.001-04:00

A few different things to talk about today...

One of my pictures is going up for auction next Thursday night at Hugh's Room in Toronto. It's a charity event featuring the band FOG and I donated the artist's proof of my Minden Wildwater image (see below). I hope it raises a lot of money -- I'll report back next week and let you know (unless it didn't do well! LOL

The band used several of my photos on their debut CD. Not the cover picture - I was disappointed and so, I hear, was the band. They were kind enough to autograph a print for me, so when they become famous, it'll be valuable! For now, it's featured in my living room. The one below is similar to the one the signed.

I've been working on different stuff the past few days. One is this illustration of a world on a star field. In a couple of days, check out my tech blog if you're interested in how it was created.

A while ago, my neighbour gave me an old picture (it was tiny: only about 2" square) and asked me to see what I could do with it. Have a look!

That's it for now: if the weather clears a bit, I'll get out and shoot some pictures over the weekend.

-- 30 --

Animal, Vegetable and Mineral

2011-10-19T13:51:00.001-04:00

I just downloaded the Blogger app for my iPad, so I wanted to test it to see how easy it is to post to the Blog from here.

First step was to get some images onto the iPad, now let's see if I can access them!

Well they're there, but I don't know how to put them where I want them.

Anyway, these are the pictures I entered in the October NAPP competition yesterday. Let's see how they look!

Edit after the fact: it worked. No bells and whistles, but it was easy and painless to make a quick blog post from the iPad. Just a few quick details about the pictures...

The 'animal' picture was cropped and edited using the Cutout filter in CS5. I kind of liked the stylized effect. The mushroom shot (yeah, I know, it's not a vegetable. Close enough!) was actually a 5-shot focus stacked image. I wanted it tack sharp but the background out of focus. Aperture was f/2.8. The 'mineral' shot is either the quartz crystals inside a cut Geode, or a peek inside the Fortress of Solitude. You decide! I spherized it, added a starry background and some lens flare. I'll write up how I did it later today on my tech blog. (I don't know how to add a clickable link here. Hmmm. Let's see what happens if I type the HTML code: Link.

Another post-posting edit: The trick is to go in and fix the post afterwards on the computer. I just did, by sequencing the pictures where they belong in about 2 minutes.

-- 30 --

A Magical Drive

2011-10-17T02:03:00.000-04:00

This evening's experience was magical. I hope I can share it through this narrative because I wasn't able to capture an image of what I saw other than in my mind and memory.

I chose to drive home from Toronto after dark this evening. For those who don't know, I live about 2 hours Northeast in the Township of Minden Hills, part of the Haliburton Highlands, or as some call it, "God's Country". To get here, you go North on Highway 48, which curls East through Bolsover and Kirkfield, then ends at Highway 35 in Coboconk. I'm 46 klicks North of that, on 35. Driving South this morning, we had some relief from the rain of the past few days, with broken clouds, the sun peeking through here and there, which gradually turned grey as the day progressed but cleared up later on. It was blustery and windy all day but relatively clear when I left Toronto around 8pm.

As I drove North, I could see the occasional flash of lightning on the horizon to the Northeast. It lit up a small segment of sky but I could still see stars above me. I figured I was driving into a storm and hoped it would pass to the East before I got home. I stopped for a coffee at the Tim Horton's in Beaverton, about halfway home, then continued up towards the Bolsover cutoff which, as I said, turned me due East. I made that turn somewhere around 9:15pm. The lightning was continuing off to my left, North of me. As I made the turn, I looked ahead and saw...

The moon. It had just risen above the horizon. It was 'waning gibbous', which means it's a couple of days past full, but it was that dusky orange colour that one relates to the 'harvest moon', its colour reminiscent of the brilliant fall foliage. It was about 3 times the size of the normal moon (it looks so much bigger when it's right on the horizon) and it was directly in line with the road, so it looked like I was driving right to it.

I thought about pulling over and taking a picture. I thought that if I turned my high beams on, I could illuminate the road ahead around the same brightness but there was no way I could do it. I was captivated by the scene evolving in front of me.

I drive a Subaru Forester. It's a stable, safe cocoon in the windiest, snowiest, blusteriest days. I was about the only car on the road and it was like floating in some sort of time and space machine along a thread of road, flying toward the moon. Not just for a moment, either: for a solid 10 minutes or so! And to top it off, every now and then, the world was split by a lightning bolt to my left, although I could still see the moon and stars. After a while, the moon rose a bit higher and wisps of cloud appeared across its face and eventually it was hidden from view. By now, the storm was further East and the moon was replaced by brilliant flashes of lightning that illuminated the whole sky and detailed the clouds above and ahead of me. Not just a little arc of sky, the whole world in front of me!

At Coboconk, when I turned North, the rain started to come down. Soon I had the wipers on high, and my high beams lit the rain which appeared to be coming down in sheets of big fat water globules. If it had been colder, I would have thought I was in a snow shower but no, it was just heavy, huge raindrops. As I turned into my driveway half an hour later, the rain stopped as if someone had flipped a switch and when I looked up, stars!

You had to be there. There aren't words to describe the experience. I wish someone had been with me to share it with. Maybe with this writeup, I managed to convey the magic of the drive. As I said, the only images I have are buried in my mind.

I want to share some new pictures with you.

Last week, my friend Ron called me and asked me to help out with a shoot he was doing, some portraits. I had this picture at the time of my last post, but couldn't share it until I received permission, which I now have. I brought strobes and stands and reflectors and backdrops... Ron brought his D3S! He did the serious shooting, I handheld my D300 to test the lighting setup but captured this image while Ron was doing something else! I asked the young lad to look at his mom and it worked! Here:

By the way, if you want teeth like hers, contact Dr. Ron Goodlin. That's what this shoot was about... Ron's a phenomenal photographer and an even better dentist! Lighting was with 3 studio strobes — two with umbrellas and one (the hairlight) open with barn doors. The large muslin backdrop should have been a bit more out of focus but this is just as it came out of the camera, no Photoshop at all! OK, I'm lying. Well, sort of — I used some negative clarity control in Lightroom, with an adjustment brush limiting its scope to the ladies' faces.

The studio stuff is for sale for a very reasonable price. I just don't use them enough and would rather have a new lens! Contact me.

Last weekend, I did some more fall colours. Here are a few images.

Everyone else does a "red leaf on a wet rock" (I got a laugh watching Judith do it at Buttermilk Falls: exactly like Shannon and Linda did a couple of years ago!). Just to be different, I did a "red and yellow leaf on a log". I didn't put it there, I swear! It was there! It was!
This weekend, I was with Rosa, my artist friend. She hates my HDR's. She says I use my Left Brain and take all the emotion and feeling out of my shots with all that hi-tech post processing pixel manipulation. So here are a couple of non-manipulated images that show what it really looked like out there. It was a dreary damp day and I think these images convey that feeling.

Is she right? I think she might be. I'm working on formulating my goals for the Gales of November shoot on Lake Superior (Wow! Only 2 weeks away!) and this might form part of them. Stay tuned!

A Perfect Day

2011-10-09T01:37:00.000-04:00

Today I had a great day. Indian Summer is here, the temperature was 24°C, the sun was shining. I decided to go for a ride, back up to Algonquin Park. Well, almost to the park — my destination was Ragged Falls just west of the Park on Highway 60. It's 68km from my door on one of the nicest riding roads in Ontario.

My motorcycle friends would understand that I was throttle steering all the way through the sweeping turns, really into the ride. I wish I had a helmet cam so I could share the great colours and wonderful weather. Next year, it's on the list. Around every corner, over every hill was another vista... I must have asked myself if I should stop for pictures over 100 times. I hung in there and waited until I was on the way home. Here's a shot from Dorset:

Ragged falls was interesting. I worked my way up a trail that took me below the main part of the falls. It was quite a challenging hike, mostly because of my knees. I was very careful climbing down a rock face. I took a number of pictures then looked up and saw this up near the top of the falls:

Waterfalls are interesting, cute girls taking their clothes off are more interesting. She didn't, though. Just waded out near the top of the falls. She had a couple of little dogs with her that she took out as well.

Here's another shot from the same spot. I did a long exposure with the ND filter but didn't like it. I have a whole bunch more to process, you'll find them on my Smugmug site eventually...

On the way home, I stopped several times for pictures. It's more difficult on the bike because you have to untie the camera bag, not just pick up a camera off the seat. Here's one from Highway 35:

Again I have lots more images to process! These were my favourites.

Yesterday was interesting too: I stopped in Norland on the way home from Toronto and caught this Pileated Woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus) doing her thing on top of a hydro pole:

I wasn't sure if it was a male or female, so I looked it up on the National Geographic website: my picture is better than theirs! Theirs is on a tree, though. This is a pretty tight crop — I couldn't get closer — and a testament to the sharpness of the Nikkor 70-200 VR lens.

As long as we're going backwards in time, these are from a few days ago.

The first shot is just off Highway 35, the second one is on Buckslide Road. I'm planning to go back there tomorrow: just around the bend from this shot is another great scene.

So I wasn't going to shoot colours this fall. But how can you help it? These vistas are all around! Stay tuned...

By the way, it's been an interesting week: there's a bunch of new equipment here which needs review, and a saga about Bell Canada you'll enjoy. You have to be patient — I'm too tired to write about it now!

Algonquin Park Excursion

2011-10-03T12:58:00.002-04:00

I joined about 30 photographers in a Richmond Hill Camera Club excursion to Algonquin Park. First of all, thanks to Larry Rezka and B.Dass for putting it together — these things are a lot of work and it often goes unappreciated. I enjoyed everyone's company, especially Liz (who stayed at my place and is an awesome cook!) and Ron, whose insights and humour are infectious.

The excursion itself was marred only by Mother Nature's lack of cooperation... to a certain extent. Saturday was actually too bright and sunny, and Sunday brought a balanced cloudy/sunny sky, but no really nice dawn (for which I got out of bed at 5:00 am!). The leaf colours were not there yet. There were some, and although it appeared that they hadn't peaked yet, there were some areas where we could see bare trees. Perhaps the lack of bright reds was because all those leaves were already down! Oh well, more to come up here, that's why I live in the Highlands!

I didn't actually shoot any colours. I focused on two things: moving water, using my new Neutral Density filter, and on some texture shots. I was somewhat disappointed in my efforts, but it was a good practice run for the Gales of November excursion coming up in a month. More to say about the ND filter on my Technical Blog. It really doesn't fix sunny/shade scenes... and I learned more about composition this weekend.

Here are a couple of ND shots:

This is the top of Ragged Falls which is technically not in Algonquin Park, but just outside it. It's a 30 second exposure taken with the ND filter, but I had to enhance it with Topaz to make it look half decent.

The main portion of the falls. It's hard to get this perspective: you have to get over the fence and near to the edge to shoot it. FWIW, my tripod feet are just outside the bottom edge of the picture, just a couple of inches from the edge. Processed almost the same way as the previous image. It was hard to think of different ways to shoot these falls. Perhaps on another day.

I did what I call "Texture Shots" at the old Logging Museum. Here are a few:

Logs hand split and hewn for making a log house. These are done the old way, as it was 100 years ago. A typical structure is in the background.

This was the door handle on a log cabin purportedly from the turn of the last century. You can see the hand work on the lower wood block and tool marks on the door planks. I find it amazing that smooth planks can be turned out using primitive tools. There's a hand built house in the Bancroft area that I'm hoping to get permission to shoot, much more awesome than this.
The handle, however, is screwed onto the door with a Phillips head screw which wasn't invented until the late 1930's...

Ship's wheel. This was in the wheelhouse of a boat used for logging 100 years ago. I loved the textures, and the patina on the wood. This is cropped out of a shot of the whole wheel which I like too, but I wanted to zoom in and show just this portion.

We stopped twice at the same spot. A small turnout on Smoke Lake, just off Highway 60. I was taken with the textures of the trees and roots and rocks. The second time we were there was at Dawn on Sunday (we couldn't find the rest of the group). Here are two similar dawn photos (I couldn't decide which one I liked better!).

5-shot HDR's processed using Photomatix Pro and tweaked with various other pieces of software and plug-ins in Photoshop.

One annoyance that I will share here, in the hope that you do not see yourself here and if you do, you'll take steps to correct it. I was setting up to take these shots, or similar ones a few minutes later and a van pulled up in the little turnout. About 5 people piled out of the van, cameras in hand, to take pictures here. I will NOT share their ethnicity, I'll leave it up to your imagination. The spit of land I was photographing was probably 10 or 12 feet wide, there's nothing but water off to the right in the above picture. They jostled past me, I had to protect my tripod to prevent it from getting knocked over, and proceeded to walk out on the rocks beyond the trees, sit down and take pictures, without a single word of excuse or apology, or any thought of asking me if I was done and if they would be interfering with my shot. By the way, the exact same thing happened the first time we stopped there, and I had to yell at the guy to stay out of my shot when he blithely walked in front of my camera. I found these people to be extraordinarily rude and self-centred. I packed up my camera and we left. Think about it next time you shoot where there are a bunch of other photographers.

The best spot on the excursion, in my opinion, was Ragged Falls. I'll be visiting back there again more than once, possibly in winter too: I'd like to see what it looks like with snow all around. It will be a challenge getting to the same vantage point, though.

Back soon!

— 30 —

Fall Colours and other exciting stuff

2011-09-27T15:06:00.000-04:00

I've lived up here in the Haliburton Highlands for 4 years now. You would think I'd be getting bored with and tired of the scenery up here. Think again. Every year there are new and exciting things to capture. This year in particular, now that my eyes are open in a different way, there are some awesome images out there.
First of all, the colours this year are outstanding. I don't think I've ever seen reds as rich and vibrant. And it's early! Still another week to go before the colour peaks. I feel sorry for those who live in places with less variable seasons, they don't get to see this:

This was at Wren Lake just south of Dorset on Highway 35. This is an HDR, but only to enhance the sky! This is how it really looked.

I did use HDR for this shot (same place) but believe it or not, to TONE DOWN the bright colours. They make your eyes hurt!

Janie's dock up on Kushog Lake. at sunset.

At the Minden Wildwater Preserve. I will admit to manipulating this one, I applied the "Indian Summer" filter in Nik Color Efex Pro to enhance the golden glow

This is an extra special photo. It was magic. This is NOT MANIPULATED, it was the way we saw it. Driving by on 35 enroute to Toronto around 9am, I looked left and there it was. As the car rolled 30 feet more, it was gone. You had to be looking directly up-sun to see the rimlighting on the trees.

If you're a photographer and you want to know how to do this kind of pictures in the middle of a sunny day, click here to go to my technical blog and learn how. If you're NOT a photographer, click there anyway: there are some more interesting images for you to see!
This weekend, we're going to Algonquin Park. Look for more georgeous fall photos next week!

— 30 —

I've never been skunked...

2011-09-21T18:45:00.000-04:00

Ha! Well I got your attention, didn't I? But it's true! You just have to let me finish my sentence! I'll do that in a couple of minutes, a bit further down.

New Stuff
I'm getting a couple of new goodies! Well it was my birthday, and I decided to buy myself a few things. One of them is the Wacom Intuos4 Digitizer tablet. I've been using a tablet for a couple of years and can never go back. But the one I have is the little "Bamboo" and while it's excellent, it doesn't live up to the professional standard that the Intuos does. The second thing is a fixed 10-stop Neutral Density filter which will allow me to do waterfalls and other moving water long time exposures. If you've followed my blog, you might remember that I bought a variable, adjustable ND filter and I was being a cheapskate and bought a lousy one. This time I didn't compromise, and I got the German-made B&W filter brought to you by the wonderful folks who make glass for Leica (I think...). I also ordered a proper sensor cleaning kit — I've been rather negligent in that area up to now. And finally, I'm going to buy a new TV. I don't need a big fancy one, just a regular $400 flatscreen. I thought my eyes were going on me: but Rosa was watching TV with me a couple of days ago and asked if I realized that my TV was all fuzzy! It's that time — I've had this Sony Trinitron for probably close to 20 years!

I do need a new laptop computer, but I decided that would have to wait a bit. Ditto those lenses I've been looking for. I've squirrelled away some money for the lenses, but not enough. I'd still like to sell my studio strobe lights, that would help! Anyone interested? Send me an email.

What else is new?
Not that much. As I said a couple of posts ago, I've been trying to participate in life instead of just observing it, if that makes any sense. I'm trying to do some meaningful things with my photography. Rosa (she's the artist friend I mentioned a while ago) bought me a couple of wonderful art books and I'm diligently but slowly working my way through them. That said, my images aren't art yet... by my definition. I'll get there. I'm still stuck in HDR mode but there's the occasional flash of other stuff seeping through. I am working on a couple of new Blurb books, hopefully I'll be able to get something printed before Christmas. I'll tell you more in a little while.

So here are a couple of images from the past couple of weeks (still waiting for the 'skunked' thing? Be patient!)

This is a really old image. It dates back to 2007 but I reworked it a few days ago, after looking at that F800 rider's Montana picture (I still haven't been able to get in touch with him). I used the "cutout" filter in Photoshop CS5 to simplify it.

This is a digital painting from an image shot a couple of weeks ago on the Lake. The sky was plain white, so I added the textures (and the matching reflection in the water) and then did the whole thing as a watercolor in Photoshop. Technically it was an HDR at one point...

Last weekend I participated in the NAPP September Rally competition. Two of the categories were "Low Key" (underexposed) and "High key" (overexposed) and my submissions are above. I actually like the second one a lot and you'll see it in my book on the Haliburton Highlands!

All right, all right. The "skunked" thing. No, I didn't get sprayed, it's an expression that comes from Cribbage and Backgammon. It means to lose, big time!

Whenever I drag myself out of bed and go out to shoot at dawn, I ALWAYS come back with at least one image that I like. I've never been skunked. It's an effort to get out there but it's worth it every time. Last night I heard that there were supposed to be 'fog patches'. So even though I didn't go to bed until after 2am, I happened to wake up momentarily at a little before 6:30 and I said, "what the Hell" and got up.

I drove over to Janie's house on Kushog Lake. She said I could shoot there when I wanted to (thanks, Janie!). And here are a few images from this morning, hot off the presses!

"Red Canoe on Dock". Kind of an overused cliché, but it works! HDR done with Nik HDR Efex Pro.

A few minutes later, the sky coloured up. Not as intense as this, but hey, that's what Topaz and Nik Color Efex Pro are for!

This little island was quite far away, so it's a bit of a crop. By painting it, I minimized any unsharp effect due to the finished size.

And finally, down on Janie's beach, I wanted to capture the mist in the distance, the dock and boat, and the detail of the sand and rocks on the beach. The wide angle lens is ideal for this. I used Photomatix Pro to render the HDR toning, then Nik Color Efex Pro and a bunch of control points to achieve the effect I was looking for.

So that's it. I'm going to bed early tonight! Only 4 hours of sleep last night. The fall colours are starting up here (we're at around 20%) and next week is our trip to Algonquin Park! Watch for some cool seasonal shots.

— 30 —

Milestones passed

2011-09-12T14:28:00.000-04:00

I'm officially a senior citizen. Yes, folks, I am now in my 66th year on the planet and while trips around the sun should not be of any significance, I do feel different after this one. Imagine! The Canadian Government is going to pay me every month, as long as I keep breathing!

Other People's Stuff.
In a bit of a departure for me, I'm going to show you some other people's stuff. Now I won't post anyone else's pictures, especially without permission, but I am going to point you at a couple of websites that I know you'll enjoy.

The first one is a website gallery called "1X.com". Go there. Look at the photos. There are literally THOUSANDS of outstanding images. When I first looked through it, my immediate reaction was to sell my camera, because I'll never be that good. Any category, I dare you (BTW there is a "fine arts nudes" category which requires you to read a disclaimer to see the images. You can turn that off in 'settings' after you join).

You don't have to join 1X to see the images. But you have to if you want to submit images for their consideration. They specifically say that 95% of submitted images are rejected. A free membership entitles you to upload one image/week for consideration: I sent them my wasp picture last week and haven't heard back.

There's a bit of a story behind the second site. I was surfing around in anticipation of the Gales of November workshop in a couple of months, and I went to Google Images and searched for "Michipicoten River Light". We were staying at the Rock Island Lodge which is located at the mouth of the Michipicoten where it empties into Lake Superior at Wawa. Anyway, my image came up first but as I looked further, the 14th image looked familiar: it was a shot of the boathouse at the lodge, so i clicked on it. It took me to a web forum called f800riders.org, which is for BMW F800GS motorcyclists. Coincidence! I almost bought one of those but ended up with a Kawasaki KLR650 (much less expensive!).

Anyway, that picture is part of a Twitter trip journal from 2009 by a motorcyclist/photographer whose nickname is f800gecko. I've tried to contact him, without success so far. I invite you to read his journal by clicking this link. "Why?", you may ask. Not only are his photographs outstanding, but the man is a talented writer. Each post is one or two sentences long — necessitated by the Twitter format — and each one is poignant and well phrased.

Scroll down to a little below the halfway point. You'll find a post, "Once I crested a rise and felt my mouth fall open at the scene before me. It is a place that draws an ancient human feeling from within one's depths and puts the taste of it on your tongue..."
and below it a picture taken in Montana that I find incredible. One day, when I grow up, I want to be able to take pictures like that. If anyone knows who this person is, please send me his email address.

Anyway, here's a mixed bag of some images I took last week and weekend. Enjoy!

15-shot panoramic at Grass Lake, Highway 118 on the way to Haliburton. The sky really did look like that so I stopped for some pictures. I took 5 bracketed photos, then moved the camera to the next position and did it again. And again. Then I created 3 overlapping HDR images and merged them in Photoshop. They didn't want to merge correctly, so that portion took some effort!

While I was there, I took this single burst of 5 images and merged them in Nik HDR Efex. After importing into Photoshop, I opened Nik Color Efex Pro and looked through the presets. This one is called "Indian Summer" and it did an amazing job of converting green vegetation to fall colours. This is what it's going to look like in a few weeks!

Last weekend was the "Open Canoe" whitewater race at the Minden Wildwater Preserve, one of my favourite venues. I used my 12mm super wide angle lens and got up close and personal with the competitors. I was about 4 feet away when I shot this image. I used Topaz Adjust to bring out the details.

This was taken standing on the rock to the left of the previous image, looking down on the canoe. Same lens. However I told Lightroom that i had a Sigma 8mm fisheye lens on the camera so I added some distortion to give the shot an interesting perspective.

My real estate agent emailed me about a house that had come up for sale. It sounded interesting, so I wandered by after leaving the whitewater on Sunday. The bank is about to foreclose on this one, so it's likely going to go for a deal! It's a custom built log house, 2 stories, 3BR/2B with a full basement, covered deck in front, fireplace on 3 acres of nicely wooded land. Outbuildings include a storage shed, a gazebo and a sauna. There's a pond and a stream... water is very low right now so the pond is a bit stagnant and the stream is barely a trickle. If this house were on a lakefront or a riverfront, I'd be making an offer. Beautiful property, well-maintained. This is an HDR processed in Photomatix Pro.

Here's the sauna, about 50' from the house and right on the pond (to the right). Very, very nice. Again I ran the HDR image in Photomatix Pro, then took it into Photoshop and used Nik Silver Efex Pro to do the black-and-white conversion. Then I painted the colour back in on a layer mask.

Anyway, that was my week in pictures. Catch you soon!

— 30 —

Don't Leave Home without It!

2011-08-31T03:41:00.002-04:00

What's "IT"? Your camera, of course.

I'll talk about that in a few minutes. But first, here's what I did on Sunday...

I took my grandson Ryan (and son-in-law Richard) up to my friend Clinton's "Canadian Motorcycle Training School" in Horseshoe Valley near Barrie. He's 12 years old as I write this (it's Wednesday Morning, 3AM. A song title!) and it's his second visit here. If you're at all interested, this is one of the most fun and challenging things you can do. AND, Clinton teaches kids as young as 6 years old! As a motorcycle instructor, I'm awed by the fact that he gets people riding within a few moments! CMTS supplies EVERYTHING — not only the bike but they outfit you from head to toe. Check them out here: www.cmts.org

Ryan, the "Power Ranger"! Outfitted from head to toe in proper safety gear (without the helmet for the picture, of course). This is a heavily processed HDR which gives the impression he should be riding a futuristic vehicle from Star Wars!

Here's a shot of Clinton teaching a couple of really small kids to ride ATV's. Their siblings — not much bigger — were on motorcycles!

Ryan was riding a Yamaha TTR-125L — one of the bikes we used to use to teach adults to ride on the street at Humber College. The challenge: this bike has a clutch and manual transmission. It didn't take Ryan long to learn how to use it and to shift gears. They put him in the same class as Richard, and treated him like an adult.

Instructor Dave Barr coaching Ryan on how to use the clutch and shift gears. Dave used to work with me at Humber College but now teaches closer to home at CMTS.
Richard had a shorter learning curve. Being a pilot, snowmobiler and all-around power sports enthusiast, he took to the dirt bike very naturally. He demonstrated a pretty high skill level for someone who had never been on a bike before.

Again a pretty heavy level of HDR toning. One image, processed with Topaz Adjust. I also used Nik Viveza 2 to tone down the green background. I never tried it before — it's a pretty impressive program.

Here's Ryan bombing around the track at CMTS. I swear the guy he's chasing is a Star Wars Storm Trooper! Richard managed to get 'air' off that bump Ryan's just past. I got a few pictures, but you'll have to go to my gallery to see them. Special border effects done with Nik Color Efex Pro, emulating an old Polaroid picture (looks better on a white background).

In order to get these pictures, I had to ride my KLR 650 out to the track, down a few hundred meters of dirt path. I was a little nervous with my camera pack on my back, I really didn't want to fall. I almost lost it once or twice when my front wheel dug into some soft sand... the KLR's a heavy bike. I'm really a useless offroad rider and I'm afraid to take the training with my knee and leg problems. I rode about 90 minutes each way from my house to CMTS and my legs are still sore 2 days later.

Now: don't leave home without your camera!

Today I went for an afternoon walk and took my camera with me as usual. I left the pack at home and just took the camera, with the 70-200 lens mounted. I spent a few minutes on my dock, lamenting the fact that the water levels in the lake have been lowered to the point where the dock is entirely out of the water. Then I walked further along the road. About 75m further, I happened to glance in a tree and there was a humungous wasp nest. Not a lot of activity, so I ventured closer for a better look.

The blended colours and textures of the nest are exactly what I've been studying as I head towards picking up a paintbrush for the first time. It looks like something a master artist would create. I got as close as I dared with the 70-200 lens — probably 8-10 feet away. Bracing it on a tree so that I could stop down a little bit, I captured this shot. I love it!

Apparently, these are "Baldfaced Hornets" (Dolichovespula maculata — Google is your friend!). 200mm, ISO=640, 1/100 second, f/8. I used every trick I know to carefully sharpen the insect, but i used Topaz Adjust 'simplify' on the nest to blend the colours

So when I say, "don't leave home without a camera", now you know what I mean!

— 30 —

I'm Baaaaack!

2011-08-20T22:08:00.005-04:00

Another 3 week absence. My email is clogged with "where are you?" and "why haven't you written anything?" and "Are you OK? Did you fall off the Earth?" type messages. I guess I needed some down time to reflect on where I am and where I'm going.

I actually spent some time with real human beings. Not cybernerds, not pixelheads. Well sort of — in between 3 motorcycle courses, swimming and biking and other stuff, I sat on a dock, watched the sunset and talked about non-photographic stuff. I enjoyed a whole new level of interaction that didn't involve a camera and with minimal computer time. I also met a new person who is influencing my life to a degree. Some stuff I won't share on a blog, but there is an interesting dimension. She's an artist. I'm about that far from picking up a paintbrush. Yes, a real one, not wired through my Wacom tablet.

For the past two weeks, I didn't pick up a single photo book or magazine (well that all stopped last weekend, but...). Instead, I looked through a thick tome of Group of Seven paintings, a book of Picasso's work... and just viewed the world differently. My perspective is changing. I don't know if I'm ready to put it into effect, but I'm slowly trying.

My artist friend told me, "stop thinking about composition. About f/stops and shutter speeds. In fact, stop thinking. Just do what comes naturally". In my defense, that's what I've been trying to do! Her point is, "stop trying, do it!" It's hard to put in words what she's taught me. Once, we pulled over to the side of the road for a long discussion about colour blends and complements, and she showed me a patch of sand and some grass and how the light blended them... hope I can get it.

You tell me whether you see a change in my work. Not today or tomorrow, over time. I'm heading in a new direction.

Back to reality. We visited the Minden Cultural Centre one afternoon. There's an art gallery (yeah, well — a daily drawing of a teapot doesn't turn me on), and some 19th century buildings. HDR material: here are a couple of shots.

The focal point is the bright orange cupola on the schoolhouse. I tried to lead your eye there with the sidewalk. Great dramatic sky
don't you think?

Inside the schoolhouse. I think the desks are on skids so the curator can move them around more easily. There was a similar picture chosen as "Editor's Choice" on the NAPP portfolio site this week
I like mine better!

Last weekend, I spent a few days with some really good photographers and friends. Whenever I do that, I somehow end up with some interesting images. Here are a few of them, starting with the mundane and progressing to the 'cool' side.

We spent several hours photographing the "Thunder on the Grand" boat races in Dunnville. Here are two of my favourites:

I shot almost everything at a slow shutter speed. This one was extreme: 1/15 second. I wanted to achieve an abstract motion blur.

This was also at a slow shutter speed – 1/125 second. My friends were shooting at 1/1000 second to freeze the action. By panning, I captured a sharp image of the boat and the motion blur of the background. He was travelling at almost 100 mph.

Kids in a Candy Store. I couldn't resist. Imagine their expressions, and what was going through their minds.

Lake Erie on a moody day. Although Photomatix HDR and Topaz Adjust toning added texture and sharpness (well softness in the sky), this is much more effective in black-and-white than in colour.

The final image for today is another HDR, but the lightning has been artificially added. I read a tutorial on how to create it on the NAPP site and this is my first attempt. I'll write it up on my technical blog in a bit, but if you're a NAPP member, you can watch Corey's video yourself.

These last two images are works in progress. The lightning shot especially: it doesn't look real yet. The concept is there, but execution is not. Still, it's interesting and a way to spice up a sky. I plan to do some more work on them so stay tuned!

— 30 —

I can't believe it's been almost a month

2011-08-02T00:18:00.001-04:00

Where has time gone? I've been enjoying myself this July, visiting with friends, spending time with special projects and working my buns off teaching in the 50 degree heat. So not a lot of images to share, but I do have a few.

This is my cousin's band, FOG (Four Old Guys). Their first CD is entitled "Eye of the Storm" and I thought this would make a nice cover photo.

Janie's nieces Melanie and Taylor. A little cosmetics in Photoshop (not needed, these are very beautiful girls) and a vignette blur in Nik Color Efex pro. You can't take a bad picture with the 70-200 f/2.8

Janie's son David waterskiing on Lake Kushog

At Furnace Falls near Kinmount. There's something about this picture I like (other than the svelte young female in the black bikini). I tried cropping the photo, but the pail and stick in the foreground really help the image.

HDR image taken at Furnace Falls. Three shots, with the
variable ND filter on the wide angle lens.

Notice all of my pictures have people in them? A departure for me! Anyway, here's one without.

Also at Furnace Falls. BW conversion by Nik Silver Efex pro.

Happy Canada Day Weekend!

2011-07-05T15:36:00.002-04:00

It was a great weekend, perfect weather, lots of activity! I didn't actually shoot a lot of pictures, but what I did was interesting. At least I think so!

Before I show some to you: a few people actually asked me where that 'quote' was from in the last blog. Shame on you! "Elwood: It's 106 miles to Chicago, we got a full tank of gas, half a pack of cigarettes, it's dark... and we're wearing sunglasses." Blues Brothers. {sigh}.

OK, now some pictures. The Red Umbrella Inn had their grand opening on Saturday and I went over to shoot a few pictures. The guitarist from the featured band saw my camera and told me his photographer didn't show up, would I like to shoot some pictures for them? Oh, okay...

This band had hired a professional stage/lighting/sound company. They set up an incredible array of lights. The concert was outdoors, at night, and all the lighting came from the spots up above. All computer controlled, too! Concert lighting is a bitch. odd colours, fluctuating levels, tough! I got a few pictures I sort of liked, here's a couple:

Could be an album cover, right?

I told you the lighting was a challenge! This was in fact an outdoor shoot but those aren't stars, it's noise which I enhanced in PS. I had to shoot most of the evening at ISO 1600!

But here's the pièce de résistance: I did a montage with the two performers. Each image was treated separately with Topaz and/or Nik Color Efex Pro, and I think it worked!

OK, now picture this: it's an outdoor concert up in the Haliburton Highlands at the beginning of July. In the evening. So there are about 200 people and about 30,000 of these guys!

Attribution: trebol-a at flickr

I only shot one set. Do you know how hard it is to frame and compose a picture when you're getting eaten alive?

I ran back in the house and a few minutes later, heard and saw some fireworks. Again, i only ran out and shot a few pictures before being driven back home. Here's one:

All the fireworks were launched from a boat just off the dock. I stood on the dock, which is free-floating, and rocked every time someone took a step. Furthermore, all the fireworks came from the same spot, so I moved the camera between bursts (with the shutter open). Interesting effect!
Workshops:
I'm not saying it's on hold because it isn't. Problem is, I don't have any free weekends for a while, with work at Humber, guests coming up to visit and a photo trip in a month or so. I have to work it out! Watch this space, and the photography.to site for updates.

-- 30 --

It's June. I'm 180 km from home, it's not dark yet and I'm not wearing sunglasses. Also I don't smoke.

2011-06-24T18:58:00.002-04:00

Surely you know where that title sort of comes from...

Did you miss me? I've been kind of busy chasing my tail and doing all kinds of non-photographic stuff, so I didn't have much to blog about. Some people will argue that I still don't...

Well I did take time out to submit some photos for a competition on the NAPP forum and, wonder of all wonders, I won! It's all about being creative on demand and while I won't win any prizes for technical or artistic expertise, I did manage to capture what they were looking for. Here's the deal.

Every month, a list of three (this month it was four) topics is posted. You have 72 hours to shoot pictures, two more days to process and submit them and two days to vote on your favourites. so among the pictures submitted, mine was the favourite in two categories and I was the overall winner. My prize? Well the ongoing adulation of my peers, a certain amount of ribbing which this blog is likely to evoke, and the task of choosing categories for next month's competition.

Without further ado, here they are:

Topic: Wood, Woods or Woody

This one did NOT win. I kind of liked it for the wide angle perspective, the sun, the composition. Not too many others did, I guess.

Topic: Floating

This was a winner. Shot at the Minden Wildwater Preserve, one of my favourite venues. The paddler was concentrating on staying put in the whitewater eddy. Lighting was a challenge, what to expose for? The bright sunlit water, the kayak, the paddler's face? I chose the water, then used a gradient and a blur vignette in Nik Colour Efex to keep the eye on the paddler, and I opened up the exposure on the face by dodging in Lightroom.

Topic: Summer Bliss

I waited quite a while at the Kawartha Dairy in Minden, for someone to order a large icecream. Nobody did. Believe it or not, this is what they call a "Small". There has to be a litre of icecream there. Amazing how only skinny people can eat like this without feeling exceedingly guilty. The effects were produced with NIK Silver Efex. Unfortunately, this did not gain the admiration of the group and was not a winner. PS: I did have an icecream while I was there, but a "baby" size which is only one scoop. A large, is 3 scoops!

Topic: Vanishing Point

This was almost an afterthought. I first tried to zoom my lens with the shutter open, shooting a decrepit shack in the trees but then I got the idea for this shot. I did enhance the texture with Topaz Adjust, and then got the idea of cropping it this way to make the viewer's eye move along the diagonal to the vanishing point. Mikey liked it, it won!

Anyway, there's a little challenge every month and you have to be a NAPP member to log into the forums. I find it a great right-brain stretching exercise. Join in! Everyone can play.

I'm sort of in 'teaching mode'. I thought I'd share some things I've been working on. Lately I've been working on my composition skills. So I've been cognizant of what I'm looking at through the viewfinder. It does pay off, I think! Here are some other pictures for you to (hopefully) enjoy.

Canola Field 1

Canola fields are such an eyecatching bright yellow! I love looking at them but I'm never sure how to photograph them. This time I stopped, walked into the field with the wide angle lens and composed this shot. Full depth of field, a triangular shape upper left, high horizon, some interesting structure in the sky.

Canola Field 2

It's all about the colour. I enhanced the colours in this image (well, images -- it's obviously an HDR). Again, I followed the landscape rule of focus from front to back, the tree divides the image in the golden ratio proportion, the horizon is low to feature the sky.

Focus Stacking

This Iris image is a composite of 6 exposures processed in Photoshop. The technique is called "Focus Stacking". Each of the images focuses on a different area of the flower and Photoshop CS5 does an extraordinary job of seamlessly merging them together. Technically, focus stacking is supposed to be done with a macro lens on a rail with measured steps between focus planes: but check this out: these shots were taken with my 70-200 f/2.8 lens wide open and manually refocused between shots. I'm going to write this up in the technical blog soon -- it's a great technique to use when you want to selectively focus areas of an image. The vignette effect was produced with NIK Color Efex Pro.

Back to my favourite technique -- HDR's. These shots were both 'cooked' with Photomatix Pro and enhanced with Topaz adjust.

"Something Old..."

1938 Dodge Pickup truck. Taken at the Kawartha Dairy while waiting for a good ice cream shot as mentioned above. 5-shot HDR, a light standard and a fire hydrant removed with content-aware tools in CS5, as was a passenger in the truck! The sky was added in: it was a featureless bright blue that day, so I took the sky from another shot and layered it in.

"...something New"

Ferrari. Red, of course. Taken at the Vaughan Hospital fundraising motorcycle ride. Oh, look! Same sky! Actually this was where I got the sky for the previous shot. Some people tell me my HDR's are "overcooked". Perhaps. But I like them...

One last topic. I know this blog is getting overly lengthy, but it has been 2 weeks!

I'm putting together some workshops. I plan to do the first session for free, then work in some additional sessions which hopefully people will be interested enough in to pay me something for my time and expertise. Not to mention my extraordinary teaching skills...

Here's the card I prepared for posting on local bulletin boards. I'm working on setting a date for the first session, probably mid-July. Watch this space, and check the photography.to website (nothing up there yet as I write this) soon for more details.

What do you think?

-- 30 --

Devastating Tornado in Minden Ontario

2011-06-09T21:59:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, a devastating tornado touched down in a retirement community just South of Minden Ontario. Here are a few images captured less than 24 hours afterwards.

Although Environment Canada hasn't actually admitted that it was a tornado, the residents know it was. One elderly gentleman, who told me he was a padre in the Canadian Forces during the Korean war and is an 80-year old retired cleric said he was in his back yard and saw it coming. It tore up the street one over from his house and although he said he couldn't see a twister per se, there was no doubt in his mind that's what it was. This house was a few doors away from his:

Just across the street was this house. The gentleman who owned it told me that his wife, who was hearing impaired, was laying down on a couch when the storm brought a tree crashing through his roof which threw her off the couch. As far as he knows, her injuries are limited to some minor contusions, but she is recovering in Minden Hospital.

These workers are working out how to seal the damaged building from the weather. It's likely that the insurance company will write off the house, but the contents still need to be protected.

By the way, most of the residents here are elderly retirees. The houses are typically modular homes. Some people were very aware of what had transpired, such as this scooter-enabled gentleman who shook his head and told me, "third time in 3 years".

This lady, though was not the only one for whom life went on. Somewhat in a daze, she was out doing her gardening; pruning her lilac tree and raking the debris on her grass. Her house was spared, but she was oblivious to all the devastation around her.

This was not on the same order of magnitude as the recent tornadoes in the American midwest, nor of course the Japanese earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Despite the fact that there was no direct loss of life, these people's lives were uprooted along with their precious trees.

An interesting sidebar: I live about 15 km North of this site. I had actually taken my camera and tripod down to the lakeside when I saw a line of heavy rain, presumably accompanied by lightning, approaching on the Intellicast weather map. I did NOT get any lightning pictures and although it got windy, it didn't even blow the big umbrella I had brought with me inside out. Just a few kilometers south: a tornado. By the way, the trees that surround my property are the same as the ones torn down in the photos. I have a few of them over 50' high and more than 4 or 5 feet in diameter. If one came down, my house would be gone. Sobering thought...

You can see the entire sequence of images on my Smugmug site in this gallery. I prepared them for submission to various news agencies, so they have been reduced in size. Also there has been ABSOLUTELY NO POST PROCESSING or manipulation: they are exactly as they came out of the camera. Enjoy!

— 30 —

A quiet week in the North country

2011-06-06T07:58:00.001-04:00

Late spring is clearly upon us. The weather is great, it's very green out there, and the mosquitoes are back. The good news is that the black flies are pretty well gone, though. I actually sat out in the screen tent having dinner last night but I have to break out the citronella candle. Although there were only a few mosquitoes around, they were hungry!

Yesterday morning I saw the sunlight singling out a dandelion puffball in front of the house: the background was in shade but the flower was in sun. I moved around to where it would be backlit and shot this image

Shot with the 70-200 lens wide open, so it had a very shallow depth of field. I used the soft outer part to frame the crisp centre of the image. This was stopped down more than one stop to hold the detail in the bright areas.

It's been a quiet week for me, focusing on work and not much else. I did get out yesterday though. The most exciting thing was buying a new shower head at the Haliburton Home Show. On the way home, I came across Bambi and his sister out playing in traffic on Highway 118.

I stopped and tracked them for a bit and got a couple of interesting pictures.

These are obviously young, probably year-old deer. Just because they are not mature-sized and because they have very little fear and were much more intent on eating the tasty foliage than on me. This is a full-frame shot with the 200mm so I was about 50 feet away.

I shot the picture at f/2.8. I generally set the camera at that opening so that I can capture shots like that without having to worry about shutter speed, then I dial it down later if I have time. Because of that, the little doe in the foreground is not in perfect focus, so I had to take it into Photoshop and tweak it a bit. That's all I did to it, though — this is exactly what I saw through the viewfinder.

Because the focus wasn't the best, I decided to do a version of the shot without her there and used the magic of Content-Aware-Fill in Photoshop CS5 to remove her. I cleaned up the distracting branches at upper left and cropped the image slightly to get this final image. I kind of like it — you?

That's it for today. Hopefully I'll have some new images for you later in the week. There's a female ruby-throated hummingbird hanging around my hummingbird feeder (haven't seen the more colourful male yet. The flowers are just starting to open in the garden so maybe he'll show up soon).

— 30 —

Get out of your comfort zone!

2011-05-26T02:14:00.003-04:00

I’ve said it often enough: I take great pictures of Rocks and Trees. I don’t take people pictures, I don’t do events. Well last weekend I decided to try something different. I’m glad I did, because I got my creative juices flowing.

I've started shooting more pictures of people. I'm finding it quite rewarding. During the Trillium weekend I think I shot more pictures of my fellow photographers than I did of the landscape. Certainly more than I shot of the beaver swimming across the pond, unlike some other people! This past weekend too — I decided to stretch myself and as a result I'm feeling less stale.

I was in Montreal for a memorial for my father and I decided to drive home via Ottawa. The 417 has a lot in common with the 401: total boredom. But after Ottawa it’s another story. The GPS took me up through Renfrew, then turned me along Highway 60, 132 past Calabogie and eventually 28 through Bancroft. I’d been on those roads before – they’re renowned motorcycling roads. A very enjoyable drive, even in a car – I recommend it. But that’s not what this is about.

At the last minute, approaching Ottawa, I decided to take an hour or so to visit the Byward Market. It’s an outdoor stall-type thing over several city blocks. At this time of year, I guess, it’s mostly produce and flower vendors, with a sprinkling of other tourist stuff as well. I parked, mounted my “walking-about-lens” (24-120) and set out to see what I could see. It didn’t take me 10 minutes before I changed to the 70-200 and I never switched back.

The 70-200 allows me to be a little less – OK, a LOT less intrusive. I can shoot from 20 or 25 feet away without getting in peoples' faces. Add to that the better perspective and the great isolation you get with the shallow DOF at f/2.8 and I'm reminded why this is my favourite lens.

I decided I would take people pictures. Candids, street pictures. Stuff I don’t usually do.

I’m shy. I asked the first interesting guy if I could take his picture. He was made up in whiteface and it turned out, was a sort of a street performer. He asked me for money. I said no, he grimaced and grudgingly agreed to be photographed. I took a couple of shots, and caught his ‘act’ later – he complained that ‘everyone is taking pictures but nobody is paying’. Right. DO SOMETHING, bud. He just stood there and pretended to be a statue. For this he wants payment?

I took candids of other people, but didn’t have the nerve to ask them if I could take their pictures. Again, I have to learn to do that. Here are a few candid images I took. The first one all by itself tells me I have to do this more often!

Sometimes you get lucky. Check out the expression on her face and compare it to her shirt.

These kids were checking out the menu board while waiting in line at the Beavertail concession.

Street guitarist showing a couple a riff that he was playing. To me, this picture tells a great story.

There was another street musician that I connected with. Well actually I threw a Toonie in his case and told him he was in the wrong city — he should have been in New Orleans. So he posed for me for some pictures as he played. He wasn't that good, but he did have some blues in him. The "Pink Panther" theme on the baritone sax sounded pretty good!

OK, I admit to doing a little Photoshopping on these pictures. Just because I changed my subjects didn't mean I had to change my style!

Finally I saw some great patterns in the produce for sale and took some of those shots.

Same image, a little Topaz. OK, a lot of Topaz.

But the most interesting ones were the people pictures! I still did my Photoshop and Topaz stuff but there’s a whole world out there of interesting subjects to photograph. I have to learn to be less shy, and ask permission to shoot pictures of people. The worst thing that can happen is they say “no”, right?

So I’m going to try to do this more. Expand my horizons, do stuff I haven’t done before. What about you? Are you ready to leave your comfort zone?

— 30 —

Trillium Friday

2011-05-17T02:46:00.001-04:00

On the way into Toronto on Friday, I came across this field of Trilliums. The difference was, it was on the verge of someone's property and they had obviously groomed the area, so there was no plethora of fallen dead leaves, no weeds, no messy twigs and branches.

I spent about half an hour shooting (I was under some time pressure). Besides, the blackflies were just out of their winter hibernation and they were voraciously hungry for human flesh. I had left my tripod at home, but I had an old one with me that I use as a stand for my external flash. It has a broken leg latch, but better than nothing!

Anyway, here are some images. I must have shot 50 different views and I don't know which one or ones I like best. I processed these a variety of ways. Please feed back which one or ones you like or dislike!

I actually painted this one using the mixer brushes in CS5

CAF (Content-aware Fill) was used to add flowers in the foreground. There was a gravel path there. I used Topaz Adjust to bring out the detail.

Obviously I used Topaz Adjust to bring out the detail. Not much else -- It really did look like this!

This is kind of over the top but I just liked the look. This was a 3-exposure HDR processed in Photomatix Pro.

Enjoy!

-- 30 --

A weekend shooting pictures with friends

2011-05-09T12:15:00.000-04:00

This weekend was supposed to be a workshop for new DSLR users but (a) I left the advertising too late and (b) I had totally forgotten it was Mother's Day, so I didn't have any (paying) takers.

I did have a few friends come up to shoot trilliums. They were just barely open -- we were a few days early -- but we had fun anyway. Here's one shot I worked on, with remote flash backlighting and a reflector dish out front, and some (ok, more than "some"!) postprocessing:

We went out at dawn on Saturday in a huge amount of mist and fog. You always get some shots, though and it was worth it -- more for them than for me. Here's a shot I did of Shannon shooting a photo. The water levels are as high as I've ever seen them so this picnic table site was flooded.

Saturday night we stayed up for sunset shots, and were disappointed. A clear sky, no good colours. But we hung around until the stars came out. This is one of my images, taken above the dock at the Red Umbrella Inn across the road from my house. The moon was just a crescent, but there's no sign of anything but a round shape in this image. It overwhelms the lighting, of course. The orange glow on the horizon has to be the remnants of sunset, because the nearest town is about 60km away in that direction! We were playing around with a flashlight, painting the trees with light during the 30-second exposures. It may not have been necessary in this case.

Thanks to Ron, Shannon, Linda and Liz for making me get up and out at 4:00 am! We need to do this again. And watch this space for my upcoming workshop series!

— 30 —

I must really like this look

2011-05-06T00:00:00.004-04:00

I downloaded a copy of NIK HDR Efex in order to compare it with Photomatix Pro and CS5 Merge to HDR Pro. There are some things I like, and some I don't but all in all, this is a program that provides more flexibility. Here are a few examples of images I worked on this week.

I had actually passed over this image before. I HDR toned it in NIK (just a single image, not a bracketed group) and did some additional work in Topaz.

Speaking of waterfalls, here's Ritchie Falls, a bit closer to home. Again it's just one shot, edited similarly. The other significant thing about this shot is it was done with my new variable ND filter. The jury's still out on that.

This shot, on the other hand, was a bracketed 5-shot sequence that I merged to HDR with NIK HDR Efex. I did a bunch more work on it in Photoshop — for instance, the background was a mess of wires and power poles. I blurred the background, brought the ground under the truck into focus, and did some painting in the sky.

To "close the show" today, here's a painting I made in Painter 11 from the mundane loon shot I posted last week. I have to re-learn that technique, it's a lot of fun.

Off to shoot trilliums this weekend! Hopefully I'll have some interesting stuff to show you next time.

If you like this button, see how to make it in a few minutes. Click it!

-- 30 --

DO NOT buy one of these...

2011-04-28T08:43:00.000-04:00

{sigh}. 2:00 am again. I don't know where the day goes...

Waste of money
I always wanted to have a variable Neutral Density filter. Well at least since I saw one up in Wawa -- Brian Barker had one. His was made by Singh-Ray and cost about $350. Ron had a Lee system with a filter holder and several glass insert filters and that was substantially more money.

I researched and shopped around and found another source, a company called Fader and by most of the reviews I read, it wasn't bad. They ran about $120 on eBay and elsewhere, so I went shopping. What I found was another one made by POLAROID. Half the price! $55! How could I go wrong?

Well, I could have my $55 instead of a useless piece of glass.

First of all, I found out (after the fact, of course) that Polaroid isn't the Polaroid Corporation that we knew and loved. Somebody bought the name and sells the branding to unknown producers in the Far East.

The way these things work is to mount two polarizing filters so that they can rotate relative to one another. When they are at their maximum setting, you get as much as 10 stops attenuation. The same shot that you would have made at 1/60 second would be at 15 seconds or so! Think about the possibilities for waterfalls! For thunderstorms!

When you look at the filter, it appears to be well built. It has a useful collar on it, something I wish they would put on regular polarizing filters so you could turn them without overtightening them on the lens, and still be able to unscrew it when you need to. The thread is a bit fine so you have to be careful screwing it onto the lens but the build quality seems to be pretty good.

All good, until you try to take a picture with it.

First I tried it with my wide angle lens -- I have two lenses that it will fit without a step-up ring, my 12-24 and my 70-200. With the wide angle you get a huge interference pattern that looks like someone is holding a big black cross up in front of the lens. So I switched to the long lens.

The word "SOFT" does not even begin to describe the results I had with my first test. Focusing is difficult, etc etc but trust me when I say I set it up carefully. NOTHING is in focus. Exposure is hit and miss, but you can deal with that by bracketing. But folks, if I got a water glass from my kitchen and held it in front of the lens I'd get sharper pictures.

Maybe it wasn't a fair test. I'll go out today (if it stops raining) and try again. But I think I just bought myself a $55 coaster for under my coffee cup.

I guess I'll never learn. I have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk: DON'T BUY OFF BRAND STUFF. You will regret it.

If you're tempted to buy a cheap variable neutral density filter, stop and send the money to my PayPal account instead. It will be better spent if you just give it to me.

That said, I'll try again and try to get some documented pictures to show you next time.

Some other pictures:
Here are a couple of pictures I did on the weekend, while teaching the Motorcycle course at Humber. Both of them were enhanced using Topaz Adjust in Photoshop.

I don't normally take the camera out, I'm being paid to teach not shoot pictures. However, they asked me to get a few shots of the old guy. He was 87, getting his basic motorcycle license. Guess it was on his 'bucket list'! How can you NOT photograph that face?

This was one of my fellow instructors preparing the students for their license qualification test. I removed his name from the nametag on his hat. By the way, I was reflected in the left lens of his sunglasses. Can you say, "content aware fill"?

It rained all day today, including a couple of thunderstorms. It cleared up and quieted down around sunset and I got this shot. I know it's kind of ordinary, but it says a lot about why I live up here.
Next weekend, some friends are coming up to shoot Trilliums and other stuff, and maybe learn a thing or two about shooting HDR's (I know, I still haven't finished that article! Any Day Now!). Come join us. May 7/8 up in the Haliburton Highlands. Shoot me an email if you're thinking about coming up.

-- 30 --

Love it or hate it?

2011-04-19T02:59:00.000-04:00

I pulled over on the roadside today because I was taken with this rockwall where the cold nighttime temperatures had frozen the water dripping off the wall. The ice glistened in on-and-off hazy sunlight.

I turned around and saw this little stream coming down with some great frozen water in front of it. I went home and got some neutral density filters to re-shoot it. A wider shot didn't work -- too much brush and rock.

And then I looked around and saw this:

I shot 5-shot brackets and merged them to HDR in Photomatix. I did some more work in CS5, including a touch of Topaz Adjust. Initially I loved the shots and now I'm not so sure. I think they're TOO sharp and have too much detail.

What's the consensus? Would you have shot these differently? Or handled them a different way in Post?

By the way, on the last shot I used a non-destructive dodging/burning technique that I picked up somewhere recently, damned if I can remember where. But I love the technique and wrote it up in my tech blog. I searched my archives and can't find it. I'd like to attribute it but can't recall the source.

Here comes the rain again

2011-04-10T23:36:00.000-04:00

...falling on my head like a memory
...falling on my head like a new emotion

I wonder why I tend to think in song lyrics? Early Alzheimers?
Where was I...

Yesterday (Saturday) was a beautiful day. It must have hit 17°C and the sun was shining. I debated taking the camera out in search of great stuff to photograph, but I decided that my motorcycle was more in need of attention! So I took it out of storage, prepped and safety checked it, and went for a ride. Then I came back and... went for another ride! It's exhilarating to be in the wind again!

I did stop at a colourful place just off the highway where they do maple syrup the old fashioned way and asked the elderly lady if I could come back the next day with my camera. She was somewhat hesitant, but reluctantly agreed.

On Sunday (today), it rained. The maple syrup place was closed. I did go back — and I drove into Minden and looked at some potential photo ops: but didn't get out of the car in the driving rain. So I came home.

What does one do when it's raining? One shoots indoors! So I set my studio up and jury rigged the light tent so I could light it from underneath. Sort of a wonky idea,but I did it and then set out to test it. Here's the setup

My strobes are too bright so I set them up to reflect light into the tent rather than lighting it directly. Even so, exposures were f/22 at ISO 100. Notice the computer at lower right. I tethered the camera to the computer through Lightroom 3. It works effortlessly. Here's what the control panel on the computer looks like:

I was just testing it by shooting at the screen of the computer itself. The big button on the right is the shutter release. Click it and the camera takes the picture! A few seconds later, it appears on screen as big as you want it! Very slick.

The light tent works. I have to do a bit more setup if I want to do pure high key shots, but here are some examples of what I shot this afternoon.

I thought I'd try a couple of challenging shots. Light bulbs are challenging, when they're on a white background. Here:

This last shot is the only one where there was any Photoshop work done. And the only thing I did in PS was to remove some dirt on the top of the bulb. All the rest of the work on all of these images was done in Lightroom.

I'll do a little writeup on shooting tethered in my technical blog, but probably not tonight! Drop back in a couple of days from now to have a look.

-- 30 --

Renovation time, uh-huh!

2011-04-03T20:51:00.001-04:00

Last time I showed you what my bathroom looked like in the middle of the renovation. Here's the before-and-after.

Water damage from a roof problem is what prompted me to get this done.

Part way through...

almost done.

The final product.

Expensive? Yes, too much. The job went over estimate (what else is new?) but the workmanship is great and I love it. Well, about as much as you can love a bathroom!

A couple of notes: the last image is (surprise, surprise) an HDR. I wrote up the procedure how I did it on my technical blog here. If you're getting into doing HDR's you may want to read it.

This is NOT the promised HDR article from the Boynton House conference. I'm still working on that, but the current one will tie nicely into it.

Busy with other stuff

2011-03-30T13:04:00.000-04:00

I've been busy with other, non-photo related stuff so I haven't posted here much. Did you miss me?

Taxes, Revenue Canada, working on my First Aid Kit business (you should all have one in your cars and homes as well as your offices and businesses. Check out the new eyewash stations! Visit my company website here). Also as I write this, we're in the middle of a bathroom renovation:

This is in the middle of the renovation. What triggered it is the visible hole in the ceiling where water had been coming in and the ceiling was coming down. Wet insulation was pulled out, the ice damming that caused the leak has been addressed (not solved yet but doesn't need to be until next fall). CS5 HDR toning and monochrome treatment, masked colour layer added.

I did wander out last week and took this picture of the ice huts sitting in the parking lot after they were retrieved from the slowly melting lake. HDR, processed in Photomatix 4 and Topaz.

I set up this table as a bird feeding station. I'm going to build one using a screen and wooden frame on a post, but in the meantime, I wanted something that looked natural so I could get bird pictures without anything artificial in them. I stuck a tree branch in the middle of the table to give them something to stage on before they went down to feed. They use it, but not much yet.

A variety of songbirds visit the feeder.

This is a male 'common redpoll' (carduelis flammea). Not that common, I never saw one here before! With the table about 15' away and the 200mm lens inside the door, he was pretty small in the image so this is a tight crop and blowup.

I'm still working on modifying the HDR presentation I had created so that it works in my technical blog. I had built it as a PowerPoint presentation, so it needs some more reformatting and a bit of a rewrite to get it up on the site. I'll get there soon, after I get through this busy period. Keep coming back!

Photo Workshop Survey

2011-03-21T19:59:00.006-04:00

But first... has anyone been tuning into the new Kelby show, “The Grid”? It’s on live on Mondays at 12:30 noon, but I’ve missed it each time. A day later, it’s up on their site or iTunes (feh. Ptui, ptui).
The first one, two weeks ago, was entertaining and fun to watch. The one last week was really interesting. They talked about DSLR HD Video and I’ll let you watch it to see what they said; but they also talked about HDR and that was interesting. RC Concepcion pointed out that the real problem with HDR is that a lot of it out there is badly done. And that there’s a lot of post-processing to be done after you’ve created it and tweaked it. At one point they talked about it being a fad and I almost shouted out loud that Ansel Adams invented it, then RC said, “and guess who invented it? Ansel Adams!” I had that written in my HDR presentation BEFORE watching this. Ask Bob Fowler! We talked about it at a club meeting weeks ago!

They said a lot of good things about NIK HDR Efx Pro. Guess I have to add it to my shopping list. I'm waiting for my Humber College Staff ID so I can get my educational discount...

Go watch the Grid. Here: http://kelbytv.com/thegrid/. Episode 3 should be up there tomorrow, and they’re talking about microstock (Les..)

You don’t have to be a NAPP member to watch it. You really should be one, though: use this link if you’re thinking about joining.

I'm preparing some multi-part content for my technical post that will be directed at people who want to try some HDRs but don't know how to get started. It's not really difficult but you need to understand some basic concepts. I expect that will be ready, at least the first part, within this week. Stay tuned!

Photography Workshops

I've mentioned several times that we're working on some potential photography workshops and/or destination trips. Who's "we"?

Well I'm one of 'we'. I have some colleagues with whom I'm working, people who have considerable experience and skill sets both as photographers and as educators. We are like-minded: we think that we have a lot to offer to photographers of all levels, and that we can put together teams to present valuable sessions.

We have some ideas about what we'd like to do, but it would be really helpful to find out what our potential customers want. So to that end, I've put together a quick survey that should take you only a few minutes to complete. Please take a second to fill it out. Answer as many or as few questions as you wish.

PLEASE be honest. I know how tempting it is to be humourous or engage in wishful thinking, but we really would like to develop some workshops based on your responses.

We will NOT record your email addresses nor contact you because you filled out the survey, unless you want us to (one question is, "should we contact you?")

One of the questions on the survey asks if you know anyone else who might be interested in a workshop. We're particularly interested in finding out if there are as many people out there as we think there are, who have gotten into digital photography and have no idea how to use that nice DSLR they just bought. So should we run a basic course for these people?

Again, please take a moment to answer a couple of questions for us. Here's the link to the survey:

FACZEN Photo Workshop Survey

Have you ever known me NOT to put a picture up in a blog post? I can't set a precedent here! I've been rather busy the past week or so, what with writing the presentation on HDR which has now been cancelled, and with one of my rites of spring for the past 10 years, which is re-certifying as a motorcycle instructor at Humber College (take the course. You will love it. You may never own a bike or you may catch the fever! Go to the Humber website for more info. And if you sign up, tell them where you heard about it!).

But every month on the NAPP forums, there's a challenge, called the "Photo Rally". Someone -- the winner from the previous month -- chooses 3 categories. You have 72 hours to shoot a picture in all three and submit them. This month's categories were, "Keys", "Patterns in Nature", and "Things that Stick". I won't bother showing you my 'patterns' shot because I hate it, but here's the other two.

"Things that Stick". That's Maple Syrup!

The forums are another reason to join NAPP. Where else can you get the kind of advice that you can from this great community. You can view the forums here but you can't post anything if you're not a member. Look in the "Digital Photography" forum for the Photo Rally but browse through the other ones!

In anticipation of the upcoming series of HDR posts on the technical blog, you may be interested in reading this commentary.

I smell a PHOTO-SAFARI in the works

2011-03-15T20:21:00.006-04:00

The Japanese Tragedy
Before we get started, I'm writing this on March 15th, a few days after the disaster in Japan. I've been looking at the devastation in the many images and videos posted and I'm torn between marveling at the great photojournalism and touching images, and the horror of what has occurred.

I can't help thinking how it would be if that happened here. When you see a video of a tsunami sweeping in and with irresistible force tossing cars and buildings around as if they were toys in a bathtub… I keep looking at the thousands of destroyed cars and homes thinking, "I just got a new car, how would I cope if it were destroyed beyond all recognition? What about my house? More importantly, what about all the people who lost their lives, who were injured, who lost everything?". I also wonder who's going to pay for all that and how people will get back on their feet, those that lived, anyway.

Here's a thought: with all due respect to the friend who was fortunate enough to have bought a new Nikon DSLR yesterday, before the price jumped by some 20%, there are some opportunistic vendors out there who won't be seeing any of my business if I can help it. At least one vendor that I looked at on eBay, modified his "buy it now" prices at 10:00am this morning. It reminds me of the gas price jumps on inventory already in the tanks. Seems a little crass to me. I would have bought one too if I could have, but I'm holding out for an H4D-40!

At this writing, the Nikon high end DSLR factory (what's left of it) in Sendai is shut down. Hopefully their people survived and they'll be back at it in a little while.

What do you think of when you read the word "Safari"?
Right. So do I. Africa. What about when you read "Expedition"? Yup, Antarctica. I have friends and colleagues who have gone to both places. It would really be nice, but let's get realistic, folks. I can't afford (a) the cost of the trip, (b) the time, or (c) the additional equipment I would need - ok, should have - to make such a trip.

So the word "photovacation" doesn't roll off the tongue as well, but that's what I'm looking at this summer. Phototrip? Photodrive? Now, where?

I've looked at a whole lot of choices. Since Northern Japan is now out (sorry, bad joke), I'm thinking one of two destinations:

New Orleans. I've ALWAYS wanted to go there. For the jazz and the ambiance, and the photo ops and
Newfoundland/Labrador. I've been to Newfoundland three times. I LOVE it there. Nature at her best. Phenomenal people.

I also had Scotland on my list but that's not happening either. I'm leaning towards Newfoundland.

Both of those destinations are in driving distance - albeit long, but if I did Newfoundland on a motorcycle, I could do it in a car, right? This time, I would like to go up to Labrador and repeat some of the outports I've visited in the past.

I'm thinking the end of May, for about 2 weeks.

Here's some pix from last time.

There's a ProShow slide show at www.faczen.com/nf3.exe. I've posted it before, but it's worth watching. You have to allow the Photodex viewer to run (it's safe) and make sure your speakers are on!).
Anyone want to join me? Send me an email.

My camera is fixed
Here are some pictures I did a few days ago after getting the camera back from Nikon

So the focus sensor seems to work...

HDR Presentation
As many of you know, I'll be presenting a seminar on HDR techniques at the Imaging Conference, April 8-10 at Boynton House. RHCC members can register now (go to the RHCC site) and everyone else next week. More information will be available then. Among other sponsors are Henry's school of imaging, Costco and the Town of Richmond Hill. We'd love to see you there. I'll be talking about the 5 steps you need to take to create HDR images. See you there!

This guy actually drove his truck out on the ice when the snowmobile they were using was unable to drag the hut out through the slush and standing water. This image was created from 3 shots, merged and toned in Photomatix Pro 3.2 with an added touch of Topaz Adjust.

All right! I got my D300 back!

2011-03-11T12:33:00.001-05:00

Whew. How do you spell "RELIEF"?

Just to remind you, my focus sensor went South on me. Nikon won't say whether it was a mechanical failure, a software failure or just dirt. They said they "cleaned and adjusted it". They also "adjusted" my 70-200 f/2.8. Total cost was just under $300.

On the way home, I stopped by the roadside and shot some test images which I plugged in when I got home. You be the judge (all images converted to jpg and reduced in size to reproduce here):

This is a 2000px x 1300px crop out of the frame. I deliberately shot it at f/2.8

This is 3000px x 2000px approximately, shot at f/8 which is, I figure,
the sweet spot on the lens

This one is a tighter crop: about 950px x 650 px, so it's almost 1:1. I shot this at f/2.8 and the tractor was coming at me at about 50kph. I shot at 200mm, when he was about 200m away, using the continuous focus function.

I also have an image of a barn (tack sharp) and a police car going away from me at about 100kph (you don't think I would be dumb enough to point my camera at a police car coming towards me, do you?). When I shot the car, he was at least 300 or 400m away and I can tell you that his license plate renewal sticker says "JUN 12".

I'm a happy camper. I don't think my camera/lenses have been this clean EVER: even when I got them! (I really don't want to put the UV filters back on, but I guess I have to!).

I highly recommend sending your stuff in for a general cleaning/adjustment from time to time. It's worth the money. Read more in my tech blog here. By the way, I don't know what they did, but even the white screened paint on my lens (where the VR switch and others are) is fresh and new: they must have replaced that piece because the paint was worn by usage!

Good customer service deserves recognition. Nikon Canada: you have my vote!

PS: the lens hood on my 24-120 wasn't latching on because it was worn. I asked to buy a replacement. They GAVE me one.

Well I woke up this morning...

2011-03-10T18:45:00.002-05:00

You weren't on my mind. Yesterday (Saturday) was an ugly day but when I looked out the window this morning I was greeted with a freshly fallen silent shroud of snow (you notice how I keep working song lyrics into my posts?). I did all the stuff I need to do when I get up (I'm into sharing, but that's TMI) then I said to myself, "Self, you need to go out and take some pictures". The snow was particularly beautiful, clinging to the trees, blanketing what was an ugly mess yesterday with a pure white blanket.

I still don't have my camera back, I've got a borrowed D70 with a 28-105 lens. Time for a walkabout, though.

The D70 was, and still is, a quality piece of equipment. Sure, it's slow in comparison to the D300, the LCD is a rinky-dink little one and it's only 6Mp but you can still get some good pictures with it!

Here are a few images I did Saturday with the D70.

Like I said it was really an ugly day, this shot across the lake shows you what it looked like.

The two guys on the ATV are soaking wet from the rain and notice the deep water-filled ruts out on the lake ice. The ATV shot is a single-image HDR -- created from only one shot.

And here's a shot of my woodpile, more traditionally done from 3 images (OK, and enhanced with Topaz. What can I say? I like that program!).

For you non-photographers or new-to-pixel-bending (post processing on the computer) types, HDR stands for "High Dynamic Range" and it helps you produce images from scenes that contain more light levels, light to dark, than your sensor or your monitor or printer can handle. There will be a series of HDR articles on the faczentech blog, but not until after April 10th. Why April 10th?

I've been asked to do a presentation on HDR techniques at the Imaging Conference at Boynton House on April 10th. I'll review the 5 steps you need to take to make HDR's, and I hope many of you will find the time to attend. I'm writing the presentation in "Pages" on my iPad and haven't decided yet if I'll present it using "Keynote" and the iPad or PowerPoint on the laptop. I'm leaning towards the iPad but I have to learn how Keynote works, and make sure I can connect successfully to the projector.

I'll publish the presentation afterwards online. Hang in there.

Both of those shots show some of the extreme effects you can get with HDR, but here's one where I just used the technique to bring out some details.

HDR toning has many uses and you don't have to go to extremes.

I started writing this on Saturday, but didn't finish. So today (Sunday) is nicer. Among other things, I did this mixed-media shot and captured a nice sunset.

All with the D70 and a mediocre lens. Huh. Monday I get my D300 back from Nikon! Stay tuned.

Celebrate What's Right with the World (TM) Preview

2011-03-05T13:49:00.001-05:00

Motivational video from DeWitt Jones of National Geographic.

This is probably the best motivational video for photographers that I've ever seen. I watched it a couple of years ago on YouTube but then it was taken down. I found it again on viddler.com and they clearly give permission to use it as long as it is not for commercial purposes. In fact, they linked and uploaded it on my blog (they put it on my tech blog and I moved it here. Hope that's not a copyright violation).

Whether you're a photographer or not, you need to watch this video. It's in Flash, so I'm sorry, iPad users, you have to watch it on your computer.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

A Real Animal Farm

2011-02-23T18:56:00.000-05:00

The Muskoka Wildlife Centre
In January I attended a field trip to the Muskoka Wildlife Centre (MWC). It was organized by Janet Balon and Myrtle Herzog for the Richmond Hill Camera Club. It was a weekend long excursion but I could only stay for the day on Saturday.

It was quite a challenging experience. The temperature, when I left Minden, hovered around –30°C. The snow was white and crisp and squeaked underfoot. I dressed rather warmly in anticipation.

MWC is a unique facility. Their mandate is to provide a haven for rescued wild animals. Much of their funding comes from the government but they supplement it with revenue from visitors. To that end, they have put a program together to accommodate photographers who want to get up close and personal with wildlife. A team of keeper/handlers take photographers right into the enclosures with many of the animals and are skilled at getting the animals to pose in fence-free locations.

Some of the animals we got to visit were owls, wolves, a lynx, wolverines, foxes, a hawk and even a non-cooperative porcupine. In addition, there were some too dangerous to get too close to, such as a cougar and a moose. The bear, of course, was hibernating.

Winter photography is a bit of a challenge. You can read some technical details here.
I used fill-flash some of the time. Some of the techniques I used were wrong. I learned a lot from my mistakes and won’t repeat them. Here’s an article in my technical blog about using fill flash.
Anyway, I did manage to get some decent pictures. Here are a few of them.

Things behaving badly, or...

2011-02-20T16:50:00.000-05:00

Camera-less in Minden

…and yes, I’m whining about it. It’s like stopping smoking. Or going on a diet. It’s painful to be without a camera.

“Why,” you may ask, “are you without a camera”?

Well it’s like this. As I write this, my D300 and 4 Nikon lenses are in a box safely (I hope!) enroute to Nikon Canada in Mississauga. The D300 needs repair. We were shooting the Winterfest games and at the end of the day on Wednesday, I uploaded my 500 images to Lightroom and gasped when I looked at them. Here’s an example:

Notice how the sign in the upper right corner, and the people in the back are in focus but the sweepers are not? Clearly there's something wrong...

I was tracking this guy for a while and released the shutter when he was in a good position. This one is not full frame: he filled about 1/3 of the frame and I cropped it to show the problem more clearly.

I was shooting in continuous focus mode. Canon calls it “servo” mode. What is supposed to happen is, you put the crosshairs on whatever it is you want in focus and hold the shutter release halfway down. When the subject moves, the autofocus is supposed to follow it and keep it in focus. As long as nothing moved, I was fine. But as soon as the subject started moving, the tracking motor kicked in, and then the camera blew it. It took the focus somewhere else: generally to the back of the image. So I essentially had 500 images with sharp advertising on the boards and fuzzy hockey players. Or curlers. Or skaters. And it did it on more than one lens, so it’s the body.

I talked to Nikon. They said, “send it in”. At least a week and a half, possibly more. As long as I was sending the camera in, I asked them to check out my lenses at the same time. So everything is in a heavily insured box, on its way to Nikon. Now I have to wait for “the call”. You know, the one that starts, “Mr. Springer? This is the technician at Nikon. Do you want the good news or the bad news?”. Would you like some cheese with that whine?…

Yesterday, I changed techniques. Do you have ANY IDEA how hard it is to shoot hockey without predictive autofocusing? Point at a hockey player. Press the shutter release to autofocus. Wait for it to lock in. Press it the rest of the way. If the player is still in the same place, maybe. But if there’s actually a game going on? Forget it. I took most of my shots by focusing on the goalie. Not what I wanted.

To top it all off, to stop the action in hockey, you have to shoot at a very high shutter speed. It begins at 1/500 second, but you really should shoot at 1/1000. How do you do that? You shoot wide open with your fastest lens (I have a 70-200 f/2.8 and a 50mm f/1.8). If the player moves one foot between the time you lock in the focus and fire the shutter, you’re SOL. AND in that lousy lighting, I had the ISO cranked. Minimum was 1600, I also tried 3200 and 6400 ISO. How did they do it in the old days? Shooting with a Speed-Graphic and at the most, TRI-X film which was rated at ASA 400 that you could MAYBE push to 640 or 800.

Shooting hockey is TOUGH. They move SO SO fast! I was camped out in the penalty box – the rest of the rink was covered with a mesh so that spectators wouldn’t get hit with a flying puck. A stick swung past me, just brushing my face when a player was bodychecked into the boards right in front of me. A high speed puck whizzed past me about a foot away, between me and Midori, the lady shooting video for the Games. Yesterday, I blocked another stick with my arm and ducked away when a couple of players hit the boards right in front of me. At least I didn’t break a monopod like Scott Kelby.

To say I was disappointed in my performance would be an understatement. I just hope the Winterfest people won’t be. I’ll start vetting pictures for them right after I finish writing this (OK, it's tomorrow and I already did that. I've got 305 images to send in. Another 300 or so that are garbage).

So on my way back from the post office where I dropped off the camera, I reveled in the wonderful sunshine and warm temperatures. The melting ice turned to vast puddles out on the lake where the ice fishermen were still plying their trade and there were even a couple of cars out there. The ice road to the huts was under water. You could see blue/green reflections in it and the effect was wonderful. Lighting was great. And I didn’t have a camera. {Sob}. I fully expected a deer to step out and pose by the roadside with a bald eagle sitting on a branch above him.

I still owe you some Muskoka Wildlife Centre shots. Next time. I had to get this off my chest. BTW another group is going there this weekend. I hope they’re as lucky as we were.

Selective shots from Winterfest 2011 will be up on my Smugmug gallery in a little while: I haven’t had a chance yet. You’ll probably find them in the February monthly gallery but it’s the 18th and I haven’t even created it yet! With no camera, I guess I’ll have time over the weekend. Here are a few to tide you over.

Speaking of things behaving badly, do you use Photoshop CS5? The content-aware fill tool is unbelievable, but sometimes it does odd things. I found a good trick to prevent that from happening and I wrote it up in my technical blog here: http://faczen.com/wordpress/?p=52. Drop in and have a look-see.

They said there's a gigantic solar flare out there, so we should be able to see the aurora borealis tonight. Better not. I DON'T HAVE A CAMERA! {whine}

The Times, they are a-changing

2011-02-15T03:16:00.001-05:00

Up to now, this blog has been a mixed bag of photography-related tips, techniques and procedures, a journal and a showcase of some of my photographic work. I've decided to focus my blog(s) on more directed topics, to provide my readers with a more useful experience.

This blog will remain as my journal. What that means is, I will share what I've been up to. A good example is the post that follows, where I talk about my visit to the Minden Ice Races, I'll show a few selected pictures and give you links to where you can find others. If you are a photographer (not all of my readers are!), you might be interested in the techniques used to capture these pictures and to manipulate them in-computer. If so, I will provide a link to a new blog that focuses on Photography, Photoshop, Lightroom and other procedures, the technical "How" side of things.

I'll also provide connections to my galleries and to the gallery that contains the images that I have for sale. I plan a third blog which will feature one image and offer a discount code on a regular basis, but I have to figure out how to do that, and to get the other one, the technical one, up and running.

I chose to use WordPress for the new blog. I want it to contain searchable topics and to make them clearly visible. So far, it's eluding me somewhat. Still, I can post there, but that's going to change in appearance.

This means that I have to prepare my blog posts more carefully, and in multiples. For example, I want to tell you about my visit to the Muskoka Wildlife Centre and show you some very neat animal and bird pictures, but I can't yet because I have to finish writing up the techniques I used, and give you some tips about shooting in the winter and with flash fill. That's what I meant above: if you're not a photographer, you don't give a damn about flash fill, you just want to look at pictures. So I'm separating that stuff.

I plan to post every couple of days. I hope that people will make it a habit to drop by regularly. I think you'll find it interesting. Onward and upward!

Ice Racing: a truly Canadian sport

For 6 weeks, the Canadian Automobile Sports Clubs (http://www.casc.on.ca/) sponsor weekend ice racing on a track constructed at the Minden Fairgrounds. They can only race when there is enough ice -- and local contractors maintain the track all week. I learned that the studded tires on the race cars chew through as much as 5 inches (25 cm) of ice in a day.

They throw up a cloud of ice dust which, depending on whether there's wind, and on the temperature, can be so thick that you can't see the cars. Imagine driving in it! The only car who has a clean look is the race leader.

I call this image "Leader of the Pack" (Vroom, vroom!), and it has an alternate name, "Sometimes when we Touch". There's a lot of touching.

See the orange light on top of car 113? They all have bright lights in back so the car behind them knows where they are in the ice fog!

There are several classes: rubber tires, street studs (you can still use studded tires on the street in Northern Ontario), racing studs (big mean ones). There's front wheel drive, rear wheel drive, all wheel drive classes. You have to watch the cars with the big racing studs flip sideways in a corner and drift around it, then hit the throttle and straighten it out for the straightaway.

Sometimes you think they're not going to make it, but somehow they pull out of their slide:

w-w-w-Wipeout! Well not really, he made it. You can see the track in front of him and where he wants to go is straight towards the camera. He's moving dead sideways in this shot!

Here's another image showing a pack of cars coming right at me

Like it says in your rear view mirror, "objects may be closer than they appear". This is the other way around because I'm using a long lens.
They're moving pretty fast: I'm guessing they reach over 100kph on the straights. Remember, they're on ice! How they make it through the corners, I'll never know (sometimes they don't! Check it out)

The driver walked away from this one. He ploughed into the embankment virtually head on. He said he'll have a ton of black and blue marks from the restraint system, though!

I was lucky to get this shot. I had been playing with the shutter speed of the camera and it was really low: 1/10 second when this happened. I took 4 shots, this is the only one that sort of came out. The best part is that Jimmy, a pro photographer who shoots these and other racing events, was standing right near me and said he had his hands in his pockets and didn't get any shots! Ha-Ha.

There are really two ways to shoot action scenes like this: at really high speed to freeze the or at slow speed and pan with the car, or track it.

To read about shooting action scenes, visit my technical blog at this link: http://faczen.com/wordpress/?p=33

I was having some focusing issues with my camera. It had to do with the format of the pictures I was taking: JPEG or RAW. You can read about that in the technical blog at this link: http://faczen.com/wordpress/?p=19

And finally, I've put some galleries of images up so racers can visit and buy pictures. The best way to see a whole bunch of ice racing pictures is to go here: http://photography.to/iceracing. I got an amazing number of quality images at these races. How do I decide which ones to put up in my galleries? Tough call!

Catch you later!

To Move or not to Move... that is the question

2011-01-11T21:22:00.003-05:00

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.

What has this got to do with the topic at hand? Well, not much but then neither does the title of “Zen, and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, but a lot of motorcyclists bought that book and try to wade their way through the Philosophy of Quality.

I just always liked that quote and it brings me back to the days 50 years ago when I learned it in High School. Mr Hunter would have been proud of me – I never was able to memorize the weekly poems, but some Shakespeare stuck! (I just spent 30 minutes dredging up his name. Ain’t Google wonderful?).

An aside. Anyone from Mount Royal High reading this? Remember Mr. Hunter? He lost his voice, rumour had it playing football when someone stepped with cleats on his neck. I’ve lost much of my voice due to surgery. I feel a kinship...

So, To Move, or not to Move... I took 140–odd pictures and made them into a video which I posted last time. That was the “Moving” one. Then I thought to try it a different way, and I took all 140 images and combined them — a bit at a time: the resulting file would have been GI-NORMOUS — by loading them into layers in Photoshop, changing the blend mode to “lighten” then dragging them all into one document (Photoshop trivia for those who aren’t adept: click on the image, hold the Shift key down and then drag it: it will align exactly). So here’s the non-moving image:

Too many stars. I reduced the brightness and detail level. A lot. Wow. If I’m going to do this again, I’ll use a shorter exposure, because there are just too many stars. But, kiddies, this is how much the Earth moves in 93 minutes.

People Pictures
I’ve said it many times. I take pictures of rocks and trees. First of all, they don’t move, so I can take my time. I never had a problem getting a tree to sign a model release. If you ask a rock to just undo one more button, it never objects. But most of all, when you show a rock its picture, it NEVER tells you it hates it and not to show it to anyone ever.

I can’t say the same thing about people. Maybe I should shoot more people pictures because it’s more challenging. Anyway, last week, I FINALLY shot a picture of a woman who said she actually LIKED the picture! The ultimate compliment! And she said I could post it here and talk about it. Here it is. Thanks, Rosanne!

Shot with my 24-120mm lens set at 58mm, f/5.6 (that’s about 87mm equivalent in 35mm camera terms. Exactly where portraits are supposed to be best! Just luck...). Lighting courtesy of a Gary Fong diffuser on an SB-600 flash mounted on top of the camera.

OK, rule number one: ALWAYS soften the skin of a woman’s picture. Always. Well except if you’re doing a shot of the “hoe lady” (not what you think! Get your mind out of the gutter! The people on the Lake Erie field trip know what I’m talking about – it was the lady with the hoe who came out to chase us off her property. A really colourful farmer lady who cooperated in the end and let us take her picture! With her hoe!), or a gritty homeless person. Always.

Rule number two: NEVER soften the skin of a man’s picture. Men look best when they are rugged and craggy and weathered and look like they haven’t shaved in a couple of days. Like alligators.

Rule number three: rules are, of course, made to be broken. But for the sake of argument...

A woman who is 40 years old wants to look like she did when she was 25. Well unless she... never mind. So there are dozens and dozens of tools, and plug-ins, and programs, and techniques, and tutorials and... that you can buy, on how to soften skin. Read up on them and try them!

What I did in the above image was to open it in Photoshop and create a duplicate layer which I blurred slightly. I added a layer mask which I filled with black, then went back and painted white on the mask in the areas I wanted to adjust. So eyes and lips and hair and teeth, were all masked with black, which means you don’t see that layer in those areas. The only thing revealed was the skin. I used the wonderful healing brush tool in CS5 to remove some lines and creases and I further painted over some areas, especially under the eyes, that appeared darker than the surrounding skin. Just removing bags under the eyes (you didn’t have bags, Rosanne dear. It was the lighting), takes 10 years off. DAB the healing brush, don’t stroke it. It works better.

Now reduce the opacity of the new layer, the one with the adjustments. This is important. If you take the imperfections out completely, you’ll end up with an image that looks like a Playboy centerfold. OK, ok, I know what you’re thinking... but they have ZERO imperfections. They are goddesses. They aren’t REAL. I deliberately left a slightly darker area on Rosanne’s right cheek. It added character and dimension to her face. Look on either side of her mouth, on the right side of her neck. The shadow under her lower lip.

Create another duplicate layer. This time do the opposite – reveal the things that should be sharp and crisp: Eyes. Hair. Teeth. Lips. On this layer, use sharpening, saturation, levels to enhance these features. Most important is the eyes. If you can, go in and paint catchlights and on the opposite side of the iris from the catchlight, a soft light, low-opacity stroke which makes the eye 3-dimensional and a bit moist. Reduce the saturation and increase the brightness on the teeth. But not too much – nobody has fluorescent white teeth (I’m reminded of a Friends episode where Ross overdid the whitening). Go in with a fine brush on a large blowup of the image and get rid of that little piece of lettuce or that area of plaque. Again judiciously use the opacity slider.

Before leaving Photoshop, I created another layer and applied a motion blur to it. I had asked Rosanne to ‘flip’ her hair for me which she obligingly did a few times until I was in sync and could shoot at the right instant. I used a motion blur roughly at the same angle that her hair was flowing. Then I added a layer mask and blocked out her face so that only the areas I wanted were blurred. Use a really soft brush at low opacity on the mask to blend the areas so there’s no obvious transition. By the way, I also added a highlight in her hair, but I ended up cropping most of it out.

OK, back to Lightroom. I reduced the clarity slider a little on the whole image in Lightroom. I wanted even more softness, more luminous glow. Then I used the adjustment brush and redid much of the same softening and sharpening that I had done in Photoshop. The tools in Lightroom are much more subtle.

Now frame the image. The Rule of Thirds says not to put her right in the middle of the picture. I wanted the flowing hair going off to the left of the image, but if I put her way over on the right, she would appear to be moving out of the frame and so would your eyes. Now the cropping of this image was accidental. I happened to click to blow it up to look at something and eureka! This exact framing appeared on the monitor when I blew it up. I loved it, so I copied it. Cropping off the forehead moved her eyes away from dead centre, let me show more of her neck and just a hint of her diamond (!) necklace. I rotated it, too, to an interesting angle.

OK, now read this: Everything I said up to now was complete and utter bullshit (pardon the expression). I am NOT a portrait photographer. I am NOT an artist. Anyone reading this who knows ANYTHING about portrait photography was probably muttering to his or herself, “this guy is full of crap. He doesn’t know what he’s doing”. All true.

Do you like the picture? I don’t care. I like the picture. And more importantly, ROSANNE likes the picture. I just kept painting, kept going, until I liked it. All I did in the paragraphs above, was to describe some of the tools I used to do it. I made a beautiful woman even more beautiful, and that’s what matters.

Rosanne lives half a world away. Maybe I’ll have another chance to photograph her one day. I’ll ask her just to undo one more button, and see what she says!

PS: there’s another took I DID NOT use on this image: liquefy. You can slim someone, move a jawline, enhance a cleavage, make a gluteus not so maximus... try it – it’s fun!

Another NAPP advantage
I found another area on the NAPP site that I’m enjoying: the member forums. But you need to be a member. There are forums for Photoshop, for Lightroom, for Photography, for Graphic Design...there’s even a place where you can upload images and have people comment on them. People ask for advice and opinions and get wonderful answers from real experts (and sometimes from hackers like me). If you want to join NAPP, click on the link on the right side of the page so that I get my ‘brownie points’. Besides you get 10 issues of Photoshop User magazine with your membership. I get something significant out of each and every issue.

That’s it for today, kiddies! Watch for a new look in my Blog, I’m planning to try something out, to focus a bit more on learning topics. Coming soon to a computer near you!

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This is TOTALLY cool...

2011-01-08T18:57:00.005-05:00

I tried something new. I was watching some time lapse videos and thought it might be fun to try! It was.
Here you go:

( I just previewed it and it worked. Click the icon that looks like this under the image. Hit "esc" to get back again after)

See where it says "360p" to the left of that icon? If you click that, and you have a decent high speed connection, you can choose "1080p" for high resolution video when you're in full-screen mode. I just tried it and it looks a lot better.
I uploaded it to YouTube if you want to look at it separately. It's here. It’s kinda noisy at that size, though.

Here's a link to the opening image by itself if you want a look at it.

Speaking of “noisy”, what do you think of the audio? I recorded that on my piano keyboard using the cheap boom mike from my headset lying on top of the keyboard, so it doesn’t do it justice. I wanted to do more but I only have 10 fingers!

OK, for photographers and wannabe time-lapse shooters, here’s how I did it. It’s not that hard, and the whole thing (not including the actual picture taking) took about an hour to produce, then I played with it for a few more hours (especially trying to figure out how to make the sound track work!).

Lots of thinking and prep work, though. Here goes.

SHOOTING THE PICTURES
1. How long do you want to make your timelapse? I figured about 15 seconds. I played with different frame rates and came up with: you need at least 10 frames per second to make it smooth. Hence 15 seconds, 10 frames per second, wait a sec, let me get my calculator: oh yeah: 150 frames. 150 exposures. Wanna shoot in RAW? Go for it. What for? I did jpeg fine, I don’t think I needed even that.

2. Stars don’t put out a lot of light. Well unless the star in question is our own sun, and you’re only 93,000,000 miles away from it. So I tried and I tried and I really wanted to use lower settings but folks, the setting you need is: ISO 3200 (yes...), 30 seconds, wide open (in my case, f/4). Even then, I had to bump up the exposure a full stop.

At that high a sensitivity, ANY terrestrial light will be too bright. The trees in the shot were indirectly lit by reflected light from the Red Umbrella Inn, not even pointed at it. The yellow sky is from the [sarcasm mode] really bright illumination [end sarcasm] from the town of Carnarvon which is about 4 km North of here and boasts a population of about 300. You can’t even see this light with the naked eye but a shutter open for 30 seconds with that kind of ISO can see it no problem.

3. Setting it up is tricky. Now if you have a Canon camera, I can’t help you, you have to figure it out for yourself. But if you have a Nikon, especially a D300, listen carefully. Nikon SCREWED THIS UP.

I wanted 150 image, 30 seconds long, over about 2 hours. So I did some arithmetic and came up with an interval between shots of 48 seconds (go get your calculator and figure it out for yourself). Now if each exposure is 30 seconds, then that means the time between shots is 18 seconds. I wondered if the camera timed from the START of each exposure to the START of the next one... nah, that would be too easy. I tested it. I set it up to do 10 exposures of 10 seconds each with 5 seconds between them (the interval timer is on the ‘shooting menu’, at the very bottom. It’s a pain to use because you need to either choose a start time, or if you start right away, it means NOW, not after you get the camera settled on the tripod...). Anyway, in my test, I only ended up with 3 or 4 exposures, not the 10 I was expecting.

Afterthought: let me try to explain this better. In the instruction book for the D300, Nikon says, "Note that the camera will not be able to take photographs at the specified interval if it is shorter than the shutter speed or the time required to record images". What does that mean? If you're trying to take 30 second exposures less than 30 seconds apart (plus a little, to allow the camera time to digest the image), it gets confused and doesn't know what to do.

But if you want your video to COVER the time period with no gaps, you need to keep the time between images as short as possible. Why do you want to do that? To smooth things out. Clouds, airplanes, if you're lucky, meteorites... so you need a workaround.

Here it is. This is NOT intuitive:

• figure out THE TOTAL TIME OF YOUR TIME LAPSE. In my case, 120 minutes, or 7200 seconds.

• The camera will allow you to set up to 999 exposures. Divide 7200 seconds by 999 and you get 7.2 seconds per exposure (I rounded it up to 8 seconds).

• THAT’S WHAT YOU SET. Don’t worry, you won’t get 999 images. What’s going to happen is the camera is going to run the program for 7200 seconds (OK, 8000 seconds if you rounded up) and then it’s going to stop, unless it runs out of battery first. Every 8 seconds, it’s going to try to take a picture, but since the shutter is already open for 30 seconds, it won’t do anything until 8 seconds after the shutter closes, then it’s going to say, “OK, time for another shot!”. So you’ll get one click every 38 seconds, or 210 pictures over that period of time.

• Unless it runs out of batteries. In my case, it did after 93 minutes, so I only got 146 pictures.

Afterthought: I forgot to tell you to turn off the LCD display as well. That's "Image Review" in the Playback menu. Why? To conserve battery.

This is silly. You should be able to set your interval timer to say, “I want one picture every x seconds. That only works when the actual exposure is short, not 30 seconds long. I’m going to try to discuss this with Nikon, when I have time.

4. Find a good spot for the camera, pointing at a nice clear area of sky and be sure to include some earthly objects in the picture, or it’ll be totally boring. Check YouTube, you’ll see what I mean. But whatever object(s) are in the picture, remember they are getting exposed at 30sec/f4/ISO3200 so they’re going to be blown out if there’s any light on them whatever.

I debated long and hard and decided that I wanted a better view than from my property. So I took a chance, got my wooly sheepskin coat on, and took the camera out onto the ice on the lake and put it in a deeply shadowed spot about 100m out from shore where nobody would see it and perhaps swipe it. Because once I set it up, I went in the house for 2 hours and let it do its thing by itself.

I chose my 12mm lens because I wanted the whole sky if I could get it. I prefocused it to infinity, set the camera on manual 30 seconds, AND I TURNED OFF THE LONG EXPOSURE NOISE REDUCTION OPTION IN THE CAMERA. Otherwise it would sit there for 30 seconds after each shot doing a compensation image. By the way, I wanted the minimum time between shots to make it smoother.

(BTW, next time I might try my 50mm f/1.8. I haven't used that lens much. That should actually give me two full stops more light, so I can perhaps reduce the time and the ISO both. A 30 second exposure at 50mm is going to show star trails, though. I'll try it.)

Once I put the camera in place, I did a manual exposure so I could look at the composition (couldn’t really see anything through the viewfinder). Then I set the interval timer to “Start Now/8 seconds/999 exposures”, stuck it quick on the tripod and clicked “OK” to make it go.

Afterthought: a couple of other warnings from Nikon (in the manual. RTFM. Google that acronym if you don't know what it means).

The interval timer only works in "S", "CL" or "CH" mode. Not LiveView, selftimer, etc
It's pretty obvious that shutter speed can't be "bulb"
It won't take a picture if it's trying to autofocus and can't. So pre-focus and turn the focusing to manual.
Cover the viewfinder to prevent light from coming in the back and fogging the image. Normally your eye is there... you got a little thingy with your camera for that — betcha don't know where it is! Duct tape.*

POST PROCESSING
1. I imported the images into a fresh folder in Lightroom.

2. I tweaked one image. The trees were too bright, so I used the Adjustment brush to dodge the tree and the lower sky, while adjusting the exposure and contrast and clarity, etc to maximize the number of visible stars and keeping the sky dark.

3. I copied the settings, then selected all the other images and clicked “sync settings” to make them all the same.

4. I did a virtual copy of the first slide, then used the lens correction distortion thing to do that cool pincushion shape thing, and opened it in Photoshop. I did the text, then saved 4 versions of it so I could flow the intro the easy way.

5. I exported all the images to a fresh folder, reducing them to 1280x1024 at 72 dpi.

MOVIE MAKING
1. I don’t have movie editing software. Well, I don’t have anything except Microsoft’s Movie Maker which comes with Windows 7. So that’s what I used.

2. I imported all the images, set the first 4 for longer times (like a few seconds each), then set the 140 time lapse images to 0.1 seconds each (10 frames/second).

3. I recorded the audio as described above, then I had to mess around to convert it to MP3 because I don’t have audio editing software either. Another freeware program I found on the web.

4. I merged the music in Movie Maker, played with it a bit, then saved the baby.

I think it took me longer to write this than to do it. I know it looks complicated, but if you think it through, it’s not that tough. Was it worth it? Will I do it again? You betcha. Will I do it better? You betcha! Not bad for a first attempt, though, huh?

I’ll leave you with a link to the videos I saw that started the whole thing: by a fellow named Dan Heller, out in California. Mine doesn’t look as good as his, of course, but I’m going to keep trying! Here’s the link: http://www.danheller.com/star-trails.html. Check it out — absolutely stunning pictures!

Later!

Afterthought: Don't forget to turn all those camera settings back to normal when you're done. LCD display, ISO, autofocus, exposure mode, long exposure noise reduction, etc.

* Duct Tape. In Canada, there are two ways to fix things.

if it moves and it's not supposed to, "DUCT TAPE".
if it doesn't move and it's supposed to: "WD-40".

Compliments of Red Green.

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Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow

2011-01-03T01:55:00.002-05:00

OK, I admit it. There isn’t any yellow snow, but I’m using catchy headlines to grab your attention! A shameless attempt to lure you into visiting this blog. Hope you don’t catch on too soon!

As I said in the last post, I was rambling on too long to include a bunch of other topics and images that I had set aside to add to the blog. So I thought I’d do a little catch-up here.

New Car
Remember I said I was getting a new car? I did. A couple of days before Christmas, I picked up my 2011 Subaru Forester. I bought it because (a) my 2003 VW Passat was aging with 210,000 km on it and things were starting to break and cost me money, (b) I felt the need for all-wheel drive up here in snow country and (c) I wanted the extra carrying capacity. Minden Subaru cut me a great deal on a lease, so without further ado, here it is:

Mountain Stream
On December 24th, I decided to go for a drive. First destination was the secret site where the locals go to fill up their water jugs with crystal clear spring water. I only learned about this spot a few weeks ago (thanks, Mike!). I don’t know the history of it, but someone obviously built a stone structure and directed the stream through a hose.

Here I am filling up a water jug at the secret stream.

Can’t you just taste the fresh, clear water when you look at this shot?

This is a really small crop out of a bigger image.

I’ll go back and do it again full frame.

Frozen Waterfall
I continued driving and as I left Haliburton, I remembered that Brian, a photographer I met on the trip to Lake Superior, had told me about a waterfall off the Gelert Road, called “Ritchie Falls”. I thought I’d try to find it, and I did! Here’s an image:

The surface of the waterfall was all frozen but the water was flowing underneath. I took a slow exposure (2 seconds) to smooth the water. It was already very dark, so I wasn’t able to capture the other neat thing going on – in the water pool there were dinner-plate size ice floes milling around in the current. I still don’t know how to photograph them effectively.

Waiting for Hard Water
The Red Umbrella Inn dragged its ice fishing huts out of the parking lot and placed them on the ice in the shallows near shore. The ice further out, where they’ll eventually end up is still much too thin to support them, so they staged them here, ready to go. I was out for a late afternoon walk and caught this image at sunset

This is an HDR created with Photomatix Pro. I couldn’t decide which of two compositions I preferred. The other one shows more foreground but this one feels right. I printed it as a 20x30 poster and it looks awesome!

Update:
on Thursday, most of the ice huts had been hauled out to the deep water on the lakes. But New Year’s eve and New Year’s Day were exceedingly warm, and the ice surface was suddenly liquid, not solid. I imagined them sinking into the water but I guess the ice was thick enough. On Saturday, I caught this shot of a guy standing out in the pouring rain. Hope he caught something! Next time maybe he'll pay the rental fee for a hut!

It froze again on Sunday. I started to walk out a bit to get some pictures but the surface of the ice was like a perfect, Zamboni-ed skating rink. Incredibly slippery. I chose not to go out too far, and I saved the camera when I didn’t fall down! Pulled a muscle doing it, though. The things we do...

Well that was it for 2010, here comes a whole new baby year. We’ll see y’all in 2011!

Glenn

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I got lucky last night!

2010-12-27T13:32:00.001-05:00

OK well not THAT kind of “lucky” but that’s not a subject for this blog. (My last post was titled, "The Earth Moved...". Anyone detect a common thread here?)

I set out to shoot a picture, researched it, planned it, set it up... and it didn’t work. But in the process I kind of got an image that I like! This is kind of a long tutorial on the thinking that went into the shot. It might give you some ideas about how to do similar shots and some pitfalls to avoid. But if you’re not a photographer, or you want to avoid having to read through a bunch of stuff before scrolling down to the image, here it is: enjoy.

As usual you can click on the image to view it larger. You can also see it in my gallery at Smugmug where high resolution prints are available for sale at very reasonable cost.

Here’s the thing. I was in a ‘celestial’ mood after that eclipse event. I got home last night to a clear, starry night and thought, what’s the longest exposure I ever did? I checked and I think, around 80 minutes. Nice long star trails, but I saw an image a couple of days ago with much longer trails and I think the maker said it was a 4 hour exposure, so I set out to do one.

What settings? I looked at my earlier work and saw settings like ISO 100, f/8. So, I though, how can I go wrong by just stopping down a stop to f/11 and shooting for a longer time? I can always tweak it in Lightroom or Photoshop to adjust the exposure as long as I’m reasonably close.

What lens? Since I wanted to see a really big area of sky, the simple answer is, my wide angle. I decided to go whole hog, and cranked my 12-24mm to its widest setting.

Physical setup: Do I have to say, locked down solid on a tripod? I used my big Gitzo for greatest stability. Last time, my pictures came out on an angle because it’s hard to aim in the dark. So I set up the tripod in the house, levelled the camera and pointed the lens at the sky. Not straight up – I wanted some terrestrial objects in the picture.

That’s important, by the way. Star trails are neat but if you don’t have anything else in the picture, well, they’re boring.

I attached my cable release, put in a fresh battery, preset the exposure to “Manual – Bulb” and f/11, ISO 100, focused to infinity and turned off autofocus. If this lens had a VR setting I would have turned it off too. Then I bundled up in my sheepskin jacket and boots, threw a little flashlight in my pocket and trudged out to where I wanted to put the camera.

Next challenge. Where? I don’t have the ideal property for this. There’s only one place on my property where I get a reasonably clear view to the North and that’s behind the garage. Trouble is, you can also see the highway from there. I thought, I wonder what it’ll look like if cars drive by – will they pollute the light or create reflections on the lens? I thought I’d test this first, so I changed the camera settings to f/4, ISO 1000 temporarily, so I could take a couple of test shots without having to wait an hour to see them. I did a few 30-second shots. Having the flashlight with me was a good idea... well yes, there was a definite trail of light, way overexposed at the bottom of the image, no detectible splash on the rest of the picture, and I could crop that off. OK, reset to the long exposure settings. Besides, each car going by was only going to be in the frame for a few seconds and I was at f/11.

By the way, the Inn across the road keeps their big parking lot light on all night. I’ve talked to them about it, they agree it should be turned off, but haven’t done it yet. That’s why I had to go behind the garage. I could take my camera down to the dock but I don’t think I’d want to leave it there unattended for several hours, although I could put it where nobody would see it. Besides it’s a long walk in the cold.

So far, so good, right? Anyone catch on yet to what the problem was? Give yourself a brownie point if you did. Well here it is...

I set it up, locked the shutter open and went back inside to sit by the fire and enjoy my evening. It was 7:30 when I put it out, and I figured 11:30 when I would go out and retrieve it. Some time a couple of hours later, I thought, hmmm. The way Noise Reduction works on the Nikon is that it hums and whirs for the same length of time as the original shot, creating a null image (it doesn’t actually take a picture) and then it electronically merges the two images, subtracting any noise or artifacts generated internally in the camera from the picture. Ideally this should be done under the same conditions as the original picture, which means leaving the camera outside, chugging away for 4 hours. I could bring it to my back porch though. But then, it would be 3:30am before I could bring it in. I wimped out. At 10:30 I decided enough was enough, and I went out to get the camera. I got there, unlocked the shutter release and... NOTHING HAPPENED.

AHHHHH! Is my camera frozen? No... the battery was dead. It turned out that the battery lasted almost exactly 2 hours in -12°C temperatures. And that also meant, NO NOISE REDUCTION. It had shut down. {sigh}.
I brought everything inside (I took the CF card out and put the camera in an airtight drybag with outside air, to warm up in a dry environment. I’ve written about this before) and plugged the card into the computer. Hey.... not bad!

OK, I looked at the image and really wasn’t too excited about the distortion caused by pointing a wide angle lens at an angle. I tried perspective cropping to straighten things up, but nah... even the North star wasn’t a ‘point’. There were a bunch of little red and blue and white speckles all over the place – that’s the noise I couldn’t cancel. The trees were kind of neat, but the car trails and the barn at lower left which was distorted and overexposed were not, shall we say, pleasing.

Here’s the original image

So I ended up cropping it. I did use Topaz, two different ways. I played with some extreme effects and ended up using a ‘simplify’ setting, then played with saturations and came up with this one:

The final picture, which I showed you first, actually did contain a bit of ‘topaz’. I wanted to use the smoothing, simplify effect, but I wanted to bring out the star trails which got reduced by the filter effect. I liked what it did to the trees, though. So I added a layer mask and added a radial gradient on the layer mask centered on the North star which masked the entire Topaz-adjusted layer in that area. Back to Lightroom for a final crop, and we’re done.

So I got lucky. I thought of everything EXCEPT battery life. If I really want to do long time exposures, I have to find a way to power the camera externally, something I’m going to explore and report on when I figure it out. The other issue was the distortion which I think I can only fix by centering the image on the North Star or using a longer focal length lens. More stuff to think about!

Next: I have some saved-up topics but the moon and the star trails posts were too long to include them. I have some pictures of my new car, some frozen waterfall and mountain stream pictures and a neat HDR I’d like to show you. Later!

The Earth moved (under my feet)

2010-12-26T02:14:00.002-05:00

First, Season's Greetings, everyone!

I know, not your typical greeting card, but I was think about riding my motorcycle in the snow, then decided it was too cold and had a virtual ride instead!
There was a Lunar Eclipse.
Which you already know, unless you're an ostrich. I’m going to go through the thought process and technique for creating the image I did. Perhaps you will find it instructive and give you some idea of things to try. If you’re not a photographer and not interested in the details, just scroll down to the photo.

The eclipse started at around 1:30 am and ended several hours later. Well, it was cold! -15°C. Since the earth moves (yeah, yeah. I already did those jokes), I couldn’t just set the camera up, turn on the interval timer and go to bed. Furthermore, the exposure changes.

My first idea was to do a composite multiple exposure image in camera. I did a little arithmetic (360°/day = 15°/hour, so a 180mm lens on a 35mm camera (120mm on a DSLR) which the internet says shows about 13° along the diagonal so if you get the movement perfect, you’ve got less than an hour). I tested it with 4 shots at 5 minute intervals and found it to be relatively accurate. So I have a composite picture of 4 small moons about a lunar diameter and a half apart. Not great. and I’d have to be right on, making sure the camera pointed directly along the path the moon would follow.

Then there’s the exposure issue. The bright full moon was properly exposed at 1/200 sec at f/11, ISO 100. Clearly, I would need a longer exposure at totality. Anyone care to guess how much? Well the difference between the full moon shot at 8:30pm and a totality image at 3:30 am was... wait for it... OVER 10 STOPS! The best totality shot was 1.6 seconds at f/5.6, ISO 400.

So clearly, I wasn’t going to be able to automate this process. I decided to shoot individual shots at maximum magnification (which for me is 400mm – my 70-200 lens and 2x teleconverter. Experience tells me that to get a sharp image with that combination, at anything under 1/100 second even on the tripod, I would have to do everything right. The results show that I was correct. More later.

I did a test around 8:30pm, as I said 1/200 sec was the best exposure. I used the self-timer to stabilize the camera. An alternative method was to use the mirror-up setting and a cable release. I locked the mirror up with one push of the release, waited several seconds for the camera to stabilize, then released the shutter. That worked all right down to about ¼ second. Slower than that, things got a little fuzzy because, well, the earth moves. With the angle of view of the 400mm lens combination (less than 5° along the diagonal, you can see definite motion trails in exposures as short as 1 second. I didn’t realize that at the time so it was lucky that I bracketed my shots.

The Nikon D300 can be set to bracket up to 9 exposures – I chose to do 5 – at 1 stop apart. By the way, you can set the interval timer to do bursts too: I tried it – I did four 5-shot bursts 5 seconds apart, all automatically! Not good for this eclipse thing, but something to file away for future use.

I figured out what the moon’s path was going to be with the help of the Star Walk app on my iPad. In hindsight, pretty obvious: at the winter solstice, full moon directly opposite the sun, due East to due West. I found a spot for the camera where ambient light wouldn’t interfere and where I had a clear view to the West.

So I sat at the camera, out in the cold for 2 hours doin’ ma thang. Brrr. A couple of times I went inside, but the hassle of de-fogging my glasses, getting dressed and undressed was too much and besides as the eclipse started, it was fascinating to watch. So I stayed out there for the most part.

By the way, you go through batteries like mad in the cold! Especially if you use LiveView to help focus and frame. I used up 3 batteries.

I was not happy with my tripod/head. I have a good one – a Gitzo heavy duty tripod with a Manfrotto ball head. But at 400mm, when you centre the moon in the viewfinder and lock down the head, it moves so much that it’s actually touching the bottom of the frame. And I had put the tripod mount on the lens collar so it was balanced, too. Somewhere on my wish list is a Wimberley mount...

At 3:30 am I called it a night, since the moon had been in totality for the better part of an hour and I was too tired to calculate how long before it would start to come out of the penumbra. I took the CF card out of the camera, put the camera and lens in an airtight drybag to warm up in dry air, and went inside. I immediately uploaded the images to the computer and was a little disappointed with the sharpness of the totality images which had been at really long exposures.

My goal was to put multiple exposures on one image. So I opened up a new image. I decided I wanted about 1000 pixels per lunar image and I had pre-selected 13 frames. A little air on either side meant that I needed 16000 pixels. A HUGE file.

I wanted the moon to follow a curved path. So I used the elliptical selection tool and scaled it up much bigger than the image itself so I could see the path I wanted. Then I filled everything with black and stroked the path with white and put it on its own layer, which I would use but make invisible before printing. Now I brought in the selected images and placed them along the white curve. They overlapped so I changed the blend mode for each layer to “lighten” – remember I was working on a solid black background.

The last two images, by the way, were shot without the teleconverter so I had to scale them up by 200% to make them match. I tweaked the exposure values for each layer as I went along so that everything matched, more or less.

Finally, I added some text layers, a keyline to define the edge of the image and that 8:30pm really sharp moon photo to balance the page. Here’s the result. Was it worth it? You tell me..

You can see a larger image by clicking on the picture, and an even larger one by going to my Smugmug site here. Not the full 16,000 pixel one, though -- that's saved for printing and hopefully for sale.
I haven’t printed it yet. I got the order process wrong at Costco for a poster and will have to go back again next week. I’ll let you know how it turns out. They can do posters up to 24x36 for $20. We’ll see...

I have more images to show you of other stuff but I’ve written too much here. Next time!