Sleeping like a Baby

sporadic musings...

Good News! I'm younger than I thought!

I hadn't taken exchange into account: 70 Canadian is less than 54 US! So I'm actually younger than I thought.

Consider this, though: my sister, who's two years younger than me, has lived in the US for more than half her life. I think she moved around '75 so 40 years in the US is like 52 Canadian so she's actually considerably older than me in Canadian years. I always knew it, Barbi!

I don't want to harp on the fact that I feel old: driven by both the number and how I feel and my habits. There's a litany of physical things... and the daily habits... wait! I typed them then realized that's "TMI" (too much information)! Let's just say that one day you wake up and discover that you ARE your father! They announced the iPhone7 today – who cares? Every day my current phone nags me about upgrading the O/S and every day I say, "leave me alone. Later". I can still make phone calls. I can listen to music and read my emails. Go away.

I have never played "World of Warcraft" and never have and never will look for a Pokemon, whatever that is. I tried FaceTime once, don't remember how, don't care. I am my Father!

By the way, where did the expression "sleep like a baby" come from? I sleep like a baby. I wake up at 2 and again at 4am. I get up because I have to go to the bathroom or something hurts. My father used to say, "everything hurts. Except the stuff that doesn't work any more". I know how he felt.

But I still know how to write, although I'm at a loss for some words I can't remember from time to time, and I know how to make pictures, and I know how to share my knowledge with others.

If I start rambling about my age after this, call me on it. Stop me. You're not interested, dwelling on it just makes me feel ancient. Life goes on.

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Gales of November: we had a cancellation from the first weekend (October 20-23) so there are two spaces available AND a lodge room has opened up. Also there are still 4 spaces on the second weekend. Jump on it, folks! This is going to fill up. 

Visit www.photography.to/gales for details and if you want the first weekend, email me directly. The October 27-30 session can be booked online. 

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I bought a boat!

If you read my last blog, you already knew that.

Photo credit: Jack March. It's a 16' Starcraft with an 85hp Evinrude outboard.

It's  quick, it's stable, it runs well... thanks to Bob Sully who brought the motor back to life after some preemptive tries. No thanks to me, I told him I'm his customer from Hell. Anything I touch with a motor in it... he had to visit at least twice before I could figure out how to start the damned thing! The electrical stuff isn't in that good a shape, I (ok "We") are going to have to work on that.

And today, I realized that I need to address something else. I muddled up throwing a tarp over it because it was going to rain last night and this morning. But I need to figure out a way to make a "tent" because now the tarp, sagging in the middle, is full of water! And one of the electrical things that doesn't work is the bilge pump... going to have to look at that!

Docking it is a challenge, since 12-Mile Lake is part of the reservoir system for the Trent-Severn waterway and the water levels are really low in fall. I'm docked for now at the Inn across the road because the water's only knee-deep at my dock. Also I've been warned to be careful, there are lots of rocks in the lake, it can be expensive hitting one with the prop!

Update: I've moved it to the Marina down the road. Makes more sense, although I have to drive to the boat instead of walking (well I could walk...). Very reasonable price and friendly folks.

As my friend Janie says, there's something about being out on the water. I'm only sorry I didn't do this sooner! I'm looking forward to Fall Colours!

Here's me in my Tilley hat. It's the only one that will stay on my head when I'm running in the wind... 

...and here's me fishing my Tilley hat out of the water. Guess I was wrong! 

 

Loons on 12-Mile Lake. Click to view larger!

Here are a couple of Loon pictures I took the other day on the water. I've shot better ones, but these were from my own boat!

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Night Skies

Last week there was an alert about high solar flare activity and a prediction of active Aurora Borealis. It's been many years since I saw a visible display of sheets of aurora... and I'm still waiting! The camera can see better than my eyes.

This little video will show you what we actually saw. It's not particularly enhanced. http://photography.to/video/aurora20160902.mp4. By the way, I did this with a program called "LRTimeLapse", straightforward but lots of steps... and since I didn't know what I was doing, I had to start over a few times! I'll play, and figure out how to add music, etc later.

Anyway, I went out and a couple of camera club friends joined me. There was some activity which I was able to capture, but it took some post-processing to enhance the images. Nothing like some of the stuff I've seen from Alaska or Iceland, but still impressive and pretty.

A couple of nights later, I stopped on the way home to see if there was any sign of Northern Lights, but there weren't. I did manage to get a few shots of the milky way (last of the season: the galactic core doesn't rise above the horizon in winter) and a couple of other star shots for your enjoyment.

This is a merge of a few shots to get a little extra detail

I was struck by the warm glow of the lit-up cottage and by the splendour of the starry sky.  

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Interesting free software

This is for PC people. You MAC guys have enough toys and good stuff to tantalize us with, so for once it's our turn. This one comes from Micro$oft themselves {gasp}!

This looks like an ordinary picture of a house under construction. If you look closely you can see some distortion, especially in the lower right corner.  But what makes it remarkable is that it's a composite of 25 separate pictures and it took me 2 minutes to assemble it. 

I wanted to document this new house being erected on our lake. Long story. But the short version is that I was there with one lens – my 105mm – and I could only get about 30' away from the  building. So here's the best I could do with a single shot:

What I did was to shoot 25 overlapping images, sweeping from side to side with 5 shots, then up a bit and 5 more, and so on. I tried to do a 'pano merge' in Lightroom but it didn't want to behave.

A few days later, I came across a picture of the Milky Way on Facebook produced by a 16 year old kid from Czechoslovakia. He said it was a merge of some 225 images, if I recall. Turns out he did it using a piece of software called "Microsoft Image Composition Editor" or "Microsoft ICE". MS calls it "an advanced panoramic image stitcher". It's for Windows, and it's brilliant. It even does RAW files, no need to convert to Jpeg first! It's fast, easy to use, it's not massive, and it's FREE. 

Rather than copy and paste what MS says about it, here's the link. I look forward to trying it for more exciting pano's. It says it will do Gigapixel images – the one I did is about 150 megapixels! In seconds. Brilliant. 

PS: I zoomed into the image and produced a 200% crop so you can see the potential.

This is detail from the same  composite image. Cropped really, really tight.

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Nothing doing on Carden Plain

Looks like the migration is well under way. The only birds I saw when I was there a few days ago were some crows in the distance. A "Murder of Crows", probably 25 or 30 of them making a racket in some far off trees. And a couple of Eastern Kingbirds. Flowers are still there but showing signs of fading for the fall. I caught a few pictures with my 105mm macro lens.

Fall's not far away! 

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Parting Shot

This was a 5-shot HDR which I then painted with Impression.  This one might get me back to my brushes and oil paints. I've been taking a sabbatical from painting for a while because I find it a lot easier to capture my vision with a Wacom stylus in my hand than with a paint brush. 

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Winter at last!

from the 'sporadic musings' department...

I love photography but I think I love music more.

If there is such a thing as reincarnation, I want to come back as a musician. How to explain...

There's a certain joy you feel when you see a painting or a photo but hearing a piece of music that moves you is a whole other thing. Pictures don't bring tears to my eyes or that feeling in my heart that music does. Perhaps these are the ramblings of an aging man but I wish I could have expressed myself with music more. I can't play any instrument well. Not keyboard, guitar or bass, all of which I've had flings with over the years, and I haven't been able to sing since my surgeries a decade ago affected my vocal cords (come on. You've heard of "Simon, Garfunkel and Springer", haven't you? So now I just listen and try not to imagine playing.

I so enjoy virtuosity. Your list probably won't agree with all my choices (yeah, you probably WON'T if you're younger than I, as most of you are!) but can you argue when I mention Oscar Peterson? Or Barbra Streisand? What about Stevie Ray Vaughan? Or Tommy Emmanuel? Or specific renditions of certain songs, like Neil Larsen on the Hammond B3 behind Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah"? Haley Reinhart doing "House of the Rising Sun" (here) (or "Moanin'" with Casey Abrams), or Jena Irene covering Elvis's "Can't Help Falling in Love" on American Idol (here). I'd better stop now or I'll be listing songs and artists forever!

You realize that writing these paragraphs took HOURS, of course. I had to take time out to listen to some of these songs (I even invested an hour watching a Streisand concert on YouTube, here).

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I love/hate Facebook

There are lots of reasons to hate it. Many of them obvious. I'm not going to dwell on those. I think I've minimized them by limiting my "friends" list to people I know or fellow photographers whose work I admire. I'm active in several groups, but only a handful of them where I've enabled notification, so if I understand it correctly, the bulk of what I see in my newsfeed comes from those. Again populated by people I know or respect (major exception: the Photoshop and Lightroom Group where there are people whom I can help). For the most part, I've learned to simple scroll past posts that I consider nonsense and noise. Occasionally I get drawn it, which is why I hate it!

But Facebook is a resource for knowledge and information. There are countless people out there researching and finding and sharing things that you wouldn't find on your own. Great music and images and stories and learning. One case in point is an article I read today, written by Tavis Leaf Glover and shared by Vincent Versace who has a lot of insight into making pictures.

Here's a link to the article itself. I encourage you to read it, especially if you're a photographer.
http://petapixel.com/2016/01/30/10-myths-about-the-rule-of-thirds/

Here's the comment I made after reading the article:

Good article. ALMOST makes me want to turn on my left brain again, Although I agree that the rule of thirds is hackneyed and there are other ways to compose an image, it serves the purpose of making the photographer at least THINK about composition before snapping the shutter. 

 It's easier to deconstruct an image than to construct one. One has to wonder if the classical artists were consciously using various composition rules when they created their art: I think not. I think they unconsciously or subconsciously recognized how to achieve the desired effect, that's what makes – made – them artists. Today we have the opportunity to see tens of thousands of images and create a mindset that subconsciously tells us what we like and what we don't like and we apply it to our vision as we look through the viewfinder. 

 The article did make me think. It made me finally go out and order Michael Freeman's book "The Photographer's Eye". It reminded me to think about balancing elements and gestalt theory. It put me back on the path of pre-visualization. Give me another 70 years and maybe I'll be an artist. 

One of the things I don't necessarily agree with is Glover's caveat, "get it right in camera, don't crop and waste valuable pixels..." (paraphrasing). That's why I bought a D800. It has loads of pixels to spare. Often I don't have time to compose images in the field (certainly not when it involves living moving things!) so I try to include all the essential elements to extract later.

Now I'm almost afraid to post pictures since I'm doubting my composition ability! Not every picture has to be a piece of art, though. However they all have to tell a story!

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Gales of November

This is another rendering of the pano that I shot in September. This time I edited it using the new "Boundary Warp" feature in Lightroom CC 2015.4. It rendered quickly and beautifully but only from the middle exposures in my bracketed shots.

This is a 360° pano image that consists of 6 original images shot with a 17mm lens on my full-frame D800. I was able to increase the coverage of this picture by about one-third by increasing the boundary warp to 100%. By the way, it's 94 megapixels in size, 22k x 4.2k pixels. LR rendered it in about one minute. I pixel-peeped at 100% and I'm unable to find a visible seam. Colour me impressed. When you blow it up, you can see every grain of sand, every pine needle. That's due to the superb lens and of course, the D800. Obviously you're not seeing the detail here on the blog! I toned the image in Lightroom and used Topaz Clarity to bring out the clouds. No cropping, no other edits.

If you click on the image it blows up only to the 800 pixel width that I rendered for this blog. However I have also uploaded a larger version here. Still only 4000 pixels wide (to keep it a reasonable size) but depending on your browser, if you click in the picture, you can see some of the detail.

The October 20-23 session is FULL. Amazingly fast! So fast that planning is under way for a second session a week later, October 27-30 (we still can't wait for November!).

It's an inexpensive outing in a spectacular place. Check it out.

As I write this, I haven't yet updated the web page to reflect that fact, and David hasn't put the booking page in place for the second weekend. I need to know who's interested in coming so we can make it happen, so please take a moment to email me and tell me if you're thinking about it. I'm giving some thought to gearing the second session more to 'intermediate' than to 'advanced' photographers, so more tutorials, more hands-on coaching. What do you think? Tell me!

Most of the information, other than dates, is exactly like the original weekend session, which you can read about here: www.photography.to/gales.

update: It's official and the site is up! Go have a look!

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Winter's here

I was going to say it's a weird winter, but it's just a little late. Last day of January as I write this, and  ice fishing – the mainstay of the winter economy up here in the Highlands – is just getting underway. Another snowmobiler died yesterday when he went through the ice so we all have to think about being careful out there.

Ice racing is happening in Minden. I spent an hour or so there yesterday and if you can, you should drop by. It's at the fairgrounds on Bobcaygeon Road. It's hard to capture the feeling with still photographs, you have to experience these guys driving faster on an ice-covered track than most of us can on dry pavement.

The lines on the ice surface give this a sense of motion, even though the shot was taken at 1/1000 second to freeze the action. 

The driver in the orange and black car at right was head-and-shoulders better than anyone else on the ice. In fact, he held back at the start line, giving everyone half-a-lap lead and not only won the race but pulled over near the end to let people catch up and unlap themselves. I'm told it was Tom Prentice, but I don't know for sure.

Some drivers weren't as good, or at least were driving beyond their abilities. Good thing they had snowbanks! I saw one car climb halfway up an embankment but nobody had an accident while I was there. 

Fender benders don't count. Imagine driving 100kph on a pure ice track, competing for position and trying to pass (or not be passed) in a chicane, while sliding sideways in a full 4-wheel drift. These are street studs, by the way, not racing studs (which are much longer). It's interesting that these are the exact winter tires I have on my car (less the studs)!

This is one of the drivers. I'm sorry, I didn't get his name but I thought the picture is compelling. So I don't know who he is either! Made you look. He said, "I thought you were taking pictures of my car, not me!" I was... He said, "be careful not to scratch the paint on my car!" LOL 

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Picture of the week

I ventured out on the ice on 12-Mile Lake a couple of days ago, on my 4-wheeler. I was assured by people who seem to know, that there's an 8" (20cm) thickness of hard water, almost enough to support a car, but some spots are thinner than others, wherever there's moving water. After 8 years here, I basically know where that is, but still I was being cautious. That's my ATV in the photo.

I want to comment on the composition. As you'll see below, when I shot the image I had the horizon in the middle but that's because when I shot it, I wasn't sure if I wanted to add drama by including foreground or feature the sky. So I left room to crop. 

This is one of the original images, SOOC ("Straight out of the Camera"). This was one of five, in fact it was the darkest one because I had my exposure comp set for +1. The finished one was an HDR merge in LR, some toning adjustments including de-haze, small crop to move the horizon, graduated screen toning and colour temperature/saturation adjustment on the sky, some spot toning on the ATV and hut, burn in on the bottom ATV tracks, that's pretty well it. Oh, and a small vignette because Ansel Adams said that a picture isn't finished until the edges are burned a little. About 15 minutes in LR, never took it to Photoshop. 

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