New Beginnings

Canada's new anti-spam legislation came in force today — I'm writing this on July 1, Happy Canada Day to all my Canuckistanian readers, and Happy Independence Day to my American Friends — and it is forcing a big re-think by everyone who maintains a mailing list. Those who are located in Canada, anyway: most of my spam comes from more obscure places who aren't going to pay attention to our laws.

In the past, I added names to my mailing list of people whom I thought MIGHT be interested in reading my blog, friends and acquaintances and people I met or had dealings or communications with. You can't do that any more. All I can do is send them an invitation to subscribe, and the link to the subscription form (if you're reading this, and you're not a subscriber, PLEASE click the "Newsletter" link at upper right. The newsletter is simply an alert that there's a new post on the blog and a hint as to what it contains. One email a week).

So as I write this, my list is only 1/10 of what it was: I'm only a couple of hours in, people are away and haven't read their email yet, there's this whole world of apathetic people out there, and lots of people who are inundated with email and don't want more. On a positive note, that means that everyone who is reading this is doing so because they want to! (update: it's July 3 and I'm up to 25%)

I'd really like to build it back up again, so please forward this to your friends and colleagues, whom you think would enjoy this weekly blog.

Something else new...

Is the header picture. As my loyal longer-term readers know, when I replace the blog header, the old one is gone forever, so I take a second to post it here.

This is the previous header, posted in May 2014. I like to keep them seasonal. Not looking forward to putting next year's winter one up! 

So a note about the new header: the background picture is a composite of 50 exposures, married using StarStaX (it's a free software utility, available here, that's designed to merge images to create star trails). It works on clouds too!

The bear was a photo I took at the Landfill (OK, the "Garbage Dump"!). The background was really ugly, to say the least. So I thought I'd try the new "Focus area selection tool" in Photoshop CC 2014 and it really works! After using the refine edge dialogue, it really rendered even the hairs of the bear! So after a little tweaking (and a flip, I like him facing this way), I composited him into the shot.

Here's the original bear picture, after I selected him and applied a heavy Gaussian Blur to the ugly background! 

This is the original cloud shot. After I merged the 50 images in StarStaX (I actually had 135 images but after 50 the effect seemed to downgtrade), I laid a masked version of the tree on the left on top because the wind was blowing and the moving trees didn't render well. 

New Toy

For starters, those following the blog should know the Sigma 120-400 lens has found a new home, someone who will enjoy it as much as I did. I find myself these days trying to travel a little bit lighter and I found I left this lens at home a lot. Just too many lenses to carry! So I decided to give it up and acquire a Nikon TC-17e II teleconverter. It only gets me 340mm focal length, at a slightly bigger aperture (f/4.8) but it fits easily into the bag. I haven't shot much with it yet — the bear above was one example — but I'm quite pleased with its performance. Here are a few more shots:

Nice and sharp, good bokeh (I suppose that comes from the lens) 

A different approach! I came in close for this one, then I used the new version of the Paper Texture Pro extension in Photoshop CC 2014 for the textured background.  I'll bet this will make a gorgeous print! Contact me.

Good Canadian source for the teleconverter? Amazon.ca. In the US, B&H Photo. By the way, it only works on selected lenses like the Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 VR, so be careful.

Speaking of long lenses

There's a phenomenal deal out there. The 600mm f/4 is arguably the best long lens Nikon has ever made. The only problem was the price tag: over $12,000. Dr. Ron had one trashed by an elk (here's a link to the story in case you missed it) and although in the end it was repaired, it isn't perfect. The autofocus is working, but more slowly than it should. Optically it's perfect. He wants to get rid of it, insurance has replaced it, and is asking an unbelievable $1800 for it. If you're interested, drop me a note and I'll put you in touch. Move quick!

Another friend has gone over to the dark side. He has a bunch of immaculate Nikon gear for sale, including two D800 bodies, a 70-200 f/2.8, a 300mm f/2.8, a 400mm f/2.8 and a bunch of other stuff. These are NOT going at fire sale prices, they are spotless but I'm sure you can make a deal. Again, I'll put you together if you write me. Where's the lottery fairy when you need her? If you want to know what to buy me for my birthday, well I'd find a way to cart around that 300 or 400 f/2.8!

Newsflash

Here's a deal from B&H Photo: If you've been meaning to get a calibration device for your monitor, they have the Datacolor Spyder4PRO on sale for $70 off! It's for July the 4th, so I don't know how long the discount is on, but here's the link. And Elements 12 is $60 here. 

Here's a sad picture

Other people get great pictures of beautiful wildlife. I'm not so lucky. Neither is this mangy, emaciated fox who has obviously seen better days. I think he was injured, somehow, or sick. He limped, and likely wasn't able to hunt. I'm guessing he didn't have long to live and I wish I had been carrying so I could have put him down. This is not a happy shot, so don't click to blow it up if you don't want to. 

On another note...

Candid Camera

I caught this shot at the Minden Wildwater Preserve. These were campers on the Preserve side who had come down to the river to bathe. This young lady was washing her hair and did this to rinse the shampoo out:

This was entirely candid: if she knew I was there, she was ignoring me. I enhanced the contrast and motion using some Photoshop filters but this is how it looked! 

FWIW, I cropped this out of a bigger shot. Her boyfriend was in the background doing the "pants on the ground" thing but without underwear and I didn't think it belonged in the picture. Here:

Kind of on the edge of "PG"... 

So that's it for the first post in my new generation blog. Not a ton of change in style or content, I like sharing pictures and stories and giving an insight into goings on in my world and up here, linking up to interesting things and events. Stay tuned!

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Going to the Dogs!

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.

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It's Winter (sort of...)

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 HSM lens. 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!

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