It's my birthday

Just a short post, I wanted to get this done now because I've got a busy week ahead of me, with a club meeting and then my trip. More when I get back, of course!

A Milestone...

One that I'm not sure I'm particularly happy about. I've entered my 70th year.
(PS: that means I'm 69, not 70!)

Physically, I understand that I'm that age .

My father used to say,

"everything hurts. Except the stuff that doesn't work anymore".

I get it.

Mentally, I'm much younger, so it's frustrating that my body won't do the things my mind wants – no, expects – it to do. I'm still in my 50's. Or 40's! And that  people (OK, women) might find my chronological age off-putting.

I've done an awful lot of different things in my life – more than most people. Not only career related, but passions and sports and activities. That's something to look back at with some pride, now to figure out a path to go forward.

That iPhone case

A few weeks ago I mentioned a custom iPhone case with my own image on it. It arrived quickly and it looks exactly like the picture:

In hindsight, I might have chosen a brighter image but it really looks excellent. Also, the "Tough" case option comprises a formed rubber skin (no screen protector, though) and the picture is printed on a hard plastic shell that snaps on.

The only downside is that the opening where the headphone plug goes in was too small for the plug that I was using in the car to connect to the sound system, so I had to do a little shaving with a sharp knife and scissors (a Dremel would have been better but I was too lazy!). That damaged the shell too, but it's hardly noticeable if you do it carefully. I wrote to them about it, let's see how they respond.

It was inexpensive (around $25), and easy to order. Open an account at www.RedBubble.com and you can do it yourself with your own images. Or you could buy one of mine! BTW they have them for iPhones, Samsung Galaxy phones, iPads and laptop sleeves as well.

My book is finished. YAY!

I've just completed and uploaded my latest book, "Best of 2014".

front cover

How do you choose a single favourite image from so many genres? By process of elimination I selected this one which is printed as the page 1 flyleaf for the book. 

It's 92 pages long, a full-sized coffee table book. I prefer the "image wrap" cover instead of a dust jacket, so I didn't put anything on the flaps.

You, my loyal readers, can preview the book here. If you're also a subscriber, you can download a free pdf of the book, click the "Newsletter" link up above.

I use blurb.com's BookSmart software because it offers more flexibility than direct creation in Lightroom or their simpler Bookify or BookWright package. And I once used InDesign which is really flexible but I don't have a subscription to it any more.

If you want to do a book yourself, the process is a bit tedious but straightforward. Basically, you download their software (free), then create a book. In BookSmart, there are hundreds of page templates or you can create your own, then you drag and drop pictures into picture containers and paste or type text into text boxes. Make sure the pictures are high enough resolution. Good practice would be to select the pictures you want to use, then gather copies of them together in an appropriate folder so you don't have to hunt around for them.

The first time I did a book, I carefully resized my pictures to match the boxes: then I stopped doing it and just used a hi-res version (pixel count is important, DPI is not. Read my tech blog at www.faczentech.blogspot.com). You can easily resize or reshape your containers. If I add up the time it took to do this book (not including my post-processing of the images, of course), I'd say around 10 hours.

Blurb books are relatively expensive (it's about $100) so I only printed a couple of copies. I use them because of the quality. If you want one, you can order it from the link above. But you can also get a pdf copy of the book! I'll put the link for the free download in my next Newsletter, so if you're not yet subscribed, click the button at the top right corner of the blog. I'll wait right here until you do so!

Next up: "The Best of 2015"! I might even do a book called "Photo Impressions" that comprises only pictures of that genre that I've done in the past couple of years. I wish I could find a way to print economically so that it would be affordable and I could distribute more books.

Lake scenes

It's the end of Summer and the Fall colours are approaching. The cottagers are slowly disappearing leaving all this glory to us!

Sunset on the lake from the beach at 12-Mile Lake Church. There wasn't a lot of colour in the sky but Photoshop and Topaz Impression helped with that!

If I were any good with a paint brush and oils, this is what I would paint. I've had two conversations in the last week or two with Harvey Walker, the artist and teacher who has been running the Monday morning art classes at the Cultural Centre. I bring him up because he CAN do paintings like this, just as easily as I can do photographs and digital paintings. He said, "come back when you have 50 years of painting experience" when I commented how easy he makes it look.

Golden Afternoon. There's more to this picture than it looks! I took 150 exposures over the span of 20 minutes using my TriggerTrap in TimeLapse mode. Then I blended them together using StarStax – the "lighten" blend mode didn't work all that well but "darken" was ugly. Then I layered it in Photoshop and applied a couple of versions of Impression (Impasto and Van Gogh) at lowered opacities to provide the mix of textures and brush strokes that you see here.  

It's all about being able to express what's in your mind's eye (or ear: musicians can do the same thing with their instruments).  That has to be the goal I mentioned at the top of this blog post. I don't have 50 years... but maybe I can put a dent in it!

ROAD TRIP!

I decided to reward myself with one. After all, I have to get away from the frenetic pace, the pressures of living up here in the Highlands (LOL).

So next Thursday morning (the 17th), I'm getting in the car and heading Northwest. Destination, Lake Superior. Should be peak fall colours up there. First stop, Sault Ste. Marie where I've booked a trip on the Agawa Canyon train everyone says is fabulous. Then a couple of nights in Wawa at the Rock Island Lodge. I hope the weather cooperates because that's the greatest spot for a star trails shot! I want to do a lot of waterfalls and landscapes.

After Wawa, I might go back South to Batchawana Bay or I might head East along 101, through Timmins and perhaps Iroquois Falls before turning south towards home. We'll see how it goes.

I plan to take my oil paints and easel with me; again if the weather cooperates, I'd like to try painting in some of the places the Group of Seven were in so many years ago. I'll take pictures too, because my painting skills are non-existent. It will be fun to try.

Stay tuned...

— 30 —

My book is done, my book is done!

I don't have a lot to report today. Except this:

My New Book is Finished!

I'd like to thank all the little people...

After many months of effort, my new book "Pathways", has gone to the publisher. It is a 96-page coffee table size book and it is a themed collection of some of my favourite (and best!) photos.

I should elaborate, I guess. When I say "publisher", I mean "Blurb.com". I ordered one copy so that I could proof it for typos and look for picture problems (see below). Everyone knows that typos grow invisibly overnight, only to appear when the first 100,000 copies are off the printing press. I already discovered that the customized text I had written on the Copyright page had disappeared, so I have to wonder what other problems exist.

Picture problems: I'm going to assume that Blurb knows what they're doing (yeah I know, "makes an ASS out of U and ME"). But do I know what I'm doing? Here's the thing: In my first Blurb book, I diligently resized each and every image to match the pixel size of the container it was going in. There were no digital artifacts that I could see, no jaggy lines, no sharpening issues. For this book, I took a different approach: I made sure the pictures met at least a minimum and didn't exceed the actual pixel dimensions by more than about a factor of 2. So if I had to fit the picture in a container that was 2342 pixels wide, I just made sure that it was somewhere between 2000 and 4000 pixels in size. Let's see how the Blurb software handles that. I'll report again when I see the physical sample.

I started the book and did about half of it last spring. The phrase 'many months of effort' is a bit misleading: I did nothing but occasionally think about it for many months. Then when I knew which pictures I wanted in it, I sat down and crashed through it in 2 days. That's kind of how I work on projects. Once I know, I go. The interesting thing is, the number of hours I actually worked on the second half of the book was surprisingly low. Why? LIGHTROOM.

If you've been reading my articles, you'd understand. I selected the pictures I wanted. Tweaked them. Stored them in a Collection. Then I clicked "Export", set the criteria I wanted (sharpening, size, location, etc) and clicked Export. Now I had finished jpegs in a folder and simply dragged them into the Blurb containers. The new version of the BookSmart software helped too, I was able to edit page layouts much more easily than in the past. So let's see, shall we?

Screen Capture of the front cover of the book. Read below how to see the rest of it!

"Where", you may ask, "can I see this book"? I thought you'd never ask: here — http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/1217216. Click on "Full Screen". You can even zoom in on any page by right-clicking, but I found that you have to right-click back to 'original size' to navigate through the book. Knock yourself out!

(small edit after-the-fact: clicking that link takes you to the Blurb bookstore with that book highlighted. Click on the cover of the book to preview it. It opens a new page with a fake wood background -- and a button that says "Full Screen". That's the best way to preview it. You can click on the book to turn the pages, you can right-click to blow it up. You can order a copy on the original page but wait until I get the preview copy to see what edits I have to make, unless you want an "artist's proof" copy. I'm going to reset the paper option so it is available with and without the premium paper if I can.)

Keyboard symbols
I like using ASCII symbols when I write. Stuff like, º for 'degrees' (as in, "it was -20ºC today") or ©2010 instead of "Copyright". How do you type these? On your numeric keypad, by holding down the "Alt" key when you type the code. For example, 'alt-167' is the º symbol. 'alt-0151' gets you an em-dash (—). Where do you find these codes? Google "ASCII Numeric Keypad Codes". I found this site: http://www.tedmontgomery.com/tutorial/altchrc.html. Try it. It's a mystery to me how to do it on my laptop, though. There's no numeric keypad, so it's something to do with the "Fn" key, but I haven't figured it out. If someone knows, email me!

Spring is here.
Well, not yet. There's still a foot or two of snow on the ground up here, but you wouldn't know it if you were in Toronto. But we've had some warm temperatures which turned my driveway into a slippery sheet of wet ice, and the roads and bush into greasy, ugly mud. Not a very photogenic time of year. So I haven't done a lot of pictures, just a couple to share.

I think this tells a story. I named this image, "Only in Canada, eh? Pity." Anyway, that's what it looks like out on the lake. I did some work on this image, enhancing the sky and some of the detail on the flag, and I removed a few twigs and stuff at the bottom.

One day I'm going to find a killer image like this. I kind of like this one.

Onward & Upward!

PS: small addendum. My file of images that I would like to use in my next book is virtually empty. I feel as though I'm starting all over again. It's strange not having that hanging over me. I have some ideas about my next photo projects, which I'll share next time. In the meantime, the working title of my next book is, "The View from Inside my Head" (or maybe, "Inside my Head, {subtitle}The view from here" ). Say next year, this time. Not a bad target, huh?