Announcing the NEW "Gales of November" Workshop!

The Gales of November

One of the longest running photography workshops around has been the "Gales of November" at the Rock Island Lodge in Wawa, on the shores of Lake Superior or 'Gitchigumi' as the natives call it. The area offers the most outstanding and spectacular landscape and outdoor photography in the Province. It has run for some 10 years under the expert tutelage of Rob Stimpson.

Due to some other commitments, particularly his trips to Antarctica, Rob has been forced to give it up and I have accepted the responsibility of facilitating this stellar photo-op and workshop opportunity.

Sunset view from the Rock Island Lodge 

Last year, the workshop was re-named, "The Gales of November Come Early" because it was scheduled for October! (That's like Oktoberfest in Munich: it's held in September because they can't wait!). The reasoning is to allow the lodge to close for the winter a bit earlier. We're still working out the details, but we're looking at one of two weekend dates, either October 8th or October 22nd, 2016. I'd like to do the earlier one because I think there will be fall colours in evidence at that time (who knows? This year was weird...) however that is Thanksgiving weekend in Canada and I don't know if that's going to be a plus or a minus.

A small corner of High Falls on the Magpie River 

I might even do a Spring 2016 session up there if enough people are interested.

The basic premises for the workshop are as follows:

• 3 nights at the superb Rock Island Lodge, great accommodations, all-inclusive
• Inexpensive. The final price hasn't been set yet but it will be affordable.
• Limited to about a dozen photographers. There are some nearby accommodations also available when the Lodge itself fills up.
• This is for experienced photographers who already know their cameras and basic post-processing. Depending on demand, we may make a separate session for those who need more guidance.
• Some physical limitations are not a problem, although there is ample opportunity for those more active to explore more challenging venues by hiking or kayaking or canoeing, etc.
• Limited teaching: I plan to set some challenges and assignments so people can step up to a new level. But Rob told me the following: "I found for the most part the last few years, people were looking to shoot and edit with like minded people - take them to places they otherwise would never get to".

One of the rooms in the Lodge 

There's a web page in progress (Link here). I would ask my gentle readers to go there and give me some feedback: I need to choose dates, etc. For now, there's a two-minute survey there, please respond if there's even a remote chance you might be able to join us!

I'm really excited about this. Some think it might be just an excuse for me to get back up there again... maybe a germ of truth in that! I absolutely love this area.

---

New Banner

When I put a new banner up top, I post the old one in the body of the blog so it doesn't disappear entirely. The new banner is an impression of the steel wool shoot in Haliburton last week. Here's the previous one:

---

Sharing a laugh

When my Nikon SB-600 flash died, I bought a Yongnuo YN568EX to replace it. It seems to have excellent specs, it costs about 30% of the price of the Nikon equivalent (it's available at B&H for $100 US here). The only downside is that my Gary Fong diffuser doesn't fit because the head is larger than the SB-600.

FREE! First person to request it gets it for free (just the cost of the shipping). Email me.

Here's the laugh part. This is what it says in the instruction manual:

FAST CURRENT-RETURN SYSTEM The time for full gloss output current-return will only take you 3 seconds; you can get fast current-return experience even without brand-new batteries, which will only take you 4~5 seconds.

Here's another example. This is from the "Quick Start" page:

Press [MODE] button to select TTL/M/Multi mode, holding [ZOOM} for a while to select remote trigger model, and then press [MODE] again to select Sn/Sc/S1/S2.

Nowhere in the manual does it explain what Sn/Sc/S1/S2 are. Does "n" stand for "Nikon" and "C" for "Canon"? That's my best guess. Oh, wait. I found a paragraph on "S1" mode:

It will work with the first work of the master flash synchronously with the result consistent with the use of radio slave. To use this mode correctly, the master flash should be set at manual flash and the TTL flash system with preflight function and the red-reduction function with multiple functions should not be used.

OK, folks. I've used off-camera speedlites before so I'm pretty sure I'll eventually figure this out but I wonder if someone who has never done off-camera would be able to do it! It also says it will do fast sync up to 1/8000 sec (interesting, the D800 says 1/320 sec maximum...). Anyone who has used one of these, please email me!

You would think that a company – even a Chinese one – who are a major supplier to the North American market, would be able to afford a translator who is not transliterating from the Chinese.

It is to laugh...

---

I'm pretty good at Lightroom and Photoshop

On Facebook, frustrated people post questions they're stumped on. Sometimes I'll watch for a while and see that nobody else seems to know the answer, even though it's obvious to me. Or people put up stupid and flat-out wrong information. That frustrates me, so I take the time to respond. The best example is "Should I output the picture at 72 dpi or 300 dpi if it's going to be printed"? (DPI doesn't matter, it's the number of pixels). Or "should I convert my pictures to CMYK to send them to the printer", or "I deleted all my pictures from the computer but I kept them in Lightroom, how come I can't output them anymore?".

I try to help out by answering many questions (but not the ones like, "which is better, Photoshop or Lightroom"?). Not blowing my own horn, but I guess I know the right answer to 95% of 'normal' questions, on either program.

I'm not pretending to be something I'm not... I certainly don't have the chops to be a Lightroom or Photoshop ACE (Adobe Certified Expert). To pass that, you have to be familiar with everything in the programs and I'm not. For instance, I've never done 3D or worked on a storyboard or tried to do a web page with slices. I don't use the print module in Lightroom, never even looked at the Map module. You have to know all that stuff to pass the ACE. But I certainly know my way around the normal (normal for me!) stuff. And I know where to look when I need to learn something new.

Maybe it's the way I'm built (wide and low to the ground?), but generally you only have to show me how to do things once, or I see them or try them once, and it sticks. Must be the fact that I was left-brained for half a century before I discovered the other side. I owe my Lightroom start to Jim Camelford who put me on the right track when I got Lightroom 1.

I love to share. And teach. Nothing turns me on more than watching the lightbulb come on, seeing someone 'getting it' (well... let's not go there!). Right now I'm doing a two-session Lightroom workshop. Session 1 is on organizing and importing images, Session 2 is on editing and exporting, because these are the things people have to do in LR and if they can do more, it's gravy. Once they can do those things, they are on the right track.

I'm also pretty good at general photography. Same thing: if I've tried it, I know how to do it, and I can probably teach you how to do it. Basic camera use; lighting; composition; visualization; shooting stars; editing images; winter shooting and more.

If anyone wants me to do these sessions for them, contact me.

PS: I'm less confident teaching the right-brained stuff: I can't teach you how to play keyboard or guitar or harmonica even though I've tried those things, I'm not good at them. Or painting: I really suck! And seeing how to do it once isn't doing it for me this time. Ditto carpentry or canoeing or anything that challenges my arthritic knees! Some people think I'm pretty good at writing, but I can't teach it.

---

Snowflakes

After Lance sent me some images of snowflakes he had taken, I knew I wanted to try it. With a new macro lens, I gave it a shot.

It's HARD! I tried a bunch of tricks and after a while I was able to get this shot. But it took a ton of manipulation to get it to look like this. There's a lot of Topaz Texture Effects in this shot.

I can do better! With winter on its way... well watch this space!

---

Speaking of Texture Effects...

I was in the car, actually parked on the shoulder of South Lake Road near Minden, talking to Dr. Ron on the phone when I saw the delightful pattern formed by the snow-covered branches of this tree. I remember saying to Ron, "there are wires, and a fence... but I bet I can make a good leading line out of it". Well it took a lot of work but I got the image I wanted. 

I went back over an image I shot last September up on Lake Superior ('Gitchigumi' is the Ojibwe name for it). This is consistent with my passion for creating art out of digital images. I think it tells the story of the Big Lake well, and it certainly takes me back to when I was there. It should print really well on canvas.

This is a composite image. I added the girl/dog in from another picture taken on the same beach that day, because I wondered if having a foreground interest would add to the image, which it did! FWIW, they were facing the other way, I flipped them around so they were looking into the image. And I spent some time creating drop shadows and matching the toning so they would fit in seamlessly. The textures were done in Topaz Impression starting with one of the Oil Paint presets (#IV, if anyone cares!). Oh, and I enlarged the moon. It gets pretty small when you use a wide angle lens. 

— 30 —

Lake Superior trip: second report

I had great intentions. I wanted to post at least every second day of the trip but "the best laid plans..." and all that. First of all, wifi access is spotty to say the least. I'm sitting here on Wednesday with a working wifi connection for the first time since Sunday morning.

And I'm having some trouble editing pictures on this laptop.

Surprisingly, it's the machine I do almost all of my editing on, but I desperately miss my 26" calibrated monitor. Maybe I'm spoiled. but the pictures look awful, badly in need of post-processing, so I'll post some pictures here with the caveat that they're not finished. Not too surprising, since the only thing I use this lousy monitor for at home if for the Photoshop menus. Can't calibrate it, colour balance and tonality is horrible.

So I'll post a few things now, more to come when I can get them processed properly.

Agawa Canyon Train Tour

A lot has been written about the Agawa Canyon Train Tour. Almost everyone says it's a "must do" and praise is virtually universal.

Maybe I'm just jaded, but it was "good", not "great". On the positive side, the scenery in the canyon is spectacular. It would have been better a couple of weeks later when the fall colours were out more, and yes, the weather was less than perfect, but that's not the reason.

Basically it's 8 hours of sitting in an admittedly comfortable train but most of the time, the trees and shrubbery were so close to the train and so thick, there was nothing to see. Occasionally you would pop out of it at a lake or bridge, but all together, that was only a few minutes out of the trip.

During that unscheduled stop for repairs. 

Then you arrive in Agawa Canyon, which admittedly is beautiful and very photogenic, despite being a week or two early. Here's the thing: the train stops there for 90 minutes. Which gives you enough time to RUN to Bridal Veil Falls, take a few pictures, then RUN to the other falls (Black Beaver, I think it's called) and grab a couple of shots before you have to RUN to catch the train before it leaves. So my hint to others: (1) when you board, try to get a high-numbered rail coach. I was in car #1 which meant I had to RUN an extra 5 minutes to reach the back of the train so I could go to the Falls. And (2) don't try to do both falls. Oh yeah, and (3) bring your own food: just for reference, a hot dog is $8 and the box lunch which is a ham-and-cheese sandwich and a bag of chips is $16.

The train broke down on the way back for close to an hour. Which was OK because we stopped on the Montreal River trestle for repairs. Good photo ops.

That's actually our train, shooting from car #1. See what I meant about it being a long walk? Bridal Veils Falls was about a 2-3km walk from the back of car #16.

Bridal Veil Falls. A 10-stop ND filter on my 70-200mm lens. 1/4 sec at f/2.8, ISO 400.

By the way, I stayed for 2 nights at the Holiday Motel (not the Holiday Inn: the Holiday Inn Express in the Soo is $158/night plus taxes!). It looks crummy from the outside but well-appointed rooms. I found it via Trivago.com.

Rock Island Lodge in Wawa

I spent two nights there, with host David, plus Renee and Andrea. HIGHLY recommended. Great spot, nice people, they fall all over themselves making your stay excellent. It's the same place I've been twice before, with Rob Stimpson's "Gales of November" workshop a few years ago. Any of my readers who have been there before would know this shot:

The Michipicoten River Light as seen from the Lodge. The "Gales of September"!

Here's what it looked like at sunset:

You'll have to wait for my star trails shot until I can get to my home monitor to finish it! 

Lots of other shots, but here's the one I came all that way for:

I'm standing in EXACTLY the same spot on Sandy Beach that A.Y. Jackson stood in when he painted his iconic "Shoreline" picture three-quarters of a century ago. AND I had my oil paints and easel with me, so I painted it too. That you'll have to wait until I get home to see, if I ever show it because I suck at painting!

By the way, I also started a painting at Chippewa Falls, right where J.E.H. MacDonald stood when he painted it. It's not finished yet.

Here's an abstract photo I took at the same time on Sandy Beach. I'm a better photographer than I am a painter! (Correction: this is in Old Woman Bay. My bad!)

This is just one little corner of High Falls on the Magpie River in Wawa. I'll show you more images later. I met a father and son from Arkansas also shooting the falls: Chris (the son) was using a Cambo 4x5 view camera with Ilford FP4 black and white film! I met them again later in Old Woman Bay at sunset.

We were all hoping the setting sun would kiss the rockface. It didn't, really.

One more to wrap up:

 This is Agawa Rock, on which there are pictographs. I didn't see them because it was raining and I didn't want to hike out there on the wet rocks. But I did do this long exposure

More to come!

— 30 —

The times they are a-changing...

There are two times in the year when the Highlands are not beautiful. At the end of the winter, when the snow melts and the world is painted in shades of muddy brown and grey, and now, after the leaves are down. One can be spoiled by the spectacular colours of autumn and once gone, they leave a sense of regret behind. The four seasons are magnificent, but there's a time between them that's less compelling.

To top it off, it's been raining and cold and grey. More to come: as I write this, the impending arrival of hurricane Sandy, coupled with a large cold front coming from the west, "Frankenstorm", the media has dubbed it. Thankfully we're not directly in the path, but we expect to be battered by it here as well.

The first thing I did was to change the banner at the top of this blog.  I plan to change it again from time to time.  Here's the old one, because I think it's gone, even from older posts.

This was the banner image up to today. The text was overlaid separately.

And here's the new one. 

So it's not a time to venture out with the camera to capture the spectacle of nature. Instead, it's time to throw another log on the fire, creating with senses other than the eyes, tools other than the camera. It's time to sit down with the computer. Photoshop, not photography.

I got to thinking about the images I've made in the past and wondered how much I've changed. I hesitate to say that I've grown, but I have to come to the conclusion that I have: some of my earlier pictures look incredibly amateurish and not up to my present technical or even artistic standards. I started by looking at my early HDR's. I found that I was taken with the extreme fringes of the technique, like many others I contributed to the frequently heard, "I hate HDR's. They're not realistic".

Although that's true, I don't hate all of them. Some are pretty good, but they lack subtlety. They're also one-dimensional in that they were attempts to get the most out of every pixel. Anyway, I looked at an image I shot 2 years ago, at Old Woman Bay on the shore of Lake Superior:

Not horrible, in my view. My goal at the time was to enhance the detail of the cliff face and the sky. 

So I revisited the image, and this time, used Nik HDR Efex Pro 2 to tone it. I did it without looking at the old version:

This time, I wanted to add some character to it, so I used control points to add the light from the setting sun, again I emphasized the cliff face, but now I cropped off the messy foreground and spent some time simplifying the dead tree in front. I varied the saturation from spot to spot and of course framed it with a vignette which I created with Topaz Adjust. This time I zoomed in and fixed some chromatic aberration and reduced the halos that I hadn't noticed two years ago.

Which image do you prefer?

Of course, I still think there's a place for extreme effects. I'll show you that in a minute.

All of that said about the lousy weather and dull scenery, I did go out. I had a purpose in mind. About 25 years ago, I wrote a short story. Now I'm using it as a basis for a more challenging work: an actual novel. Here's a sample, for what it's worth:

As soon as it reared up over the rocks, Henry recognized it for what it was: a large black bear sow. It spotted Henry and for some reason, felt threatened and moved to the attack. Bear were usually docile unless provoked or if you got between them and their cubs, so he wasn’t prepared for its aggressive behavior. He could see the sharp claws and hear them as it scrambled over the rocks, could almost smell its fetid breath as he stared down the gaping mouth, through the sharp teeth. It roared and the sound chilled him to the bone and spurred Henry into action.

He quickly lifted the .32-20 and thumbed back the hammer as he brought the muzzle up. Henry knew that this lightweight gun was much too small against a large bear, but it was all he had. He tried to mount the gun on his shoulder but his pipe was in the way and he couldn’t get his cheek on the stock so he brought it down and fired from the hip. Working the lever quickly, he fired again as the bear attacked with race horse speed. He got off a third shot and with the bear very much alive and ...

Yeah, you're going to have to wait to find out what happened. In the original piece, I wrote these opening paragraphs:

An artist would need only shades of grey, green and brown on his palette to capture the entirety of the November forest. No other colour intrudes upon the senses. The ground is carpeted with the brown colour of dead leaves, interspersed with the occasional spot of green where a hardy fern still displays its life. Here and there, a slate-grey rock pokes up its gloomy head, covered with splotches of dark, almost black moss. Occasionally the moss is bright green, almost fluorescent in its contrast with the rest of the bleak world.

Above stand the trees: their trunks painted almost universally in shades of grey, tinged with green. The evergreens are close to black in colour, sometimes forming a monolithic wall against the dull sky or the brown hill behind. Everywhere are the dormant branches of the brush, like a brown fog wherever you look, partly obscuring whatever’s behind. You can focus your eyes on a branch, or try to see through it. There are gaps where you can see with crystal clarity, but mostly this is an out-of-focus world.

Here and there are bushes where not all the leaves have fallen – a bright yellow/brown that draws the eye. It’s hard to focus elsewhere, difficult to see through them. Or the odd silver birch, a bit of white in an otherwise pastel world.

Today, a gloomy, rainy day, I set out to capture that feeling.

It's not a great picture but read the text. It tells the story. The bear came over the rise on the left...

Just for the record, I'm about 8,000 words into the book. I hope I'm not jinxing it by talking about it. I'm giving myself the winter to finish it. I may publish excerpts here from time to time.

So...

"If you go out in the woods today, you're in for a big surprise."

There's always something to shoot. Here's what I found...

I don't care if you think extreme HDR is for the birds. I like it sometimes.  

 Also, I went out on Thursday for a last ride on my bike. I'm giving up motorcycling, the bike is traded for an ATV with a snowplow which, according to the phone call this morning, I'm going to get on Wednesday, weather permitting. Expect pictures...

Here's a farewell picture of my bike.

The naked trees aren't the story, the bike is. A similar selective coloration treatment as in the tractor picture, and vignette like the Lake Superior landscape. 

Since colour isn't the story out there right now, here's a monochrome treatment of the pine woods where I stopped to get the bike picture. This is now the wallpaper on my iPad. 

Be safe in the hurricane, everyone. I'll see you on the other side.

— 30 —