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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What's Goin' on?

Well for one thing, summer appears to be drawing to a close. We usually get an "Indian Summer" period where daytime temperatures approximate high summer, but the nights are definitely getting cooler and, "the colours are coming, the colours are coming"!

I've extended an invitation to several friends to come up and visit at the end of the month or first weekend of October. We'll be going out shooting the outstanding panoramas of Fall in the Highlands. I hope we can get up to Algonquin Park too. If you want to come along, send me an email so we can figure it out.

What else is new?
I don't want to jump the gun, but I've ordered my new Nikon D600. Faithful readers will know that I had to pass on the D800 I had my heart set on, but I've been saving my shekels and I can do the D600. Like I said, I don't want to jinx anything, but when you read the NEXT blog entry, I expect to have the camera in hand.

Now although I'd really like to have a backup body, frankly I can't afford it right now. And I have a superb lens that's DX and I need an FX one for the new camera. So my D300 is for sale, complete with a Nikkor 12-24mm f/4 lens. More than 20% of my keepers (the images I really really like) were taken with that lens. The big winner, by the way is the 70-200 f/2.8 with over 40%. You can't take a bad picture with it. So if you're interested in a deal on a great camera/lens combination, contact me. I'll cut you such a deal!

Absolutely Outstanding Customer Service
I'm impressed. I've written this up elsewhere (on the TIF forum) but the story deserves repetition here. A while ago I wrote about a new funky tripod made by 3 Legged Thing that I bought. It's got some incredible features, from the fact that it's only about 2 lbs and will support up to 17 lbs of camera/lens due to its carbon fiber construction, it extends up higher than I can reach on my tippytoes, folds down to 20" and costs half the price of a Gitzo. I've been using it for a few months and have a few quibbles. I sent an email to the manufacturer in England and to my surprise, I almost immediately got an overseas phone call from Danny, the CEO of the company.

First we walked through me trying to make him understand what the issues were (my terminology was flawed) and he immediately acknowledged them without argument. Then he said, "I could send you a few parts and tell you how to fix it, but I'd really rather just send you a new tripod". He asked me to be patient for a few weeks because their new model is being introduced at Photokina next week and he wants to send me the new one. He assured me that I wouldn't be out of pocket one cent (or farthing, I guess!).

This tripod is worth a look. You can buy it at B&H (here's the link). We even talked about his need for a retailer in Canada, and I've forwarded some contacts to him. By the way, the manufacturer's website is as funky as the tripod itself and you can see it here.

You didn't think I'd finish without some pictures, did you?
I was out shooting for a couple of days after quite a dry spell. But I'm going to start with the most recent pictures, from last night. OK, well technically from early this morning, not last night. I was on my way to bed and realized I forgot something in the car. When I went out to retrieve it, I happened to look up. O–M–G! The night was so crisp and clear, the stars were like light bulbs and the Milky Way was like a carpet of mist. I HAD to go out and shoot some pictures. So here are a couple:

I had a small flashlight with me so I painted the trees with light during the 30 second exposure. I did need to do some work in Lightroom to enhance it, but nothing fancy. I've often wondered what that cluster of stars is, in the upper right corner. Anyone know? That really really bright one has to be a planet. 

Beats me what that glow is across the lake. The lights from a house illuminating the bottom of a cloud? It was barely visible to the naked eye, but a 30 second exposure at f/4, ISO=3200 can see EVERYTHING. I can't wait to shoot some of these with the D600 fantastic noise performance! 

I decided, "in for a penny, in for a pound" and I prepared the camera (and of course my 3 Legged Thing "Brian" tripod for a long time exposure. At 2:45 am, I set it up (by the way, ISO=100, f5.6, 12mm focal length) and went back inside with the shutter locked open, intending to spend an hour editing images before going out to retrieve the camera. Well I fell asleep in the computer chair, so the actual exposure was 102 minutes! Probably should have stopped it down a bit more, I've had success at f/8 but working on the RAW file in Lightroom, I came up with this:

Hope it reproduces well on your monitor. 

Let's go back in time to Friday. I went out for an hour or so to try to get the images for the monthly TIF rally. The 3 categories were "Yellow", "Motion" and "Fuzzy", set this month by yours truly. I didn't cheat: I went out with fresh eyes looking for images. I won't post the ones I'm going to enter here, you'll have to go over to the TIF forum to see them. You need to register (to keep out the riff-raff) but there's no risk or associated spam. Look for "September Rally" under "Battlefields".

Anyway, here's some shots I will not be submitting (unless I change my mind!)

Macros are fun, but really challenging! This is a focus-stack of 5 images, enhanced with Topaz Adjust 5. 

I've been trying for a month to get a bee in focus! 

This is a tiny bee-like insect. These guys are more interested in the pollen they're gathering than in the lens less than 2" away, or in the delicate, vulnerable hand holding that lens! 

La pièce de résistance!
After filling up my water jugs at the Maple Lake mountain spring (it was running really slow, so I took the bee pictures while I was waiting. And the leaf at the top too), I went in search of another water source a local told me about, at Stanhope Airport. Nothing doing there worth photographing, but there was a sign saying "Open Doors Ontario" on the church at the corner, so I popped in (be patient, I'm getting there!). Nothing caught my eye in this 111-year-old church but in chatting with a lady there, she told me that the Twelve Mile Lake Church was also open for visits. She said it was tiny, and completely off the grid: no electricity. It was built in 1890, which makes it 122 years old. I wandered inside, and the décor wasn't spectacular, but they had a manual antique pump organ that had been built in 1888 and was still in use! According to them, the natural wood carving and finish are original. Can you say, "HDR"? So I asked and received permission to photograph it, and here it is.

I decided to also use the Oil Paint filter in Photoshop CS6, after rendering the HDR. I spent a lot of time reconstructing the top step on the left in Photoshop and think I did a creditable job, shadows and light nuances and all.  

So that you get a feel for what the Oil Paint filter can do, here's a 100% crop from the image:

 

So that's it for now. I'm going to head out in a few minutes, have to drop into the garbage dump and pick up some groceries. I'll be bringing my camera with me, of course. TTFN

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