All work and no play...

Yeah, I know you can finish that. Quite a week.

Since the show, I feel like I haven't stopped. Then I look around and it seems like I haven't accomplished anything, My house is still a mess, I have papers and pictures everywhere, I was trying to work on something and couldn't find an uncluttered horizontal surface to put things on... everywhere I look there's something else I need to do.

The house smells funny: like old cigarette smoke. So I thought it would be a good idea to go clean the creosote out of the fireplace chimney. When I ran the brush down the chimney, there's this odd 6-foot gap between the bottom of the steel pipe and the fireplace insert. I have a call in to a chimney repair guy. Stay tuned... it's a good time of year for that to happen, though. Think what it would have been like mid-winter!

Update: he was just here. There's nothing wrong other than my brush being worn to the point that it's looser than the chimney liner in spots. He figured that it was a combination of things, including the gasket which is worn down a little, and told me how to fix it. That's a relief! I can't fix stuff generally, because all I do is break things!

I broke my Wacom stylus. I went shopping for a new one: even on eBay they're $70 or more. I got lucky, though (and so did one of you!). I found an almost new Intuos4 Small for almost the same price, complete with stylus, mouse and all the goodies! Bought it, got it, I'm a happy camper. I also found a used stylus on Kijiji, bought it too.

FREE Wacom Tablet

So why is one of you going to benefit? I've been using a tablet and stylus since I took the Pixel Painting course several years ago. Once you use one, you'll never go back to a mouse! OK, that's not fair, the mouse is good for certain stuff, like writing and file management and web surfing... but for any kind of photo editing or management, the stylus is like heaven. Imagine trying to write with a brick instead of a pen: that's what the mouse is like in drawing tasks. And don't get me started on trackpads.

 I now have two Intuos4 tablets, one small and one medium. The tablet I bought originally was a Wacom Bamboo Fun, size small. It is great for getting your feet wet. And I'm going to give it to someone. Free. It's used but it works perfectly on PC or Mac, driver is readily available at Wacom. You only need to do three things.

1. Subscribe to my newsletter. Upper right on the blog or click the QR code graphic, or go to www.photography.to/subscribe.html.
2. Send me an email telling me you want the tablet. Put "bamboo" in the subject line. If you're already on the newsletter list, you'll get an error when you try to subscribe, but send me the email and I'll put you in the draw.
3. Promise that you won't sell it, that when you're done with it you'll give it to someone else.

As soon as I get 50 new names, I'll pick someone at random.

Magic Mushrooms

A couple of years ago I posted a picture of a huge pile of carrots and wondered what caused it. The most popular conclusion was that aliens shaped like bunny rabbits had invaded the Earth unknown to mankind and had planted cachés of food while on their mission to enslave mankind and take over the planet. Search for "carrots" if you dare.

The plot thickens. Today I was out talking with the chimney repair guy and I turned around and saw this:

Yes, some mushrooms growing in my water-soaked grass (or what passes for grass here. Mostly dandelions, but that's another story, kids). 

But then I looked a bit more closely, and was compelled to take a little video with my P&S to try to communicate what was going on (if you're not on high speed you may want to skip clicking on it):

The mushrooms are growing in a perfect circle, approximately 4 meters in diameter. There are no other mushrooms around. It's hard to capture unless you get up on a ladder with a wide angle lens (and I don't do ladders), so I opened a ground level shot in Photoshop and circled the mushrooms in the picture:

It's not my septic bed, I'm standing on that to shoot this picture. It's a perfect circle of mushrooms. 

Now I think the alien bunny rabbits landed their spacecraft right here and left behind spores from their extraterrestrial home. There's no other logical explanation.

Disposing of an old computer

I had a Sony Vaio laptop years ago. It got really slow in it's old age (I can relate!), it's probably 120 years old in computer years and I replaced it with a Lenovo. The screen died on that one too, about a year ago and I replaced it with the HP Pavilion that I'm typing this on right now. But it was time for the Vaio to go to the great computer home in the sky. Or in the landfill...

I'd been using it to drive my scanner/fax/printer that's also toast, so it was plugged into the network and I also occasionally would back up files on it, like financial records, email addresses, etc. So it wouldn't be a good idea to just throw it, with the hard drive intact, into the garbage. I'm here to tell you it takes only one shot with an axe to eliminate that problem.

...and there's a certain satisfaction to be gained. By the way, little tiny shards of platter poured out the middle. Wish I had taken the time to photograph it, bet it would have been cool. 

Anyway I wrote this to remind you not to throw out old computer stuff until you make sure your data is really and truly gone. Even CSI, the CIA, CSIS and other "C" groups wouldn't be able to put Humpty together again!

Time for some pictures

I know, you've been waiting and waiting, reading through my rambling drivel, waiting for some pictures. OK, here you are.

On Saturday, I unlimbered the ATV (must give her a name. "Polly", maybe, she's a Polaris... definitely female because you sit... let 's not go there). Anyway, I took Polly out for a ride not only down the trail but also along Horseshoe Lake Road to the White Water Preserve. It was a nice day and I figured I'd see some kayakers there. I've shot thousands of kayak pictures but it's somehow compelling.

I did, but I don't have anything special to show you. However I did take a few other shots in other locations.

In the forest, partway down the trail. I promised you I would keep you apprised of the changes in the scenery. The sun on the forest in the background caught my eye. Great colour! 

Looks like I'm in the African Veldt. Deep in the elephant grass. OK, maybe not, the dandelions give it away. It's 15 feet behind my garage... Go ahead and criticize my over-processed HDR, but I like it! 

How about this one. Remember when you were a kid and set up one friend holding his hand up and another friend in the distance looking like she was standing on his palm? My old satellite dish looking like a communications link while riding through the elephant grass in a third world African country.

One more shot at looking like I was trekking on safari in a remote place. 

I told you I went to the fast water. I had a picture in mind, and here it is:

I spend some time on this. The image is a 3-shot HDR merge, all shot with the 10x ND filter on the camera. The dark rocks and bright white water told me I had to merge more than one shot to capture all the detail; the fast flowing water needed slowing down, hence the ND filter.

I got some other pictures there but I'll save them for next time. I was following my own advice to "work the scene" and look around for other things to shoot. You'll have to come back to see them next week!

— 30 —

Challenges

Not for you, for me.

Oh, OK. I have a challenge for you. But first let's talk about me.

Due to some family matters, I literally haven't picked up my camera in over a week. Which implies that the photos in this blog are older than that! So that's been keeping me busy for a while. Then I got home and turned on my laptop and, "boing". That's the only word I could think of that wouldn't end up with this blog getting x-rated.

Without dwelling on the details, it's dead. I was lucky enough to be able to recover my data. I had done a backup to an external drive about a week before, and if you're not using Dropbox, you'd better start now. Click the link. Saved my bacon — I had gotten into the habit of copying my critical files, especially my Quickbooks accounting file to Dropbox and there it was when I needed to recover.

So I went computer shopping. I really wanted to get a Mac, but in the end, the price of changing over was too high for me. Not only the hardware, which is close to double what you pay on the PC side, but also all the little bits and pieces of software that I would need. I stayed on the Dark Side.

This is not an endorsement for either the manufacturer or the store, but I bought an HP laptop at Costco. When I transport stuff, it's in the back of my Subaru Forester SUV so size doesn't matter (in computers as well as other things...) but I have to admit that the 17" I bought is HUGE. In fact, when I got home I discovered that the big leather computer bag I've been using for years is too small, it won't fit in! I had to buy a computer backpack (at Costco again... OK, I do endorse them!). Anyway, a quad-core i7 processor, 8Gb of RAM expandable to 16Gb, 1.5 Tb of hard drive storage in the form of two discrete 750Gb drives, and a 2Gb NVIDIA video card. All of which I'm sure will be obsolete in 6 months!

Anyway, I'm sure you don't want to read about the endless trials and tribulations of getting software installed and configured, it's a daunting exercise. But it can be a Sisyphusian task (look it up!) if you don't do it right from the beginning, which is why I brought the computer up to Jim's place before even taking it out of the box! Jim is a workflow guru and I think we got things set up in the best possible way. Thanks, Jim!

Photography Courses in the Highlands

They are up and running. I have at least two sessions booked in the next two weeks. All as a result of this ad placed in the Haliburton Highlander:

For those of you interested in taking such a course, I'll be running these here in the Highlands or in the Toronto area for now. Please use this link to contact me. Or you could, of course, pop over to the photography.to website. Or even phone me!

If you're interested in TEACHING such a course, my Train-the-Trainer manual is coming along nicely and if all goes well, it will be ready in a month or so. Please contact me via this link to get on the list of those who will receive a FREE copy of the manual when it's ready.

Rosa is a smart lady

So she deserves a subheading of her own in this blog! Kathy and others will remember the difficulty I had trying to collapse my light tent so that it would fit into its original dinner-plate-sized bag. Kathy did it last summer in about 3 seconds but try as I might, I just haven't been able to do it.

Rosa said, "Look on YouTube. I'm sure you'll find how to do it there". I was skeptical. She is a smart lady! There are a number of tutorials on there that show exactly how and I DID IT! Her insights into a thousand different things amaze me. For a right-brained artist, she sure knows a lot of stuff. She's even challenging me on Quantum mechanics and string theory. She doesn't "get" the Big Bang Theory, my favourite TV show, though! LOL

Business Cards

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I have a source for full-coloured, double sided, high quality business cards at ridiculously low prices (like $20 for 1000 cards!). Since then, we've ordered a number of them for people and they've all come out exceptionally well. If you're a photoshop type, you can do the whole thing from start to finish yourself, if not, I can help you with it. Go back and check out the previous article or contact me if you need some.

A really Excellent presentation.

I watched a presentation by Scott Kelby a couple of weeks ago and it caused me to recompose some of my teaching points in my course, but more importantly, to rethink some of my practices when shooting pictures. It was called "Crush the Composition" and it was recorded on YouTube. It's an hour long, and worth watching -- make the time. Here's the link.

One of the things Scott touched on in his talk was "Working the Scene" and it's a fabulous concept. In three words or less, if you've stopped to take some pictures of a scene, don't just take one or two snaps, work it. Your original picture may not work out, but there are bound to be others that will, if you take the time and make the effort to try different perspectives or views of the same scene. He documented a great example, when he visited the Taj Mahal... but I'll let you hear it directly from him instead of trying to paraphrase it.

A few days later, I stopped at a canola field that caught my eye. I already showed you one image a couple of weeks ago, but here's the one I had in mind when I originally stopped there:

In the spirit of "working the scene", I mounted my 400mm lens and took this shot:

and this one:

And this one, which I did some additional work on:

I used some of the new tools in Photoshop CS5 to move the plants around to form a better arrangement,
then the oil paint filter to add some texture.

Back to my 70-200mm lens, I created this layered looking panorama

and now a deliberately slow shutter speed and panning action on that smooth gimbal mount produced this:

I call this one, "Yellow". I wonder why? I'm contemplating making a very large print of this for mounting and display. The one before as well.

Are you bored yet? I'm not. Half-a-dozen totally different images, all from the same stop at a yellow field of canola plants (actually I stopped twice, about a week apart).

My challenge to you

Next time something catches your eye and you stop to take a picture, pause and look around and see what other images you can create from the same spot. Post your pictures somewhere and send me a link to where they are, I'd love to see you stretching yourself like I think I did!

I had originally intended to come up with a theme for you, but I don't want to impose any limitations except that you should try to capture some totally different images, all from the same location.

I'll try to find some time this week to shoot some pictures. I'm working on the course, and I have to prepare for my CRA audit (shudder) next week, but I'll be baaack!

— 30 —

Busy, busy times!

I’m sitting here writing this in front of a curved bank of 3 monitors. The Biggest one is on the left, it’s the new 25” spectacular HP screen, running Lightroom and showing me the selection of photos that I’ve chosen to accompany this post. This new monitor is outstanding.

When the screensaver comes on, it runs a slideshow of my favourite images. I’ve seen them before, obviously – it’s the same screensaver I use on the other computer – but they’re so bright and crisp, I get carried away just watching them. I love this new monitor, but the only issue with it is that it’s too brilliant. I just got some prints back and they’re less than I’d hoped: the operative word is “muddy”. The colours are calibrated on the new monitor, but the image is so brilliant and beautiful I don’t want to turn it down! In future, I’ll use the other monitor for final tweaking of the brightness and contrast levels of my photos before sending them to print or posting them.

To my right is the laptop screen. My Blog is onscreen, with the previous post showing so that I can refer to it as I write this one. It’s dull by comparison.

In the middle is my Dell monitor, the one I’ve been using as the secondary monitor with the laptop up to now. It’s currently connected to the laptop, and I’m running MS Word, writing this. I like to pre-write the blog in Word, then cut and paste it in when I’m done. I installed a “KVM” switch – a $25 device I picked up at Tiger Direct which allows me to switch this monitor to either computer, along with the keyboard and mouse (actually my Wacom tablet/mouse) at the press of a button. Slick. I keep an extra mouse plugged into the HP computer, and I have the touchpad on the laptop keyboard, so I can navigate and switch pages and applications on the machine the keyboard is not connected to (great English, right? “Never end a sentence a preposition with!”).

Cool. Looks like the dashboard of a Boeing 787. My computer table is getting a little crowded, but if I sit up and look out the window, I can still see a corner of the lake. Or I could if it weren’t night. Or winter. The Inn across the road has some Christmas lights up, I really should go out and take some night shots. Nah, it’s -20°C out there. I’m rambling, aren’t I?

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Tell your friends what you want for Christmas.
Here are a few ideas. Clickable links.

• A membership in NAPP. The gift that keeps on giving.
• A Gary Fong Lightsphere. I used to carry a ton of lighting equipment, now just a piece of Tupperware in my camera bag. You want the “Cloud” one, choose the right size for your flash here (scroll down), and buy it here.
• A 2x teleconverter for your long lens
• A new lens. Nikon or Canon.
• A new camera

OK, you're allowed to dream, right?

Here comes the whiny part: I haven’t done a Hell of a lot of productive work in the last week or more: installing this new computer, plus dealing with the networking issues took a lot of time. Then a Blackberry Desktop application upgrade crashed my laptop and I had to actually go back to an earlier restore point to get it going again (there must be a registry issue with my laptop. Any new software install causes it to sit and cogitate for 30 minutes or more on the first reboot afterwards. I’ll have to look into that sometime). Then we got hit with a gigantic snowstorm and I’ve been dealing with clearing snow, getting my snowblower repaired, having the roof cleared, etc. I also had to deal with updating a website I’m responsible for and helping Jim with a Santa Claus shoot. So it’s been busy, and that’s why it’s been 3 weeks since you’ve seen a new post in the Blog!

Took me a long time to say that, right? Oh well, that’s what you love about me! And I hope you like reading my stuff because this post is turning into a long one! Through the magic of the computer, I came back and added this paragraph after the fact and decided to postpone two topics I was going to include, for another day.

OK, so today’s Blog topics are:

• Some computer issues
• Switching to Lightroom
• The wondrous human eye

Computer Issues.

Here’s the thing. I said I didn’t lose any data when I lost the old desktop, but when all is said and done, it takes forever to get a new machine up and running. I don’t want to start the old Mac vs. PC debate but…. Anyway I have my reasons for sticking with PC and I won’t bore you by going there.

I’ll just say this: what happened to the good old days when Windows was just one file? The Windows 7 folder contains over 65,000 files in over 14,000 folders and occupies 12.5Gb. Does anyone else think this is a little over the top?

Networking was the biggest timewaster. Here’s a hint, folks: in both Windows 7 and Vista you have to not only specify the folders you want to share, you also have to address the permissions in TWO places: on the sharing tab and on the security tab. You have to create a user named “Everyone” and set the permissions for it. “File and Printer Sharing for Microsoft Networks” has to be turned on and installed. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you need to find someone who does. I could just barely do this, and not alone, either (thanks, Jim!). When I got up here today and fired up the laptop, it was all wrong and didn’t work again. I think it’s because I reverted to an earlier restore point because of the Blackberry-induced-crash. Hours. My internal body clock is all screwed up from these 3am days. I guess that’s why I’m writing this at 1:00am!

Lightroom

To top it all off, I decided to switch to Lightroom. I admit arguing strenuously against it and even ribbing Jim about it (the word “proselytize” comes to mind. He’s so committed to the program!). It’s a change in my workflow and, I hate to admit it, it’s better. But I’m on a learning curve into which I have to invest some time (better grammar?).

I installed the trial version when I set up the new machine. I argued that I could do the exact same functions using Bridge/CS4 and Camera Raw. I could – to an individual photo – but not to a batch of them, at least not with the ease that Lightroom does it. I have not installed the new LR3 Beta – too many bugs for now, I’m told – I’m running LR2.6. What really convinced me was a plug-in that allowed me to seamlessly upload a bunch of images to my Smugmug gallery.

Smugmug deserves a mention here. It’s where I host my galleries. It’s unlimited, loaded with features, and there are real live people behind it you can talk to if you have questions. It’s not free, but it’s very reasonable for what you get. If you look at it and decide you want to have your own Smugmug gallery, please paste this into the “referred by” field on the signup form: 16NrueyZ8KPmc. Or my email address (glenn dot springer at faczen dot com – you know what to replace!) and you’ll get a $5 discount on your membership and I’ll get a credit for my renewal too. Go to http://www.smugmug.com/ to see what it’s about, or check out my galleries at http://www.faczen.smugmug.com/ (badly in need of reorganization!).

One of the biggest Lightroom revelations for me was the concept that you don’t actually have to generate a .jpg for an image until you’re ready to. And you can change some parameters, like size and resolution, etc on a whole batch of images all at once.

Lightroom, like Photoshop, is a very deep program. I don’t know how to use it properly yet. Nor will I ever, I expect. It will take some time, but the workflow and organization of my images is vastly improved over what I’ve been doing up to now. I recommend it. I went back into my Photoshop User magazine archives (which you get if you’re a NAPP member (a hint you might give someone looking to get you a useful Christmas present!) and I’m re-reading the articles that I skipped in the past because I wasn’t a LR user. The first one I came to, oddly, posed exactly the same question that I had: “where’d all my pictures go?”. Unfortunately, it didn’t answer it: you open a folder and it says there are 50 pictures in it but it won’t show any of them to you. I’ll figure it out eventually! (Got it! Turn off the filters!)

The “Adjustment Brush” in LR is excellent. Non-destructive dodging and burning and clarity and saturation and sharpness and… all adjustable on specific areas of an image. Again, there are complexities in the tool I haven’t got to yet. I’m used to the concept from Camera Raw but this seems to work better. The cropping tool works like the one in PS except that when you drag, you’re dragging the image not the cropping rectangle! Takes a moment to figure out why it won’t move! I like to crop my images: there’s often stuff in a corner I don’t want, or I want to reframe an image to focus on something, and I don’t believe that everything has to follow rules, like be 8x10 proportion, etc. Non-conformist, that’s me!

Anyway, I can’t make this into a LR tutorial, it’s too long already. Just admitting that the millions of photographers out there who are committed to LR are not wrong. See? I can admit when I'm wrong!

The wondrous human eye (just musings)

I went out late one afternoon last week to talk with my neighbor (about my recalcitrant snowblower!). As I trudged home along the snowy road, I was greeted by a magically saturated dark blue sky with a few stars poking through, as the day faded into true night. It was incredibly beautiful, but I knew I couldn't capture it. Again, I stepped outside a few nights ago to enjoy some fresh air and I looked up at the stars, one of my favourite things to do. After a couple of minutes, my eyes adjusted to the light and I could see the millions of stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy painting a swath across the heavens. OK, I couldn’t see millions of them, but there were a LOT.

You can’t capture this on film, or in digital form. The camera does not have the dynamic range or the sensitivity to do it. There was too much ambient light that late afternoon to get a still image that would include the stars; the dark night scene can be done but not with pin-point sharpness – last post I showed a star shot but it was 10 seconds long at f/1.8 so there was some movement. You can turn up the ISO but then you get a grainy, noisy image. But your eyes can do it.

As I sit here writing this, my reflection in the HP monitor caught my eye. Can I capture this? Judge for yourself. But can I also include the nuances of shadows on the brightly sunlit snow outside the window at the same time? I think not. But I can see it.

I have lousy eyes. Astigmatic, needing several diopters of correction, I have floaters from a retina problem some years ago, my night vision sucks… and yet I can see so much better than my camera can. I have infinite depth of field – I can look at the hairs on my arm then pick out a small bird in a tree with no effort or noticeable time lag.

I think the HDR concept addresses some of those differences. HDR stands for “High Dynamic Range” (sorry for the basic level tutorial here) and essentially what you’re doing is making a composite image that reveals a much larger than normal range of light levels, more than the four octaves your camera can see, and closer to the seven your eyes can do (I hope I got those numbers right, it’s from memory).

I’m not very good at doing HDR’s but this image should give you some idea of what I’m talking about. A normal photo would either pick up the detail in the trees or the rich colours in the sky. You can pick out details in the bright sky and clouds lit by the sun, and at the same time see the nuances of the greys in the water and pick out the detail in the snow-covered trees by sandwiching exposures shot at different shutter speeds. That's what an HDR is. I also admit to some additional manipulation where I painted colour in the water and removed colour from the trees, but that’s not what this is about.

The depth of field issue is being newly addressed by a technique called “Focus Stacking” where images taken by focusing at different distances are combined so that everything is in focus.

I think that an upcoming generation of high end cameras will have both of these features built in. I don’t know how, or whether it will be soon, but I think that future photographers will be able to create incredible images that might approach how we actually see things. I hope I will still be around to see these advancements.

But I wrote this piece because I marvel at what the human eye can see and how powerful that built-in computer we call a brain really is.

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In the spirit of not letting you go away without seeing some images, here are a few.

The following three images are terrible, technically. It was snowing fairly heavily and the subject was at least 300m away. I include them, though, for the purpose of considering how tightly to crop a subject.

The first image was shot with my 120mm lens. Notice how it tells the story about what’s going on – they’re clearing the snow off a cabin roof, the snow is deep and the roof is steep.

This is with the 400mm lens – or my 200mm with the Kenko 2x teleconverter (buy it here) It doesn’t really say that much, it’s an interesting composition but because of the quality due to the snow coming down, it doesn’t stand out.

This is a tighter crop and is compositionally more interesting but you lose the story. Sometimes you lose too much by trying to isolate the subject.

These two demonstrate a bit of what the camera can do, and are just images I enjoy.

This is exactly how my eye remembers seeing it. And for once, I didn’t do any fancy photoshop – the only thing I did in CS4 was to remove a couple of pieces of dirty snow that had fallen off a car and were in the frame on the right. Believe it or not, I shot this through my front windshield, while moving!

Here I wanted to convey the feeling of the deep snowfall we had had, but in order to show some detail in the snow I had to increase the contrast of the image and change the exposure. So I created a second layer of the wall and door, and changed its exposure values, then added considerable saturation. I used a layer mask to make those effects apply only to that part of the image.

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Next time, I'm going to say a few words about the judges course I attended, and about how we set up and lit the "Santa Claus" shoot that I helped Jim with.