Back in the real world

...from the sporadic musings department

Do you remember your dreams?

One weird thing that's been going on since my surgery is that I'm not sleeping well, consequently I seem to fall asleep with no notice right in the middle of things (unfulfilled REM sleep, according to my cousin the psychologist!). Maybe I'm a Narc. Narcoleptic, that is. And I have dreams. I'm writing this now because here I sit in my computer chair and I just woke up from an unplanned nap, in which I had a vivid dream.

I was facilitating some workshops, others were teaching them but they were my program. I was in some sort of teaching facility – maybe a hospital – and although I had pre-booked classroom space for three simultaneous sessions, I couldn't find the third one, the one that I myself was supposed to be teaching. Not only had they moved it to a different room, I learned that it was not even in the same building and nobody could tell me where it was! I asked them to point to the building on a map or just give me the street address and they couldn't. Then I woke up really frustrated.

I had another dream the other day, in the car when I had pulled over on the side of the road for a nap, and I dreamed about being high on a mountain side and in a hurry to get down, so I basically flew down a trail being pulled along at speed by my walker (you know, the thing that my mother uses to help her get around) except mine was powered and  it was very fast and the trails were twisty and narrow and dangerous. I had to descend several flights of stairs and I found myself jumping whole stair sections like Jackie Chan. I remember being somehow stymied and frustrated when I woke up.

This morning, I dreamed I was in a college dorm room and with me was this very tall, very beautiful blond girl and we were just starting to explore some of the physical differences between us when I woke up. I really, really tried to get back to sleep into that dream!

There's this disorienting moment when you wake up and you think you're still in the dream. Very weird, I never experienced that before with the vividness I am now. Let me try to go back to sleep now. There's this college dorm I want to visit...

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Practicing what I preach

A couple of years ago, I borrowed a phrase from a Scott Kelby video, "Work the Scene". I Grokked the concept (stole that one from Robert A. Heinlein), and part of it ties in with the old Norwegian fable by Hans Christian Anderson, "The Billy Goats Gruff". Marrying concepts is what I do and whether I communicate them well is for you to decide.

I went out yesterday to shoot some pictures. It's been a few weeks, I'm still recuperating so a day-long trip was pushing it. I went over to the Minden Wildwater Preserve for an hour to see what I could see. It's an ugly time of year here, brown melting snow and mud, no colour out there other than grey and brown and white, it was a dull day. But, I said, that doesn't mean there isn't something to photograph, there are a million things out there in Nature, from the very small to the very large (Oh dear. That one comes from DeWitt Jones! It is said that "...great artists steal". Stole that from Pablo Picasso.). However, I only had my long telephoto lens with me, or at least that's the only one I took out.

So when I got there, I saw that the Gull River had overflowed its banks, there was an incredible cascade of rushing water and there were little ice caps everywhere because the temperature was still below freezing. So that's what caught my eye and I spent some time trying to make some images of the crystallized waters. With a little success.

But I wasn't done. This is where working the scene comes in. I'm here, there's more to shoot, work it. Find something else interesting.

A spot o' colour on a dull day 

More colour. This was the only natural thing that I found that was colourful! 

By the way, except for the screaming tree below, everything was shot with the Tamron 150-600 lens. Mostly at ISO 6400.

My photo of the day wouldn't have happened if I hadn't kept at it.

I liked the original too, before post-processing. But when I looked at this image I saw the possibility of doing it as a painting, so I used Topaz Impression, Impasto preset as a starting point.

It's also interesting to note that the first pass had too much detail in the lower left corner. So I took the original image into Photoshop and used Content-Aware-Fill to change that area and only then took it into Impression. I also did a charcoal version to play with later using real charcoal pencils on sketching paper. 

On the way home, I drove down Horseshoe Lake Road, a road I've been on a thousand times  over the 9 years I've lived here. As I came over a rise I spotted something interesting but I kept going for a bit until it registered. Here's where the "billy goat" thing enters into it. In the past, I've driven along and saw a nice sunset, then figured if I kept going I might find a better foreground for a shot. You never do: by the time you find something, the peak is gone, the light has changed. So I've learned not to drive by and hope for something better to come along, I've learned to stop. So I made a u-turn. Here's what I had seen:

A tree stump that looked like a screaming figure! Like I said, I've driven this road many times before, how come I never saw it? 

I took several shots. I remembered that the 105mm lens was in the bag so I changed to it and kept shooting. I tried an HDR bracket, I changed the colour temperature, I wanted to make this guy stand out!

So many options. Adding fog, duo-toning... but in the end, here's what I came up with.

The "Screaming Tree on Horseshoe Lake Road". Rendered with Topaz Impression and Texture Effects.

The lesson? If you see something, if it catches your eye, STOP and SHOOT IT. It may not be there later!

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It's about a week later now. Writing this thing over time... when I re-read what I wrote I realize that "I woke up today..." isn't exactly right. Forgive me!

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Cops for Cancer

Last Saturday I did the Cops for Cancer headshave thing. Bottom line: they raised over $60,000 for the Canadian Cancer Society. Proud to have been a part of it. I saw a lot of really nice and dedicated people, talked with a bunch of them, saw my old friend Sean and Dr. Ron was nice enough to come down as well to take some pictures (which I haven't seen yet!). Had my head shaved, took a few pictures myself, it was a worthwhile event and I'm glad I did it.

More importantly: a number of my friends and colleagues donated to the cause, so I raised almost $1000. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. We will beat this thing.

So here's a short photo sequence, of my shots and Sean's iPhone pix of me!

Deputy Chief Mike Federico gives a welcoming and big thank you speech

 

and then takes his turn under the clippers 

Karen (I think that's her name) donated 10" of her waist length hair last year and another 8" this year, for wigs for chemotherapy patients. 

For some, it was a family affair, a dad and his two boys did the shave and raised substantial donations 

He said he'd been growing his 'Bon Jovi' hair for years! Yeah, well the wig came off, and then so did his real hair 

Here's my buddy Sean, one of the most imposing cops you'll ever meet at over six-and-a-half-feet tall. He looks mean when he wears his motorcycle duds but he's much too nice a guy!
 

before... 

...and after! I think this could be the poster-boy shot for next year's event. Sean was in fact on the committee that made this happen. The radio reporter in the foreground was one of the many media types on site. 

Now it's my turn. This and the next two photos courtesy of Sean Shapiro 

Ahhh! Feel the wind in my (non) hair! 

"so what are you doing later, my dear?" 

I plan on going back next year. Expect me to bug you for donations again!

(PS: Wendy – you were right – it does feel cold! I even wore my Toronto Police watch cap to bed that night!

— 30 —

Keep on Learning.

I like to think that I'll only stop learning when I'm on the other side of the grass. With that in mind, I read and re-read books like Freeman Patterson's "The Art of Seeing", or Michael Freeman's "The Photographer's Eye" or Bruce Barnham's "The Art of Photography" and I seem to learn something new every time. I also look at fine art books with a view to seeing how painters approach their works, to try to apply it to my photography. We'll come back to that one.

Just so you don't think I'm one-dimensional, I also read Michio Kaku, other simpler theoretical physics books (it's been a long time, but I'm still interested), tons of crime and adventure fiction (I average 3 books a week), I listen to a lot of music (mostly guitar blues and jazz and amazing singers), I watch The Big Bang Theory religiously, and, back to photography and art, I look at many, many pictures on Facebook to see how other people do things. I spend a lot of time post-processing images in Lightroom and Photoshop and their ilk, as ALL of my regular readers know!

I also attended a workshop presented by Phil Gebhardt for the Haliburton Highlands Camera Club a couple of days ago and I admit to going in with an ulterior motive. I wanted to see how other instructors teach less-experienced photographers, in order to improve my teaching skills. I also wanted to see how he approached a topic near and dear to my heart, the lessons to be learned by modern photographers from the old time painting masters.

Phil Gebhardt, rimlighted! 

Phil's workshop, entitled "Lessons from Rembrandt"  was clearly not addressed at me, it was for new photographers. His message was that whether the medium is paint on canvas or pixels on a screen or photographic print, we're all trying to render a three-dimensional scene in two dimensions and he showed us some techniques in how to do that. His presentation covered points familiar to anyone who has taken any kind of composition course (in fairness, I have never even taken Art 101!) but that was his stated goal and he stuck to it.

Comments that I heard from the participants all around me indicated that he was very successful at opening some eyes: so kudo's, Phil. The only disappointing thing on my side were a couple of comments from people who had taken MY basic course who thought some of the concepts were new to them, although they were covered in my workshops (although in fairness, they were only part of the workshop which was more directed at the students' left brain). And he seemed to run out of things to say in the latter part of the course although that wasn't his fault, the continuing rain prevented us from going outside and shooting as he had planned.

I know this is long but I hope you're still with me. I did learn some things but more importantly, I came to an epiphany last night. Photographers and artists (paint and other media) are not the same. Generally their approach to their images are completely different, although there are a few exceptions. I've struggled with getting the point across about pre-visualization and careful composition and now I think I've figured out why.

How long does a photographer spend visualizing and planning and rendering his image? A photographer spends anywhere from no time at all (for a snapshot), some milliseconds or seconds (for an action shot), a couple of minutes (for a landscape or sunset, for example). Sure, there are exceptions. Pre-planning, lighting setups, backgrounds, etc. But once it's set up, it's just a matter of milliseconds to  take the picture.

Here's a Lake Superior seascape. I drove for 2 days to get this shot but it only took moments to shoot it. By the way, the Gales of November workshop still has space on October 27-30. Book now if you want to attend! www.photography.to/gales 

I've posted this picture before. But it's an example of what I'm talking about. Although I had this picture in my mind before I even drove down Pleasant Point Road looking for a suitable subject, it still only took a few seconds to shoot it. I knew I wanted to emphasize the vertical lines and how to achieve it. I wasn't sure about the exposure or the shutter speed or how much to move the camera, so I took about a dozen shots until I was satisfied. And I knew that I would be able to enhance it once I got it back to the computer.

Now think about a painter. He has a blank canvas or sketchpad in front of him. He decides what he wants to put on that canvas and where. He thinks about how he wants to light it and where to guide the viewer's eye and what to include and what to exclude and what to change. He decides where to put that horizon, the proportions of the various elements and their relationship to one another, and will probably do an underpainting or sketch to block them into place. He chooses his colours and how he wants his brush strokes to look. Only then does he start putting paint on canvas and he pays attention to every detail, every brushstroke, every nuance.

I'm trying to learn to paint. But I'm a newbie. This is an attempt to render the scene in the photo above in oil on canvas. But it's different, isn't it? I thought about leading the viewer's eye. I thought about how the distant objects are less sharp and detailed or even saturated than the foreground. I needed to lean a tree in the left group to make it more dynamic. I had to fill the negative space at lower left and upper right without drawing the viewer's attention. 

Would I sell this original oil painting? Well, yes, but you'd have to make it worth my while. Think about having an early original 'Springer' and what it might be worth after I'm gone!

Sure there are photographers who work similarly – Ansel Adams comes immediately to mind. Or anyone doing commercial studio work. But for most photographers, "oh, look, a Pine Marten", and a barrage of tens or 100's or 1000's of images follow. Then they winnow through this multitude of images in the hopes of finding one or two that work.

So how do we photographers take these "Lessons from Rembrandt"? I've often said "you have to know the rules so you know when to break them". There are those who disagree with this platitude and I respect their points of view but stand by mine. Except that's not really the message, maybe I can explain it better.

This is the paragraph I'm having the most trouble writing. It relates to the relative laziness of the photographer, the lack of investment he or she has in their images. If a painter screws up a picture (or just doesn't like it), he or she throws away hours, or days or possibly even weeks of work. If a photographer screws up a picture, "oh, well". Click. What if a photographer were to invest more in an image? Not money: time and thought and planning. We tell everyone about this great world we live in, how much better we have it than the oldtimers who were limited to only a few images when they went out shooting but do we really? What if we would approach each image as if pressing that shutter release cost $100 every time we did it? 

Do we need to be more careful with our exposures or focus? NO, not really! That's our advantage in this digital world. That's where we can bracket or shoot multiple shots. Where we can USE the technology.

Would we not then spend more effort designing and planning our images? When we press the shutter release we should ask ourselves, "is this the best I can do? What can I do to improve this picture? Is this going to be a keeper?"

Depending on what you're shooting, you may not have the luxury of all the time in the world. Even if you're shooting landscapes, the light will change. If you're shooting action (could be wildlife, could be sports, could just be kids at play) or particularly if you're trying to capture peoples' activities or expressions, maybe a wedding or a headshot... you don't have the time. Do you want to spend what precious time you have trying to remember the Rule of Thirds or keeping your horizon level, or making the subject stand out through size or colour or value or brightness or contrast or how much exposure compensation to dial in...? That's why you should know the 'rules', know what works, so you can focus your valuable attention on the things that will make that image outstanding.

Make sense?

I think I STILL haven't found a way to say it.

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Did you ever have one of "Those" days?

Yesterday. I had a great visit with my mom in Thornhill. On the way there, I stopped for some pictures: I was actually looking for Snowy Owls, but didn't see one, still, the ice-encrusted branches made for interesting images. I took the same route home and again got some not-owl shots.

However on the way home, I stopped for a bathroom break at a gas station in Georgina. I put my cellphone down, and remember specifically telling myself not to forget it. Seriously, I actually told myself not to forget it, literally 5 seconds before leaving the bathroom. You know what's coming, right?

Three hours. I knew exactly where I had left it. It took me an hour to get back there and two more hours to get home. It's my only phone so leaving it for a few days was not an option.

I've lost/forgotten stuff before: but never this bad. Is it just age, or the early onset of you-know-what? I can't find any of my drybags (I use them to keep condensation from forming in my camera when I bring it in from the cold). So I had to buy a new one. I can't find any of my half-dozen flashlights (well, one...) so I bought some new ones yesterday. I go in the grocery store without a shopping list and I can't remember why I'm there. {sigh}.

Anyway, here are some pictures from yesterday.

The trees were coated with a rime of ice and it was capturing the light snow as it fell. I saw this tree and stopped to shoot it. However, I had the long lens on (hoping to see a snowy owl) so even at its widest setting – 150mm – I couldn't get the whole tree in. So I deliberately shot a sequence of nine pictures: starting at lower right, three across, then back across the middle, then the top. I stitched these together with Lightroom CC 2015.4's marvelous new pano-merge feature. The resulting image was almost 150 megapixels in size – so big that I couldn't save it in the normal fashion! It did the job flawlessly. Then I decided it needed some textures and toning... 

Like I said, a rime of ice. This is basically right out of the camera, although I did work on the toning a little.  Surprisingly good given that it was handheld at 600mm (1/1000 second at f/6.3, ISO 5600)

This picture needed some noise reduction. Topaz Labs announced the latest version of DeNoise (6) a couple of days ago and I used it. I simply dialed in the preset for the D800 at 6400 ISO and clicked "go". Wow.

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Topaz DeNoise 6 Upgrade

From now until March 20th, Topaz DeNoise 6 is on sale for $30 off their regular price of $79.95. Worth it at twice the price! You can download a free trial to see how it works for you before buying it, but you have to complete the transaction by the 20th of March to get the discounted price. 

Here's the link to the Topaz Labs page: Topaz DeNoise
Use that link, and enter "NOISEFREE" in the coupon code box at checkout to get the discount.

PS: If you already own deNoise your upgrade is free. You probably got an email from Topaz but if not, use the link and download the new version. It will recognize your existing serial number when you install it.

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Here's one of these "I can't decide which picture I like best" questions. I hate when people do this on Facebook ("which one do you like, colour or black-and-white?") so forgive me.

The first image is a considered landscape. Diagonal leading lines, hazier in the distance, framed by the dark foliage... it tell the story of this rural house of worship on a snowy winter day.

The second image came to me when I was looking through the viewfinder, composing the first one. I loved the textures of the bricks and I wanted to make that the story. I wanted to make the church stand out from the softness of its ice-covered surroundings.

Snowy owls sometimes perch on that roof. That's why I was there...

— 30 —

Happy 2016 to all my friends!

My 2016 wish for all of you:

HEALTH

Because if you don't have that, nothing else matters.

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When I read what I wrote, I realize that I must really be an old man. Those ubiquitous wishes for prosperity and happiness in the new year ring hollow when one has had brushes with problems of health. As I get older, I realize that you can get past the engine in your car blowing up, your basement getting flooded, your business failing or losing your job and none of that matters if you don't have your health.

I'm a cancer survivor. I had surgery for metastatic cancer in 2004 and again in 2007 and several radiation treatments and medications since. It's been 12 years and I'm still here. One day it's going to jump up and bite me but I'm still here. My father had the same cancers I do and he made it to 89. That's a long way in the future. Maybe I'll make it that far, maybe not.

But that puts a perspective on one's life: sure, I want to be fulfilled and content and not lack any of the necessities but mostly I want to not have to worry about my health for a while longer. Because if I have that, I won't sweat the small stuff.

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Speaking of the years going by...

I've been writing this blog since 2006. TEN YEARS! This is my post #345, so about 3 posts per month for 120 months! I don't have a huge audience, a couple of hundred regular readers, more when I have something significant to say. As I look back, I've been pretty consistent and it's pretty clear that my photography, my art, has matured and grown over that time.

It occurs to me that in all that time, I have never made ANY statement about politics. I'm about to break that.

When asked what my politics are, I say that I am APOLITICAL. That means I don't care, one way or another, I have better things to think about. Another way of looking at it is that they are all cut from the same cloth, one is just as bad as the next. But at the risk of alienating some of my readers, I feel compelled to step out and say something now. And the reason is a fellow named Donald J. Trump.

Nothing scares me more than the possibility that this bigoted, racist fascist might get elected President of the United States. At the beginning, you could laugh about him: he wasn't seriously running, he's a joke... but then so was Rob Ford. The scary part is that so many people are taking him seriously – even people whom I otherwise respect – and not only the threat that he might get elected, just the fact that he is running, is probably the most serious threat to world peace since Germany in the 1930's.

The man colours all Muslims with the same paintbrush, all billion-and-a-half of them in the world. He equates them all with violent fanaticism, analogous to Hitler's beliefs about the Jews. The words that come out of his mouth are born in hatred and fear and worst of all, disdain for what anyone else thinks: it's as if no one else's opinion matters. He will cause – he IS causing – a backlash and as some have mentioned, he's probably ISIS's best recruiting tool right now.  

I have always been right-wing. OK, right of centre. I am a firearms owner, I'm very pro-police, the only reason I don't hunt anymore is due to physical limitations. I rode motorcycles, I still drive too fast, but seriously, my American friends and relatives? Seriously? Hopefully you're just having fun laughing at him too, but enough! 

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Minden Wildwater Preserve

Everyone knows my favourite place around here is the whitewater. I dropped by there on Christmas day and again after the ice storm on Monday.

It's a very spiritual place. I often go there and take in the serenity and majestic beauty of the rushing waters. Today, Christmas day, I saw this guy at the river's edge. He was lost in prayer, didn't even know I was there. I watched him kneeling motionless for several minutes and took these pictures to capture the feeling. 

There's a Zen word for this. It's "Shikantaza". Look it up.

Then I discovered what he was really doing... as he reached over and took the Neutral Density filter out of his Lee filter holder (in case you don't know what that is, it fits over your camera lens and lets you do long exposures among other things)! Fooled me. Good story? But without the explanation, I find this a very emotion-filled image.

Of course the white water never freezes. But it creates remnants of ice on the rocks and twigs and trees. I call them "Ice Caps" (sorry, Timmies. Different spelling!)

That 105mm Nikkor lens is pretty sharp! 

Same lens. This was handheld at 1/5 second, sitting really, really still! My long range rifle skills came back to me, control breathing, relax muscles... 

This was one of a series of long exposures (tripod this time). All shot in the same place and all different!  

On the way home, I got this image behind my house

A little post-processing went into this one: it's a 5-shot HDR blended in Nik HDR Efex Pro, then treated with Topaz Impression, then I used Topaz Star Effects to bring out the reflections of the ice coating the trees and grass. Click it for a better look.

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Algonquin Park

I'm blessed. Not only because Algonquin Park is an hour away but because I can still just go up there when the mood strikes me. It did on Sunday, so I hopped in the car and went. I didn't know what to expect to see: not much landscape for me this time of year, but I thought maybe I could find some foxes to shoot and I was really jealous of the pictures I've been seeing of the Pine Martens. A couple of people told me where I might find them. As you will see below, I did.

The other interesting part is the people you meet. John Marshall was someone I hadn't met before, with his friend Charlene?? (bad with names!). Steve Dunsford, whom I've met before: he owns the Mad Musher in Whitney and does some phenomenal photography in the Park. I'm struggling to remember the bearded guy's name, whom we met while shooting the Pine Martens... and his friend Laura (John just told me: Jesse Villemaire). 

Some of the animals are too unafraid of humans. That makes it possible for people like me to get pictures but it makes me uneasy about whether their reliance on people to feed them will prove their downfall. The story I heard yesterday about the foxes on Arowhon Pines road is that they (or their ancestors, I guess) were sick with mange a few years ago and someone left medicated food for them to nurse them back to health. They got used to people feeding them, which I hear many people do (but have never witnessed).

I saw some photos later of the fox kit I photographed and a sibling playing with one of the photographers. Great shots. I don't think that road is plowed in winter. We got snow today so I wonder if anyone will get up there until Spring. Hope the foxes survive. Here are some pictures:

 

And now... a Pine Marten. I'd never actually seen one until that day! Exceedingly cute, and very very fast! S/he scampered through the trees, occasionally posing for a photo.

Not so "cute" when s/he was showing her teeth, upset at the blue jays who were stealing his/her food! 

I was just going to post one or two pictures but I got carried away. They're so damned cute! Prints are available, so are cellphone cases, tote bags, pillows, even shower curtains if you want! Email me and I'll link you to where to get them.

I just realized I updated my watermark a day or two early! Oops.

Anyway, see you all in 2016. Come join me up in Wawa in October. Details will be on the web page at www.photography.to/gales.htm (if I ever get it finished!).

— 30 —

Blowing my own Horn?

...somebody has to!

Art Gallery Exhibition

Last week I wrote that I consider myself more of a craftsman than an artist. It's still true, but it seems others might have a higher opinion of me! This is exciting, some recognition from a respected art venue!

The Agnes Jamieson Gallery and Minden Hills Cultural Centre has selected three of my images in a juried competition. Twenty five images were selected by the curator of the museum, and three of them were mine! They will be exhibited in the Gallery in the month of January. They are for sale in the gallery, or after the exhibit, right here, assuming they haven't sold. If you're in love with any of them, well, you know what to do!

So that's the good news. The bad news is that I had to prepare the images for exhibition which means printing, framing, matting... in the end it cost me over $100 each. They'd better sell...

This was an extra print I did (frames were two-for-one at Michaels...). It's very similar to one of the accepted images and I thought someone might like to acquire the pair. Sorry about the crummy iPhone picture.  

I have to give 'props' to two people. Jim Camelford printed these images for me. Jim is an absolute printing guru. He did his magic with his Epson 7900 and the dynamics and the deep blacks in these monochrome prints are incredible. Jim offers his services for people who want excellent prints made and his pricing is really low. Only bad part is the fact he'll be away for a while in Florida. However you can email him at jimcamel@rogers.com.

The second guy is Bryan deLang who is a frame maker and artist par excellence up here in Minden. I found Bryan through the local facebook buy and sell group, but Bryan is not on the internet. He doesn't own a computer, doesn't want to. I really like this guy: he's eccentric, a curmudgeon, has a wry sense of humour but does fantastic work at very reasonable price. You can reach him at 1 705-286-3572, he's on South Lake Road in a really interesting house!

Sporadic Musings

From the "sporadic musings" department, how much of us is upbringing and how much is DNA? I was sitting and enjoying a Manhattan last night – 2 parts rye, 1 part red vermouth, I skip the bitters, but always put in a maraschino cherry and a couple of ice cubes – and reflected on the fact that it was my father's favourite drink. It's still mine: oh, I've flirted with 18-yo single malts, European beers, Cabernet Sauvignons, but when all is said and done, my dad's favourite is also mine. Then there's my penchant for chocolate, undeniably dad's thing too! So is there a gene sequence for taste buds? Or is it all in the environment in which I grew up?

Waiting for Harder Water

It's freezing up! The weather forecast is for a couple of warm-ish days this week but it shouldn't affect it much. It's been cold for the past few days, and nights are below freezing, so the lakes are getting hard. The Inn across the road has prepared their ice fishing huts to go out when the ice gets thick enough, but I was able to walk on the shallows today. Did you know it's not quiet out on the new ice? If I didn't know better, I'd think I was hearing whale song, there was an almost continuous moaning that was really the still liquid water under the ice finding openings to filter into. Occasionally, you'd hear a big "crack". It's just a guess, but I think there was about 4" to 5" of hard water. You won't catch me out there yet but I'm sure there will be some brave – and foolhardy – souls venturing out very soon!

This was an HDR, converted to black and white with Silver Efex Pro. I loved the sunset sky. Click, as usual, to view it bigger.

When I shot this, I envisioned capturing the essence of the sunset reflecting off the new ice. But it didn't come to life until I processed it with Impression, one of the Georgia O'Keeffe presets. Then I added a Flypaper texture called "Dorian Gray" which made it look like what I had seen in my mind. 

I also shot another picture that I wasn't really satisfied with. But then I used a portion of it after trying the new Topaz Glow plugin:

Could be a huge flock of birds taking off! But it's Glow's interpretation of the fractals in the ice surface. 

Speaking of "Glow", here's a rendering of an older shot

That's the canoe in the morning mist shot from Algonquin Park at the end of September. Topaz Glow is a fascinating program, it lets you explore some off-the-wall ideas! 

Topaz Glow is on sale for the month of December. $20 off the regular $69 price. You can take advantage of it via this link: http://goo.gl/aQvTVd. Enter INTROGLOW in the coupon code at checkout. Because it shares a lot of things with Impression including the hardware requirements, you should do the 30 day free trial before you buy. But bear in mind the deadline is the end of the year.

Parting Shot

I'd like to leave you with one more shot. This one is right in my ballpark, I think. I woke up Wednesday morning to a dusting of new snow and had to go out to take the prints to Bryan to mount. Of course I had the camera with me (I always do). After dropping the pictures off, I went exploring down some back roads and was captivated by two things here: the orange coloured dead leaves still hanging on some bushes (ash, I think), and the tall trees silhouetted against the snowy sky.

So I loved the composition, but again felt it needed some post-processing to make it 'painterly'. The Georgia O'Keeffe preset is turning into one of my favourites. So is this image, I think it'll print well:

The birds aren't real. I "enhanced" the sun, but I actually created the birds with brush strokes in Photoshop. The image needed some balance. I don't know what I'd do without my Wacom tablet!

I haven't shot a lot of straight "photographs" in a while. It's time I did some pictures without adding paint or brush strokes or other impressionistic things, so I'll try to do so in the next little while. We're coming up on the year end, of course, so the deadline is fast approaching for images that will appear in my "Best of 2014" book!

It's not time yet to write that "what I'm looking forward to for 2015" article... stay tuned!

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Paranoia runs deep!

But before we talk about that...

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Paranoia
The little green men can still be after you even if you are paranoid, you know.

Two things triggered this thought.

1. The cops are out to get me

Driving home the other day along the Argyle Road, traffic was light. Perhaps 5 vehicles came from the other direction in about 10 km. Just to give you a sense... the road was bare and dry, the weather clear. The speed limit was 80 kph and I'm not afraid to admit that I drive around 100 kph in these conditions. I use the cruise control to keep from overdoing it.

I looked in the mirror and there was a black SUV behind me, with a suspicious looking roof rack/profile. I don't know where he came from, I'm generally pretty good at watching around me. Uh-oh. I know what that is. OPP (Ontario Provincial Police). I eased off the cruise control, just dropping to about 95. He stayed where he was. 90. Still there. Then came a straightaway and he pulled out and passed me. Then he accelerated to about 105 and was slowly gone.

Like this one. 

Two days earlier, on Highway 400, limit 100 kph, everyone travels at 120 or so. But then cars are slowing down... another OPP cruiser. He was doing 100 in the right lane, causing a traffic jam because nobody drives at 100... I held 110 or so and tipped my new hat to him as I passed.

But you get that sinking feeling in your gut whenever you see a cop car. Even if you're not doing anything wrong or unreasonable.

2. My power's going to fail!
This came up the other day. I went to the kitchen to get a cup of coffee and while I was there, I heard an odd beeping from my computer area. Nothing I recognized... then I heard a similar beeping coming from the back room where the DSL modem is. Putting 2 and 2 together, I said, "AHA! Power failure! Those are the UPS warnings".

I'm guessing it was a low voltage or brownout. I still had lights, etc. It stopped after about 10 minutes. I've not seen that here before, either it's on or it's off. But it made me think about my UPS's and wondering whether all of you are wearing protection.

Just in case "UPS" is not familiar to you (or it makes you think about brown trucks), it stands for "Uninterruptable Power Supply" and it's a battery backup system that provides power when the mains fail or drop below a threshold, and it usually includes pretty heavy duty surge protection as well. I recently replaced the main one that my computers are plugged into, I now have about 20 minutes to save my work and power down smoothly in the event of a power outage. I have a second one that supports only my DSL modem and that gives me about 2 hours of wifi and wireless internet when the power is gone. That's important to me because I'm isolated up here, I'm not in a city and without power, I don't have water pumps, a furnace blower, etc.

  

PS: Think it through when you install one. You need your computer, your monitor, your mouse and keyboard, your wifi or internet modem, and any external hard drives you're using. If you're on a laptop, you're usually covered, but maybe not the external drives or your router...

Pond Hockey pictures
So you expected to see some more pond hockey pictures, huh? You will, but not today. I have something else for you.

Snowmobiling on 12-Mile Lake

First of all, when I typed this heading, Blogger didn't recognize the word 'snowmobiling' and it wanted to replace it with 'monolingualism'. Shades of 'autocorrect' on an iPhone or iPad! Too funny.

It looked as though we were going to get a nice sunset yesterday. So I fired up the bike* and headed out on the lake around 5pm.

* Snowmobilers call their machines, "sleds". ATVers or 4-wheelers call theirs, "bikes". And you thought this blog wasn't educational!

Anyway, there wasn't a colourful one, although the sky was kind of HDR-ready.

Anyway, while I was waiting for the sun to set, I heard the angry hornet-buzz of a bunch of sleds. Usually these guys just go whipping by at 1200 mph but this time they wanted to play on the snowbanks at the side of the ice-road plowed by the Red Umbrella Inn. Looked like a photo-op, so I hopped on the bike (see how the new terminology works? You've learned two new words!) and wandered over. They were cooperative, to a point, so I unlimbered the camera and...

It was starting to get pretty dark, so I had to vary my shooting technique. Initially, I was doing slow shutter speed panning, but it got too tough, so I slowly switched to high-ISO fast shutter.

Small young guy, big sled. He couldn't jump as high simply because he didn't have the weight and strength to lift that big sled. This is 1/250 sec at f/4.5, ISO 2000.

For you techno-weenies, we're at 1/1000 sec, f/4.5, ISO 2000 and even then I was underexposed a stop or two. Getting dark! Shooting RAW gives you a lot of latitude.

In case you're wondering, these are not HDR's. Most of the lighting effects were done in Lightroom with the adjustment brush. I also used Topaz Adjust 5.

I converted the first image to a "Paintograph" (I read that term somewhere. I like it). The oil paint filter in Photoshop CS6 is very cool.

You've gotta admit... OK you don't gotta, but *I* like it!

These sledders have contacted me by email and are hopefully reading this blog. If they are, then I'd love to do some more pictures in better light one of these days. Please get in touch!

More to come next week...

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