Last Gasp of winter

The past several days up here in the highlands has been that ugly, muddy, wet, soggy time of year when everything is melting. I have a "pond" on the north side of my house. It's not very deep but the bottom is so soft that you sink in a few inches, resulting in a 'soaker' every time you go out for some firewood (taking it around to the front door for now). The driveway is all rutted at the back, although the 10 or 12 little trailerloads of gravel I spread last year at the entrance has worked. It's a muddy mess back where my garage is (and where my sump pump line exhausts!). So I parked my car in the driveway last night, not wanting to drive over it.

So of course, this is what it looked like when I got up this morning! Last Gasp.

iPhone pano. But it's all mud under that white frosting. I heard Algonquin Park got 15-25cm of the white stuff. Tempting to take a drive up but, nah... 

I did get one more trip into Algonquin Park before the end of March. Still snowy up there, but spring is on its way (I wrote this before I got up to the white stuff this morning!).

I culled my images back to three favourites as I promised (I know, should only be one. But it's better than the NINE I wanted to post here!

This young fox was in the Spruce Bog. Too accustomed to the presence of Man, s/he  followed us around in the hopes of a handout. The late day lighting was perfect. BTW I had a shot I liked better but there was a leaf or something stuck on the fox's nose! (if you subscribe to my blog you'd see that picture. I always send an unpublished picture to my subscribers! Click the "Newsletter" link at the top of this blog to subscribe. No spam, one click to unsub.)

This is a mink, making its way along behind the creek. I don't think it wanted to go in the water like the otter. I had a shot of it at full gallop, but chose this as one of my three! 

And here's the otter, snacking on frog's legs. I had closer shots but thought showing the environment tells a better story. 

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This was created using a Photoshop Action called "Seven Styles Watercolor" (Google is your friend!) which I purchased for the princely sum of $6. I don't normally buy actions or presets, but this one was so intriguing when I saw it in the Topaz forums, that I had to try it. It could add a new creative dimension to my post-processing.

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It was a rainy day... practicing for Newfoundland

When I'm in Newfoundland this summer, there are going to be a lot of photo ops shooting colourful little outports overlooking the ocean, with weathered, textured fishing stages and probably less-than-perfect weather conditions. I want to work up some techniques for shooting under those conditions.

Karen was visiting from Toronto so we decided to go out and shoot some pictures despite the rainy weather.

This first shot was overlooking the lake from my dock area. Um, the sun wasn't there and the duck was in a different place! I was showing Karen some post-processing techniques. Also my "blogframe" action (I wrote this one myself!). It needs updating, it doesn't work right on the Mac, especially since the fonts aren't available. Next time I get ambitious. 

One thing you need to do is work the scene. Sometimes you shoot close, sometimes more landscape. This ice fishing hut had lots of texture in the weathered wood but I decided that it competed with the graphic nature of the picture, so I smoothed it away. 

Then I thought that this scene might be typical of an outport in the rain, so I gave it a painterly treatment, bringing out the colours, especially in the reflections in the muddy foreground. This was actually a good test: I had the wrong lens, so I shot 6 images and stitched them together using the merge to pano function in Lightroom. I resized it before working on it, it was almost a 100 megapixel file!

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I have two trips to look forward to: Newfoundland in July and Lake Superior in October. I can't decide which one is going to be more fun! Anyone want to come along?

— 30 —

Chains upon my feet...

...from the "musings" department

I've said this before: if you want to learn how to set up a photo, watch TV. Or movies.

Last night it struck me again. I was doing something on the computer and although I don't normally watch NCIS Los Angeles (I do admit to watching the original NCIS and New Orleans, though), it was on in the background behind me. I turned around and saw a scene where the curly blond haired guy was sitting, talking to the old, short lady (his boss? – told you I don't watch it!) – and the scene made me come to a stop. It was outstanding.

The subjects were perfectly lit – they were in a dark room, on a staircase, with a doorway in the background and some light that appeared to be sunlight dappling the floor in front of the doorway. The lighting, the composition, the depth of field, the textures, were absolutely outstanding. If you took a still from that shot and entered it in an international Salon level competition, you would win, hands down. Then she walked away, through the dappled light, while the camera stayed focused on the guy's face. What a visual story!

But it's not just this shot, it's pretty well ALL of them. Go switch on your TV. Doesn't matter what you watch, a talk show, a sit-com, a commercial, a movie, a football or hockey game: it's perfect. Look at it and try to figure out why!

These are the big guys. The people who make big bucks doing photography and videography. They have unlimited budgets, all the equipment you dream about, and a staff that includes set designers, lighting experts, makeup artists, etc., as well as graphic designers and people who sit there and design and storyboard the shots. Do they do a better job than you can with shot setup, design and execution? You bet they do, better than I can or anyone that I know.

Sure there are differences between stills and video.  So hit "Pause" on your PVR and look at the still. Is there any question in your mind what the subject is of the picture? Is the subject in the middle or off-centre? Is it too flat or too contrasty? What about colour balance? Is it in focus? Is the exposure too bright or too dark? I can't see what you're looking at but I'm pretty sure I know the answers to those questions.

Use it as a learning experience. Sure, you don't have a team to set up your shots, you don't have an unlimited equipment budget... but there are tons of things they do that you could also do. One of those things is to stop and study a scene (if you're doing landscapes) BEFORE you press the shutter, even before you take out your camera. It's called "Pre-Visualization".

99% of the pictures I see, whether on Social Media, in competitions... would be instantly rejected by these big guys. Everyone is trying to emulate them, with little success (I was going to say 'varying success' but a 99% reject rate is not 'varying'). I may not be good enough to get in that 1% very often, but that isn't going to stop me from trying. I need to take more time to think about it. How about you?

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Gales of November Workshop

The Rock Island Lodge 

I've been invited to several workshops this year. Exotic places like Cuba, Costa Rica, Africa, Iceland, Yellowstone. You know what they all have in common? They're all THOUSANDS of dollars. US dollars to boot. The Gales workshop IS in an exotic location: the Canadian Wilderness, on the shores of Lake Superior, where the Group of Seven wandered and expressed what they saw in their art. And it's NOT thousands of dollars.

There's only room for a dozen people (although if demand is high, I can do a second session). It's already about half full. Think about it. If there's any chance you might be able to make it up to  Wawa next October, PLEASE go to this webpage and take two minutes to do the short questionnaire and leave me your name so I can keep you in the loop.

PS: I'm still working on the web page. Bottom line? It's a 3 or 4 day field experience for intermediate or advanced photographers who want some fresh ideas and an opportunity to experience some outstanding landscapes and express themselves in the company of other talented people.

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Topaz Labs year-end special

They're at it again! Topaz Labs is offering a 35% discount on any and all products until the year-end. If you've been waiting to take the plunge or add some more of their outstanding plug-ins, now's the time!

Some of the newer Topaz products require a higher graphics functionality to work. If you're not sure it will work on your computer, download the free trial before finalizing your purchase. Be sure to complete the transaction before the year-end, though.

Here's the link to their site. Enter the coupon code "TOPAZ2015" at checkout to get the discount.

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Triggertrap update

They've been listening! I love my TriggerTrap but one thing I've run into is the drain on the iPhone battery. Even if you turn the brightness all the way down, you still only get about 90 minutes out of an iPhone6. So I ordered (but haven't yet received) an external battery pack for the phone. This is not something TriggerTrap can fix (other than to remind you to turn your screen brightness down when doing time lapses).

But they did address the other issue, which is that brightly coloured and white screen glow which can affect your images if you're not careful. So their update 4.1 includes a "night mode". Much better!

Also they included a ND filter conversion calculator in the Timed Release mode: just enter your base shutter speed, the ND filter strength, and TT does the rest! I had printed out a table on a laminated card, then I lost it somewhere... no more mental arithmetic.

If you want to know how TriggerTrap works without paying anything, simply download the app (for iPhone or Android) for free and try it! To make it work with your camera, you need the hardware, which you can buy from a European or North American source. Free shipping until the end of the year! Here's the link to their site. There's also a bunch of useful video tutorials on their site under Inspiration→howto. Give it a looksee!

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Are we having fun yet?

It sure is a lot easier (for me) in Photoshop and Impression! MUCH harder with brushes and canvas and oil paints! Two of my oil painting works-in-process.

Chippewa Falls, Lake Superior. It's a tighter crop than the last version, from much the same vantage point as J.E.H. MacDonald painted it. I didn't paint this one plein air, I came back to it and did another painting. This is oil paint on board, 9x12.

South Lake Road, Minden Ontario. This is in process; I want to change what the tree looks like but have to wait for the paint to dry a bit before I go over it. You saw a black-and-white version of the original photo in last week's blog, I'm happy with a lot of this image, especially the foreground, but not the tree.  Painted in oils on canvas paper, 9x12.

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Winter has finally arrived

...at least I think so. The forecast for Monday is warm and rainy, so I'm not counting my chickens. But the world looks so much nicer with a blanket of clean white snow than muddy brown!

I did take the opportunity to get my ATV out with the snowplow for the first time this year. We had about 4" of snow (I was going to say about 6" but then I would be open for all those off-colour jokes...). And new this year, "Chains upon my Feet". What a difference! In fact, my 4WD wasn't working yesterday (it's mysteriously back today) and I actually had difficulty on a slippery surface until I put on the chains! It feels unstoppable (I know enough not to get too cocky, though).

Putting the chains on wasn't too difficult, although I threw one after my first attempt. It was easier when I figured out that using the motorcycle jack to lift the tire off the ground was the trick. I need to get some heavier duty bungee cords to hold them tight. And with them on, no playing around doing donuts or they're likely to come off and damage something.

I didn't do much to this image. Almost straight out of camera... well it is a 5-exposure HDR processed in Nik HDR Efex Pro 2, I did a radial filter to add haze to the background, then I added the yellow light to the headlights which were actually off... all right, I'm lying, but really only about 10 minutes work, all in Lightroom!

This is the original SOOC 

And this shot is just the way I saw it... in my mind!  Among other things, I added a masked motion blur layer to give it a sense of motion (I know, doesn't make sense since it's obviously not being driven), blurred the background and treated it with Topaz Impression, then Texture Effects to give it a vintage feel 

"Waiting for Hard Water". Every year I do a picture of the ice fishing huts at the Red Umbrella Inn, waiting to go out on the ice. Well as you can see, despite the fact that it's December 20th, no ice yet. I think it'll be some weeks before they can go out, but I could be wrong. This is one of their smaller, older huts; the one at left in the foreground is brand new and 4x the size.  

— 30 —

Busy, Busy weekend!

New Header Photo

Every couple of months I like to change the header picture on the blog to reflect the season. Today's new header is wishful thinking, I think! Last night it was almost 30°C below and we have a ton of snow on the ground. The theory is, "if you think it, it will happen". Think warm thoughts!

The new header is actually an old photo that I took with my D70 back in 2006 on the Cabot Trail, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. It's amazing what quality a 6Mp camera delivers, even in today's terms. I enhanced it within Lightroom and Photoshop, then I applied the excellent "Paper Textures" extension in Photoshop CC. It's free, and if you install it, note that there are TWO versions, "Paper Textures" and  "Pro". Install both.

When I replace the header photo, I put the old one here for reference or it's gone! So here's the header picture that was up to the end of February.

The ongoing New Laptop saga

Strictly speaking, not a new laptop, just a new boot drive. The old one gave up the ghost, so I had a new drive installed. We put in a 256Gb SSD drive and loaded the operating system and programs on it. Data resides as it always had, on a second internal drive, backed up to various plugged in external drives.

By the way when I say "we" I mean I paid for it, and James Keller did it. He really knows what he's doing and is starting a fresh computer services business in Haliburton. He has my vote.

So my data was safe but I have to reinstall all of my programs. There are probably 20 of them that I use regularly, and a bunch of others that are more sporadically required and lots of support stuff. Today I discovered that I didn't have a PDF reader installed, for instance, or Dropbox. I've got the critical ones done but there are 7 or 8 of the main programs left to do and who knows how many of the utilities. What a pain.

I also discovered that I was missing some important pieces of the puzzle. For example, my Lightroom and Photoshop preferences and presets! So if I were you, I'd go look for those and make sure you have a backup somewhere. Also your Outlook file if you use that client. It's usually in some obscure location!

FWIW, the laptop sure boots up quick now! And since the swap files are on the SSD, I imagine Photoshop will fly much faster when working on some of those huge D800 files!

How's this for an HDR location?

I came across this old building last week. The sign on it says "Ontario's Coolest Building".What an awesome HDR site, especially if we can get inside (which we might be able to do after the winter). And across the road is a larger structure that had collapsed, so there's just some brick walls and framework left. Ill try to set up a shoot there!

This is a 5-shot HDR, then I added a Topaz Simplify layer.  

This is the yellow sign on the building (click to blow it up if you can't read it), shot through my car window. Hey, it was cold, OK? 

It was a busy weekend

It started with Ron Goodlin's wildlife presentation on Friday night, attended by almost 50 people. A wonderful program, turns on the 'envy' genes, both about his skills as a photographer and speaker, and his ability to travel and his great equipment.

Forgive the lousy iPhone photo! 

We went to the dogsled races on Saturday. It was a snowy, flat day, that got even worse later on. Sunday was clear but Saturday was a long day and I didn't get there the next day until much too late (someone told me the 8-dog race STARTED at 3pm. In fact it ENDED at 3pm. {sad face}.

It took a bunch of editing to make a useable shot out of this one. Really flat lighting and snow falling made it a difficult capture, especially since it was with my 400 mm lens. By the way, that looks like a GoPro camera on her chest: they're really ubiquitous. This was the 6-dog race on Saturday afternoon. 

This is an 11-week-old puppy. I tried to steal her to take her home, but couldn't get away with it. This has to be one of the cutest puppies I've ever seen. Her name is Nyx, after (Νύξ), the Greek primeval goddess of night. Apparently she will be bred in 18 months, so I gave her my card and said to call me in 18 months and 8 weeks! Do you think she bought the jacket to match the dog's eyes?

Dr. Ron, lying down on the job as usual! Ron, your camo isn't working! I SEE YOU!
I tried getting down on the ground too. It took 3 people to help me get up. {sigh}. 

The lighting was MUCH better on Sunday. This shot is only lightly edited. Could have used a touch more depth of field... 

But that's not all. I decided to drive home via Bethel Church Road, which leads to the white water venue on Horseshoe Lake Road. First thing that made me put on the brakes and grab the camera was this seasonal home.

It's a log building, boarded up for the winter, with a fastidiously applied coat of pastel blue and green paint. I thought it lends itself well to this painterly treatment. I had to climb up a snowbank to get this vantage point. Then one more step and I was in up to my hips. I didn't expect that, and didn't bother to take gloves with me, and couldn't use my healing right hand to help get up... you should have seen me floundering around!

That's still not all! As I got to Horseshoe Lake Road, I saw a herd of deer at a house on the right. I quietly got out, changed lenses, walked over to the driveway... and they ran off. I went to the white water, scouted around a bit, nothing doing, headed back. The deer were back again. This time I managed to get some shots. Even better, this one youngster was too curious to be frightened and I got to within about 15 feet!

Love his expression and the pink tongue sticking out! Notice his ears aren't even up! He's going to have to learn some caution or he won't make it through hunting season next year! He was trying to wind me, but I was cross-wind to him. 

An eyeball shot.Told you I was close! 400mm and cropped, but hey... 

...and you thought I was done for the day! When I got home, I saw these great clouds, the sun was about to set... I thought I'd get that colourful sunset I had missed last week. Again it didn't materialize. By the time the sun went down, it was cloudless. I spend two hours waiting for it out on the ice, to no avail. I sat in a fishing hut (no heat, but out of the wind) for an hour or so. Anyway, I took this burst while setting up the camera for later.

7-shot HDR and I painted in the lights. Then I added the stars. If those clouds had hung around for another hour it would have been more spectacular! I'll get one yet! 

So I figure that's enough for one weekend. Until next time!

— 30 —

Doodling

Doodling

I was doodling with my Wacom stylus in Photoshop. What do you think?

When I did this, I was thinking about a logo for the new Haliburton Highlands Camera Club (this isn't it: it needs a camera or lens or shutter in it). But I started playing with a pressure sensitive brush and started by trying to draw a pine tree. I'm actually not that happy with the brush (can't seem to go from really big to really small) but anyway, this evolved.

Somehow I really like it, wish I had something i could do with it. If you know someone who owns a resort in the pine trees, this would make a great logo for them!

PS: it's 5 strokes of the pen and a filled circle. I so wish I could draw...

What got me started thinking in this direction was this image I took on the way home from Haliburton yesterday.

Winter Sunset. Straight out of the camera. Just a little crop and some Lightroom toning.
My new blog header banner until another one catches my fancy! 

2014 Resolution, Day 1

Asking people if I can take their picture. I stuck my toe in the water. I sort of asked someone in McKeck's restaurant if I could take his picture. Sort of... there was a guy there in a full snowmobile suit and helmet in the upstairs restaurant (you don't see that in the city much. Different story in Haliburton!). Anyway I didn't really ask, I chatted with him, told him how unusual that was, and TOLD him to go stand in the window light so I could get a shot. He didn't question it, just did what I said! The shot didn't come out as I would have liked but it was a first step!

Then Karen, the lady who served us, started talking about how they had REAL oyster crackers with their clam chowder and got all animated and excited about them (!). I didn't ask, I just picked up the camera and shot a burst. She didn't mind at all, just said "I hope you got my good side".

We don't just have crackers, we have OYSTER CRACKERS!
I got a nice smile in another shot but I like her expression here!

So I guess my resolution is about taking people's pictures when they know I am, not like a paparazzi with a telephoto lens.

So it begins

Ice fishing season is under way. With the recent cold spell, the ice on the lakes is nice and thick and the seasonal villages of ice huts is about to explode on the northern lakes. Frankly, I don't see the attraction, probably because I'm not a big fish eater or beer drinker, but it does provide some photo ops!

And so it begins. Kirk, from the Red Umbrella Inn, dragging an ice hut out onto 12-Mile Lake. Processed with Topaz Simplify, I also used Topaz Star Effects and a radial filter in Lightroom. My latest favourite tools! Because I get asked how I post-process images, here's what I did.

I used Topaz Simplify to add the painterly look then I masked it for his face, hat and jacket, the front of the ATV and the snowplow blade (and the bit of snow at the bottom). This was already low DOF because it was shot at f/2.8 (200mm) but I wanted to enhance that look. I also used the local adjustment brush in Simplify to burn in the wood on the shack a bit to give it more vibrance. The windshield was covered with a mass of duct tape where it was cracked and it's a white mess, so I used the healing brush and then the mixer brush to blend it out. Then I added stars to the headlights which were just a dull yellow since this was a daylight shot. To do that, I had to brush in a little white spot where I wanted the stars, then run the Plug-in. Back in Lightroom I darkened the image then I added a radial filter around his face and clicking 'invert mask' to adjust the inside of the filter, increased the exposure, clarity and sharpening on his face.

For me that's really light post-processing. Nothing I do any more is SOOC (straight out of the camera), that's just my style.

It's Sunday morning, 4:00 am

...and here I am typing on my blog. In case anyone is wondering why, it's the downside of living up North. I was lying in bed and heard my sump pump running. It should go off after a few minutes, but it didn't. That means my sump pump line under the driveway is frozen (I didn't think the heatline in it actually works...). I was going to wait until morning but then I thought about how my basement might be filling with water and wondered if the pump would fail. So I went out and attached a jury-rigged hose to the outlet and ran it across the driveway. I have to do that every winter. When that line gets frozen, I swap in another one, and bring the frozen one in to melt in the bathtub.

Then when I came inside and looked at the thermostat, the low-battery warning was flashing. I figured as long as I'm up... and I changed them. Then I went to the computer before going back to bed and here I am. PS, if it snows a lot today, I'm in trouble. My ATV is in the shop, the 4WD was only working when I curved to the left. They found the problem but didn't have it back together yet on Friday, so it'll be Monday before I get it back. Kirk, the guy on the ATV in the picture said he would plow out my driveway if we get a big snowfall before my ATV comes back. The joys of living in God's Country!

Now I'm going back to bed. Night-night!

Free Wallpaper

Remember this image from a couple of weeks ago? It makes a really nice background picture for your computer.

Free for use as wallpaper on your computer. This image is protected under Creative Commons Licensing BY-NC-ND. Attribution required if you distribute it, no commercial use, no modification in any way. Please do not print it: this version is not optimized for printing. If you want a print (large format art print available) or if you want to use it for commercial purposes, just ask.

Readers of my blog can download it for free as follows:

Go to one of the following links, then you can right-click/save-as to take a copy

• 4x3 size for normal monitors: http://photography.to/wallpaper/nakedtrees4x3.jpg
• 16x9 version for wide-screens: http://photography.to/wallpaper/nakedtrees16x9.jpg

You can of course stretch either version to fit your monitor but you may prefer the cropping of one or the other.

Haliburton Highlands Camera Club Meeting

We found a great location for our meetings: The Royal Canadian Legion in Minden! Seating for about 60 people, easy to get to and to park... next meeting is Wednesday, January 15 at 7pm. If you didn't get the invite via MailChimp, drop me a note and I'll get you on the list. Among other things, we're going to do a mini-tutorial on how to resize and upload pictures, and on the private Facebook group we have set up for the club. Here's the club's webpage. See you there!

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Winter in the Highlands

That's actually the title of my new Blurb book. I've been procrastinating forever, every now and then selecting some images to use in a book, wanting to do something limited to images up here in the Haliburton area... too many images! So with the impetus of a Richmond Hill Camera Club competition, I finally got around to it.

The book is only about winter up here. City folk are always asking me how I can stand it up here in winter and my response to them is, "did you know snow is actually white"? I love it up here and winter is a candidate for my favourite season. Anyway, the book isn't quite ready for public viewing. The competition required that a 40-page minimum book be uploaded to the Blurb site by the end of the day on the 24th of February. Believe it or not, I started working on it on the 22nd. I made it! There are lots of things to polish before it's ready, but it's there.

I'm not going to show you images from the book here today. Actually, you've seen most of them over time but they're together and form a story in the book. You'll just have to wait for it!

An Artist's Vision

Rosa and I talked about artist's vision last week. I was thinking about my music. When I sit down to a keyboard, or pick up a guitar or harp, I know what I want the music to sound like but I'm not good enough to make it happen. I can't convey the emotion that I feel inside, and that frustrates me. I wondered if a skilled artist can render on canvas, or paper, or in sculpture or in digital form, the picture that he/she has in mind. I was having doubts, you see, about my skills. She told me, "yes, almost all the time". That didn't make me feel any better.

We had been looking at a Picasso painting — "Court Jester" or something like that, I don't remember the exact name — and she told me about how the lines flowed and the eye moved along the curve to a specific point. I said, "yes, I can see that, but surely Picasso didn't plan it that way, he didn't think that through before putting a brush on canvas". "Yes he did. He knew what he wanted to do before he did it" (I'm paraphrasing: a woman can remember exact words, but I can't!).

How many of us do that with a photo? "I want the light to flow exactly like this. The composition should be just so, in order to lead the eye where I want it to go". I'm rambling and maybe not making sense, but a lot of my pictures are accidents. I don't often have a vision in my mind and go out and capture it. Rosa pointed out that a painter or sculptor has much longer to think about it than a photographer, production of their work could take days or months and since it's really easy to push a shutter release, serendipity figures into a photographer's work more often than not. Making any sense?

That's the direction I'm striving for. At the very least, when I'm standing at a scene, camera in hand, I should know in advance what I want to achieve, rather than bang off a bunch of shots and then say, when looking on computer, "oh, there's a good one".

I'm going to show you an image that I posted last week again: but I spent some more time on it. When I stood and looked at the scene, I had a vision of what I wanted to achieve. And although it took a lot of Photoshop and desktop effort, this was what I saw in my head:

This is what I had in mind. Not what I posted last week. I used some Photoshop effects, like Gaussian Blur, brush strokes and selective sharpening on different masked layers. Most interesting to me was the sky which I created using the mixer brush in CS5 after watching a tutorial by Mike Hoffman. It's exactly what I saw in my head even though the sky was just grey that day.

Along the same lines, I went out on the ice on 12–Mile Lake today (really yesterday because it's 2:00am), braving temperatures down around -20°C. I didn't know what I wanted to shoot until I got out there, then I saw the sky and I saw an ice fishing hut made from a blue tarp, through which the light glowed.

Was the sky that brown? No, but there was the diagonal line of dark and light streaks of cloud that you see. I knew that I had to shoot an HDR to capture it, and again I needed to re-tone the image so that the light glowing through the walls of the hut was more obvious. I softened the focus of everything but the hut to make it stand out even more.

So I didn't plan this shot before I walked a mile out across the ice, but I did plan it before I pressed the shutter (5 times! HDR, remember?). Here's another image that I took with a different perspective. This one wasn't planned, it was pure luck.

HDR again, of course. Processed entirely in Lightroom and NIK HDR Efex pro.

Don't leave home without it

This was another one of these moments. At the last second, I threw the camera, with the 70-200mm lens mounted, in the car. I was just driving into Minden for some supplies, with a stop at the garbage dump. Remember I said I liked living up here in the winter? Where else would you see scenes like this:

There are 10 deer in this picture. There were another half dozen there as well, but I couldn't get them to pose for the camera. It's hard to shoot a whole herd. It's like hunting, when you get a whole flock of ducks in front of you: you have to pick one, you can't shoot at a flock. I was tracking that deer that came in from the left and suddenly, there they all were! 

Here's another shot:

Deer are incredibly curious. Their ears perked up and they looked at me at the sound of my shutter releasing. I shot this with my 70-200mm lens from about 20 feet away. They weren't afraid, just curious

These two deer shots were at the dump, as I said. I did a lot of work to conceal that fact by cloning out and desaturating the detritus of man.

Enough for today: off to bed. See you next week!

— 30 —

Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow

OK, I admit it. There isn’t any yellow snow, but I’m using catchy headlines to grab your attention! A shameless attempt to lure you into visiting this blog. Hope you don’t catch on too soon!

As I said in the last post, I was rambling on too long to include a bunch of other topics and images that I had set aside to add to the blog. So I thought I’d do a little catch-up here.

New Car
Remember I said I was getting a new car? I did. A couple of days before Christmas, I picked up my 2011 Subaru Forester. I bought it because (a) my 2003 VW Passat was aging with 210,000 km on it and things were starting to break and cost me money, (b) I felt the need for all-wheel drive up here in snow country and (c) I wanted the extra carrying capacity. Minden Subaru cut me a great deal on a lease, so without further ado, here it is:

Mountain Stream
On December 24th, I decided to go for a drive. First destination was the secret site where the locals go to fill up their water jugs with crystal clear spring water. I only learned about this spot a few weeks ago (thanks, Mike!). I don’t know the history of it, but someone obviously built a stone structure and directed the stream through a hose.

Here I am filling up a water jug at the secret stream.

Can’t you just taste the fresh, clear water when you look at this shot?

This is a really small crop out of a bigger image.

I’ll go back and do it again full frame.

Frozen Waterfall
I continued driving and as I left Haliburton, I remembered that Brian, a photographer I met on the trip to Lake Superior, had told me about a waterfall off the Gelert Road, called “Ritchie Falls”. I thought I’d try to find it, and I did! Here’s an image:

The surface of the waterfall was all frozen but the water was flowing underneath. I took a slow exposure (2 seconds) to smooth the water. It was already very dark, so I wasn’t able to capture the other neat thing going on – in the water pool there were dinner-plate size ice floes milling around in the current. I still don’t know how to photograph them effectively.

Waiting for Hard Water
The Red Umbrella Inn dragged its ice fishing huts out of the parking lot and placed them on the ice in the shallows near shore. The ice further out, where they’ll eventually end up is still much too thin to support them, so they staged them here, ready to go. I was out for a late afternoon walk and caught this image at sunset

This is an HDR created with Photomatix Pro. I couldn’t decide which of two compositions I preferred. The other one shows more foreground but this one feels right. I printed it as a 20x30 poster and it looks awesome!

Update:
on Thursday, most of the ice huts had been hauled out to the deep water on the lakes. But New Year’s eve and New Year’s Day were exceedingly warm, and the ice surface was suddenly liquid, not solid. I imagined them sinking into the water but I guess the ice was thick enough. On Saturday, I caught this shot of a guy standing out in the pouring rain. Hope he caught something! Next time maybe he'll pay the rental fee for a hut!

It froze again on Sunday. I started to walk out a bit to get some pictures but the surface of the ice was like a perfect, Zamboni-ed skating rink. Incredibly slippery. I chose not to go out too far, and I saved the camera when I didn’t fall down! Pulled a muscle doing it, though. The things we do...

Well that was it for 2010, here comes a whole new baby year. We’ll see y’all in 2011!


Glenn

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