It's Spring. But not everywhere...

I was in Toronto the other day. What a difference from here! Apple and cherry trees are masses of flowers, people's gardens are blooming, grass is green. Here in the Highlands, not so much. In fact that's an understatement. Some green shoots here and there, the forest floor is still covered with dead leaves. The ATV trail I like to ride is blocked with a fallen tree (Jack, if you're reading this... chainsaw & winches. Call me)

That said, the trilliums at the Wild Water Preserve are coming out. There are actually flowers in some of the sunnier spots.

This is a focus stack of about 8 or 9 images. In theory you can control the background better this way. I also did a single shot at f/22 just for comparison:

not much difference in this case. Slightly different treatment and some extra Clarity added in this one. 

I used one of the DaVinci presets in Impression as a basis for this sketch, then added some colour back in. This is another focus stack. 

It was a nice day Saturday. When I went to the landfill, I decided to get some practice shooting birds on the wing: what better location? Hundreds of gulls and crows and turkey vultures to shoot. I concluded that the Tamron lens is too slow autofocusing: you needed a few seconds for the lens to lock in and if it lost focus, sometimes it wouldn't get it back. Still...

A face only a mother could love. But the Turkey Vulture is majestic in flight.  

Not my favourite bird but again I was practicing and using the Tamron at 600mm handheld. Sometimes you get lucky — I have to turn that into more of a regular occurrence.  

I need a lot more practice before Newfoundland!

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Speaking of Newfoundland

All booked! Things could change but my itinerary looks something like this:

I'm planning to take 3 days to drive out, including a loop around Cape Breton. The ferry leaves at midnight on the 27th, arriving early in the morning. It's a long drive the next day to Twillingate. I'll spend a week in each of three locations, and I left a few days at the end to go to the Cape St. Mary bird sanctuary. The ferry from Argentia is expensive but it would save me a couple of days and about 1500 km of driving.

I'm skipping two places I really should visit: the Gros Morne national park (it's halfway up the west coast) and L'anse aux Meadows which is the very Northern tip. The former because I've been there, I'm not a hiker, and it messes up the schedule and the latter because it's FAR. 700km up the coast (and another 700km back). I do want to go to Fogo Island (been there too) but if I do it'll be a day trip out of Twillingate. And a must-see is the Puffin colony at Bonavista.

The places I'm staying are all cottages or efficiencies because I really don't want to eat in restaurants all the time.

I'm working on a shot list. I plan to make the record of this trip into a story. I came across a new piece of software called Adobe Spark which looks promising to create such a record. More on this later.

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Pictures

As promised, I'm holding it down to a few. Only my better images should be here, I think. I still have to work up a portfolio... not enough hours in a day!

'Tis the season to go to Carden Plain (or as I've been told, to call it "Carden Alvar". When I remember...). I'm there at least once a week. So far not all the birds are back, but here are a few shots I'm proud of:

I shot this at the 'blind' of course. Not an unusual or particularly difficult bird to shoot but I like the pose and I absolutely NAILED the sharpness and focus! 

This is a "lifer" for me (non-birders — it means I've never seen one before). I decided to try the Seven Styles Watercolor action on this one and I like the effect! I can't claim to have found him: Bruce Carmody, whom I ran into at Carden ALVAR, spotted it. I'm really not very good at seeing things... 

It's all about the light, isn't it? You know it, I know it... how come I don't remember that more often? 

... and finally, my "parting shot"

I've been wanting to shoot a composite that includes the Milky Way arch. So it was frustrating to see cloudy skies every night. On Saturday, the skies cleared but I knew clouds were coming in. So I went out to my usual spot only to discover no Milky Way (covered by clouds or I don't know where to look). But I had set up to shoot composite pano's so I did one: a full 360° in fact. This is part of it, a 5-shot merge — the actual file is over 70Mp! I did not replace the sky or foreground, it's 5 portrait-orientation images 15° apart merged together. I took my time and edited this the best I could. Smooth tones, one of the best landscapes I've done suitable for large scale printing. 

Again, the intent of this shot was practice for Newfoundland. I want to do night and dusk shots like this of the landscapes and seascapes.

Time to go: painting class in half an hour! 'Til next time.

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Don't Leave Home without It!

Musings

1. Are you cooking your steaks wrong?

This has absolutely nothing to do with photography!

A friend of mine (Sean, I think it was) sent me a link to an article asking that question. I tried it and came to the conclusion that they were right, I've been doing it wrong for 50 years.

Follow this thinking:
If you sear the outside of the steak first and then BBQ or broil the steak (the way I've always done it), you will end up with only the centre of the steak correctly cooked (your call: rare or medium-rare. If you like your steak well-done please skip the rest of this story and click here for a tasty treat you'll enjoy).

Now for the rest of us: that means that most of the meat will be overdone. The article suggests to slow-cook the steak over low indirect heat until it reaches an internal temperature of 115°F. NOW sear it at very high temperature to give it that crispy outer crust. Note that it will continue to cook internally so the done-ness will be right. There's another reason too – it will melt in your mouth! How do you make a tough piece of meat tender? You cook it slowly, at lower temperatures. That's why crock pots work.

This also works for lamb chops, roasts (I've been doing them that way for a long time) and even hamburgers. For what it's worth, that's how high end steak houses cook. Try it!

2. Unsubscribing from junk mail

You know those "unsubscribe here" buttons at the bottom of most junk mail? Should you or shouldn't you? It's possible that they're waiting for you to click on it so they can verify that you are legitimate and gather your email address for additional spam. What does everyone think? 

By the way, the unsubscribe on my Newsletter is totally legitimate. I use MailChimp and by clicking it, you get totally removed immediately from my mailing list. Not that you would ever want to do that!

Press Accreditation for Pan Am Games

My Press Accreditation application has been approved as a photojournalist for the PanAm Games this summer. Specifically, I've applied for the Canoe and Kayak slaloms to be held at the Minden Wildwater Preserve July 17-18. I'm looking forward to photographing and reporting on this marvelous event. If you are in the media (or know someone who is: please pass this on), I am shooting as a freelancer and would be delighted to submit images to your publication(s). Please contact me directly via photography@faczen.com.

    

 

Some sample images

By the way, I would like to borrow or rent an extra camera body for the event. Nikon, of course, minimum D7100 (or D4s or D800 or...). A crop-sensor body would be useful for the extended tele capability, but I have enough reach with my present gear. Please get in touch if you can help!

Workshops

It's time to start thinking about 2015 workshops. I still have to rewrite my workshop pages (www.photography.to/workshops.htm) but here's what I have in mind. I have three or four basic introductory sessions that last half-a-day and cost $50. Basic photography, Lightroom, Photoshop, specific topics. All of them can be expanded to two day sessions ($150) at the end of which the student will have a working knowledge of the topic. Photography workshops can include a field trip as day 2. All sessions are designed to run up here at my house, but I can also travel if it makes sense.

My schedule is pretty open, so I don't want to set firm dates at this point. Not in the July 11-20 window, though! (PanAm Games). So this is a preliminary heads-up and anyone considering moving up to the next level should read what's on the site above (remembering that I haven't updated it for 2015 yet) and contact me (pardon the anti-spam attempt. I'm sure you understand).

Star Light, Star Bright

The other night, when I got home from the camera club meeting I looked up and actually saw stars.They looked pretty crisp, it was one of those dry winter evenings, temperatures hovering around 0°F (-18°C). Unfortunately I have some local light pollution (one day I'm going to take a .22 to that all-night hydro light in the Inn parking lot next door!), which you can see in this shot, illuminating my garage.

It was the first clear night in a long time: in fact I can't remember a cloudless night since last summer when I did stars workshops! (there may have been some but not predicted more than a day in advance). For fun, I thought I'd include the garage in the foreground and shoot the Eastern sky above it. Besides, Venus was up there blazing brighter than anything else. Besides, I got to set the camera up in my driveway and go inside where it was warm!

This was one single frame, before stacking but after doing lens correction to remove the distortion you get by pointing a wide angle lens upwards. Lightroom did a neat job of straightening everything up.

I took a total of 162 exposures over 81 minutes (the arithmetic isn't tough: 30-second exposures!), tweaked them in Lightroom and exported them to StarStaX. As usual, too many stars! So I took them back to Lightroom and darkened them down, then I used the lens correction tool.

For the tekkies: D800 full frame with Nikkor 17-35mm f/2.8 at F=17mm. 30 seconds at f/2.8, ISO 1600. That's a little bright, even for a single shot (ISO 1000 is enough) but you need much less when you're stacking them.One time I'm going to see what I get at ISO 400. Anyway, the sky was 'way too crowded so I took only 80 of the images into StarStaX and turned on "comet mode". I processed the images in reverse order to make it look like the comets were raining down instead of up.

Turns out it wasn't totally clear. The red you see at the bottom of the picture is from a cloud layer that moved in across the shot. The red glow probably comes from the village of Haliburton, about 20 km away. It was interesting to watch it develop so I took the same images and loaded them into MS Movie Maker and did a short time-lapse (15 seconds) which you can find here on YouTube.

Take your camera with you!

"What kind of camera should I use"? "The one you have with you"! Yesterday I was stopping off at the landfill (PC word for "garbage dump"). I almost left the camera at home, it was a grey, not very pretty day... but threw it in the car anyway. GOOD THING!

What is that huge bird? It's a juvenile Bald Eagle! And there's his sibling, and there's mom (or dad)! They just sat there while I took off the wide angle lens, put on the telextender and the 70-200. Still pretty far away... so I took a few shots, then started walking closer to them. Came over a little rise and startled a herd of 6 deer! And when they ran away, the eagles also decided to make themselves scarce. 

Still I got a few shots... and the message is, "Don't leave home without it"! You never know...

Not a great shot, couldn't get close enough and the lighting wasn't great. This was about half a frame. Mom and the kiddies. Actually it's probably Dad because the adult actually looks smaller than the juveniles and males are generally smaller than the females.

Of course the deer are so curious that even though I startled them, this guy came back to see what the fuss was about! Since they shed their antlers in the winter, I can't tell whether this is a buck or a doe but I suspect it's a male because my impression was that it was bigger and healthier than the others in the herd. Also I think he was leading them.

I used Impression (Impasto, brush 14 if anyone cares) on the deer and the background. I masked out the brush effect on the snow and burned in the slight shadows to give it a more realistic look. 

'til next week!

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Inspiration

I love music.

Not all kinds, mostly blues and jazz and, it occurs to me, most of the artists I listen to are dead. Oscar Peterson, Janis Joplin, Moe Koffman, Jimmy Smith, Paul Butterfield... and SRV.

There are exceptions, of course: Barbra Streisand, Eric Clapton, Gordie Lightfoot, the Eagles, Leonard Cohen, Rhoda Scott, lots of others, of course. Almost nobody contemporary, though. The nearest I come to that is Casey Abrams (and Haley Reinhart). I love their rendition of "Hit the Road, Jack" and "Moanin'". I have about 10 different versions of that last song by various artists.

I consider all the artists I've mentioned to be virtuosi. Not just lucky accidents, people who have skill and talent and have taken them to the pinnacle. Yesterday there was a Labour Day event at the Inn across the road and they had live music going all afternoon. Sitting here, I suddenly heard what sounded like a B3 (the Hammond organ I'd kill for) so I wandered over. The keyboard player was "just OK", as was the group he was in. 10 minutes later I was home, put on some Rhoda Scott and some Tony Monaco...

I'm writing this because this morning, a thread about Stevie Ray Vaughn showed up on Facebook and of course I had to fire up iTunes and play some tunes. I listened to "Pride and Joy" and "Mary Had a Little Lamb" and as I'm typing this, "Voodoo Child". Sometimes I listen to a cut and want to try to learn to play it on the keyboard or guitar or harp. Lately I just listen and enjoy, recognizing I'll never be able to play like that, even if I had a hundred more years to practice.

What's this got to do with photography? It occurred to me that you get your inspiration from experiencing what others have done. When I see images that move me, I think one of three things: (a) I wish I could do pictures like that, (b) what a good idea, I think I'm going to try to use that technique, and (c) I can do and have done better.

The other day, Lance Gitter, a photographer I met about 10 years ago at the Richmond Hill Camera Club, posted a new book he created, called "Gitterized". More about it down further. As I viewed it, thoughts (a) and (b) went through my mind. Lance inspires me to try harder and do better.

PS: iTunes, in its infinite wisdom, picked a random track from my library to play next. How is it possible that I forgot to mention Ray Charles. "Georgia on my Mind" is playing now...

In my next life, I want to come back as a musician. I think that's the best medium in which to express and share your emotions. Sounds odd, from a left-brained person but as I approach my 67th birthday in a few days, I realize that my priorities have changed. My goal in photography is the same: to express emotion and mood, not just technically correct images. Thanks for those who have inspired me in that direction.

Maybe this has inspired you to think about what you're trying to accomplish with your photography. Or painting. Or music. Or writing. Or...

Here's a story with emotion in it

I rode over to the MWWP yesterday. I was actually going to shoot some landscapes enroute but forgot my polarizing filter and Xume adapter at home, so I just shot some kayakers. One caught my eye: different from the usual bearded old guys and grungy characters, she was young and blond and cute and very photogenic.

At first, I couldn't figure out why she was sitting for such a long time off to the side, concentrating on the Otter Slide (a feature in the MWWP waterway). She'd get partway in, then turn around and back out. Another kayaker would be coming down the river but well above, and not actually going to enter the slide yet... it reminded me of a motorcyclist I knew years ago who wouldn't come out of a gas station because she was afraid of the traffic, even though it was light... I figure that she's not that experienced a kayaker and was not confident she could actually do it.

Here she came halfway across, figured she couldn't make it, and struggled to get back to safe water. She did this a few times while I watched.

Finally, she gave it a shot. Here's the sequence I shot as a burst

Check out the facial expressions from left to right! You can click on the image to enlarge it. From 'worried', to 'OK, I can do this', to 'I'm doing it!' to 'yesss!' to 'Yahoo!'  Can you tell from the last two shots below if she was having fun?

I heard her talking with her mom afterwards, it was the first time she actually managed to negotiate that white water (and by the way, the water flow was quite high yesterday, the Otter Slide was wild!). I sent her dad a copy of this image, I know his name is Keith, but I don't know her name...

Fun story. I'm glad I caught it!

Speaking of Inspiration

I remembered a video that I had watched a few years ago and even embedded in my blog (with permission) in 2011. When I went to revisit it, it comes up as "Forbidden". I looked a little further and found it again on a different site. So I thought I'd post a link to it here (not embedding it, just linking to it so copyright isn't an issue).

Possibilities: "Celebrate What's Right with the World" by DeWitt Jones, former National Geographic photographer. It's worth watching again (although the image quality is lacking but the message is still there).

OK, Adobé. NOW you got my attention.

Adobe just announced that the price of Photoshop CC + Lightroom 5 will be an ONGOING $9.99 per month. John Nack specifically said on his blog,,

To reiterate: the intention is not to get you in at $9.99/mo., then crank up the price after a year. $9.99 is the expected ongoing price.

NOW you got me. No hurry to sign up, you have until the end of 2013. This offer is for those who own CS3 or up. I'll give you the link later, you can't do it yet anyway.

Topaz deal available on Monday

REMINDER: I got an email from Topaz Labs that they're putting Topaz Adjust 5 on sale for 50% off ($24.99) from September 9 to September 30th. It's very rarely on sale, so mark your calendars and jump on it next week! Topaz Adjust 5 is my go-to plugin in Photoshop and in Lightroom, it's absolutely my favourite. Go to this link, and enter the promo code "septadjust" (without the quote marks) when ordering.

'tis the season to be jolly! Fa la la la la... never mind!

Get Gitterized

There's an outstanding book available, written by my friend Lance Gitter. It's titled, "Gitterized". Here's what Lance says about it:

This is a collection of my creative images from the last number of years. I have finally accomplished the goal of putting them together in a format where I can share my creativity, who and what inspired me to make some of my photos and what tools and/or techniques I used to come up with these creations.

Lance's work is incredibly creative. Here (with permission) are two images from the book:

Shot on the Rideau Canal last winter 

This montage is a self-portrait. What vision! 

Whenever I see Lance's work, I'm inspired. And not only do these images appear in the book, but also some of the thinking and techniques that went into their creation.

Lance has generously made the entire book available for viewing on-screen but you would be remiss if you didn't buy the book and enjoy the full experience of seeing these images in print. The link for viewing or buying the book is here.

Sometimes you win

And sometimes you don't.

I spent the better part of an hour at the landfill (polite way of saying "garbage dump") this afternoon. They had the giant chipper going — technically I was told it wasn't called a chipper, but that's what it does. It turns big pieces of garbage into small pieces of garbage. This was construction material, so what they do is to bury the wet waste, the household garbage, and cover it with this stuff. Eventually the deep stuff composts, but I learned that they dug up a Sears catalog from 1950 and it was still readable. "That shiny paper takes a long time to decompose".

Where was I? Oh yeah. I tried my damnedest to "isolate the subject". I wanted to make sense out of the chaos that was there. And I couldn't. So these pictures are failures, but a valiant attempt, don't you think?

They dump big garbage in the top of the chipper and little stuff comes out the conveyor belt to the left. Mountains of it. Then they move the big orange thing (the operator of the big excavator has a remote control) and build another mountain.  

Another attempt to isolate it. Here I did three things:  I put the Neutral Density filter on and shot long exposures (around 2 seconds) to give it a sense of motion, I combined about 4 exposures as layers in Photoshop using "darken" as the blending mode between layers, and I ran Silver Efex Pro 2 and put in a bunch of control points for selective colorization.

You win some, you lose some. I gave it the ole college try.

This is Leonard. He works there. He spent part of the day trying to keep the people dropping off garbage and the bears apart. There were two males there today, but not the big one-eyed boar they often see. f/2.8 on the 200mm and Nik HDR Efex Pro 2 (one image only) helped to separate him from the background.

This is Big John. He drives the tractor that makes mountains out of mole hills. Captured his character, I think. He told me his beard used to be down to "here" but it kept getting caught in the tattoo gun. Tough guy. But a pussycat deep down, I think (don't tell him I said that!).

TTFN!

— 30 —

It's Winter (sort of...)

I wish it would make up its mind. The temperature keeps varying between -10°C and +10°C which means we have snow, then we don't, then we do, then we don't... Rosa asked me, when I grew up in Montreal, what was the difference?. Well we had a lot more snow than in Toronto (or maybe it's because I was smaller so the snowbanks were higher!), it was colder and, after some prompting from her I realized we actually had 4 distinct seasons. When it was winter, it was WINTER. When it was spring... even here, up in the Highlands of Central Ontario, spring could be 4 whole days long, then we jump right into summer. Or maybe this global warming stuff really is happening. I'm not thinking year-to-year, I'm going back 50 or more years to when I was a kid. Technically, it's not winter yet, until tomorrow, though.

I saved the best picture for last in this post, so don't go away without scrolling down! Your comments are very welcome: click the word "comment" at the end of this post.

I have taken my camera out for a walk several times in the past week and especially, I took the new lens out for a trial or two. Since I bought it for shooting wildlife, I thought I'd give it a shot at some rare birds, seagulls at the dump! It turns out that although I was trying to be facetious, this bird is a Glaucous Gull (Larus hyperboreus) which in fact is theoretically a rare bird! I dunno, there are hundreds of them at the dump!

This guy is not in my bird book. Some immature gulls are mottled brown but the book says the babies of this species have dark eyes and black bills, and this one has a yellow bill. Maybe it's a new species, Larus springerensus!

It's hard to shoot birds in flight. I'm going back today to try again.

Both of these shots were taken with my new (new-to-me) Sigma 120-400mm F4.5-5.6 DG APO OS HSM lens. Both were cropped about half a frame, and both were shot at f/8, shutter speed 1/1000 or faster. ISO was 400. I didn't have as much success with this lens shooting in a hockey arena (my grandson Ryan plays for the Uxbridge Stars). In fact the only really good shot that day was with the Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8. The lighting was so bad that I had to shoot at much higher ISO — this excellent goal (the Stars are in white/green) was at 1/800 sec, f/2.8, ISO 2500.

He shoots, he scores! Young Mr. Anderson scored the other goal as well, less than a minute earlier. I did capture that one too, better isolation on the shooter and the goalie, but no puck in the shot. The Belleville goalie kept the Stars off the scoreboard otherwise and won the game 3-2.

In this really badly lit arena, the best I was able to do with the slower Sigma lens was at ISO 6400. Incredible that they came out, but nothing to write home about.

This month, one of the assigned topics in the NAPP challenge rally was "Knifes, Forks and Spoons". I wasn't being very creative, but had fun with this shot anyway:

"One of these things doesn't belong here. One of these things isn't the same!" which comes from a kid's song on Sesame Street, I think. I mixed in some line-art processing to add visual sharpness and merged them into drop-shadowed layers in Photoshop. These pictures were shot in my light tent using ambient light (no flash).

Here's an HDR I shot when out walking.

I like the vignette effect. This is the door latch on an ice fishing hut, waiting for hard water before going out on the lake. Processed with Photomatix Pro, toned with Topaz Adjust 5 and the vignette was done in Nik Color Efex Pro. I do like my plug-ins! I think this image looks best on a white background, but if you're reading my blog with a normal browser, it's black. Click the picture itself to open it in a separate (white) page.

I saved the best for last. The same day, I shot this:

Again, I created the HDR with Photomatix, toned with Topaz and vignetted with Nik Color Efex. I went a little further though, notice how the horizon on both sides is the same. I cleaned up some background and I stretched the image horizontally to give it a more pleasing proportion.

This is a killer shot. I will be printing this as a limited edition art print and if anyone is interested in purchasing a copy, email me. Generally many of my images are available in print, let me know.

Oh yeah: speaking of print! My "Michipicoten River Light" image from Gales of November 2010 was published in Photo News! It's available online as a .pdf, click the link here and scroll down to page 11 to see my picture!

That's it for now. I'll try to get one or two more posts in before the New Year — I actually made almost 50 posts to the blog this year!

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