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 —

Challenges

Not for you, for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photography Courses in the Highlands

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

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

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

Rosa is a smart lady

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

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

Business Cards

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

A really Excellent presentation.

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

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

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

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

and this one:

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

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

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

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

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

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

My challenge to you

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

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

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

— 30 —

A weekend of getting things done

OK, who's tired of waiting for summer? I'm up North and while technically it's warm enough to go for a swim, it's not really. 24°C is OK, but with the breeze coming in off the water, I wasn't that warm. THe house is cool, too, since the nights have gone down in the low teens (I'm sitting here in sweats, not shorts, and I've laid in a fire to start this evening), so I don't really feel like going in the water. I went for a short motorcycle ride, with a fleece vest on under the mesh jacket: where's summer?

So I spent this holiday weekend catching up and getting some things done. Mostly computer stuff. I did my month-end backups: actually, it's been 3 months since I did a proper one and I feel much more secure now that it's done.

I'm writing this so that YOU will start thinking about what you should be doing. How about you? Isn't it time to do your backups?

I know I don't do things in the most efficient way but here's what I did:

• I copied my "Documents" folder in its entirety to my 1TB external backup drive
• I created a backup Outlook .pst file and put it on the drive as well
• I burned the May, June and July photo folders to DVD (6 of them!)
• I copied them to the external drive, then deleted May and June from the computer
• I defragged the hard drive, archived a bunch of old emails and
• I copied more photos -- ones from the past 6 months -- to my favourites folder, a slideshow of which serves as my screensaver.

I have one thing left to do. I need to update the 'image' that I have of my hard drive programs and operating system and store it in a safe place. Iris's laptop hard drive failed last week and she had to start absolutely from scratch. I can't imagine (or unfortunately, I can) how difficult that would be so I have to take steps to prevent that from happening to me.

By the way, I take copies of my critical files -- there are two of them, my Quickbooks accounting file for the company and the student database for the firearms courses -- every day. I keep the copies on USB drives, with me at all times. Just in case...

The other project I've spent some time on is my book. I'm finally past the planning stage: I was trying to decide what theme to use, and the format of the chapters, but I'm there now. The target is between 100 and 120 pages, divided into about 5 sections and the working title is "Pathways". I've done one section, about 15 or 20 pages worth. I'm trying to target end of August to finish it, so watch this space for progress reports. The book will be for sale through Blurb.com and I plan to do a multimedia show based on the book.

I'll leave you with a couple of pictures as I always do. Nothing exciting, I'm not really inspired right now. I've been trying to get a shot of a bald blue jay who's been visiting my feeder, but he's elusive. Either he's a juvenile, or something happened to him because he doesn't have the usual plumage above the neck. Really ugly! We'll see if I can get him next time.

This is my new BBQ. The old one died of, well, old age. There are 3 burners
inside and one outside and the starter thingy actually works (sometimes)!
Photographically, it is a really straightforward image but I used
Photoshop's Vignette action on it which makes it much more interesting.

By the way, the vignette effect looks a lot better on a white background
than it does on a black one. Click the image to blow it up and see it
on a white screen.

After breakfast, but before the cleanup. Cooking with gas is so much better than with electricity. The food comes out much better, probably due to the even heating. I wish I had propane in the house...

I picked up this little rollaway computer table at a garage sale on the way up on Saturday -- for $3! It's perfect for when I want to sit on the deck or out in the gazebo working on the laptop.

I did a quick-and-dirty job on this photo. I created a layer copy, applied a heavy Gaussina blur, then added a layer mask and painted black over the sections of the new layer that I wanted to hide (white on a layer mask is transparent, black is opaque).

A little fresh fruit for lunch today. I ended up buyng too many fresh berries and need to eat them before they go bad.

A bunch of cottagers on the road along the lake got together and bought these little fluorescent green figures. I think they're cute and very effective. I don't know if the little tricycle was there by accident or on purpose but it sure sends the message!

That's all for today. The grey, threatening cloudy skies and thunder rumbling in the distance don't really make me want to go out and shoot pictures or ride my bike, so it's time to get some work done.