Two Days to go 'till the Show!

It's Wednesday and the Haliburton Home & Cottage Show starts on Friday! Two days to go!

Am I ready? Hell, no. I will be, though. As I write this, I still have to create about 25 more greeting cards, bag them all, make one or two more signs, a couple of signup and register sheets, finalize the course agenda for my basic photo skills workshops, frame and re-frame several pictures, run into Toronto tomorrow to go to Staples and Costco for last-minute stuff, buy groceries because my fridge is empty and Linda and Bob will be here for the weekend...

I'm quite satisfied with the images I've produced for the show. I hope I didn't guess wrong about what people would like to buy and I've kept the prices affordable so that hopefully I won't be taking them all home with me! It's a bit of a gamble.

I have 3 goals for the show:

• to sell some images
• to book some workshop students
• to increase the readership for my blogs.

To accomplish the first two, I will be getting out in front of people and they will at least be more aware of me. I've created some show special prices and I'll let my images do the talking for me.

Special offer for my loyal readers: if you come to the show, I'll give you an ADDITIONAL 20% off any print you buy (not the cards. They're cheap enough, at $5 or 3/$10, just check Hallmark's pricing!). So if you see a fine art watercolor image marked at $175, show special $140, your price would be $112. 

All you have to do is tell me you read about it here, and as a skill-testing question, tell me what animal is featured in the header photo of this blog. 

But wait, there's more!

AFTER the show, for the entire month of June 2013, you get the same deal! If you buy art images by going to my gallery and emailing me (I don't have a shopping cart set up yet), and you tell me you read it here, I'll price accordingly. 

To accomplish the third one, I've decided to give some stuff away. If people sign up for my Newsletter, I'll enter their names into two draws: one for a free fine art picture, and one for a free workshop session. 

You can get in on this too! I want you to sign up for my newsletter. Don't worry, if you're not happy, there's an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of every newsletter. 

Here's the deal: sign up for the newsletter by clicking here or scanning the QR code to the right and I'll automatically enter you in the draw for the picture. If you also want to be considered for the free workshop, leave me a comment at the bottom of this blog post. Make sure I have your name and I can find you in the Newsletter list.

And if you click here in the next 5 minutes... a set of Ginzu knives! Nah, nothing. But I had to say that. Humour. Arr, arr.

Want to see the images I'm exhibiting?

Go to my photo gallery to check them out. Everything you see there is available as an exhibition quality display print, either on fine matte or on fine lustre papers, lovingly printed by hand one at a time! They're all available at very reasonable cost, especially if you read about it here!

The white water is such a great venue...

I ran a DSLR course last weekend (not enough students. Hope that changes!). I heard that CanoeKayak Canada was running the team trials at the MWW (Minden Wild Water Preserve. I'm tired of typing that all out!) so we went over to practice shooting pictures. The winners were chosen for Canada's National Team, for competition in the World Cup and other races in Europe and elsewhere. I was busy with the course, but did manage to capture a few images:

This is Zachary Zwanenburg from Cornwall, Ontario who competed both in the Canoe (C1) and the Kayak (K1) classes and who will represent Canada in the Junior and under-23 teams in both classes. This is a kayak, by the way, if you don't already know. 

 The above image shows how WILD the Wild Water is right now, with record high water levels and flow after the Minden floods a few weeks ago.

Another WILD water shot as  Samuel Primeau from Quebec battles the boiling waters in Earl's Hole during one of his kayak runs.

Haley Daniels from Calgary, Alberta scored at the top in Women's C1 and was named to teams for World Cups, World Championships and Under 23 World Championships. 

20-year-old (I think. I know the year but not the month of birth!) Alexandra McGee from Ottawa placed second behind Daniels in C1 and was named to both the Senior team and the under 21 teams. 

Although 16-year-old Maxime Leboeuf from Valleyfield, Quebec didn't place in the top 3, he will be representing Canada as part of the junior team in Slovenia this summer. 

Competitor names and stats and other information courtesy of Ian Miller from CanoeKayak Canada. Claudia van Wijk from Whitewater Ontario also helped me identify the competitors from their bib numbers.

Nothing to do with white water...

On Saturday, there was a motorcycle ride to raise funds for the flood victims and they started and ended up at the Red Umbrella Inn. This bike was parked out front (and in fact was there overnight). During the DSLR course, I told Dawn to shoot 15 pictures of the bike, all different (trying to get her to work the scene). At the same time, I took a few but I knew what I had in mind.

I took the opportunity to write up how I created the image on my Technical Blog, for those of you who are photographers and interested in Photoshop. Here's the finished image, ready for print. I think it will look fantastic on Epson Cold Press matte paper... you know what to do if you want to order a print! 

So back to work on the show stuff. I hope to see some of you there! Come by and say hello, and bring your wallets...

— 30 —

The Times, they are a-changing

Up to now, this blog has been a mixed bag of photography-related tips, techniques and procedures, a journal and a showcase of some of my photographic work. I've decided to focus my blog(s) on more directed topics, to provide my readers with a more useful experience.

This blog will remain as my journal. What that means is, I will share what I've been up to. A good example is the post that follows, where I talk about my visit to the Minden Ice Races, I'll show a few selected pictures and give you links to where you can find others. If you are a photographer (not all of my readers are!), you might be interested in the techniques used to capture these pictures and to manipulate them in-computer. If so, I will provide a link to a new blog that focuses on Photography, Photoshop, Lightroom and other procedures, the technical "How" side of things.

I'll also provide connections to my galleries and to the gallery that contains the images that I have for sale. I plan a third blog which will feature one image and offer a discount code on a regular basis, but I have to figure out how to do that, and to get the other one, the technical one, up and running.

I chose to use WordPress for the new blog.  I want it to contain searchable topics and to make them clearly visible. So far, it's eluding me somewhat. Still, I can post there, but that's going to change in appearance.

This means that I have to prepare my blog posts more carefully, and in multiples. For example, I want to tell you about my visit to the Muskoka Wildlife Centre and show you some very neat animal and bird pictures, but I can't yet because I have to finish writing up the techniques I used, and give you some tips about shooting in the winter and with flash fill. That's what I meant above: if you're not a photographer, you don't give a damn about flash fill, you just want to look at pictures. So I'm separating that stuff.

I plan to post every couple of days. I hope that people will make it a habit to drop by regularly. I think you'll find it interesting. Onward and upward!

Ice Racing: a truly Canadian sport

For 6 weeks, the Canadian Automobile Sports Clubs (http://www.casc.on.ca/) sponsor weekend ice racing on a track constructed at the Minden Fairgrounds. They can only race when there is enough ice -- and local contractors maintain the track all week. I learned that the studded tires on the race cars chew through as much as 5 inches (25 cm) of ice in a day.

They throw up a cloud of ice dust which, depending on whether there's wind, and on the temperature, can be so thick that you can't see the cars. Imagine driving in it! The only car who has a clean look is the race leader.

I call this image "Leader of the Pack" (Vroom, vroom!), and it has an alternate name, "Sometimes when we Touch". There's a lot of touching.

See the orange light on top of car 113? They all have bright lights in back so the car behind them knows where they are in the ice fog!

There are several classes: rubber tires, street studs (you can still use studded tires on the street in Northern Ontario), racing studs (big mean ones). There's front wheel drive, rear wheel drive, all wheel drive classes. You have to watch the cars with the big racing studs flip sideways in a corner and drift around it, then hit the throttle and straighten it out for the straightaway.

Sometimes you think they're not going to make it, but somehow they pull out of their slide:

w-w-w-Wipeout! Well not really, he made it. You can see the track in front of him and where he wants to go is straight towards the camera. He's moving dead sideways in this shot!

Here's another image showing a pack of cars coming right at me

Like it says in your rear view mirror, "objects may be closer than they appear". This is the other way around because I'm using a long lens.

They're moving pretty fast: I'm guessing they reach over 100kph on the straights. Remember, they're on ice! How they make it through the corners, I'll never know (sometimes they don't! Check it out)

The driver walked away from this one. He ploughed into the embankment virtually head on. He said he'll have a ton of black and blue marks from the restraint system, though!

I was lucky to get this shot. I had been playing with the shutter speed of the camera and it was really low: 1/10 second when this happened. I took 4 shots, this is the only one that sort of came out. The best part is that Jimmy, a pro photographer who shoots these and other racing events, was standing right near me and said he had his hands in his pockets and didn't get any shots! Ha-Ha.

There are really two ways to shoot action scenes like this: at really high speed to freeze the or at slow speed and pan with the car, or track it.

To read about shooting action scenes, visit my technical blog at this link: http://faczen.com/wordpress/?p=33

I was having some focusing issues with my camera. It had to do with the format of the pictures I was taking: JPEG or RAW. You can read about that in the technical blog at this link: http://faczen.com/wordpress/?p=19

And finally, I've put some galleries of images up so racers can visit and buy pictures. The best way to see a whole bunch of ice racing pictures is to go here: http://photography.to/iceracing. I got an amazing number of quality images at these races. How do I decide which ones to put up in my galleries? Tough call!

Catch you later!