Summer storm, Sports photography and High Contrast Portraits

First a personal note: I'm doing fine, pretty well recovered except for the voice. Which is improving, but frustratingly slowly. I was at a dinner on Friday night, with a somewhat boisterous group, everyone talking at once at times. I was trying to have a conversation with the person beside me and I was amazed that she said she could hear me, because I couldn't hear myself! I guess it'll be a little longer before it comes back.

The summer has been very quiet (calling it "summer" is somewhat of a misnomer, weather wise). The tornados a couple of days ago resulted in considerable damage but fortunately no loss of life (one up in Durham, but none in Toronto). I was indoors, enjoying dinner when it hit -- I heard about it on the way home. It was amazing how the sky cleared up to the West, while to the East the ominous black clouds were contrasted by a full arc of rainbow. I drove around for a while looking for a place to shoot some pictures of it, but I was unsuccessful. I did manage to capture some pretty awesome looking skies, though.

This was shot in Oak Ridges, looking West at the sunset.
Spectacular cloud patterns!

This image was shot at Lake Wilcox, just before I got home. It was already getting quite dark, but I exposed for the sky. I think I cropped the original a fair amount because it looks quite noisy when viewed close up. By the way, there were a flock of ducks flying in the distance, but they took away from the picture, so they got cloned out!

On a totally different note, here are a couple of images I took when I went to my grandkids' soccer tournament on the way up North yesterday. There are more shots on my Smugmug site in the August Gallery.

Now which of these images is the better one? Neither are perfect (if such a thing were possible) but the vertical one, with the crowd of players, tells the better story. Ryan (my grandson) is breaking out of the group going for the ball. The second shot captures the action, but it's really like a portrait -- it could be staged, not in the heat of a game!

Kelly, my granddaughter is the awesome beauty on the left. The other little lady is her best friend, Mackenzie and Kelly asked me to take this picture. Can you not read the emotion in this image? Suitable for framing (and it will be!).

Speaking of portraits, I want to share this next one with you. I shoot ID photos for a course, I've posted a few pictures before, but I really liked this one the moment I saw it on screen. The camera captured the texture and the lines on this gentleman's face, even though the lighting was soft (Gary Fong diffuser on the flash). I loved it, and wanted to enhance it even more, so I spent some time working magic in Photoshop. It's not my normal style, but I think it does justice to the subject. What do you think? The publications seem to be full of these high contrast portraits these days.

This is the original image, essentially as shot.

Here, I created a new layer and applied a very heavy duty hi-pass filter, then multiplied it in. Then I rendered some lighting effects to make the background more interesting and to create some contrast across the face. Finally, I added a black-and-white layer which I blended in at medium opacity to reduce the saturation of the skin tones. I could have done even more, but decided to stop at this point!

This is turning into an endless blog posting. Some days, I have more to say than others. I think I'll stop here, although I have a whole article on using the Orton Effect that I've created, but I'll save it for next time. Maybe as early as tomorrow -- so watch this space, and please -- feed back some comments!

Life (NOT) in the Big City

As most of you know, if you've been paying attention, I've had some surgery a couple of weeks ago that has slowed me down a bit. I'm pretty well fully recovered, except that it's going to take some time for my voice to return fully. And for those who haven't heard, "they got it all".

Anyway, I've been spending time up North for the most part, and using this 'recuperation' time as an excuse to not do much. I guess this is in lieu of the vacation I was going to take, driving around Lake Superior looking for spots to shoot photos that look like Group of Seven paintings! Although I'm not really housebound, I'm being very lazy, and that means I haven't shot many photos either. We did have an incident last week that made me bring the camera out: a thunderstorm in which (1) lightning hit a tree about 100m from my house, bringing it down in flames over the hydro lines, knocking out the power for several hours, and (2) the wind was so strong that it ripped my SECOND gazebo of the year out of the ground and destroyed it. I have to think carefully about what I'm going to have to do for next year.

Here are some photos:

This is the tree that came down a couple of doors away. The hydro crew was there quickly.
More photos in my August gallery on SmugMug.

My poor gazebo. The canvas and screening wasn't torn, as far as I could tell, but the support poles were mangled. What I really need is a screen porch over the deck, but no money to buy one. Unless a bunch of people want to come up and have a porch-building-party...

I went out for an early morning walk the other day. When I saw how misty it was out, I went back for the camera, with the 200mm lens mounted, thinking I'd do some shots including the other side of the lake in the mist. However, I saw a funky aluminium boat so I went back for the wide angle and the tripod. I wanted to try some HDR shots, so I shot bracketed 5-shot bursts. I haven't got the HDR process down pat yet: but there were some interesting effects.

I did the HDR thing, then a selective hue/saturation thing on the red colours, then a black-and-white conversion for the background. I painted the layer mask to isolate the colour image.

This one started the same way but I used curves to bring out the range of the areas I wanted to feature, like the hull of the boat.

Although I wasn't taking pictures, I wasn't entirely idle. I did spend some time working on my next book (I've done about 20 pages out of the targetted 100-120) and at getting some inspiration from others.

A good place to look if you want to see some superb photography, is on the NAPP (National Association of Photoshop Professionals) site, which you can access here. The "Image of the Week" is usually superb (although I don't like this week's image). I like to click on the "Browse" button, which gives you a random spread of images posted recently. Click on any image to get into that maker's portfolio. If you enter my name on the 'search users' tab, you'll get to my portfolio. Or just click here.

Talking about HDR images: I came across this picture which I absolutely love. I don't know if it's an HDR but it's a wonderful image, don't you think?

By the way, I'd love to have some dialogue going here, not just a monologue from me: click on "comments" below and leave one!

Images for Competitions
I was reflecting on the difference between creating images for competition and images for other purposes. I'm signed up to take the course at the GTCCC (Greater Toronto Council of Camera Clubs) this fall, to become an accredited judge. I suppose that after I'm accredited, I'll be limited in what I'm allowed to share, but until then...

It's my experience that competition judging is primarily based on technical merit. If you don't follow the rules, points are deducted: the rule of thirds, tack-sharp focus, 3:1 lighting ratios, histograms that don't extend off either end, etc. That's not to say that these are bad things: on the contrary, creating excellent images is often a result of following the rules. But the judging often loses sight of the artistic impact of an image. For instance, Richard Martin-like shots with deliberate camera motion and blurry shapes, or deliberate high noise shots, will rarely be recognized on their merits.

Also, judges are rather subjective: one will look at this image (click the link if you haven't looked at it yet) and deduct points because it's oversaturated and not natural: another judge will downgrade it because the eye is drawn to the bright sky at upper right: a third will look closely at the person in the picture and say that there was some inaccuracy doing the selection for the hue/saturation work (seems to be some too-bright green over his right shoulder). A fourth judge will say, "this image absolutely blows me away. I give it a 10".

My point is, if you're not shooting for competition, do whatever YOU like best. Follow your own eyes and heart, don't try to satisfy some disembodied technically picky judge. If you are shooting for competition, then by all means, learn what they're looking for and go for it.

My Mountain Man picture is a good example. After creating it, I carefully went around the edges cleaning up artifacts, burning in some bright spots, etc. That made it a better picture overall and it was accepted in both worlds. It took first prize in the club competition, and I like it and so do a lot of other people. The canoe on the beach image and even the background heading photo for this Blog had similar attention to detail which I learned when shooting for competition. They are better because in processing them (and in shooting them too), I followed some rules. That said, the canoe on the beach shot was criticized because the image was too central, it didn't follow the Rule of Thirds.

I personally like the concept the Richmond Hill Camera Club played with introducing last year: a dual scoring system, one component based on technical merits, one on artistic (brings to mind Olympic Figure Skating, doesn't it? Whay says the "Russian" judge?).

So preparing images for competition is a great idea, to help you learn what the rules are. How, and whether you apply these rules at all in images for your own enjoyment or for other purposes, is entirely up to you. A prize-winning photo and one that tugs at your heartstrings are not necessarily the same.

PS: Terrific new product!
I was watching TV one day last month and there was an ad for a product that you could use to clean out those grungy places in your car or elsewhere. It's like that kid's product, "SLIME". That's what it feels like. What you do is press it into places that have dirt and grunge in them, then pull it away and the dirt comes with it! You can reuse it until it gets too dirty.

The product is called "CYBER-CLEAN". I couldn't find it in Canadian Tire or Home Hardware, but I did find it at Zeller's, for something like $7. They have little foil pouches for a couple of dollars less, but I bought a 5-oz (140g) cup. There are a few listings on eBay for it, but be really cautious: one major vendor said "FREE SHIPPING" but only to the lower 48: they wanted, believe it or not, $35 for shipping to Toronto. By MAIL. I submitted a complaint to eBay about their shipping practices.

Great stuff. Not only did it work on the car, but also on the computer keyboard. I'm bad because I munch while working at the computer, so there's all kinds of stuff that shouldn't be all over things or in the keyboard. Press it down enough and it'll suck up all kinds of stuff from between the keys!

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.

Two events of interest

Well of interest to me... and hopefully some of you.

Before I get started: I have a question for those who are more knowledgeable
than I. I just joined FaceBook because "everybody" told me I should. I have
absolutely no clue how this can help me. As far as I can tell, I have everything
FaceBook offers already in place: I have my Outlook address book (complete with
pictures), I have a photo gallery, I have this blog, I have distribution lists
for people interested in certain subjects: for instance motorcycle instructors,
photographers, etc., and a personal "friends & family" email list.

So what is it exactly that I would do with Facebook that I'm not already
doing? Send me an email to give me a clue, please.

Event #1: the Tilley Sale
Every August, Alex Tilley holds a warehouse sale. If you're not familiar with Tilley products, check out their website here. They make arguably the finest outdoor, adventure and travel clothing anywhere, as well as the trademark Tilley hat. I've been wearing Tilley's since the early 80's when I outfitted the entire Ontario Combat Pistol Team in Tilley's for the national championships.

The sale has products at half-price or better. Of course it isn't cheap stuff to begin with, but the value is there. The dates announced for the sale are August 6th to 16th, but they don't tell the public that: for those not in the know, it only starts on the 8th. Their new location this year is 1100 O'Connor Drive (Google map here) and they open at 9:00am. Get there on the 6th or 7th: you may think it's crowded then, but it's nothing compared to what it's like on the 8th. And the selection is at it's maximum.

Two warnings: it is usually a total zoo. You may have to wait in a Looooong lineup for the better part of an hour to check out. And it's like going to Costco: you know, you went in for one item worth $20 and when you get to the cash you have a full basket and swallow really hard as the cashier rings up $300 on her register.

I find the Tilley hat superb for photography. It offers full sun protection all around, stays on your head and the floppy brim doesn't get in the way when you hold the camera up to your eye in portrait rotation like a baseball cap does. Their vests have so many pockets you can't count them, although I haven't found one big enough to accept a 70-200 lens, I have to admit.

Event #2: The 2009 Great Lakes Police Motorcycle Training Seminar
This is to be held at the Ontario Police College in Aylmer, ON from the 19th through the 22nd of August.

Whether you are a motorcyclist or not, this is an event worth visiting. If you visit their website, you will see that this is where they train already superb police motorcyclists to become outstanding riders. The venue is open to the public and for me, it represents a superb photo opportunity. Check out the videos and photos on their site.

There are competitions throughout the event, but looking at the schedule, the Friday and especially the Saturday events are going to be the most fun to watch (and photograph). Click on "events" on their site. I notice the Golden Helmets (OPP Precision Team) are doing a Friday afternoon show in St. Thomas.

I have a couple of photos to show you -- one was from the BAD Ride in May where the Toronto Police Winged Wheels did a demo -- this image has been in the blog before. Another is from a practice session at last year's event, held at Humber College. It shows RCMP Sgt. Luc, a friend of my friend Lori's, practicing on his bike.





Although it's a 2 hour drive down the 401 from Toronto, I think it's well worth the time. If I can get away, I'm planning to spend a couple of days down there.

One final note: for those concerned about my health issues: I'm fine. I've come through the surgery OK, with only some lingering voice problems which will eventually go away. I tell you what, though: I'm going to do something about my knee issues before it turns into surgery. This is the second time I've shared a room in hospital with someone who had knee surgery. Let's just say both of them gave their morphine pumps a lot of exercise and I'm not into that.

These issues have kept me from shooting pictures the past few weeks and although I had great intentions to work on my book, I've not done much. Watch this space for progress in the near future!

An update and a few photos

Many of you know that I had surgery on Monday. They went back in to clean up a cancerous node where my Thyroid used to be. According to the surgeon, they got it and I should be OK. He used a different "C" word: "CURED". There were some issues, especially with my voice, which is barely there but which should come back in a matter of weeks.

I need to take a moment to thank everyone who showed they cared so much. I was inundated with good wishes, visits, lifts, phone calls (I told you, I can't talk!), magazines, books and chocolate! All of the nurses at Mt. Sinai were great, there was one special one, though, named Mielana or "Mills" who actually went down and got me a Tim Horton's coffee when I said I was dying for one. She always had a smile and really cared, even when she was sticking needles in me!

I'm home, bored to death, but can't really get motivated to work much, although I did do some work on my First Aid website and some bookkeeping. I should be back in the swing of things next week. I have a Monday appointment to get the stitches removed and maybe I'll go up North for a couple of days.

So I can't write a Blog entry without some photographic content. I took a self-portrait with the Blackberry a couple of hours after surgery. Just thought I'd share...

A couple of weeks ago, Ron Goodlin and I shot the whitewater kayaking races up in Minden, then we drove around and got a few other shots. Here's one of the kayak images that I kind of like: although it's high key, it typifies the action that day for me.



We drove up to Dorset where I took this shot on the dock. I did a burst in order to create an HDR of the image, in an effort to capture the texture of the wood and the blue of the sky as well. Not dramatic, but I think it worked.



I love shooting pictures of moving water. "Painting with Water". You have to experiment with the exposure times -- for me, somewhere between 1/2 sec and 1/10 sec seems to work best. Here are a few examples.

I took a series of pictures here, each with a different shutter speed.
This one was 1/6 sec. Needless to say, a tripod is not an option.

This was an HDR composite. Then I converted it to black and white and cropped it a bit. I was trying to capture some of the detail in the rocks and the moving water. The early morning mist and soft lighting adds a different dimension to this image.

Again, I took a series of pictures here, each with a different shutter speed. This one was 3/10 sec.
Needless to say, a tripod is not an option.

This one is cropped really tightly. I was actually trying to enhance the noise and the texture in this composition. The original photo was not spectacular, but if you use your eyes, you might come up with something unexpected.

I'm almost ready to start putting the next book together. It's going to be quite an effort, but I'm sure it will be worth it. Catch you later!

Testing some new techniques

I spent a little time looking through the workbook and my sketchy notes from the Adobe seminar. What the seminar was about, was to point out useful features in Photoshop. He did a quick demo of some of those features and then left the participant to go home and play with them. As I said, if he had spent a little more time explaining "why" he did certain things and how to use the features better...

Anyway, one of the things I've been meaning to do is to learn about "smart objects". So I created a poster (below) just for playing purposes. I used some of the font techniques he talked about (knew them anyway), did a couple of drop shadows because I think he showed an alternative way to achieve the same thing but I didn't get it, and tried the 'flaming ribbon' thing he presented. Oh, and I used the pen tool to create a path and then stroked it. If you read my Blog you'd know I do use the pen tool, but this is a new way of achieving stuff.

It's not great art but it's a basis for trying new things.

The picture of the kayaker is a 'smart object'. It's a simple matter to replace it with another image and retain all its characteristics. And rescaling it doesn't create resolution or resampling problems. Cool. Of course I'd have to redraw the ribbon if I changed images. Click on the picture to blow it up.

I have to spend some more time with some of these techniques before I can share them with you. Of course they say the best way to learn how to do something is to teach someone else how! Give me a few weeks.

There are a number of people asking me for Photoshop lessons. Most of them are almost new at it, or have minimal practice with the program. So I'm considering structuring a one-day seminar to show people some of the basics. I don't want to fall into the same trap that Corey Barker did, so I need to put some thought into it. If you're interested, email me and tell me (1) what version of Photoshop you have and (2) how much you've played with it. You could also send me an image or two that you've done and tell me what you did. Let's see if we can't get this together in the next couple of months.

I'm looking forward to the weekend shoot at the above venue. I was there yesterday scouting shooting points and I think I found a new one I like on the other side of the river. I plan to get there fairly early on Saturday, and Sunday morning Dr. Ron is coming up to join me so watch this space for some neat images.

Adobe Seminars -- are they worth it?

First the answer to that question: yes.

However, some are more worth it than others. Sound a little trite? Kind of obvious? Well, OK, but let me elaborate a bit.

Adobe is the undisputed expert when it comes to making photo manipulation software. Undisputed by me, anyway: PhotoShop is the standard that other products aspire to. But they haven't rested on these laurels: their vector graphics program (Illustrator), their web development product (DreamWeaver) and Adobe Acrobat for pdf files are tops: so is, supposedly, InDesign for page layout, although I haven't used it because I don't do much page layout and the old PageMaker (Adobe, of course) is good enough for me. That's the good news.

These programs are all massively deep. The learning curve is humungous. One could spend a year doing nothing but Photoshop and studying it, and still not know it all. So Adobe has gotten together with Scott Kelby to provide training in how to use their products. Kelby & co. designs, creates and markets a variety of training courses and presents them in a variety of locations, including Toronto. But it all comes back to the people who do these courses and some are better than others.

Bottom line: with a program, or a topic with as much depth as Photoshop, unless you use the tools all the time, you're not going to remember how to do so without in-depth workbook materials and I personally felt that was the area where this last seminar fell short.

Last year, I attended the Photoshop CS3 for Photographers workshop. It was wonderful. Ben Willmore, who probably didn't design the course all by himself, realized that, and the methods and techniques he presented stuck with me. I learned a lot. And I have the workbook to fall back on when I can' t remember how to do things.

Last week, I was at the "Down and Dirty Tricks" seminar put on by Corey Barker. If the Willmore session was a 9 on a scale of 1-10, Barker's was a 5. Why?

Well for one thing, the seminar was directed at Graphic Designers. Not at photographers. One of the first things he said was that he wasn't going to teach us how to use Photoshop, just some tricks. Fair enough, that's what the course description said going in. But here's the problem: he went 'way too fast, for me anyway. Right near the beginning, I put down the workbook, because I had to focus on what he was doing and looking away to look at the book, I would have missed stuff. Important stuff because skipping a step in some of those techniques, they don't work.

Anyway, Corey knew his stuff. He was an articulate speaker but he wasn't a teacher. Oh, he had a few glitches, sometimes things didn't work as planned (if I recall, Bill Gates, when he introduced Windows XP, had a "blue screen of death" right there in the presentation!) and often he had to take a minute to look at his notes to remember what or how to do the next step. But my main issue was that he would perform a function, often loading a pre-designed image like an existing selection, do the 15 steps to come to the desired result, show you the finished product for about 10 seconds, then kill it and go on to the next thing.

Having attended this seminar, knowing now what I do, would I attend it again? Yes. In addition to some neat tricks and graphic techniques (reflections, for instance, or painting with light, or using the vanishing point tool, I learned an important thing for me: I already use a lot of these techniques and I have a good basic background knowledge in graphic design that I shouldn't be afraid to use.

Do I recommend Adobe seminars for everyone? No. I think you need to get beyond the basics and become comfortable with the concepts of the program being taught before attending one, or you will be frustrated because you won't be able to follow, or later implement any of the techniques.

I'm going to try to use some of these techniques in the weeks to come and I'll post some images here. Watch this space.

---

In the meantime, I can't leave you without a couple of pictures to look at. Here's a pair of hairy woodpeckers that visit my feeder regularly.

Hairy Woodpecker Couple (picoides villosus). The male woodpecker (red patch) has a peanut in his mouth. But he didn't get it from the feeder, the female did and gave it to him. Manipulated some in photoshop with "poster edges" filter applied to increase the detail and texture layers. I used the art-history brush for the edge effects on the vignette.

A few nights ago, I was sitting at the computer at 1:00 am and a crash outside caught my attention. I thought it was the bear that had visited last week but this time it was a raccoon. Cute, but destructive. He worked diligently at tearing my peanut feeder apart, then sat on the ground gorging himself on peanuts. I happened to have the camera handy, and I took 50 exposures ranging from available light (the floodlights on my deck), to the pop-up flash on the camera, to my SB-600 external flash and finally to the flash with the Gary Fong diffuser on it. The low light shots were done at very high ISO so the noise was obvious, but with the bigger flash, I was able to bring that down to a reasonable level.

Now animals have very big pupils, especially if they're nocturnal, and the flash created really ugly reflections. So I used the techniques I learned from Hilarie and re-drew the eyes, or at least added catchlights. Pretty good, if I do say so myself!

This is the "before" image: as taken. I used the Gary Fong diffuser on the external flash
to light this shot and look what it did to the eyes!

...and this is after working on the eyes. Hilarie taught us that drawing a soft reflection of the catchlight on the opposite side of the eye makes the eye really pop out.

One final thought: Microsoft seems to have gotten their act together with Internet Explorer 8. I downloaded and installed it and it works well. Among other things, I can now read the fonts onscreen MUCH better. Websites have a much cleaner look. And their "Accelerators" seem to work well. I hope I'm not speaking too soon when I say I like it.

Top O' the mornin to ya

Here I am up in Minden, on a beautiful summer day. It almost seemed that summer would never really appear but here it is! I've been working on some other things and haven't spent much time behind the lens but hopefully I can change that.

Here are a few shots I took at the house. The tree is just outside my front door and the attraction is a couple of bird feeders. By the way, a small black bear came by the other day and ripped one of them down, for a few peanuts. It's the first time I've seen one on my property. I just wonder where momma was!

Blue Jay (cyanocitta cristata)

Cedar Waxwing (bombycilla cedrorum)

Purple Finch (carpodacus purpurpeus). This fellow was hard to identify. I actually bought a "Birds of Ontario" book and looked him up, without success. Finally I posted this picture and sent the link to a site called "whatbird.com" where I had an answer within about 10 minutes!

At the end of this week, I'm attending Adobe's "Photoshop CS4 Down and Dirty Tricks" seminar. I was at one of their sessions last year and came away with a bunch of new techniques and ideas. Hopefully the same will happen this time. Watch this space for some neat stuff.

On July 4th weekend, Whitewater Canada is having a Whitewater kayaking race event, called "Gullfest". It's being held at the Minden Wildwater Preserve which is 6km from my house. I've contacted them a few times to request press accreditation, but nothing yet so I'll have to take my chances. Here's a link to the event (click here).

I had posted some pictures here a few weeks ago last time I was there. I went again this weekend with the intention of trying some different techniques. I was only moderately successful. Last time, I froze the action with a high shutter speed, this time I decided I wanted to bring some motion into the shots by using a slow speed. I quickly settled on shutter speeds between 1/20 sec and 1/30 sec. Anything slower and there was too much camera shake (well I did it deliberately a couple of times but it's really hard to control).

Normally, you would pan with the moving target (the kayaker) but if you watch these guys, they tend to stay in the same position on the water. So the best technique is to hold still and use the slow shutter to capture moving water. Like I said, very hard to control and I didn't get a lot of successful images. Here are a few, though.

1/30 sec at f/18, ISO 200, 24-120VR lens set at 70mm. I love the water motion in this picture. I didn't really do anything to it in Photoshop, and it's just slightly cropped from the original.

Exactly the same exposure, zoomed in to 120mm, taken a few seconds later. I think you can see what I mean: he's holding the kayak in position, not moving. By the way, if you haven't figured it out, these guys generally point their boats upstream. I imagine they'll be facing the other way when they're racing next weekend, unless they're trying to get through some slalom gates.

Again, this is the same exposure but I moved the camera as I took the shot and got this abstract effect. Very hard to control.

Let me leave you with one image that I really like. I'm not sure exactly why... just the feeling in the image. I call the shot, "Together".

This couple was doing the same stuff that the little single kayakers were doing, but less aggressively. They then moved over to this calm spot, took the boat out and portaged it upstream so they could run the part of the river that I think is called the "Otter Slide". Go to my June Smugmug gallery to see them back enjoying the action after this quiet moment.

Quiet Month

Despite the fact that I haven't had much time to get out and shoot pictures, I feel the need to post here to update the Blog. I haven't been totally idle: for instance, I participated in the B.A.D. Ride with over 1000 other motorcyclists. It was a long day since I rode back up North right afterward, but it was a day of "participation", not "observation". In other words, I didn't shoot a lot of road pictures as in previous years. I did get a couple of good images, including this one during the demo from the Toronto Police "Winged Wheels" Precision Motorcycle Team.

I had decided in advance that I was going to do some slow
shutter speed shots. It's tricky.

I didn't shoot anything in the city for a couple of weeks. But when I went up North, I went for a short bike ride (disappointed: the Fiery Grill in Dorset is closed on Mondays!) and took a few shots while I was there. There were some brightly coloured things, like picnic tables, windows, etc. And a long pier that called to me..."wide angle", it said. "Wide angle..."

I used the Perspective control while cropping this image in Photoshop. It wasn't anywhere near as wide as this when I shot it.

Then finally, when I got home, I saw a guy go out on the lake on a seadoo. The attraction of this toy escapes me. He went out for 5 or 10 minutes, did a few donuts and then returned to the dock. I'm sure it's fun for a few minutes, but what do you do after that?

Well, back to the city on Thursday. I'm slowly working on my next book and dealing with some other issues. Watch this space for our plan to run at least one course this summer... we're still trying to decide what level we're going to teach. All kinds of people are asking for a basic DSLR course, and basic Photoshop, but we want to do something more advanced. Now's your chance to let me know what YOU might want. email me.

Whitewater Fun and other stuff

It's been an active weekend shooting pictures. I'd been meaning to drop into the Minden Wildwater Preserve (for those who were on that course last fall up here -- do you remember the cemetery we visited? This is right around the corner). I've been here before, but never when there were actually kayakers on the water.

Would you believe I actually filled up a 4Gb CF-card? And ran out of battery? (I changed the battery, but had left my spare memory cards at home). Anyway, what fascinating photo-ops!

Here are a few shots:









For more, go to my smugmug gallery (click here), find the May 2009 monthly gallery and scroll about halfway down. There are actually two batches, from Saturday and from Monday. Saturday was more challenging because it wasn't sunny and bright and I had to increase the ISO to capture the action.

I wanted to share some pointers with you that might help when you get in an action shooting situation.

Basic rules:

› either use a fast shutter speed or pan with the action (which takes lots of practice)

› be prepared. Things happen fast

› test. Get the lighting, focus and composition set up in advance.

I can't say that I don't enjoy having an excellent camera like the D300. It lets me do some things that lesser cameras don't: but some of these features exist on earlier models (and even on Canon equipment -- LOL!). One great feature is the 6 frame per second high speed mode. And another is the ability to lock the autofocus on a moving target. That feature got me some razor-sharp images of fast moving targets. The trick to tracking moving objects is to keep them in the finder with the release button held halfway down. The computer in the camera will do the rest (sometimes! It can be fooled).

If your camera doesn't have this feature, one suggestion is to manually focus on a predetermined spot and shoot when the target reaches the spot. A higher depth-of-field helps too.

I chose to stop the action using a fast shutter speed. It was a bright, sunny day but when I set the lens to its sweet spot — f/8 — I got about 1/500 second, so I decided to crank the ISO up just a little. I set it to 400, which gave me shutter speeds around 1/1000 sec. I was going to slow things down and pan with the boats, but then I ran out of memory, so I'll save that for another day.

I thought about how to meter the exposures. Averaging didn't work well (I tested it). The excessive brightness of the sun reflecting off the water swamped everything, so I went to spot metering. The D300 lets me move the metering spot off-centre, so I did: I moved it up and to the right, which is mostly where I would put the subject when I composed the shot, so I was usually metering on the kayaker or the boat. It didn't always work, sometimes I composed the photo differently; but it did most of the time. Still, in the end, the bright water did get in the way. Photoshop to the rescue.

When I got home and downloaded the almost 300 images I had shot, I wondered how I was going to decide which ones I liked best. I don't use LightRoom, I prefer Adobe Bridge, but both of those programs will let you flag images. I set the slideshow function in motion, with my hands hovering over the keyboard. Pressing the number 1-5 while viewing an image assigns that many stars to it; pressing ctrl-delete trashes it. Anything soft focus went immediately in the trash.

I assigned "1" to any image that was vaguely interesting for later review. "2" was used for what I thought was a better picture. "3" was for one I definitely wanted to work on, and "4" and "5" were reserved for images I absolutely loved. Out of all those pictures, I gave two 4's and one 5: they happen to be the ones above. The first one got the 5.

Then I went back and looked at the "1's". I upgraded a few. Then the "2's". Same thing. I ended up with about 80 pictures rated 3 or better. I opened two new folders, called "selected" and "alternate" and sorted further. Sometimes, with burst shooting, I had 2 or 3 very similar pictures: one was selected, the others moved to the alternate folder. There were several shots that told a story: a kayaker capsizing, with half a dozen images of the event. I moved those to another folder called "sequences". I actually have those still to work on; I want to do composites or storyboards with those.

Now to the editing. I won't bore you with excessive detail (OK, OK, I already did! But I think the workflow is important when you have several hundred shots to go through) but I will comment on one more trick. In Camera RAW 5.0 there's a great new feature: an adjustment brush. On almost all of the pictures, I used it on the kayaker's face in order to boost the brightness of the face. It works really slick: you paint an area with it then set the attributes for the painted area: exposure, brightness, contrast, black point, etc etc. The face is almost always in shadow (I avoid shooting with direct sun on the face) and it needs a couple of stops more light.

Most of the shots needed some white recovery to minimize the blown out whites on the water. So I created a default correction set and used it almost all the time. Once I had the image in Photoshop, it was a matter of cropping and saving. Nothing fancy.

By the way, the sharpening and other tools in Camera RAW are soft. By that i mean that their effects are subtle even when you crank them up fairly high. You can rarely overdo it. Try it, you'll like it!

So I bent your ear enough. Watch this space: next time I shoot there, I'll try slower exposures and panning with the boats. That will make the images more dynamic, some hints of motion.

Here are a couple more images to enjoy before I go away.

Trillium shot with my ultra wide-angle lens.
I altered the colour of some of the dead foliage in the background.

Rose-Breasted Grosbeak male on my bird feeder.

Springtime and other stuff

I'm still not feeling very creative. But I have been out a few times to shoot some pictures, and I thought I'd share some of them with you.

If you're afraid of spiders, close your eyes:

Someone already said that I had a lot more nerve than they did. I can only respond by saying, "that's not MY hands!" They belong to Irina Popova who has a lot more nerve than me! Shot with my handheld strobe as described
in the text below.

The Richmond Hill Camera Club hired a company to come in and set up a bunch of "critters" for us to photograph. It was a well-choreographed event where some eight stations were set up and about 40 photographers had a chance to shoot what they wanted. The best part about it was that they set up strobe lighting with soft boxes for each setup and provided a remote trigger so that the photographer at the setup could trigger the flashes.

I used their setups some: but I also tried different lighting and my favourite was to use my SB-600 flash off-camera and control it in commander mode -- something the Nikon D300 does well. I usually held the flash in my left hand, low and up in front of the camera, and I usually had the Gary Fong diffuser on the flash to soften the light. What I like about ihis arrangement is that it does cast a soft shadow, to give a 3D feel to the subject and it brings out the texture.

THere are a bunch more "critter" shots from that evening in my April 2009 gallery here.

Aside from that, I have been out shooting a bit more stuff. I found a waterfall -- actually a white water park -- near my house in Minden one day, and took a few shots there and of the "bazilliums" (there are bazillions of trilliums in the woods in May) nearby. There are kayakers who frequent this water on weekends, I'm going to try to get some of them on digital film this weekend. Here are a few shots from that day:









Again there are a few more of these images on my SmugMug gallery here.

OK, a couple more images to share. I was asked to shoot the new Kimco scooters at Humber College and while doing so, Marshall (one of our Chief Instructors) came by and we did a few action shots. The marvellous selection tools in Photoshop CS4 made a closecut selection quick, accurate and easy so I superimposed Marshall and the bike on another picture.

As mentioned in the text, Marshall was riding in the parking lot at Humber College. I superimposed the closecut picture over a shot of one of the nicest riding roads in Ontario, Muskoka Road 13 out of Bala.

And finally (hopefully you are disappointed, not looking forward to seeing the end of this posting...) I was on my way to an early morning meeting when I was greeted by a very misty, foggy morning. But the sun was up, and visible in the fog. It was interesting that the thickness of the mist made looking directly at the sun very pleasant and I drove for probably 15 minutes looking for a place to pull over and get a good image. I was resigned to the fact that I may not find a spot -- by now I was on the 404 highway; then out of the gloom the Slovak Cathedral of the Transfiguration in Markham appeared. I pulled over and took a few images. When I opened them in Photoshop, I couldn't decide how I wanted to render them. I tried a bunch of different effects, and I kind of liked these.

I created a threshold layer and blended it into the original image to produce this textured effect. The saturation on the grass was increased. The image below was done similarly, but with higher opacity. I left it in colour instead of converting to black-and-white because I wanted the subtle shading in the sun to appear.