Everyone has a Dream

Twice in one day! I didn't know I could blog twice in one day! It's been years since... never mind.

I did get out to shoot some different pictures on Sunday so I thought I'd share some of them here. We'll get to the meaning behind the title of this Blog in a minute, but first this story...

Frantic Biker

If you ever see a motorcyclist by the side of the road tearing his clothes off, and you're not a biker, you wouldn't understand. However if you ride you would get it instantly. I was riding back from the Whitewater Preserve on Saturday, took a detour down a nice dirt road and came out on Highway 35 just below Carnarvon. I felt a sharp pain, but just a little one on my back below my left shoulder blade. Sort of like a sharp itch. I was a couple of minutes from home so I figured I'd wait it out.

Just as I turned off on Red Umbrella Road, another one. This one was more intense: no mistaking it this time — I had a wasp in my jacket. I IMMEDIATELY parked, jumped off the bike and started to take off my jacket, but my gloves were in the way so they had to go first. Then the jacket, then it stung me again! I couldn't get my shirt off with the helmet on, so that took a minute which felt more like an hour, then I ripped the shirt off and saw a telltale black and yellow mote fly away out the corner of my eye.

I've been stung while riding a few times before. Once multiple times on my abdomen — I undressed in a church parking lot in the Elk National Forest in Pennsylvania that time and reduced the little bugger to a smear of yellow paste under foot. He might have stung me, but he was dead, dead, dead. Another was a single bee sting just below my collarbone (I actually dropped the bike that time, but that's another story) and once above my eyebrow when one got in my helmet.

For motorcyclists, there's an old saw: "if you've never dropped your bike, you will". Change that to "if you've never been stung while riding, you will be". You won't be a real biker until that happens.

That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

So after getting dressed again, the pain being tolerable and reducing to a simple annoying itch (which persists even now, 3 days later. I can't reach the spot to scratch, so you'll find me rubbing up against doorframes and trees like a mangy bear), I decided to drop in on my neighbour, Vic. He comes walking by from time to time, and often stops in for a chat and a coffee. He lives a little ways down Pleasant Point Road, which is a dirt road just off Red Umbrella, and although I've been past his place, I never seemed to be there when he was, and wasn't sure which was his property. A couple of days ago I verified his "911" number (they've replaced all the lot numbers with a real address), and I knew he was there so I had told him I would drop in.

Dream Home

Vic is a former pharmaceutical executive, retired, and he bought his property with just a couple of rundown structures on it 20 years ago. He has spent that time building a dream estate, which you can't really tell from the road. When I grow up, I want a place like Vic's. It'll never happen — short of a lottery win — and for another reason: this man does magic with wood, and can turn his vision into reality. I got the $5 tour (I would have said 5¢ tour, but not in this place!). VIC DESIGNED AND BUILT THIS HOUSE HIMSELF (well he used trades, but it's entirely his concept and most of the woodwork is his).

I told Vic that I would take some pictures of his place. He graciously agreed to let me. He wasn't home on Monday evening, so I only got some outdoor late day shots, but I'll be coming back to do more. Especially interior shots looking out at a spectacular sunset from his outstanding open living room. Watch this space. If he lets me, I might even do a Blurb book for him.

Here are a couple of images for now: there are more on Smugmug. Outstanding.

View of the house from the lakeside. I was about halfway between the dock and the house for this shot. It's a multi-image HDR, gently treated just to bring out the texture of the wood and the dappling of the setting sun. The living room I mentioned is the cathedral-ceiling'ed area to the left, there's more house hidden behind the trees! Click on the picture. It's worth looking at full-screen size.

This is the "gazebo" he built at the water's edge. You have to go inside it to see the flawless design and construction, the warmth of the golden pine and oak he used, the massive posts and beams. Again this is an HDR shot, somewhat 'spicified' using Topaz Adjust 4 to bring out the textures. Again, click on it to appreciate the detail of the image.

To the right of the gazebo, facing the lake, is this spot. If you look further to the right, there's a hemlock grove populated by hundred year old trees. The pine tree on the left in this image leans out over the water and Vic tells me it is about 200 years old and is called "Lone Pine". This point of land was named after this massive tree a hundred years ago.

And as you may have guessed, this is yet another HDR treated shot, with a whole bunch more technical work, like a gradient map across the bottom and some levels work to bring out the texture in the pine tree. I wanted to show the detail of the forest floor as well as the sunset colours. Perhaps I got a wee tad carried away, but I like it!

More to come of this outstanding estate. I wish one day I could have one like it! {sigh}.

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PHO–TO–GEN–IC (fəʊtəˈdʒɛnɪk)

"A photogenic subject (generally a person) is a subject that usually appears physically attractive or striking in photographs". Another definition is, "Attractive as a subject for photography".

So can an event or a venue be termed "photogenic", or is that term reserved for models with high cheekbones and symmetrical features? I'll leave the semantics to you.

I think that Whitewater Kayaking is a photogenic subject. It has everything: fast-flowing water which you can smooth out with a large f/stop and slow shutter speed or stop in mid-air with a big opening combined with a high ISO and resulting fast shutter; bright colours because the kayakers favour psychedelic paint on their boats and gear; incredible physical action and skill which can be captured in pixels; and a gamut of emotions from "the thrill of victory to the agony of defeat".

Last weekend was a fun event at the Minden Wildwater Preserve, continuing this week with the Canadian National Championships. I took a bunch of pictures, but tried a few different things so that I didn't simply duplicate the shots from last year's event (last year I focused on faces. I have a two-page spread in my "Pathways" book just of competitors' faces). This year I played with motion, colour and perspective. I got a few good images.

And now a video (if this works) for your viewing pleasure!

The first picture was one of a series in a burst of about 5 images i took at high speed (the D300 will do 6 frames/second without the external battery pack).

The second shot was taken during a race event called a "Boatercross" where half a dozen boats came over the dam simultaneously with a goal to be first at the bottom. A wild and crazy event.

Next is an image taken with the 400mm lens. I love the long distance perspective.

Fourth is a lucky shot. I slowed the shutter down to 1/6 second and panned with the boat. The wild water movement, and the brightly coloured boats in the background were even further enhanced by using the Topaz Adjust 4 filter "Spicify", not once but twice!

I came back today without my main camera, then got the idea that I could shoot video with my little Nikon Coolpix, so I tried it out. What do you think?

Unusual for me, I shot 430 images on Saturday afternoon. I brought them back here, uploaded them to the computer and processed them in Lightroom. First pass was a quick "keep it or toss it out"decision, and 90 images bit the dust. Then I went through and marked the ones I wanted to work on with a coloured flag and stars. As I write this, I've only gotten around to looking at the 3-star and up images!

By the way, there were lots of photographers there: this guy was set up across the river and I think was working for the organizers. I thought I got a good picture of him. He had set up a couple of strobes on tripods at the side of the river and was triggering them remotely with the transmitter on top of the camera. If it had been a Nikon, I would have tried to mess with him by selecting the same Commander channel, but alas, he was stuck with Canon gear.

Check out my Smugmug site for more pictures.

Adios!

I Love Thunderstorms!

I feel sorry for people who grew up afraid of thunderstorms.We had a country place just North of Ste. Agathe, Quebec. I grew up in Montreal. We called them "country places". "Cottage" was reserved for a two-storey house in the city. Not like Torontonians who go away to the "cottage in Muskoka or the Kawarthas". There's an urban legend about a transplanted Montreal kid (I swear it was my daughter!) who said to her parents one day, "one day I'm going to see this fabulous resort called "The Cottage" that everyone goes to"!

Anyway, our house was up on the hill, across the road from the lake. My grandparents owned "the big house" which was on the water. It was a lonely spot, only 5 or 6 families on the whole big bay (Lake Manitou, we called it "Ivry" for some reason), and the property declined over the years until it was sold for a song many years ago. Of course it's now worth millions, and the whole lake is filled with "cottagers" and people who have retired. Torontonians: can you imagine — 500 or 600 feet of pristine shoreline on a clear, unpolluted lake only 45 minutes from the city?

Back to thunderstorms. My mom used to take us kids into the centre of the living room during a storm. She'd even take the bobby pins out of my sister's hair, I'm told, because she was afraid we'd get hit by lightning. Didn't rub off on us, though — a thunderstorm was a time we'd sit huddled in blankets and play games, having a great time!

A little older, I remember watching the storms through the picture window in the living room as they would track across the lake. The advantage of living up on the hill was, of course, the great view! I remember being in my grandparents' sun porch — it ran the full length of the lake side of the house and was screened in — you know what I remember most about being in there during a storm? That special smell of the rain through the screens. Every time I smell that smell, I go back to those idyllic childhood days.

I love thunderstorms. I was hit by lightning one time, while operating a Ham radio station on a "Field Day" at the top of Covey Hill sourh of Montreal. Blown through the wall of the tent. I have no lasting effects (right, don't say it!) and it didn't make me afraid. Later, I used to go to our garage in our "cottage" (two-storey house!) in Unionville and open the door and sit in a lawn chair protected from the rain except for the splashes that came in, and watch the storm.

Yesterday, we had a storm here. I grabbed an umbrella and went out to the gazebo in front of the house and just enjoyed the cataracts of  rain and the occasional thunderbolt. There was a smattering of small hail, and the sound of hail and rain on the canvas top of the gazebo was overwhelmingly beautiful. One lightning bolt hit somewhere out on the lake, couldn't have been more than 500m from where I was with an earsplitting blast of sound. Only one — too bad. I didn't have my camera with me because first of all, the gazebo is screened in and second I'm surrounded by trees so I couldn't get a great picture anyway. But I ran in the house as the storm slowly passed and took this photo out the doorway through the rain.

That's a closeup of the roof of my car.

I love thunderstorms.

Writing that took me back to great times growing up. I do have a photo somewhere of multiple lightning hits that I took out the window of our 15th floor apartment many years ago. It was a 35mm slide which I scanned, but I'll have to go find the DVD somewhere on which I stored it. I'll post it here when I do. If you have a picture like that, I'd be happy to share it, just send me an email and tell me where it is!

Last time I mentioned Intellicast. Here's an image I captured onscreen just after the storm passed.

but I went back in time to just when the storm was overhead. I'm right where that big orange and purple splotch is. I changed to look at the cloud view instead of the precipitation, and saw this screen:

http://www.intellicast.com/. It's very cool.

That "Revolver Map" spinning globe on the right

Looked very cool, but it doesn't do what I thought it did. I doesn't show you who HAS visited your site, it shows who's visiting the site RIGHT NOW. Yes, there's a counter at the top, but... so when I look at it, all I see is one visitor — me. And it has my location wrong, as "Markham, ON". Still, it's fun so I might leave it there for a while.

Enjoy your day!

Yippee, no HDR's!

For once, I didn't shoot any HDR's this weekend. I love the technique, and it's hard not to like the dramatic colours and precise lines, but there's a lot of it out there. Whenever I browse the NAPP site, it looks like every second picture is an HDR. Overdone. But fun.

Anyway, I went to the Haliburton Sportsman's Show for two reasons: OK, three. One, it was something to do, a good destination for a ride on a beautiful weekend (the WeatherNetwork was wrong: no rain at all until the middle of the night last night!).

Non-Photographic tip

There's a site called intellicast.com that has interactive weather maps online! You can see precipitation, cloud cover, all kinds of stuff and you can see it tracking across a map, or satellite picture. It's really cool. Check out the link, click the purple "full screen" box upper right, then click "play" to watch the weather move across the screen. It's almost realtime: the weather pattern is only 5 minutes old! As you can see, the rain has already passed here. Very cool site.

Two, my old hunting buddy Pete was delivering a lecture on how to keep whitetail deer on your property (Pete is the author/owner of Ripple Outdoors. He's a noted writer and photographer, specializing in fishing and hunting). I had a coffee and a catch-up with him.

And three, I read that Yamaha was going to be there with demo rides (my friend André from Humber who manages the motorcycle program for Yamaha was there) and with the Yamaha Rider Academy which gets 6- to 10 year old kids scooting around on motorcycles. Clinton, the owner of Canadian Motorcycle Training Services wasn't there, but Bob Island was, an interesting guy who is also a photographer and is the editor of Snowmobile Magazine. I figured, a good photo-op and I wasn't disappointed.

Reincarnation of Ricky Carmichael? Actually there was another kid there who also buzzed around fearlessly but was older. This little guy looks like about 6 years old! I might take some time to clean out the background on this shot.

Then there were these 3 little girls — sisters, I'm pretty sure — who lined up for a picture from their dad. I thought the 3 colourful helmets made an interesting shot: I called it "R-G-B" (if you're not into digital, you may not know the significance of that. Google it). I cheated, though. It was "R-Y-B" when I shot it. A quick fix in Photoshop and voîlà!

This Yamaha WaveRunner was scooting around on the lake. I knew the 400mm lens was good for something! I was going to crop it tight but thought the image might be more interesting composed like this.

There are more pictures from this weekend on my Smugmug site.

Photo Tip

My friend Pete writes and photographs for Ontario Out of Doors and other magazines. In the course of the conversation, he told me he could sell lots more pictures to them if he had taken the trouble to get MODEL RELEASES signed by recognizeable people in the pictures. He's right. And I've been lazy and don't have releases with me. You should always carry some in your camera bag. You never know when that super shot is going to come along!

I have one somewhere on the computer. I'll go find it, print up a handful of copies and stick them in my bag. If you want a copy, let me know (I think I said this before and never followed through: if I can't find the one I made a while ago, I'll make a new one. We need them)!

OK, I found it. If you want a copy of the modelrelease.docx file that I created and use, send me an email and I'll shoot it to you... Glenn

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Hi, I'm back!

Due to somewhat of a cascade effect, I haven't posted here in a while. When my dad was hospitalized and then passed away last month, a lot of the time I spent doing other things was, um, spent doing other things. That included work time, and creative time, and play time. A lot of that time became "family" time. So there was no time left to spend taking pictures, blogging, even riding my bike (I did 'force' myself to go out for a short ride from time to time. (how many times did the word 'time' appear in this paragraph? There will be a test at the end...).

I decided to simplify my blog postings. I plan to post reasonably frequently, make the posts shorter and the topics fewer. I'll post pictures, of course, because that's what this blog is about, and new techniques and tips to give you ideas, but I'll try to make them more succinct and organized. By skipping some of the fancy formatting and stuff, preparing a post should be more painless, and therefore somewhat more frequent.

A couple of years of doing this has not caused me to standardize the look and feel or even topic list since when I write it I generally write what I'm thinking at the time. Hopefully you will still continue to find it interesting and worth reading. Please feel free to pass the link on to others (http://www.faczen.blogspot.com/) and if you haven't already done so, please click on the "Follow" button over on the right so I can see how many people are following the blog. It doesn't mean you will get junk mail or have to check in all the time, it just helps me keep track.

Non-photographic tip of the day
This is an important one. Please read this.

My dad was meticulous, almost obsessive about maintaining his "Bible" which is what he called his 'just in case' binder. It contained instructions on what to do, who to contact, where to find things, in case he died. Without it, we would have been totally lost. However my sister and I are still struggling to do the things that we need to. There are a million of them and many of them are not obvious and were not listed in the "Bible". For example, what steps does one need to take to advise the various branches of government (motor vehicle bureau, health department, social security, and (God help us), Revenue Canada) that he's passed away?

Fortunately he took steps to ensure that all his financial vehicles — bank accounts, investments, etc — were in both his and my mother's names. Did you know, for instance, that Power of Attorney ends when the principal dies? Did you know that a bank will not accept a legal, notarized Power of Attorney unless it's written on the bank's own form? That the Motor Vehicle Bureau is giving us a hard time about transferring ownership of their car (jointly owned) into our mother's name so that it can be sold, without a signature from my father (which might be a little difficult to obtain)?

So. Here's my tip. If you don't have a will, MAKE ONE. If you don't have a set of Powers of Attorney (for health and for property), MAKE THEM. You need a lawyer for this and I know a good one — email me for the name. Prepare a DETAILED "What to do if I'm not around" binder and tell the people who matter where it is. Keep it up to date. Make it complete.


Now some photo stuff.

As I said, I haven't done much in the last month. But there are a few pictures, and it's worth visiting my July Smugmug gallery.

I've become somewhat enamoured with HDR techniques. Some things work, some don't. I said before that Photomatix Pro is the defacto standard, but Photoshop CS5 has awesome HDR capability and I've been using that first. If I'm not satisfied with the results, THEN I'll go to Photomatix. Hasn't happened much... anyway, here are a few images to make you think.

Leafy Abstract At the Minden Wildwater Preserve. Slow shutter speed and camera motion.One of my better abstracts, I think. Watch for this image in the revised "Pathways" book.

Exploring While exploring a dirt trail in the woods west of Minden on the KLR, I stopped for some shots along the road. I wish I was a better rider, I'm still a bit nervous on this kind of surface. That's a pretty steep hill. HDR/Topaz treatment. Go to the smugmug site to see some images taken along this trail.

Wild Orchid Thai Restaurant and Antique Shop in Minden. The bright yellow truck screamed "do an HDR!" to me so I did. A 5-shot bracket and Topaz filtering resulted in this image.

The Minden River Cone Natalie owns the "River Cone" ice cream and takeout place in Minden. Their burgers and shakes are excellent, they have a wide variety of ice cream products. Be sure to drop in when you're in the area! The "Cartoony" effect is a result of some creative processing with Topaz Adjust. Blow up the picture to X3Large on SmugMug to see it better. The clouds were stripped in from another picture, as was Natalie in the window.

Cloudscape A mundane sky made spectacular through the magic of HDR. From my True North back yard. A beautiful day and these dramatic clouds made me run back in for the camera. It's a 5-shot HDR but the main effect comes from the Topaz Suite, "Spicify" filter.

Rest in Peace

I haven't written in my Blog nor taken a significant picture for some time. The reason is below.

Robert Arthur Springer. August 14, 1920 — June 14, 2010.

Rest in Peace, Dad.

I didn't take this picture, just added a few effects.

Playing with Photoshop CS-5

It's like being back at school. JUST like being back at school. Oh, wait — I AM back at school! Well, sort of. I'm staying in Residence at Humber College and I'm in a typical college dorm room.

Here's the thing. I was looking for a way to stay overnight in Toronto when I was teaching the motorcycle course at Humber College (I'm not just another pretty face! I ARE a motorsickle instruktor, even tho I can't spel it). Humber rents out residence rooms like hotel rooms during the summer, except at half the price! I thought I'd give it a shot. Reasonably comfortable, very convenient to where I teach, obviously and I was going to say it brings back a lot of memories except I'd be lying because I went to McGill University and we lived in Montreal so I never actually lived in residence. Over the years I've stayed in res a number of times on training courses and whatever, though. The difference is, I seem to be the only one around — it's pretty quiet. Cheap, though.

There's 24/7 security here, no way to sneak someone in if I were of a mind to. Oh, well. What do you want for $30/night? Anyway I'm here for a couple of days, then except for a couple of breaks, for the next two weeks. I miss having coffee and my own bathroom but...

So some interesting stuff. I loaded Photoshop CS5 onto the desktop computer (still running CS4 on this laptop, I haven't had a chance to install it yet) and as soon as I had it up and running, I loaded an image into it to test it, and played with one of its new features: Context-Aware Cloning and Fill. Since I'm not an RTFM kind of person, ("Read the F(*^'in Manual), I looked up enough to find out how to find it, then gave it a shot. What I did was to make a loose selection of an area, then hit shift-f5 and Enter.

Amazing. How the program knows what you want to remove, I don't know, but it does! Here's my first test — I removed the climbers and the plants growing on the canyon wall in under a minute.

This image was taken at a waterfall just off the Blue Ridge Parkway down in North Carolina. I can't remember the name of the place, except that it was just South of Grandfather Mountain and was just a short hike off the road. Click on the pictures to blow them up to see what I did.

Fast forward to yesterday, when I shot a couple of photos in my light tent, to update some images on my First Aid website. I needed a cover picture for my "Consumer Products" section so I gathered a variety of kits and threw them haphazardly in the light tent, fired up the strobes and banged off a few shots. Sure I did. Try, "I made what I thought was a pleasing arrangement", then I fiddled with the camera and flashes until it worked — it didn't right away, something to do with the setting of the flash function in the camera, but I finally got it.

So the intent was to create a floating product shot and since all the other shots on the site are on a blue mottled background, I thought I'd create one. I close-cut the kits, used the "render clouds" filter, colourized the background, threw in a drop shadow and voila!

OK, now don't ask me what I was trying to do next. I have no idea. I think I had just installed Topaz Adjust 4 or at least linked to it in CS5 and wanted to play with it, or I wanted to do something with the background, I don't remember. What I did was to select the products in the image, then selected inverse (so everything else was selected) but I think I had the product selection copied to the clipboard, and I hit shift-f5 and Enter. Holy Water, Batman! Look what happened! I added a couple of Topaz-layers (making sure it worked in CS5) and here's the result!

I liked this image so much that I used it as the cover shot for my Promotional Items section on the website, just the way it is. You have to admit it's cool. OK, you don't have to admit it, but *I* like it. So there.

A couple of days ago, I was watching the birds at the feeder and was amazed at the variety of species that were visiting. The Robins were fighting with the squirrels (amazing how mean they are when they're probably defending a nest), there were chickadees, American Goldfinches, white-breasted nuthatches, a couple of downy woodpeckers and a pair of hairy woodpeckers, white-crowned sparrows, a pair of rose-breasted grosbeaks, some blue jays and common grackles, among others. OK, I'm not all that knowledgeable, I bought a picture book of bird species and when in doubt, visited www.whatbird.com and posted pictures when I couldn't identify something. I still don't know if it was a Wood Thrush or a Brown Thrasher. The grackles are mean. They infested the area in a swarm (everyone knows that it's a "gaggle" of geese but did you know it's a "murder" of crows? Cool, eh?). So I don't know if it's a swarm of grackles but an "infestation" sounds good. They viciously attacked all the other birds and kept them away from the feeder when they wanted to gorge themselves. Fortunately they were easy to scare off, I just had to open the door and they were gone.

So this is what a grackle looks like, although the head and neck colour is more of an irridescent blue and the body is darker than the picture shows. The white flecks in the image are snowflakes. In May. Go figure. 

 

And this is a female grackle. In the animal kingdom, the males are the vividly coloured, showy ones!

The nuthatches kind of hang upside down to feed. Here's one on the Scotch Pine. OK picture except for the twig across the bird.

CS5-time. Let's try the new context-aware healing tool. I kid you not. This edit took a total of 5 seconds. I'm suitably impressed.

So that's my first exposure to CS5. I wonder what other magic it has to offer?
Cheating.
 
Have you ever had trouble getting access to an event or a scene to get pictures?

When I got that shot of the perp being arrested for the jewellery store robbery, i shot from far away with the 200mm lens, although the police let me nearer than I would have thought. The professional looking equipment helped. I was at the scene of an accident a while later -- I threw on a green reflective vest and the cops assumed I belonged there. In fact they shooed away some other sightseers and let me right into the scene. So the secret is, look like, and act like you belong there! It works.

Last summer I wanted to shoot the kayakers at the Canadian Whitewater championships and I was worried that I wouldn't be able to get in, or get close. So I made up a "press" badge. I made a new one this year. Look official?

You can get a bar code off the internet. This one says "photographer". Oh, and when I'm asked who I work for, I say I'm a "Freelancer" but since I've had some pictures published, I add, "the Toronto Star", the "Toronto Sun", "CTV", "Global TV", etc. I'm not lying! They've all bought pictures from me! OK "A picture". LOL

I'd best get to bed. I have to be up at 5:45am to get to a meeting and it's already 2:00. Bye for now!

I've been busy!

Doing what? I'm not really sure. I just know that when I sit down on the couch, I'm more than likely to fall asleep instantaneously, probably because (a) basketball season is over for the Raptors (which means it's actually 11:00pm not 7:00!), (b) because I've seen that episode of Two and a Half Men a couple of times before and (c) because my days are full and getting fuller... I'm good at procrastinating too — I've been seriously considering where I'd like to go for a couple of weeks at the end of June, with Newfoundland and Lake Superior the top two on the list, but I haven't gotten around to committing yet. Soon...

Speaking of "Lists", is this an age-related thing? I find myself making lists. Mostly "To-Do" lists. Today's list has 8 items on it, one of which is "get stuff organized for Toronto trips". I'm going to be spending something like 18 nights in Toronto in the second half of May and beginning of June, and stuff like making sure I have enough socks and underwear weighs heavily on my mind. OK, not heavily... But seriously, did your mother ever say to you, "if your head wasn't screwed on your neck, you'd probably forget that too!" If you were like that when you were a kid, how much worse is it now? By the way, if you're reading this and it's not May 10th yet, you're in luck! Pick up that phone and wish your mom "Happy Mother's Day". If it's already past, then call her and say, "you know, I was thinking about you all day on Sunday but I couldn't get to a phone. Remember when you used to say, if my head wasn't screwed on..." but I digress. (No, I'm not starting that again!).

So what have I been so busy with? Go back and read the first paragraph...

Well I sold my motorcycle and got a new one. My old bike was a long distance touring bike but it is unsuited to riding on dirt and gravel roads, something we have lots of up here in the Haliburton Highlands (technically, I'm in Carnarvon which is just North of Minden which is just West of the village of Haliburton. But nobody's ever heard of Carnarvon or they think it's in England, and this Minden isn't in Germany, so when people ask where I live, I take the easy route and say "Haliburton". If you're from Ontario or most parts of Canada, you've heard of Haliburton. If not... well that's what Google is for!).

My new bike (new to me – it's a 2006) is a Kawasaki KLR 650 which is a dual sport bike which means it's designed for those back roads but you can ride it on the highway as well. Sort of – my butt gets sore after about 100 km, it's not designed for long distance travel. Here's what it looks like:

Notice how this photo was taken from a low angle and that the horizon is not level. That was done on purpose to add a dynamic feeling to the image. Loaded with my camera gear as I go off in search of Trilliums!

which segues me into my first topic: perspective.

Shooting from a different perspective

I've been doing this anyway, but the concept of shooting from a different perspective was brought to the front of my mind as I've been reading and re-reading Scott Kelby's Digital Photography Library (see below). He says it so many times in his books that it was bound to sink in eventually: your photos will be better if you shoot them from a different perspective. If you hold up your camera to your face while you're standing there looking at someone or some thing, your picture will look exactly like what that subject ALWAYS looks like. You always see kids from above. You always see flowers from above. You look straight across at that building (or if it's tall, you look up), or that lake or ocean view. Ho-hum. Boring.

So Kelby says, get down on your knees. Crawl in the mud like a snake. Climb up on a hill or shoot down from a staircase. Remember Dr. Ron's shot of the Humber Instructors from a couple of weeks ago? Always shoot level with or up at flowers and at kids. OK, well there's another rule I want to break from time to time, but do you get the picture? here's a Trillium shot from level with it, and a Hostas shot from down below. Oh, and above is a motorcycle shot from knee level. All better than what they would have been had I shot from standing.

Lighting this shot was a challenge. The sun kept going in and out of the clouds, so I got the flash out, set it to remote and held it in various positions while I shot a bunch of pictures. In the end? The best shot was with no flash, just partial sunlight.

There are other ways of achieving different perspectives. Yessss. You got it before I said it: focal length! In the third book in the series, Kelby says to use your long zoom lens when shooting portraits in the studio! Use that ultra-wide-angle on flowers, but you need to get one really really close to the camera! Now the motorcycle was shot with my point-and-shoot camera, zoomed as wide as it could get which isn't very wide, it's like a 35mm lens on a 35mm camera (or 24mm on my DSLR). The Hostas was shot with my 200mm lens zoomed to about 150mm because I cropped it out of a bigger image and I wasn't re which part of the flower would look best when I shot it.


Another thing: the flower shot was 1/10 sec at f/11. I chose f/11 because it's about the sharpest point on this lens, and because I wanted more depth of field (the smaller the f/stop – the larger the number – the more stuff is in focus in your shot, but you knew that already, right?) and I cranked the ISO down to 100 for minimum noise (or "grain"), which resulted in a slow shutter speed. If you look REALLY closely at the image, you can see some ghosting where the wind moved a flower while the shutter was open. Did I tell you that you have to put the camera on a tripod? Did I have to? Or to use the self-timer or a shutter release cable to avoid shaking the camera? Go back a couple of posts and read about maximizing sharpness. Anyway, I don't have a macro lens, but you can get pretty close to macro using a long lens from further away.

So when you go out shooting pictures, do something different. Richard Martin, I've been told, goes around entering local photo club competitions and his goal is to get the LOWEST possible score. Richard makes great pictures, and he takes great pride in breaking all the rules. Club competitions are about following the rules. If it's a landscape, everything has to be in focus from front to back. There has to be a foreground, middle ground and background. The horizon shall be exactly horizontal and never in the middle. The centre of interest shall be off-centre, following the "rule of thirds". By all means, join a club, enter competitions, strive for great scores, and learn what the rules are. In my mind, you're not an artist if you blindly follow them but you have to know what they are if you want to break them! Make sense? I don't consider myself an artist but I'm trying, and I want to become one. (Feel free to send me stacks of email telling me that I really am one, and a fine one at that, and that I should have more confidence in myself and my abilities and don't stop, and by the way can you buy a signed original print of one of my images or would I care to spend some time for which you will pay to coach you into becoming a better photographer than you are and...)

Let me talk about the Kelby books. And, at the risk of sounding like a broken record, direct you to this site to join NAPP if you want to buy something at a discount or actually learn something. [An aside. The Kelby Photoshop CS5 seminar will be in Toronto on June 10th and you should go if you can. I wish I could go, but I’m teaching that day. I’ve been to two Kelby seminars, one great, one not so great. The one that was not wonderful was directed more at graphic designers than photographers so that was more my fault... It’s pretty cheap for a full day of expert training. $79 if you’re a NAPP member, $99 if you’re not. For info on the seminar, http://kelbytraininglive.com/maximumtour].

So back to the books. I bought the Digital Photography Library — it's 3 slim books in a slipcase for $50 or $60 — around Christmas time and deliberately took this long to read them. As Scott himself says, when you read his books, it's more like he's sitting there beside you when you're shooting pictures saying "hey, try this!" He has a conversational writing style and gets his point across on a very basic level. If fact, this book series states somewhere, "for beginners". OK, then I guess I'm a beginner. Because I've gotten lots and lots of stuff out of these books. On the downside, Scott, if you're reading this or Larry, if you would pass this on to Scott, we don't all have extensive disposable incomes! I know you make the point in the first couple of books that there are various levels of equipment prices addressed, but the third book drops the pretense and tells us that we must have a Grid Spot or a triflector or a 78" scrim (which is ONLY $350 without the stands). I get that your third book shows the equipment that you yourself use, but unless we're all pro's getting paid big bucks to shoot pictures or are independently wealthy, how many of us can afford to have not one, but 2 or 3 Nikon SB-900 flashes for almost $500 EACH? Someone should write a book that says, "here's what the pro's use, here's what they use them for (or why), and here's how you can come close if you're on a budget".

Anyway, the books give you lots of GREAT ideas and you should all go out and buy them. If you're a NAPP member, go here... If not, go here, but it's more expensive there.

High Dynamic Range Photography, or HDR's.

I wrote last time that I was hooked on shooting HDR's and I implied that everyone kind of knows what HDR's are. A couple of emails and at least one phone call tells me that not all of you do. So bear with me a couple of paragraphs while I try to explain it, what it is, why you might want to try it, and how.

If you take a picture of something with a bright sky behind it, what should you expose for? Normally, the subject of the picture, which would make the sky badly overexposed, basically pure white. If you exposed for the sky, to show those fluffy white clouds on a blue background, the object in the foreground would be dark and underexposed. How come, when you look at this scene, you can see both the foreground object and the sky? Because the human eye is a wonderful thing. If you compare the brightness of light to a piano keyboard, the human eye can distinguish 7 octaves, but the camera (whether it is digital or film), only 4. So how do you get a picture with both the sky and the foreground visible? By combining multiple exposures. You sandwich a picture of the foreground, properly exposed with a picture of the sky, properly exposed. It's a tedious process in Photoshop, deciding which things should come from which picture, but you can eventually do it. The HDR process is a software solution that automates that process.

Essentially, HDR compresses that range of 7 octaves of light into 4. Things that would normally be blown out, like bright skies, still show their details and the same is true at the other end, the dark end of the spectrum.

Here's an example.

Photoshop itself has some built-in routines for generating HDR images. But, it is acknowledged, there are better programs out there, and the de facto standard is a program called Photomatix Pro. Once you combine the images, you can change some parameters and completely vary the look and feel of teh resulting combined image.

You can take the resulting image into Photoshop and do some more magic on it. I use a program someone recently introduced me to, called "Topaz Adjust" which lets you do wild and crazy things.

Strictly speaking, this isn't from the same 2 images above: it was made from 5 images, all exposed differently, one stop apart. Topaz works magic with textures and painted surfaces.

Here are a couple more HDR images to show you what they can do.

Now technically, if you shoot in RAW, you can adjust two copies of the same photo to expose details in the light and dark ends of the spectrum, then combine them into an HDR image. Sometimes that works. If you're shooting something with motion in it (people, for instance), that might be your only solution.

Well, that's all for today. It's raining and cold-ish out right now, so I'll likely stay indoors this evening. I want to try to shoot some First Aid Kits in the studio tomorrow, we'll see how they turn out. If the weather turns reasonable, I'll get out on my new bike and see if we can't explore some new roads. I'll be sure to take at least one camera with me!

See y'all later.

Trying some new stuff

It’s been a busy time, or actually a make-busy time the past couple of weeks. Business is slow (not just me – the people I talk to in the First Aid industry agree) so I’ve had to spend a lot of time working on making it recover. Adding new products, cleaning up the ones I offer now, working on marketing channels, etc. So I haven’t spent as much time as I’d like on photography.

So if you want to help, you must know people who need really good First Aid kits because the ones we make are Outstanding. If you know someone who has a business, the law requires that they have one but anyone with a home or car or kids or dogs… What about a little kit for photographers? Fits in your camera bag and I’ll put extra sterile gauze pads inside to use wiping down your camera stuff! Go to the FAC First Aid website or email me and I’ll take care of you or your contacts!

Photographically, it’s been an interesting few weeks. I have a bunch of pictures to show you, which might give you some ideas or send you exploring in some new directions. I did some stuff I'm not that used to.

What I tried was (a) using natural light, (b) HDR techniques and (c) shooting birds with the long lens.

I took some shots of my kids and grandkids the other day, using only natural light. I think the best light in the world is what comes through a North-facing window (OK, one shot was at an East-facing window and I don’t see much difference!)

Facing the window. My newest granddaughter Leah

Leah's mom, Maria. She's facing the window, but I'm off to the side. I love this lighting!

Kelly's quartering into the light. Now you don't need to soften the skin on a 6 year old but look how mellow it makes the image!

This picture of Ryan at a chess board made me think about a picture I DIDN’T take last week. I was out for coffee with a friend and noticed a young couple sitting in the coffee shop playing chess. There was such a feeling of intimacy between them and I really wanted to capture that picture but I didn’t because I didn’t want to intrude and because I’m generally shy about asking people if I can shoot them. For two days, I’ve been picturing that shot and regretting that I didn’t get it. So I resolve to try harder to step out of my comfort zone in future. That’s what I meant about exploring new directions. Am I making any sense?

A phone call from a journalist at Sun Media set me going in another direction. This had to do with marketing my First Aid products but in the end he asked me for a product shot which wasn’t in my archives. Well it is Spring, and it’s time to set up my studio which has been parked for the winter! The garage isn’t heated, you see… anyway it spurred me to set it up again to take a couple of product shots.

This is the finished shot.

I took it on the white light tent background but I created a background and added a twist: the helmet is an HDR image. OK, I need to explain that! HDR is a technique that allows a wider than normal range of light levels to be displayed in a photo. It stands for “High Dynamic Range”. You can do it with as little as 2 exposures, one light and one dark and combining them in an appropriate way.

You can even use one picture, if you shoot in RAW because you can adjust the exposure to show details in the shadows and use a second copy of the image where the details in the highlights are shown, then mix the two. There are a bunch of different software packages out there to achieve this, but the benchmark is Photomatix Pro.

Anyway, look at the motorcycle helmet in the picture. Go ahead, click on it to blow it up. Amazing how detailed it is, isn’t it? I didn’t want to do the whole picture that way, so I just stripped in the HDR expanded helmet on a new layer and left the rest of it the way it was exposed in the light tent. The helmet is a combination of 5 different exposures. So in this case I used HDR techniques on PART of a picture.

But even Photomatix doesn’t go far enough sometimes, so there are additional programs like Topaz Adjust 4 which can provide some interesting effects. Thanks to Lance for pointing me in that direction!

This is my outdoor/motorcycle First Aid kit. The helmet is in the shot to give it a sense of size. By the way, there is no table, no reflection: shot in the white tent and everything created! Click on it to blow it up.

I really got interested in HDR’s and the more extreme effects in Topaz (which is a Photoshop plug-in, by the way). Here’s a variety of shots handled in different ways but all HDR.

Some people think this is what HDR is all about. Just look at the detail! The colour depth, the sharpness...

And this is completely different! Textures, motion... this is a false HDR, created from only one image, and two separate treatments on the car and the background in Topaz. Blow this one up. It looks best when viewed big.

...or this cartoon-like treatment with super saturated colours

This is more of a pure HDR expansion of the range of light at dawn. I chose not to expand the shadow areas, the cloud and the reflections in the water are the point of this shot. Here's a case where (I think) the horizon line should be in the centre of the image to give equal importance to the sky and the reflection.

Except for the police car image, I used 5 exposures for each of these shots: ranging from 2 stops underexposed to two stops over. The D300 will do that automatically. The software will compensate for some of the variations when handholding but the best results come from tripod mounting the camera and shooting with precision.

So I'm really taken with the potential of HDR photography. It's going to be hard not to use it all the time!

When Dr. Ron was up here, we drove past an empty osprey nest. I know where there are several of them in the Balsam Lake area. Driving up the other day, I saw that the ospreys are back! I loaded the 400mm lens and learned how difficult it really is to shoot birds on the wing with a long lens. First of all, there’s trying to find it in the viewfinder. Then there’s focus, which is really critical! I ended up shooting about 150 frames and only got about 6 in focus! Autofocus is way too slow, and manual is, well, tough!

Here’s an out-of-focus or at least motion blurred shot of a Canada Goose which I kind of like the dynamic of anyway:

And here’s a picture of an Osprey in flight that actually worked:

I got one shot of it coming in to land at its nest but… out of focus! So I decided to unlimber my painting tools and give it a shot.

Everything you see is created. There is no original photo in this image. I sketched on new blank layers as if I laid tracing paper over the image, then discarded the original image (which was out of focus anyway!). Topaz provided some enhanced colours on the bird and the Photoshop Texturizer provided the canvas. This was done in Photoshop, not Painter 11.

One more picture. This one isn’t mine, but I “art directed” it. Every year I shoot the instructor group picture at Humber College but this year I wanted to make it a bit different. So I invited Dr. Ron to come shoot it and we gave the picture to John Kerns to postprocess. He’s really creative with Photoshop effects. I gave both of them totally free rein: I only told Ron how I wanted to arrange the people in the shot, where to shoot from, what lens to use, what lighting, otherwise he was on his own! Same thing with John! Just kidding. What do you think? Did these guys do a great job, or what!

Well, tomorrow I get my new motorcycle, instructing season starts next week, I'm planning my vacation trip to Newfoundland, the sun is shining, the grass is turning green... trilliums are two weeks away, it's a new season, new beginnings. See y'all!