I'm not a Virgin any more!

I finally dipped a brush in some paint. A real brush. Real paint. All these years I've wanted to paint and I've taken the first baby steps to learn how. I've never held a brush in my hand, I've often said I can't draw (I can't make a straight line even with a ruler!) but Harvey says you don't have to draw straight lines to paint!

Harvey Walker teaches a weekly class at the Minden Cultural Centre and I started this week. I bought an easel and some supplies and showed up bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed (well sort of: it was Monday morning, after all!).

So I'll occasionally bore you with some reports of my progress. But since this was my first time, well, here goes!

You start by making an underpainting or a wash to block in the light and dark areas. Here's the reference photo we chose (something easy!) and my first attempt. 

I Had the feeling I should have stopped there. Framed it and put it up as my first sketch. But I couldn't leave well enough alone, so when I got home, I started painting it.

Not very good. OK, really bad! But hey, my first attempt. Oil on canvas.

Now imagine owning the very first painting that Pablo Picasso did. You now have the opportunity to have the very first original "Glenn Springer" which might be worth orders of magnitude more when I'm gone! Bidding is now open, email your bid to photography@faczen.com!


...from the sporadic musings department

I'm not going to say it yet, but I am tempted to use the words, "winter is done". I'm writing this on March 17th (happy St. Patrick's Day). It's been above freezing for several days and although it looks like the nighttime temperatures are going to dip again on the weekend, I think we're done.

Thank God. It's been a particularly vicious one this year, temperature-wise. January and particularly February were frigid with temperatures in the -30°C range for days on end. Even though I went out of my way to burn a lot of firewood, my heating oil usage in that month is the highest it's ever been since I moved here 8 years ago. I can't imagine what it would have been had the oil price not dropped this year.

We didn't get a lot of snow this year in the Highlands. I can't recall a snowfall over a few inches and the total had to be in the one meter range (the first year I moved here, 2007, we had almost 4 meters of snow!), but it sure was cold!

So it's on its way. Spring, that is. Spring is not a pretty season up here, it's my least favourite, since the pristine, crisp white of the snow gives way to a world that is soggy, muddy, brown, but there will be green things poking up soon!

Why does someone think it is so important to tell me that Matt Damon cured his blurry vision by eating grapes, that they send it to me not once or twice but FIVE times? From different email addresses. The person who cures the scourge of email spam gets my vote, I'll tell you!

That said, those messages and 29 others were trapped this morning by my ISP, 1and1.com. I have it set up so that I see the headings of the spam messages just in case a real one gets routed in there and I can retrieve it. That's all due to the fact that my email addresses are published on my websites. 

The question is, when you get messages that say "click here to unsubscribe", should you? Or are they using that to find out whether they've hit a real email address or not? Mine (on my newsletter) is perfectly safe, you just get removed from the mailing list (I use MailChimp) but I will admit that I get a message that says "so-and-so unsubscribed" so I suppose I could do something with it if I was mean and nasty!

Outstanding picture

Have you ever seen a picture that you can say, "I wish this was mine"? I have to share this one with you but without getting their permission, I won't post it on my blog. Instead, here's the link. Click on it and enjoy:

http://goo.gl/dyFhSh

This was on the "North of 49 photography" site. I can't say enough good things about this shot, it is outstanding. Check it out.

I was researching a visit to the Raptor Conservancy, I saw some pictures from two friends and was reminded. I'd like to make another visit there, say sometime in the Spring. We need about 10 people to make it pay, If anyone is interested, let me know. It's about 2 hours Southwest of Toronto.

Aurora Hunting

When you hear that there's been a class G-4 solar storm and people in wonderful places like Alaska and Norway start posting pictures of curtains of fire in the sky, you search online to find out whether there's any chance that you will see something! All indications were positive: the weather forecast was for cold and clear, cleardarksky.com showed great possibilities and the Northern Lights Forecast said we were due for a biggie. Nada.

Well not much anyway. I girded my loins (with fleece and down) and headed out after the camera club meeting and saw just a hint of green on the horizon for the hour and a half I was there. I spent the time shooting star trails: 160 images (15 seconds, f/2.8, ISO 1000, F=17mm). Here's the result:

Schuyler's Island Causeway on Horseshoe Lake. Merged with StarStaX using Lighten/comet mode. Some Lightroom adjustment to the foreground. A hint of green at lower right.

Here's the Topaz Impression version

I used the "Smudged" preset for the sky and the "Impasto" preset for the foreground. 

A little hint when you're out doing star shots. When you put the camera back in the car, make sure the shutter release cable is not hanging out when you close the door! Good thing they're cheap ($1.69 from China, shipping included on eBay. I don't know how they do it but not complaining!).

Anyway, as I headed home, I decided to detour to another star shooting spot I knew, pulled over and... there they were! Not brilliant and impressive, but definitely there, in the Northern sky. 

This is after a fair bit of enhancement in Lightroom: they were barely visible to the naked eye. Highway 118 where it crosses between 12 Mile Lake and Boshkong Lake. 

I took a few shots and as I was walking back to the car, I noticed a green streamer behind a hill to the West. Again, with some help from Lightroom:

 

So there you go. Who needs sleep anyway?

This is a rework of an image I captured last fall up in  Algonquin Park. With a little help from Topaz and from some Lightroom presets I got from David Kingham that I was trying out. 

You may have noticed that I like shooting at night. I ran two tutorial workshops last summer on shooting stars; I'll do it again if anyone is interested. Send me an email and let's talk!

Wintergreen

Last week I told you about Wintergreen Maple Products. I was there again for breakfast on Saturday (Shhh. Don't tell my doctor. Pancakes or French Toast smothered in maple syrup... and really good coffee!) and went upstairs to shoot some pictures. It was really cold up there so I didn't stay long. I understand they'll be starting to boil syrup this week if it warms up, more shots next weekend if I can!

I usually use Nik HDR Efex Pro 2 for my HDR merges but for some reason, this one didn't render well. I tried it again in Photomatix Pro and liked it much better. Since I can never leave well enough alone, I added a layer of Topaz Glow (just lightly blended in) and some Topaz Star Effects just to highlight some, well, highlights! For you techno-freaks, this was a 5-exposure bracket, two stops either side of about ½ second at f/8, ISO 200. The bottom half of the picture wasn't square with the top part so I used Perspective Warp in Photoshop to bring it into line. I was going for the symmetry, deliberately breaking composition rules. 

While I was there, I noticed at least one other interesting photo (work the scene, folks!). 

"Abused"There was a pile of old construction boots that struck me as interesting. The main treatment is with Topaz Impression "Da Vinci" preset but I did extra work to enhance the worn toes of two of the boots.  

The camera club is going to have a get-together at Wintergreen in May and they're having an event we're going to shoot in June. Stay tuned!

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