"License and Registration..."

Great Lakes Police Motorcycle Training Seminar

If you see one of these guys in your rear view mirror, remember they can ride better than you can drive! Motor cops from all over were there to hone their riding skills and on the final day, to share their skills in the spirit of competition.

I used to know a lot of these motor cops, but there are a lot of new guys – and gals – in the cadre. Still some familiar faces: some retired, some not. Luc, for instance, from the RCMP in Ottawa (forgive me for not posting his last name here) is the Staff Sergeant in charge of training for his crew. I made a mistake, joking with him "if you drop your bike, give me a heads-up so I can get a picture!" Don't be mad, Luc, I didn't mean to jinx you! But I won't publish the picture. That is, if you put a package of small unmarked bills... kidding, kidding!

This is one of Luc's group, in perfect control of that big 'ole Harley. A fun edit with heavy-duty tone mapping and some added warmth. 

But even he isn't immune:

When you push the edges of the envelope, sometimes you get a paper cut! 

This was interesting: it's an electric bike. "Zero" was there with a bunch of bikes for the motor cops to try out. Without a clutch, I can only imagine how it is to ride in these tough low-speed exercises. 

I'll leave you with two "people" pictures.

He didn't see the humour when I suggested he shouldn't do that while riding!  

I was there with my friend Lori who actually said she LIKES this picture! I'm flabbergasted. This is the first time she said she liked a picture of herself! 

More Flowers

From there I drove to Humber College where I said hi to my former motorcycle instructor colleagues and took an hour to shoot in the Arboretum behind the campus. It's a good spot to visit if you're a photographer, free access (unless you're shooting a wedding or something in which case you need to arrange with them).

My goal was to shoot some more flower images for my black and white series. I still haven't figured out the optimum subjects for that treatment, but I'm getting there. I'm going to write a tutorial on how to do this, and put it in an eBook format. Watch this space or drop me a note and I'll tell you when it's ready.

I actually shot this one at the Fruit and Vegetable Market in Minden a few days earlier.

This one too... 

This one was shot at the Arboretum. And lots more, no time to edit them!

Shooting Stars

As most of you know, I ran a 2-part workshop last month on shooting the stars. But the weather gods have not cooperated: there hasn't been a single suitable night for shooting stars since the end of June!

PS: at last night's camera club meeting, one of my students said I could count on him NOT to come out to shoot stars in February. LOL. However, I do have an idea that involves making use of an ice fishing hut...

A couple of nights ago, I woke up from a 'nap' in front of the TV at around 12:30, went outside and saw, "STARS"! I loaded up the car and headed out to check out one of the spots I had pre-selected for the field portion of the workshop, when and if the weather cooperates. I got out there, set up and sure enough, clouds started moving in, so I didn't get a suitable sequence long enough for stacking. However, I did get a couple of shots:

This is facing East. That's the moon coming up on the right.  Click the picture to see it better. I was going to brighten it up but it lost the mood when I did.

Zooming the lens while the shutter was open produced this image. And a little help from Topaz Adjust which is on sale for 50% off until the end of August. Click the link at right and use "augadjust" in the code field at checkout.

Boat HDR

Yesterday I took the boat out and shot this 5-shot bracketed group. The Topaz Simplify filter produced this "painterly" effect. 

Free eBook

If you're reading this and you haven't yet downloaded your free eBook on shooting Fall Colours, get to it! There are some early red leaves out there... click the "Newsletter" button at top right. If you're already subscribed, you got an email with a link to the eBook. If you've lost it, send me an email.

I'll be running a photowalk day into Algonquin Park around the peak colour season for the Haliburton Highlands Camera Club. If you've never been up there at that time of year, bring your sunglasses because the colours are so bright you'll burn your eyeballs out. Oh, and DO NOT come up on a weekend. Last year the stop-and-go lineup into the Park was over 20 km long and the outfitting store/restaurant was a mob scene.

This weekend is the PanAm Games test event at the whitewater, with the entire following week taken up by the Minden Invitational National Kayaking Championships. Guess what you can expect in  the next blog post?

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I should not own tools.

Just thought I'd start with some "sporadic musings".

First, a sad moment.

R.I.P. Robin Williams

As I get older, the list of people whom I have admired and who have died grows necessarily longer and longer. Some were taken from us too young, some lived to a ripe old age, but in every case, it was too soon.

My father tops the list; today he would have been 94. Nobody lives forever but they leave a big hole when they're gone. I'm lucky. I can count on one hand the people to whom I was close who have died. But there's a longer and longer list of those whose talents were so huge who are gone.

Robin Williams was one of those. His off-the-wall humour, his incredibly quick wit made him my all-time favourite comedian. And some of the more dramatic roles he played were memorable because he made the characters believable. Good Will Hunting, the Dead Poet's Society, August Rush, yes, even Mrs. Doubtfire. I read somewhere that most of his dialogue in Good Morning Vietnam was not scripted, he improvised it.

In recent years, he pushed the edge of the envelope. His comedy became vulgar, his intent, to shock. I didn't like it, but I appreciated it. He explored boundaries, he pushed buttons. No doubt his substance abuse issues were a contributing factor in his death, but it was inevitable, in him and in others, mostly musicians, who brought their bright lights to live among us and make us feel. Maybe he really was an alien, Mork from Ork.

I wish I could have met, you, Mr. Williams. R.I.P.

Are you a good Samaritan?

The other day I saw a van parked by the side of the road, the driver, an older gentleman, sitting on the grass nearby, with his hand on the side of his neck seemingly feeling for his pulse. I made a U-turn and stopped. He wasn't really in distress, just waiting for a friend in another vehicle that had become separated, but he thanked me for stopping.

Just food for thought. Suppose you saw a motorcycle broken down at the side of the road. Would you stop to help, or at least offer the rider a lift to the nearest service station? Would you still do that if the biker was muscled, tattooed and wearing a ratty leather vest with a 3-part patch on the back?

I would. Would you?

I shouldn't own tools.

If I have tools, it's easier to break things or hurt myself. In fact, my picture should be posted in every Canadian Tire, every Home Depot with an order not to sell tools to me. My latest escapade?

I wanted to remove the ball head from my Gitzo tripod (the head is a Manfrotto 486RC2) but couldn't get it off. I wanted to mount my gimbal mount on it, which sits in a box in the car, unused, and which, I've found out, isn't a wise thing to mount on my lightweight 3LT carbon fiber tripod. But I couldn't get the ball head off.

So I Googled it. Sure enough... however the article talks about a set screw in the bottom of the head, and mine doesn't have one. I figured it's just too (friction) tight and then I thought, "I have an oil filter wrench that should fit around the base of the head, let me give that a try".

I now have a Gitzo tripod with a sheared off 1/4 inch bolt on the clamp that holds the centre column in place, with a Manfrotto 486RC2 ball head still firmly attached to the centre column. Fortunately, I know where Gentec is, the Gitzo importer and repair depot. Next trip to Toronto. Maybe I should buy a whole new centre column piece, after they fix the tripod, of course. Wonder how much that exercise is going to cost me?

If you see me coming, don't sell me tools.

Emergency Medical Information Card

Every now and then, I remind people about this. Suppose you were taken to an ER, unable to communicate (say, God forbid, in an accident and unconscious, or having suffered a stroke or other attack of some kind). How difficult would it be for the ER staff to find out about pre-existing medical conditions, allergies, or what meds you're taking?

Years ago, I made a wallet-sized Emergency Medical Information Card template and made it available to anyone for free. It's a PDF you download, you can fill it out and print it on your own computer (no information is sent anywhere) and get it laminated at Staples or wherever.

Over 20,000 people have downloaded it. That makes me feel good. The link is over on the right side of this blog, or here. Do it today.

Supermoon

I shot the same picture of the so-called "Supermoon" that everyone else did. I wasn't going to, but there it was, around midnight, when I went out to check if there were any stars to be seen (there weren't). I grabbed the 200mm with 1.7x converter and took a few handheld shots. Cropping out of the awesome 36Mp D800 image, I got this:

But everyone has the same shot. So I sat down with my coffee to play for a few minutes. That dragged into about an hour because when I posted it on FB, someone said the clouds should be in FRONT of the moon, so I went back and fixed it.

Just playing, you understand. You've seen this landscape before, I grabbed it, did some layer masking, then drew the birds in with the Wacom stylus. I darkened the image with some gradients, for mood.

New Technique

I picked up a new technique for rendering flowers in black-and-white on a black background from a fellow named Antony Northcutt. He put it together in a pdf eBook tutorial which I bought for £4.99. It's well done. The key is to choose a good picture to use. I'll do some more of these, but here's my first effort using that technique.

I put my own spin on this, doing some things differently from Antony. For instance, I used Silver Efex Pro for the BW conversion, and added some Topaz Simplify as well. The difficult part for this image was making the selection, it took a bit of painstaking painting on a mask layer to get rid of the background. 

Here's another, my second or third attempt. I went out today in search of subjects that would suit this style, this is a bit closer to my vision. This took me about an hour in Photoshop. It's closer to Antony's style, although I added a background glow.

Here's another one, with a difference. Instead of focusing on details, I went for textures. Topaz Simplify was the finishing tool.
 

Last but not least. Simplify again, but more detail. I like this technique and I'm thinking about printing a series of these images.
 

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Let me tell you 'bout the birds and the bees

OK, not bees.

Birds and flowers and stuff. It is that time of year. I'll get back to landscapes soon! I think I've taken a big step in making sharp pictures (even without a D800!).

People tell me they like to look at the photos in my blog, so here we go. That's what this post is about.

Lupines on black. Beside my house.

Dandelion Puffballs on black. I have a love/hate relationship with these guys.

Right place at the right time. This mallard drake flushed out of a puddle as I walked along the road near my dock. I just happened to have the right lens on the camera, the right settings, the reactions to shoot a 5 or 6-shot burst. The background's not great, but the duck's in perfect focus. I have another shot when he lost lift and touched down on the road: his feathers were, well, feathered, but the background was even worse!

Female American Goldfinch. This is one of my first successful shots with the 400mm lens: I'm convinced that removing the filter makes a difference.

Male American Goldfinch. Same tree, same time.

Taking a break. This is a male ruby-throated hummingbird, taking a break from his usual helicopter routine. You can only see the red on the throat at certain angles, but this is a better shot.

On the wing. This is the female ruby-throated hummingbird giving me the eye.

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail. (Thanks, Linda!) Right near my dock, this butterfly was competing with a bunch of big honey bees for nectar from this flowering tree.

Hope you enjoy the pictures. I now have enough black background shots to put a gallery selection together, perfect for that kitchen wall you have begging for pictures! Drop me a note if you want some prints!

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Basic Black

Good Morning!
We'll get to the topic of the day in a few minutes, but first, these other messages!

Im starting to enjoy the spring up here. There's a period of time where I don't: when it's brown and grey out, chilly and damp... but we're coming to the end of that and the world is starting to look green. Also colourful: the flowers are coming out too. I was scouting yesterday and saw a huge patch of trilliums already opened. There are some people coming up to shoot some pictures up here in about 10 days (the weekend of May 12th) so if anyone is interested in coming up for the day or tagging along, drop me a note.

Software Updates
There's all kinds of stuff going on in the photo software world right now. When Adobe released Lightroom 4, and then Photoshop CS6 (still pre-order as I write this, but supposed to deliver next week), all of the plug-in manufacturers had to scramble to catch up, to make sure their products were compatible.

Coincidentally (ya think?), HDRsoft released their updated version of Photomatix Pro 4.2. It's a free update for registered users of Pro (I think from version 3-up) and you can download it here. If you don't have Photomatix, you can go to their site and download a free trial before buying it. The bad news is, their free trial puts a watermark on the image so you can't really use it for anything until you buy it.

There are 3 commonly used programs for HDR generation/tone mapping: Photomatix, Nik HDR Efex Pro and Photoshop CSx (where "x" is "5" or "6"). I haven't seen CS6 in action yet, but I heard that Adobe has updated the already excellent HDR generating engine in CS5. Topaz Adjust 5 doesn't generate HDR's but it's right up there as a tone mapping utility!

Speaking of Adobe, they've released Adobe Camera Raw 6.7 which supports Process Version 2012 (Lightroom 4 users are tired of seeing the incompatibility warning when they try to open an image in Photoshop) and it also supports new cameras like the D4, the D800, the V1, the 5DMkIII. If you use Photoshop, all you have to do is open it, click Help→Updates and follow the bouncing ball.

The ongoing problems with Lightroom 4 haven't been resolved yet. Some users have no difficulty but some (and there's no clear correlation who: Mac or PC, high end or not...) still have issues with the software being slow. Sometimes it uses up TONS of resources. When generating previews, for instance, it uses up 100% of all four CPUs that I have in the system, plus up to 80% of my 8Gb of memory. And sometimes it doesn't. I hope they solve it soon.

Beginner's workshops and course material
Just an update on the workshops and books I'm working on. If I said I was halfway through it now, I'd probably be exaggerating. But the hard part is done: all the concepts are in place, it's just about getting words on digital paper.

The reason I'm mentioning it is: who's interested in having a preview of it when the time comes? The first thing that will be ready is the Instructor's Workbook, so if you're interested in teaching beginners to use DSLR's, you will be interested in this. Email me and I'll put your name on the list for a free copy of the workbook.

Business Cards
Do you have any idea how cheap business cards are these days? You can get 1000 full-colour business cards, printed on both sides and UV coated for about $20. I'm about to reorder some and at that price, I'll make more than one design.

I have a dealer account with BossLogo, so if anyone is interested in making up some cards, drop me a note and I'll fill you in on what's needed to make it happen.

Let's get on to some pictures, shall we?

I was at my favourite spot a couple of days ago: the Minden Wild Water Preserve. It wasn't a beautiful day, and the dam was blocked up (they insert 12" wooden ties to limit the water flow) so the white water was particularly low. Nevertheless, there were a couple of kayakers on the water.

Got him looking right at me! Notice the cold weather gear: especially the glove/grips on the paddle.

These guys were just working on their techniques. As I said, the water level was really low which made it difficult to navigate in spots.

White water Quacker. Then there was this guy. He fought the current to swim across just above where I shot the other Kayakers (see the play on words? Huh? I posted this picure on the NAPP site and someone said it "quacked him up"!). Too bad I couldn't get more white water in the shot. I looked away to adjust the camera settings for a second, and he was gone!

Multiple Exposure. Remember I mentioned Photomatix 4.2? After I installed it, I wanted to test it in Lightroom 4 so I clicked on 5 images and ran it with ghosting turned OFF. I don't know if anyone's thought about using Photomatix this way: these were all equally exposed images, not bracketed. Had he been moving across the scene it also would have been interesting. Also if I had used a tripod. I'll try this again another day, but I kind of like this image!

Basic Black

Dogwood Leaves. I brought my black cloth with me and set up this shot in the woods at the Preserve. There was too much sunlight on both the leaves and the background, so I shaded them by standing between the sun and the leaves.

Baby Trillium. This is the pièce de résistance. Again it was shot with the black background and shaded. I enhanced the textures but the colours were just as you see them, including the highly saturated green leaves!

Both of these black pictures were shot with my Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 VR lens. I don't have a macro lens (really should get one!). I had to do some work to get rid of stuff in the background, including making it really really black. Photoshop and Lightroom were really helpful, especially the black slider in the new Lightroom 4. And I added a black vignette.

By the way, as a technique trick: when trying to get an even, solid black background, sometimes you have to clone out stuff or use the content-aware spot healing brush. They aren't perfect. So what I do is to add a levels adjustment layer, and crank the right slider way over to the left to see anything that isn't black, then I can paint or clone it out. I delete the adjustment layer before saving the image.

More to come...

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Life's Distractions

Would you believe I let life get in the way of taking pictures? Me? Oh the horror.

Now if I could report that I actually achieved something, it would be different. With one exception, everything was "reactive" as opposed to "proactive". The only thing I've made some progress on is my basic DSLR photographer's course and I AM getting somewhere with it. The concept is complete, and now it's all about getting it down on paper. Well, not 'paper', but you know what I mean. A few more weeks...

Non-Photography note
Just a non-photography note: I don't know about you, but I HATE those in-ear bluetooth thingies. First of all, it makes you look like a Borg, second it's uncomfortable and for me at least, won't stay in, and third, there's something that psychologically bothers me about there not being a microphone in front of my mouth somewhere.

As many of you know, I have problems with my voice and if I try to use the built-in bluetooth in the car, nobody can hear me. For years, I've been trying to find a headset that goes over my head instead of in the ear, but they don't make one to fit the Blackberry. My friend Styles found one: it's bluetooth as well, but it goes over the top, not in the ear, and there's a boom mike that sits in the usual position near your mouth. They have them at Radio Scrap (oops, I mean "The Source") for $50.

Why am I telling you this? Because I found a product I really like and I wanted to share it.

On to some pictures!
Spring is starting to appear up here. I was in Toronto earlier this week and the buds on the trees are magnificent. I didn't have time to stop for photos, unfortunately. There's really nothing like that up here since the trees are not 'ornamental', and anyway, we're a couple of weeks behind the big Smoke. Rather stark, but here's one of my raspberry stems, just starting to revive:

Although it's cropped out of a larger image (I don't have a macro lens!), not much other than sharpening has been done to this shot. Hmmm. Black background. Hmmm

I also shot my one and only daffodil (there will be more. This one appeared all on its own, for some reason)

I did do some work on this image. Not as much as you might think,though. Mostly sharpening and getting rid of some extraneous objects; plus a dark vignette to isolate the flower. Hmmm. A black background. Hmmm.

One more: here's a shot of my wind chimes. I was trying to be creative, responding to the theme "music" for the monthly NAPP rally.

This is a 5-shot multiple exposure, all done in the camera! I used my flash off-camera to light it and made them move between exposures. You might have noticed that I shot it on a black background... hmmm.

By now, the more astute and observant of you might have noticed that I have become enamored of black backgrounds! I did some pictures a few years ago on black, and my interest has been rekindled. So I did some research and found that there are some sneaky ways to create "invisible black backgrounds" using flash, and while I want to try that too, it wasn't what I had in mind. I found a really simple and very cheap solution and I documented it in my technical blog (link here).

You can't take a bad picture of your kids.
OK, well actually you can, but you can get away with a lot of stuff when the subject of the photos is so near and dear to you. I only took a few shots when my son and daughter-in-law brought my granddaughter for a visit last week, but here are my favourites.

Leah is sitting with my mom and I can feel the happiness in this picture. Almost 90 years separates these two. The light is entirely from a big north-facing window, my favourite lighting scenario!

Here's Leah with my other two grandkids, Kelly and Ryan. Ryan likes hamming it up for the camera and Kelly's picture is in the dictionary beside the word "precocious". I couldn't tear her away from my iPad, though!

OK, one more to share with you. I drove by my favourite spot, the Minden Wildwater Preserve again, just to see what was going on. Sunset, that's what. But when I finished with this picture, it looks more like a huge forest fire than a sunset!

Conflagration. The sun was still illuminating the trees in the background, but the front ones were already in the shade. This is NOT an HDR, although I did shoot for one (5 exposures). They didn't work because the trees moved too much between shots. So I used one frame, and toned it.

Have I bored you enough for today? OK, OK. Say goodbye, now! Until next time...

PS: Photoshop CS6 is scheduled to be released on April 23rd. Are you going to be an early adopter? Not this cowboy!

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