Sleeping like a Baby

sporadic musings...

Good News! I'm younger than I thought!

I hadn't taken exchange into account: 70 Canadian is less than 54 US! So I'm actually younger than I thought.

Consider this, though: my sister, who's two years younger than me, has lived in the US for more than half her life. I think she moved around '75 so 40 years in the US is like 52 Canadian so she's actually considerably older than me in Canadian years. I always knew it, Barbi!

I don't want to harp on the fact that I feel old: driven by both the number and how I feel and my habits. There's a litany of physical things... and the daily habits... wait! I typed them then realized that's "TMI" (too much information)! Let's just say that one day you wake up and discover that you ARE your father! They announced the iPhone7 today – who cares? Every day my current phone nags me about upgrading the O/S and every day I say, "leave me alone. Later". I can still make phone calls. I can listen to music and read my emails. Go away.

I have never played "World of Warcraft" and never have and never will look for a Pokemon, whatever that is. I tried FaceTime once, don't remember how, don't care. I am my Father!

By the way, where did the expression "sleep like a baby" come from? I sleep like a baby. I wake up at 2 and again at 4am. I get up because I have to go to the bathroom or something hurts. My father used to say, "everything hurts. Except the stuff that doesn't work any more". I know how he felt.

But I still know how to write, although I'm at a loss for some words I can't remember from time to time, and I know how to make pictures, and I know how to share my knowledge with others.

If I start rambling about my age after this, call me on it. Stop me. You're not interested, dwelling on it just makes me feel ancient. Life goes on.

---

Gales of November: we had a cancellation from the first weekend (October 20-23) so there are two spaces available AND a lodge room has opened up. Also there are still 4 spaces on the second weekend. Jump on it, folks! This is going to fill up. 

Visit www.photography.to/gales for details and if you want the first weekend, email me directly. The October 27-30 session can be booked online. 

---

I bought a boat!

If you read my last blog, you already knew that.

Photo credit: Jack March. It's a 16' Starcraft with an 85hp Evinrude outboard.

It's  quick, it's stable, it runs well... thanks to Bob Sully who brought the motor back to life after some preemptive tries. No thanks to me, I told him I'm his customer from Hell. Anything I touch with a motor in it... he had to visit at least twice before I could figure out how to start the damned thing! The electrical stuff isn't in that good a shape, I (ok "We") are going to have to work on that.

And today, I realized that I need to address something else. I muddled up throwing a tarp over it because it was going to rain last night and this morning. But I need to figure out a way to make a "tent" because now the tarp, sagging in the middle, is full of water! And one of the electrical things that doesn't work is the bilge pump... going to have to look at that!

Docking it is a challenge, since 12-Mile Lake is part of the reservoir system for the Trent-Severn waterway and the water levels are really low in fall. I'm docked for now at the Inn across the road because the water's only knee-deep at my dock. Also I've been warned to be careful, there are lots of rocks in the lake, it can be expensive hitting one with the prop!

Update: I've moved it to the Marina down the road. Makes more sense, although I have to drive to the boat instead of walking (well I could walk...). Very reasonable price and friendly folks.

As my friend Janie says, there's something about being out on the water. I'm only sorry I didn't do this sooner! I'm looking forward to Fall Colours!

Here's me in my Tilley hat. It's the only one that will stay on my head when I'm running in the wind... 

...and here's me fishing my Tilley hat out of the water. Guess I was wrong! 

 

Loons on 12-Mile Lake. Click to view larger!

Here are a couple of Loon pictures I took the other day on the water. I've shot better ones, but these were from my own boat!

---

Night Skies

Last week there was an alert about high solar flare activity and a prediction of active Aurora Borealis. It's been many years since I saw a visible display of sheets of aurora... and I'm still waiting! The camera can see better than my eyes.

This little video will show you what we actually saw. It's not particularly enhanced. http://photography.to/video/aurora20160902.mp4. By the way, I did this with a program called "LRTimeLapse", straightforward but lots of steps... and since I didn't know what I was doing, I had to start over a few times! I'll play, and figure out how to add music, etc later.

Anyway, I went out and a couple of camera club friends joined me. There was some activity which I was able to capture, but it took some post-processing to enhance the images. Nothing like some of the stuff I've seen from Alaska or Iceland, but still impressive and pretty.

A couple of nights later, I stopped on the way home to see if there was any sign of Northern Lights, but there weren't. I did manage to get a few shots of the milky way (last of the season: the galactic core doesn't rise above the horizon in winter) and a couple of other star shots for your enjoyment.

This is a merge of a few shots to get a little extra detail

I was struck by the warm glow of the lit-up cottage and by the splendour of the starry sky.  

---

Interesting free software

This is for PC people. You MAC guys have enough toys and good stuff to tantalize us with, so for once it's our turn. This one comes from Micro$oft themselves {gasp}!

This looks like an ordinary picture of a house under construction. If you look closely you can see some distortion, especially in the lower right corner.  But what makes it remarkable is that it's a composite of 25 separate pictures and it took me 2 minutes to assemble it. 

I wanted to document this new house being erected on our lake. Long story. But the short version is that I was there with one lens – my 105mm – and I could only get about 30' away from the  building. So here's the best I could do with a single shot:

What I did was to shoot 25 overlapping images, sweeping from side to side with 5 shots, then up a bit and 5 more, and so on. I tried to do a 'pano merge' in Lightroom but it didn't want to behave.

A few days later, I came across a picture of the Milky Way on Facebook produced by a 16 year old kid from Czechoslovakia. He said it was a merge of some 225 images, if I recall. Turns out he did it using a piece of software called "Microsoft Image Composition Editor" or "Microsoft ICE". MS calls it "an advanced panoramic image stitcher". It's for Windows, and it's brilliant. It even does RAW files, no need to convert to Jpeg first! It's fast, easy to use, it's not massive, and it's FREE. 

Rather than copy and paste what MS says about it, here's the link. I look forward to trying it for more exciting pano's. It says it will do Gigapixel images – the one I did is about 150 megapixels! In seconds. Brilliant. 

PS: I zoomed into the image and produced a 200% crop so you can see the potential.

This is detail from the same  composite image. Cropped really, really tight.

---

Nothing doing on Carden Plain

Looks like the migration is well under way. The only birds I saw when I was there a few days ago were some crows in the distance. A "Murder of Crows", probably 25 or 30 of them making a racket in some far off trees. And a couple of Eastern Kingbirds. Flowers are still there but showing signs of fading for the fall. I caught a few pictures with my 105mm macro lens.

Fall's not far away! 

---

Parting Shot

This was a 5-shot HDR which I then painted with Impression.  This one might get me back to my brushes and oil paints. I've been taking a sabbatical from painting for a while because I find it a lot easier to capture my vision with a Wacom stylus in my hand than with a paint brush. 

— 30 —

Fall is coming to an end...

...I feel as though I'm girding my loins for the challenging battle with winter to come. Rumour has it that we can expect a tough one this year.

The roof is done, at least that part that I'm doing this year. The chimney mortar still needs pointing, we're waiting for a dry spell, cement bags and tools sitting at the ready. The sump pump line needs attention: maybe we can prevent it from freezing up this year. Outdoor furniture is stored and covered, the top of the gazebo's hanging in the garage, I made space for the ATV and the car, the 4-wheeler's been tuned and ready for the snowplow to be mounted. 

Firewood is stacked and I have a bunch of kindling split and ready to go; I bought 50 pounds of birdseed and the overhanging branches have been trimmed, ready for the weight of snow to come. I'm making an appointment next week to have the snow tires installed.

It's coming...

My neighbours are running around with leaf blowers. I get a real kick out of that: seeing them wake up the next day to a whole new crop of fallen leaves! Can you say "Sisyphus"?

I have prepared this image as a desktop background picture (wallpaper).
You can download the standard width version here: www.photography.to/wallpaper/leaves4x3.jpg
and the widescreen version here:www.photography.to/wallpaper/leaves16x9.jpg.
Let me know if you want a different one. Enjoy.

I don't have any of these. My property is framed on three sides by pine trees – 37 of them at last count, all mature and sky high (I wish I'd planted some red maples and other deciduous at the back of the property 7 years ago when I bought the place. They'd be adolescents by now). What I have is a carpet of pine needles, anyone who thinks "evergreens" don't shed in the fall doesn't live here! 

A neighbour once complained that I should rake up all those needles. He said it was preventing the grass from growing well. "Good," I said, "that means I don't have to mow it"! I live in the country, folks. 

If you go out in the Woods today...

I feel a little as if I'm making an AA speech here: "it's been a whole week since I took any pictures". Literally. From the 11th to the 18th. So I took the ATV up in the woods yesterday. I have a number of places where I like to sit and let my mind float (I don't want to use the 'meditate' word or the "Zen" thing, I'd have to research what they mean so I'd be using them properly). That's one of the places. 

It changes constantly. Look back a couple of posts to see that picture Cheryl took of me on my ATV, or here's another one we took that day, three short weeks ago.

The ATV trail ends at a dirt road called "Surf Trail". This is down near the end of it. 

This is what it looked like in the woods yesterday:

It was overcast and in fact drizzling a little. That adds saturation to the colours. HDR with added brushstrokes added via Topaz Impression, van Gogh 1 preset. 

Eat your hearts out, city dwellers.


New Fall Banner

I change it every couple of months and post it here in the blog as well for those who can't see the header on an RSS feed or mobile device and as a record because the old one disappears when you change it.

Topaz Clarity on Sale!

Topaz Labs makes my go-to set of plug-ins for Lightroom and Photoshop. The other set I use are from Nik (Google): I rely on Nik HDR Efex Pro 2 when I'm working with HDR's, and on Nik's Silver Efex Pro 2 to do black-and-white conversions, the others less frequently.

What are plug-ins, by the way? They're 'preset' programs that change a bunch of Photoshop (or ACR or Lightroom) settings to achieve certain effects in a professional manner. Things that you might spend hours slaving over are suddenly available with a single click. They don't actually do anything you couldn't do yourself, but wouldn't want to! For example, creating an HDR merge manually to match HDR Efex Pro would likely take you 8 or 10 hours of work, things that the plug-in can do in one click.

But Topaz keeps coming up with winners, their latest is "Impression" which addresses the frustrated paint media artist in me (one day I'll actually pick up a brush!). I use many of the modules in their complete bundle regularly too. Some are less useful to me, some address specific problems (like DeNoise) and some should be used on almost every picture if you're trying to prepare a final image. Clarity is one of those.

Here's their words:

There are a lot of ways to increase depth and definition in a photo, but many methods will leave you with unnatural-looking contrast. The intelligent technology behind Clarity allows you to enhance contrast without over-emphasizing transitions between light and dark areas. This unique approach essentially eliminates the common problem of halos, noise, and artifacts.

Using the adjustment sliders, you can easily strengthen an image’s levels of micro, midrange, and overall contrast. You can even do this selectively by taking advantage of the masking module. With Topaz Clarity, your images will never lack visual impact!

This plug-in makes the Clarity slider in Lightroom or ACR look mickey-mouse. But don't take my word for it, download the free trial and try it for yourself, you'll get hooked like I am. Here's the link, and enter "octclarity" in the coupon code field. You can also get a 15% discount on any one of their other products including the complete Topaz bundle by entering "faczen" in the code field. 


My New Book is out!

Those who know me know that I'm not a "multi-tasker". My style is to cogitate and procrastinate and then finally dive into a project with both feet, working at it pretty well single-mindedly until either it's done or I abandon it. That's not always a good thing: I have lots of started projects where I've gotten stuck and set them aside, hoping that my mindset and time available will let me eventually get back to them.

My Blurb "Best of 2013" book is one of those. It's almost the end of 2014 and it wasn't done yet. I made a few abortive tries earlier, being really fussy about layouts, etc., and wanting to do it with Adobe InDesign, but that got really tedious and finally I started over using Blurb's proprietary software, BookSmart. And finally it's done.

Yesterday I uploaded the book to Blurb for publication. I also had them make a PDF version of it because the cost of the hard copy book is high, it's about $1 per page. So the 104 page book is over $100 to print.

The description is as follows:

This 104 page full sized coffee table book contains a selection of the sporadic musings and compelling images of Glenn Springer, a published photojournalist and author and artist located in the Haliburton Highlands of Ontario, Canada. The images were all created in 2013 and reflect the artist's growth in that period. Many of the images are also available directly from the author as limited edition exhibition quality prints.

I ordered a couple of copies only because of the cost, and because I wanted to at least proof one before ordering more; I think the only people who might buy a copy of this book are future historians who want to say "I knew him when..." and who want to trace my development as an artist, those who are so impressed with my art that they need to have it in their collections, corporate, medical and personal clients who know that a book of this quality will add prestige to their coffee tables and waiting rooms, and close friends and family.

If you fit in any of those categories, don't be shy: the book is available for purchase through Blurb at the preview link below. It's printed on high quality premium matte paper and it's a full 11x14 hard cover book.

You can see a preview by clicking this link. It shows about 15 of the page spreads, my real "Best of..."! (be sure to click the "view fullscreen" icon at lower right below the image. Blurb does a good job of emulating the book, albeit at less-than-perfect resolution). I hope you will have a look. If you're a photographer or other artist or writer, it may give you some great ideas to do your own book. 

By the way, they have a deal running until the end of October for Canadian and Australian customers: by entering the code "CANADA25" or "AUSTRALIA25" you get a 25% discount on your order with them (and when books are as much as $100, that adds up!). Here's the link (yes, it includes an affiliate code for me...). By the way, they make less expensive products as well but I opted for the full-sized high quality coffee-table book.

PS: I have about 30 hours in the book, in addition to the actual photo editing, of course. Dr. Ron tells me he puts a book together in an evening, I don't know how! Maybe if I didn't customize every one of the 104 pages... I almost never use their preset layouts.

Winter Workshop

I don't want to say too much too soon, but  we're planning a massive winter workshop retreat up here in the Highlands on the weekend of February 28 - March 2, 2015. We have a fantastic facility lined up, with accommodations for up to 200 people (Gawd, we don't expect that many!!!), we're working on some really talented seminar and workshop leaders and we're talking to the Man Upstairs to arrange for some appropriate weather so we can do a bunch of outdoor as well as indoor sessions! (I personally hope we get some crystal clear nights for star shoots, although the moon is waxing gibbous that weekend).

February 28 – March 2, 2015

So watch this space for updates. And mark your calendars for that weekend, it's shaping up to be a great opportunity to build your photo skills and get away from the city for a weekend! Interested in presenting or running a workshop? Contact me.

Guest Photo

This image was made by Katherine Staynor in Newfoundland. She took my DSLR course last summer. I loved it so much, I asked her if I could post it here. She calls it, "The Three Amigos". Wonderful shot, Katherine, and thanks!

One more closing image for your enjoyment. Not much different from the earlier fall shot in the woods, a little different treatment, but somehow I wanted to share this composition as well.

— 30 —

Fall is here!

What a wonderful summer!

{begin sarcasm mode}Was it hot enough for you? Enough clear starry nights? Sunny days? {end sarcasm} As far as I know, Toronto only had one day with any kind of heat warnings all summer. But at least two big heavy duty storms.

We have not had one single suitable night for star photography all summer. As we joked at the club meeting on Wednesday, our star shoot will be in February! And I'll bet only a few of my students will want to be there! (I actually do have an idea about that, we'll have to pursue it later on).

And yet I heard that from a Global perspective, the average temperature worldwide was higher than ever. Just not here. Or in the US. Or in Europe, I understand. Africa and Asia got it.

Onward and upward! Pray for Fall Colours!

Remember, there's a free eBook on shooting Fall Colours available by subscribing to my Newsletter. Click the button at top right!

Topaz has done it again!

They released a brand new product yesterday, called "TOPAZ IMPRESSIONS". If you like to convert photos into fine art, this is the plug-in for you (it also works as a standalone, but all the Topaz products seem to work better for me inside of Photoshop (or Elements) because you can control it better using masked layers.

Click this link to go to the Topaz Impressions page. You can see some great examples of how it works, download the free trial or buy it right there. If you key in the coupon code, "SEPIMPRESSIONS" at checkout, you will get a 25% discount. This is only valid until the end of September!

I'm sure there's a deal there if you already own the bundle. I'm waiting for Topaz to reply to that question but I see that if you have a log-in on their site you may be able to find out there. As soon as they tell me I'll pass it on.

Remember, you can also get a 15% discount on the entire bundle or any other individual Topaz product by using the code "FACZEN" at checkout. This one doesn't expire but you can't get BOTH the 15% and the 25% at the same time (I wish!).

Do the math... 15% of $429 is $64. 25% of $99 is $25. If you're buying the bundle...

New Fall Colours Banner

Here it is (for those using RSS Feed so they can't see it at the top). This is an impressionistic picture of the early fall colours!

Win some, lose some

I usually drive the Argyle Road from Beaverton in order to avoid the 50km zone in Kirkfield when I'm travelling from Toronto to home. On Friday, I did as well, but for another reason. For once, I wasn't in a huge hurry to get home, it was a nice day and I wanted to take my time and some pictures.

There are several solar farms under construction in that area. I learned that several farmers had agreed to sell their land for that purpose, and for several reasons – access to the grid, flat geography, etc – it's ideal. I've been wanting to get some pictures of the solar arrays, so I stopped to ask permission to come in and shoot.

Nope. Got to get agreement from the company that owns the place. I got a clear explanation at the second place I stopped at: liability. If I trip and fall on their property...

The problem is, they have a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire to keep people out. And the links in the fence are small, less than 2". No way to shoot through it without seeing the fence. This is the best I could do:

Too bad. There were some awesome pictures to be had there. In hindsight, if I had my point-and-shoot with me I might have been able to, by putting the lens through the hole. Think I'll try that next time.

Now THAT's a tree

I kept driving and ended up on a back road south of Kirkfield. There was a section where trees overhung the road, I stopped for some shots but I'll come back again after the colours are mature. However just after that, there was a farmer's field with some awesome oak trees in it. I spent some time there trying to get some images, I did get a couple. I had a mental image when I came in, don't know if I achieved it, but I stuck around and "worked the scene", and came up with this one.

Technically, it's a 5-shot HDR which I edited quite a bit. The textures were wonderful, but too overpowering. So I went to Topaz Simplify to smooth them and then I did some toning in Lightroom.  

Same tree, different view.This is what I envisioned when I was actually there, shooting it. For the tekkies, deliberately overexposed. Everything was done in Lightroom, using the adjustment brush, then I took it into Photoshop and used Nik Color Efex Pro 2 to enhance the high key look. 

As I said, I wasn't in a hurry and I wanted to have a look at the Carden Plains, an "Important Birding Area" just North of Kirkfield. I took an hour or so exploring up Wylie Road, then turned on Alvar Road. There weren't a lot of birds around, must be the wrong time of year.

Wetlands on Alvar Road. Probably a good idea to have 4WD here. A few minutes later, 3 deer crossed the road about 50m ahead of me, a buck and two does.   

PS, I did talk to some people on Wednesday (notably Dan Busby, who will be presenting at the HHCC meeting next month, don't miss it!) who are familiar with Carden Plain. Apparently Ontario has now designated it a Provincial Park. And the right time to visit is late May, into June (I said you probably should bring a macro lens to take closeup pictures of the blackflies!). You can bet that I'll be there. How have I not been there before??

Why do I do Photoshop?

Or more accurately, "post-processing". I have to admit it's partly because I don't work well under time pressure. I'm off-topic here, but yes, I'm a procrastinator, yes I wait until the last second and put myself under huge time pressure, but that's not really what I'm talking about. I'm a "deliberate thinker". I need to sit back and analyse things, then take action. So making on-the-fly decisions  is not my forté and that includes while I'm looking through the viewfinder. The best camera I've ever bought is the D800 which gives me so many megapixels I can crop and straighten like crazy, and which has such good high ISO performance and dynamic range that I can ETTR (expose to the right) and fix stuff later in Photoshop. Or Lightroom. Or a number of plug-ins like Topaz and Nik.

So I'm about to give you a dumb example. Don't laugh, OK? When I was in Carden Plain, I drove past these cows. I remembered that I needed a "cow" picture for the HHCC Scavenger Hunt so I took a couple of snaps. The 70-200 with the telextender was on the camera and I just shot from the seat of the car at 340mm. This was the one I liked the best

I was a little slow; the two cows – one's a calf – were actually  interacting better in another shot but I didn't nail the focus.

Crappy picture, right? Horizon skewed, cows in the middle, a tree growing out of one of them, bad foreground, didn't fill the frame... but this is how my vision works. I knew I could solve most of that stuff in post. By the way, focus was not tack sharp either.

In Lightroom, I straightened it, cropped a little, toned the image a touch, then I used the Radial Filter tool to make them stand out from the background more. Then I took it into Photoshop and used the new "shake reduction" filter to sharpen it, and even took a paintbrush to the eyes to make them more crisp. I cloned out the tree. I cropped it again to get them out of the middle and saved it. I played with some plug-ins and while I was looking at the oil paint option in Topaz Simplify and really liked what it did to the sky; so I ran it, then masked out everything except the sky, and did a little painting with the healing brush. In the end I also blurred it a bit because the contrast between the sky and the rest of the picture didn't look natural. Voilà!

Not the world's greatest picture, it's not going to end up in the National Gallery, but somehow I like it. Now if these had been lions instead of cows... 

Cool, Unique Product

What do you buy someone who has everything? Something different. I ordered a pillow from RedBubble for my granddaughter. She loved it. And her little 6 month old sister apparently has been "saying hello" to it!

This picture is a screen capture from the Redbubble site. Visit my Redbubble page to see the pictures I have available there. Buy something! I haven't actually seen the pillow yet, it was delivered to Leah in New York, but I'm going to order one for me, perhaps with a different picture. If you join Redbubble, you can upload any hi-res picture and order prints and other products too! 

The whole thing cost me $40 US including shipping and everything. You can buy three different sizes (this was the medium), and the whole pillow or just the outer casing and you put what you want inside (cheaper and your choice...).

As an aside, ever watch Two and a Half Men? Walden has three pillows on his couch with custom markings. Comment here if you know what they have on them!

Algonquin Park Photowalk

Pretty well every year I swear I'm not going to shoot more Fall Colours and every year I do. Last week I told you about my planned photowalk to Algonquin Park. Yesterday I visited the Frost Centre to find out the rules about using the area (it's closed and "No Trespassing" signs are posted. But if you access from the south end, where the Algonquin Highlands hiking trails begin, it's legal.

Technically, the beach is part of the Frost Centre, but the hiking trail cuts between the Centre and the beach, so I don't see it as a problem. Neither does Curtis, the Township guy who runs the Parks and rec office right there. By the way, there's less colour at the Frost Centre than there is where I live (OK, well "green" is a colour, right?) but I'm sure it will be outstanding two weeks from now.

If you want to join the Photowalk, you need to sign up. Click this link to do so. By the way, it's free except (a) if you're not a club (HHCC) member, we're asking you to buy a coffee mug for $10 to support the club, (b) you need to get a day pass for the Park when you come in ($16 per vehicle) and (c) of course you're on your own for food and gas. I'll send out a list of people interested in carpooling after this weekend.

Featured image for today. Early fall colours in the Highlands  

— 30 —