Two Days to go 'till the Show!

It's Wednesday and the Haliburton Home & Cottage Show starts on Friday! Two days to go!

Am I ready? Hell, no. I will be, though. As I write this, I still have to create about 25 more greeting cards, bag them all, make one or two more signs, a couple of signup and register sheets, finalize the course agenda for my basic photo skills workshops, frame and re-frame several pictures, run into Toronto tomorrow to go to Staples and Costco for last-minute stuff, buy groceries because my fridge is empty and Linda and Bob will be here for the weekend...

I'm quite satisfied with the images I've produced for the show. I hope I didn't guess wrong about what people would like to buy and I've kept the prices affordable so that hopefully I won't be taking them all home with me! It's a bit of a gamble.

I have 3 goals for the show:

• to sell some images
• to book some workshop students
• to increase the readership for my blogs.

To accomplish the first two, I will be getting out in front of people and they will at least be more aware of me. I've created some show special prices and I'll let my images do the talking for me.

Special offer for my loyal readers: if you come to the show, I'll give you an ADDITIONAL 20% off any print you buy (not the cards. They're cheap enough, at $5 or 3/$10, just check Hallmark's pricing!). So if you see a fine art watercolor image marked at $175, show special $140, your price would be $112. 

All you have to do is tell me you read about it here, and as a skill-testing question, tell me what animal is featured in the header photo of this blog. 

But wait, there's more!

AFTER the show, for the entire month of June 2013, you get the same deal! If you buy art images by going to my gallery and emailing me (I don't have a shopping cart set up yet), and you tell me you read it here, I'll price accordingly. 

To accomplish the third one, I've decided to give some stuff away. If people sign up for my Newsletter, I'll enter their names into two draws: one for a free fine art picture, and one for a free workshop session. 

You can get in on this too! I want you to sign up for my newsletter. Don't worry, if you're not happy, there's an "unsubscribe" link at the bottom of every newsletter. 

Here's the deal: sign up for the newsletter by clicking here or scanning the QR code to the right and I'll automatically enter you in the draw for the picture. If you also want to be considered for the free workshop, leave me a comment at the bottom of this blog post. Make sure I have your name and I can find you in the Newsletter list.

And if you click here in the next 5 minutes... a set of Ginzu knives! Nah, nothing. But I had to say that. Humour. Arr, arr.

Want to see the images I'm exhibiting?

Go to my photo gallery to check them out. Everything you see there is available as an exhibition quality display print, either on fine matte or on fine lustre papers, lovingly printed by hand one at a time! They're all available at very reasonable cost, especially if you read about it here!

The white water is such a great venue...

I ran a DSLR course last weekend (not enough students. Hope that changes!). I heard that CanoeKayak Canada was running the team trials at the MWW (Minden Wild Water Preserve. I'm tired of typing that all out!) so we went over to practice shooting pictures. The winners were chosen for Canada's National Team, for competition in the World Cup and other races in Europe and elsewhere. I was busy with the course, but did manage to capture a few images:

This is Zachary Zwanenburg from Cornwall, Ontario who competed both in the Canoe (C1) and the Kayak (K1) classes and who will represent Canada in the Junior and under-23 teams in both classes. This is a kayak, by the way, if you don't already know. 

 The above image shows how WILD the Wild Water is right now, with record high water levels and flow after the Minden floods a few weeks ago.

Another WILD water shot as  Samuel Primeau from Quebec battles the boiling waters in Earl's Hole during one of his kayak runs.

Haley Daniels from Calgary, Alberta scored at the top in Women's C1 and was named to teams for World Cups, World Championships and Under 23 World Championships. 

20-year-old (I think. I know the year but not the month of birth!) Alexandra McGee from Ottawa placed second behind Daniels in C1 and was named to both the Senior team and the under 21 teams. 

Although 16-year-old Maxime Leboeuf from Valleyfield, Quebec didn't place in the top 3, he will be representing Canada as part of the junior team in Slovenia this summer. 

Competitor names and stats and other information courtesy of Ian Miller from CanoeKayak Canada. Claudia van Wijk from Whitewater Ontario also helped me identify the competitors from their bib numbers.

Nothing to do with white water...

On Saturday, there was a motorcycle ride to raise funds for the flood victims and they started and ended up at the Red Umbrella Inn. This bike was parked out front (and in fact was there overnight). During the DSLR course, I told Dawn to shoot 15 pictures of the bike, all different (trying to get her to work the scene). At the same time, I took a few but I knew what I had in mind.

I took the opportunity to write up how I created the image on my Technical Blog, for those of you who are photographers and interested in Photoshop. Here's the finished image, ready for print. I think it will look fantastic on Epson Cold Press matte paper... you know what to do if you want to order a print! 

So back to work on the show stuff. I hope to see some of you there! Come by and say hello, and bring your wallets...

— 30 —

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...

— 30 —

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!

An update and a few photos

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

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

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

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

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



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



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

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

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

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

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

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

Top O' the mornin to ya

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

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

Blue Jay (cyanocitta cristata)

Cedar Waxwing (bombycilla cedrorum)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Whitewater Fun and other stuff

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

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

Here are a few shots:









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

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

Basic rules:

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

› be prepared. Things happen fast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rose-Breasted Grosbeak male on my bird feeder.