It's a small, small world

A basic tip

I don't usually post photography tips here but I keep seeing the same questions and the same errors time after time, and it's bugging me. So if you're not a photographer, or if you're too advanced for these tips, feel free to skip ahead. I have a few of them I want to share, what better place to do so?

Focus

The #1 reason for rejecting photos is that they're out of focus. You can fix a lot of things in post processing, but you can't fix out-of-focus, or "OOF". Unless there's some extraordinary reason to keep an OOF picture it's going to end up in the trash.

The thing(s) you want in focus in your picture have to BE in focus.

Cute pine marten but no way to save this picture. The focus was on the branch above him and he is out of focus. Good thing I got another shot in focus!

Branches in the foreground can be a challenge. Your camera WANTS to focus on them. The other shot is a better composition, but which one would YOU keep?

Your camera is smart. But it can be fooled. Suppose you're shooting two people against a background, but there's a space between them. Unless you're careful, the camera will focus on whatever's in that space, not on the subjects. So how do we solve that? How about locking in the focus on one of the subjects, then moving the camera to recompose the image correctly? What about increasing the depth of field by stopping down the aperture* so that you have a better chance that the subject is in focus?

Your camera has a variety of ways of focusing: manual, continuous, single; you can use one point in your viewfinder or a bunch of them, you can average, you can preset your focus to a specific distance. It can track moving subjects, or not. You can use the shutter release button by pressing it halfway down or you can program a button on the back of the camera for focusing (it's called "Back Button Focusing". Look it up. Google is your friend). The best way to learn how to focus your camera is to RTFM.

READ THE FRIGGIN' MANUAL

Do it. You'll learn something. But that's not enough. It's like learning how to swim by watching YouTube videos. That's great but what you really have to do is jump in the water. Same thing here: Shoot pictures. Lots of pictures. Think about your focus while you're doing that until it becomes part of you.

When you're looking through and vetting your images (throw away the bad ones, folks. Ask yourself, "will I EVER want to look at this image again?), pause on that OOF one and ask yourself, "Why is this OOF? What should I have done differently"? That's how you learn.

* But if you stop down the aperture, either your shutter speed has to decrease or your ISO has to increase, which creates problems with camera shake or added noise. Camera shake is a whole other subject, watch for a future tip. But I will say one thing about using high ISO: you're DEFINITELY going to throw out an OOF picture but the ONLY people who care about noise are other photographers. Get over it.

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Do you print your pictures?

If you print yourself, you fall into three categories:

■ You're fussy and you know what you're doing
■ You're not that fussy, you're just happy to see prints
■ You're fussy but you don't have a clue.

If I printed, I would fall into category 3.
I don't print. I send them out. I'm still mostly in category 3.

I'm lucky, I have friends who print and who are in category 1. Occasionally I'll go to Costco or someone like that for "category 2 prints", but if I have prints to sell, I'll go to a professional lab and pay the big bucks. Or call in a favour from one of my really talented friends.

I decided that I wanted some canvas prints, especially from my Newfoundland trip, and there was a vendor offering great "Black Friday" deals so I thought I'd give it a try.

Now I do have a LITTLE knowledge of what it takes to prepare a file for printing. The main thing I learned was this: if I prepare an image so that if it looks onscreen or online like I want the print to look, I'm going to be very disappointed. There are a couple of reasons for this.

First, I edit in the ProPhoto colour space because it gives me the biggest gamut of colours to work in. I'm careful to do that in both Lightroom and Photoshop. But I know that when I export an image for printing (or for anything else), it needs to be converted to sRGB and it WILL LOOK DIFFERENT.

Second, I know it is important to calibrate my monitor and I do that with a ColorMunki device regularly. However I'm guilty of the same thing that almost everyone else is, my monitor is too bright. It just looks prettier when you're looking at a picture onscreen. Also when I'm judging images for a competition, or just looking at them online, 90% of them have been edited on someone's monitor which is also too bright and to see what the maker is trying to portray, you need to turn up the brightness. 

You need to turn it WAY DOWN if you want to match what a print is going to look like. For one thing, your monitor creates colour by projecting a mix of red, green and blue light; a print's colour come from light being absorbed by cyan, magenta, yellow and black inks (simplistic, I know), so it's different. You can turn up the brightness on a monitor, but the more ink you add to a print the darker it gets!

as an aside: don't even think about converting your image to CMYK, if that last sentence put that in your mind. The printer takes RGB input and converts it inside the machine to the inks it uses. The only time that's not true is when you're printing on a printing press.

And third, if you want to see onscreen what your print is going to look like, you have to do something called "soft proofing", which is available in both Lightroom and Photoshop. You're telling your computer "show me what my picture is going to look like if it's printed by this specific printer on this specific type of paper". And that's going to be very different from what it looks like normally onscreen.

Some images are tougher than others. Here's an example. On the left is what I wanted my print to look like. It's a screen capture of the image under normal conditions. But I knew it wouldn't, especially after converting to sRGB for the printer. So I turned on soft proofing and I edited the image until it looked right for print. The right image is what it ended up at onscreen with soft proofing turned off. 

You might think it looks pretty good here, but the bright lights are WAY too bright, they have a halo around them they're so bright, the sky is too saturated and the soft nuances of the reflected city lights in the hillside are too strong. You don't want a print to look like that (at least I don't!). It won't: it'll look more like the one on the left.

If you're going to print at a pro lab, they should be able to send you the ICC profile of the printer and paper combinations they're using. Pop those into Photoshop or Lightroom and soft-proof to them and your prints should come out as expected.

The resulting print turned out excellent. I had this printed on canvas and I didn't have the ICC profile, but I figured that using the profile for the Epson 7900 on matte paper, I would get close. It looks almost exactly like the image at left (in hindsight, a little dark, still). Some images are more difficult than others. I know that the blacks are really going to fill in and the colours are going to be much less saturated.

I now have 6 large format canvas prints ready to hang on my walls. And two others hanging on other peoples' walls that I've sold. I also had two others: they helped me heat my house by burning them in the fireplace. Literally.

Here are a few. The two landscapes at the bottom are 20x30. The piping plover is 16x24

This abstract is called  "Sunset on Lake Superior". It's 24x36

These canvas prints are all available for purchase. They're all digitally signed and will be marked as "Artist's Proof"s to distinguish them from any limited edition prints which may follow. Contact me.

I will have more prints made. There's something about seeing your work on something other than a computer screen. Even though I still have about 30 or 40 printed images left over from a show I did a few years ago, but new stuff comes up. I do not plan to start printing myself because it's a ton of work to get it right, and a good printer (say Epson 7900) is about $5000. You can get away with a lot less if all you want to print is 4x6's or run-of-the-mill 8x10's but I know I wouldn't be satisfied.

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Lens sold

Almost every wildlife picture I've shot in the past year or so has been with my

Tamron 150-600mm f/5-6.3 Di VC USD Lens

which I have just sold (I first started writing this a few days ago at which point it was "for sale").

"Why?", you might ask. Well, because I'm ready to step up to the AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor 200-400mm f/4G IF-ED lens which, new, would be almost 8x the price, and weighs twice as much. I've been very satisfied with the Tamron but it's time. By the way, if you have one of those for sale, let's talk.

It took some practice to learn to use this lens effectively. Especially if you put it on a crop sensor body (did I say it has a Nikon mount? It has a Nikon mount!), where it's effective focal length is about 1000 mm. At about 68 oz, you can actually handhold this lens but you have to watch your shutter speed if you do.

So I've probably shot about 10,000 images with this lens (and kept half of them!). I had the firmware updated at Tamron last year, and I added a LensCoat neoprene cover to protect it and make it less visible when shooting birds. The lens is in great shape; there are some 'brassing' marks on the lens mounting foot, and no scratches on any of the glass. Somewhere, I have the box and all the goodies that came in it with the lens.

(I told you I wrote this when it was still for sale!)

Here's a link to a quick web gallery of sample images shot with this lens. All of them were at the maximum focal length of 600mm. Click on any image to blow it up.

Contact me if have or you know anyone who has that Nikon 200-400. Or a 400mmf/2.8 prime!

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A couple more from 'Gales'

I forgot to post a couple of pictures in the last blog, so I thought I'd add them in here. Neither one is from Wawa, both were taken on the drive up.

I shot this along Hwy 141 in Lake Rosseau on the way up to Wawa. Spectacular rockface. 

When I stopped in the Soo for a day on the way up, there was continuous heavy rain and strong winds.  This is what it was like in downtown Sault Ste. Marie that day 

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GALES 2018 dates have been announced! Mark your calendars.

OCTOBER 25 — OCTOBER 28

This year, the primary instructor will be Ben Eby. If everything goes well, I plan to be there too, to help out.

We're just starting work on the event and the web links, etc. If you want to be kept up to date as it develops, CLICK HERE.

There's also a Facebook group called "Gales of November". Up to now it's been restricted to people who were participating in the workshop but we've decided to open it up to people who are interested in perhaps joining us next October. It's a place to see pictures from previous years, see discussions and comments, ask questions, and so on.

It's a closed group: only people who are members can see the content. But if you're interested, if there's a possibility you might attend, by all means, join the group. Just search for "Gales of November" on FB and you'll find us!

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SPEAKING OF WORKSHOPS:

I'm thinking about going back to Newfoundland this summer and about guiding some photographers and artists to some outstanding spots. I'm thinking about providing accommodations and finding local experts to help out. I'm thinking that it should not cost $4000 to participate.

If this interests you at all, please send me an email or contact me privately. This is really preliminary, but I need to find out how much interest is out there.

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Pictures

It's time for some pictures.

After procrastinating for a long time, I finally got around to buying Helicon Focus Pro software. It's primarily intended for focus stacking when you're shooting macro. I've recently seen some awesome insect photos and needless to say, if you want to shoot snowflakes properly, you have to focus stack. 

Since I bought it, I haven't found even ONE insect to shoot. Dead or alive. It's just not the right time of year. So to test the software, I had to find a variety of other subjects to shoot. I set up my light tent and got to work.

I went outside and found some little berries. This was my very first effort.

Then there were some water drops, on a pebbled plastic surface

Here's a closeup of a dead leaf

My diamond ring... I did add a little post-processing to this one in Topaz.

Here's another leaf, with a drop of water on it. Learning, learning!

So I need to find some insects to shoot. And snowflakes! The challenge is that I have to be tethered to my laptop, so I have to figure out the logistics of doing that out in the cold. Watch this space!

— 30 —

Playing "Catch-up"!

Since getting back from Newfoundland a month ago, I've been playing "catch-up". Not so much on things, more on my 'headspace'. My month on the Rock was about photography, mostly. I didn't go anywhere without the cameras. For the record, I took 9,700 pictures and I kept almost 7,000 of them — a very high percentage for me. I also drove 10,600 km, spent about $1300 on gas alone. Add ferries, accommodations and food and it wasn't a cheap trip.

I had to do it, though. I had to get away. People ask me, "Why? You're retired, you live on a lake in God's Country, you have a nice house, a bunch of toys (ATV, boat...). What are you getting away FROM?".

I know a lot of people who are of retirement age or getting there. You have to understand, I need a purpose in my life. People envy me, that I can choose to go up to Algonquin Park on the spur of the moment, because I heard that there might be aurora borealis tonight, or friends have spotted bears gorging on blueberries at Mew Lake airfield. That I can stay up until 4 am or sleep in until noon (no I can't, but that's another story!).

I remember my dad used to say the same thing before he died. He and mom lived in a senior's home and he used to spend his time working on his financial "bible" because he had nothing else to do. I used to think that would never happen to me, I have too many hobbies and interests, but you know what? It did.

I took up painting. That's frustrating when you don't have built-in talent. I gave up trying to play music, except sporadically when the mood hits, because although I appreciate hearing great music, I really suck at playing. I took a week-long creative writing course at Fleming College in order to re-awaken the desire to write fiction: I've always wanted to and have started dozens of books and stories over the years, and never finished one! More on that later. I have my cameras and computers, they take a lot of my time and are vehicles for expressing myself.

Family and friends? I'm really bad at keeping up relationships. It's easy to say that's something to work on and get better at, a lot harder to do. The bulk of my guilty conscience is related to this but it's hard for me.

As I write this, I'm on the eve of my 71st birthday. I've been living with cancer for 14 years. Who knows how much longer? I have an overwhelming desire to make a mark but I haven't figured out how. Writing this down and especially sharing it, is cathartic, and maybe, just maybe it will spur me into action.

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I was doing a DSLR course this week and we were at the Minden Wild Water Preserve yesterday. This guy landed 10' behind us and wouldn't leave, even though I had only arranged for him to be there for a short visit (when I do a camera workshop, you get more than you expected! LOL ). We got tired of shooting him after close to an hour! We left before he did.

This is straight out of camera with a minor crop for composition. Spot metering and exposure compensation, class!  Great Blue Heron, if you didn't know.

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Did you know that TopazLab's "Studio" is free? 
Do you know what it is?

Topaz Studio is a Photographer's editing toolbox. It works independently of other platforms — you don't need to have Photoshop or Lightroom or... (although it does operate as a plugin within those programs if you want it to).

Studio contains a whole lot of adjustment tools that you can use for free. But Topaz also offers extra full-detailed control of some of those adjustment tools if you want, at nominal cost. You can get some or all of them but you don't need to.

Studio also supports the Topaz plug-ins and they're gradually being ported over to the Studio platform. Topaz Clarity was offered on sale last week and this week, it's my FAVOURITE plugin, Topaz Impression. So you can call up Impression from inside Studio and it will knock your socks off. The Puffin sketch was done in Impression.

Click the image to go to full-screen. Look at the eye. I painted the keylights on the eye using techniques that Hilarie McNeil-Smith taught me many years ago. They were also sketched over but I decided I wanted to see the eye in all its glory so I masked the sketch out (also a little of the blue and yellow areas). All in Impression, called from within Topaz Studio.

If you already own Topaz plug-ins, they'll appear in Studio. Or you can purchase them individually and as I said, Impression is on sale at 40% off through September 29th.

Here are some links for you.

For all the details, answers to pretty well any questions you have, and to download the FREE Topaz Studio platform, go here: https://web.topazlabs.com/ref/32/

For the Topaz Impression plugin (which will also work with your existing platform) at 40% discount, go here: http://web.topazlabs.com/impression/ref/32/

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From the "Sporadic Musings" file. A Rant...

This was prompted by the backlash from a story about how an order issued by a McDonald's manager in Yellowknife forbidding the employees to speak their native language while on the job was rescinded by the franchise owner.

Imagine you lived in a place where you were not allowed to speak English.

I grew up in Montreal. I left there in 1983 (would have been earlier if I could have) because the Quebec government legislated that it was illegal for me to speak my native language — English — in the workplace and indeed that it was only because they were doing a special favour for those who were educated as Anglophones in Quebec, that they allowed my children to be educated in English.

So you can see that I have a strong aversion to any government (or other group) interfering in how I live my private life. I should be able to speak whatever language I wish, I should be able to practice whatever religion I prefer and I should be able to express my sexual orientation any way I want to. It's nobody's business as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else..

A similar policy was put in place at the Senior's home where my mother lived before she died: workers had to speak only English on the job. There was no practical possibility of moving her elsewhere but I would have had one presented itself.

We live in a country that runs under free enterprise. Sure, we lean a lot more left than we did when I was growing up, and we have a lot more socialist services than we had in the past (Medicare and Education come to mind first) but I'll tell you this: consumers in our system are free to choose where they do business. If you don't like the fact that people speak other languages or have other cultural, religious or gender orientations in the restaurant or shop or home where you live, then you are totally free to eat or shop or live elsewhere. Or start your own enterprise. If you own a business and customers start staying away in droves, you may want to rethink your policies, but it's your business, it's your call.

And by the way, you should think about that next time you go out for dinner and eat "har gow" or "maki" or "calamari" or "pad Thai" or "souvlaki" or "schnitzel" or "hummus" or "boeuf Bourgignon"... these are all non-English dishes with non-English names. Think about it.

I'm proud of the fact that I live in a country that celebrates diversity and makes it work in a non-confrontational environment. What's happening on the other side of the border, where the racist right is persecuting everyone who is not a white, straight, Anglo-Saxon male, echoing Germany in the 1930's is downright scary. We should build a wall...

{/rant}

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RECOMMENDATION: 

600A Peak 15000mAh Portable Car Jump Starter

I put a business card in the picture to give you a sense of scale. The unit is 6" x 3" x 1", and weighs about a pound. The battery inside is Li-Ion.

I bought one of these things for $65CDN on Amazon. I have both a boat and an ATV with potential battery issues and although I didn't really believe that something this small (and inexpensive) would do the job, I figured I could always return it if it didn't live up to expectations.

I went down to the boat yesterday after several days absence and some on-and-off rain through the week. My bilge pump runs automatically if water gets in the bilge (my boat doesn't have a cover) and it can drain the battery. That's what I discovered. Trying to start the engine resulted in a resounding "click" and silence.

Long story short, I hooked this thing up to the battery and the engine started right away, as if I had a full charge in the 50lb marine battery. And the old 85hp 2-stroke Evinrude doesn't fire on the first crank, it takes several seconds of cranking with full choke, then close the choke and crank again to start it.

I was shocked it worked so well. The charge on the unit dropped to about 3/4, so it still had lots more juice. I plugged it into the USB in the car and it was charged up full in half an hour.

It looks like this particular one is out of stock at Amazon but there are lots more like it listed. I looked for high cranking amps and reasonably large storage, so 600 amps/15000mAh was what I chose.

Worked for me. It goes wherever I go (car, boat, ATV) from now on. PS, it can also power my iPhone forever, when I use it to drive my timelapse photos for hours.

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Picture Time!

I put this picture up online as kind of an experiment:

I shot this in Trinity one foggy morning. Then in post-processing, I enhanced all the colourful buildings — colour saturation, clarity, sharpness... to my eye, there's something wrong here. The buildings don't blend properly with their surroundings. I put it up anyway.

 Here's my premise: most people don't care about the technical details. They like a picture or they don't. It's only other photographers (or retouchers) who care. And I was right. I got tons of "Likes" and "Hearts" and positive comments both in the Newfoundland FB group and on my own general timeline and nobody commented on the processing.

I took my boat out and went Loon hunting on 12-Mile Lake. Found one!

I went up to Algonquin Park, didn't see any moose and only one bear (no photo). But I did take the macro lens out, and I discovered that I could mount it on my teleconverter for a net 210mm. Less bending down!

Dewdrops on a spider web, Mew Lake Airfield, Algonquin Park

Hoverfly on a wildflower 

Wild blueberries at the Airfield 

I went back up to the Park a few nights later because I was hoping for Aurora. Nope, but I did take these...

At the Lake of Two Rivers beach. A little light painting with a flashlight, a little Topaz Simplify... 

...and this is at Opeongo. There's a hint of Northern Lights on the horizon, but nothing to speak of. This is a 162-image StarStax composite. 

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As I mentioned at the top of the blog, I did a DSLR course last week and I invited a Great Blue Heron to join us at the white water. I'll close with a few more shots from the workshop.

Illustrating lighting, focusing, point-of-view and composition (centre is OK when you've got symmetry).  

North-facing window lighting, focus, spot metering 

And this is our group, at the white water, with our invited guest! The lighting was challenging, Lightroom to the rescue! 

Parting Shot:

Topaz Clarity, called under Topaz Studio. Minor crop in Lightroom. 

OK. I'm caught up. Back soon!

PS: Gales of November is full! Yahoo!

— 30 —

Flower Power

Focus Stacking

For the photographers among my readers. 

Others might enjoy the images but have no interest in the methods. This first part is a bit of a loose tutorial on Focus Stacking, just from a hands-on, empirical direction. I thought about putting it in the tech blog instead but there's a very popular article there on exporting images from Lightroom, especially for print, that I don't want to push down. If you're at all confused about cropping or sizing images for print, read this article: www.faczentech.blogspot.com.

Often I like to work on new techniques, or at least techniques that I don't use frequently so that I can improve my skills. A good example is focus stacking. I spent some time on it the other day and at the same time, figured out how to get my camera down to ground level with my 3 Legged Thing tripod. Let's start there.

It's pretty simple, actually. Remove the tall centre column and replace it with the short one they provide. I even left off the collar under the ball head to get an inch or so lower, so I had the camera about 6" (15cm) off the ground. I could have had it even lower, in fact right ON the ground, by inserting the column upside down and hanging the camera underneath (image would be upside down) but that was overkill for what I was shooting. It's good to think about and practice this stuff for when I need it in the future.

This tripod (3LeggedThing "Brian") allows me to put the legs flat on the ground so the minimum height is governed by the height of the centre column and ball head. The camera is  Nikon D800 and lens is a Nikkor 105mm f/2.8 macro. I used a cable shutter release and to help see the LCD, a Hoodman Loupe which you see at lower left. I find shooting multiple shots using LiveView to be cumbersome so mostly I just used the viewfinder.

Focus Stacking is used to control depth of field. I could have used a small aperture to get the whole flower in focus but the background wouldn't have looked the same.

Besides, a small aperture means less light so shutter speed and/or ISO would have to be adjusted. This shot was 1/60 sec at f/18, ISO 100. Note this was after the sequence below and I had spritzed water drops on the flowers.

With a large aperture, depth of field is minimal and when you're shooting macro, often not enough:

1/2000 second at f/3.3 (as wide as this lens will go when you're shooting this close), ISO 100. Note that only part of the back flower is in focus. Click any image to blow it up if you want to see it more clearly.

So I took 7 exposures, each one focused a little closer to the camera than the previous one. I looked through the viewfinder and just moved the focus ring slightly between shots, using the cable release so as to not move the camera. Then I opened all seven as layers in Photoshop, auto-aligned them and then auto-blended them. Photoshop looks for the sharpest focus in each image and masks out the rest. You could do it manually but that would be tedious.

Here's the resulting image. I cropped it before exporting it here, as well as doing some sharpening and toning... notice the great-looking background as compared with the small aperture shot up above!

* You may have wondered why I didn't say "the Bokeh" of the background. Because that would be inaccurate. Bokeh refers to the shape and tonality of out-of-focus highlights, not the background as a whole. 

Faithful readers know me by now... I can't leave well enough alone! Here's my finished image after I applied some Topaz Impression, using the Impasto-1 preset as a basis.

These wild strawberry flowers are about the size of my thumbnail, by the way. When I did the frame for display here (an action I wrote in Photoshop), I took a colour from the image to use as a background. This image itself is ready for printing!

When you focus stack, you have to be careful to get all the slices in focus. Not that easy to do! Sometimes you need to work at smaller apertures than the minimum (deeper depth of field) or use more images in the stack. For the following image, I merged 20 exposures and on close examination, even that wasn't enough (the closer you are, the shallower the depth of field).

This is also a finished image. I added a bit of Topaz Glow and again, Topaz Impression for the painterly effect. 1/1000 second at f/4, ISO 100. 

I shot a couple of others, some worked out, some didn't: here's another focus stacked image:

Look at the delicious Bokeh in this image! I thought of cropping tighter but I thought the yellow corners – especially the flower at lower right – added a depth and balance to the shot. This has the look of a medium- or large-format image from the old film days! It's why I love my D800. This is comprised of 8 stacked images shot at 1/1000 sec at f/3.3, ISO 100.

You can click on any image to blow it up and view it larger onscreen. Pretty sure I'm going to print this one, probably on canvas.

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Gales of November news

This was the banner atop the blog until today, when I replaced it with the Sandhill Cranes picture. 

Two more people have signed up for the October 27th workshop so we're slowly running out of room! If you've been sitting on the fence, time to hop off! The closer we come to it, the more excited I am about the experience we're going to have! 

Go to www.photography.to/gales for details and to sign up.

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Flower Power

Carden Plain isn't just for the birds! There's interesting flora there as well. Among the many varieties there are two in particular that I photographed third week of May, the "Prairie Smoke" and the "Indian Paintbrush". I can't say that either are unique to the area but the word 'ubiquitous' comes to mind. Large bands of both plants give the Alvar a spectacular colour and texture in the Spring.

Bands of Prairie Smoke (and of course dandelions. Where AREN'T there dandelions!)

The buds of the Prairie Smoke are beautiful in their own right. Here I did a multiple-image focus stack while lying on my stomach in the grass. "They" are right when they say you have to get down on your subject's level! 

When the flower ripens, this is what you get. The tendrils give it a smoke-like appearance.  

That's more obvious when you get a whole bunch of them together. This was another focus-stack. 

A patch of Prairie Smoke. Now you can see where the name comes from!

Indian Paintbrush is a brilliant, photogenic Orangy-red and it also grows in bands across the open grassland. The bird in the distance is a Sandhill Crane! 

Here's a bunch of them. You can figure out where the name came from. This plant is more indigenous to the Pacific Northwest.  

I chose to do an artistic, painterly rendering using Topaz Impression. Many of the presets yielded interesting images, it was hard to choose just one! 

What I love about this shot is how the colours of the two flower species' work together on the green and yellow background to produce a coordinated palette of colour. Looks like this will make a fine abstract print on canvas. 

Next on tap is the trillium. Several species of these abound in Ontario for a short time in the Spring. One variety I haven't seen this year is the "Painted Trillium", but it ain't over 'till it's over!

Last week I posted some trillium shots that I painstakingly lit and stacked and crawled on the ground to capture. Then again...

I shot this one hanging out the car window with my long lens! We were driving on a dirt road just North of Carden when we saw these. The white trilliums turn pink as they fade and die. 

This specimen was so beautiful I had to give it special treatment. Another one I shot from the comfort of my car seat!

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Birds...

Yeah, well! I'm definitely not an experienced birder but I'm an enthusiastic one. I don't know what I'm looking at, it's hard for my eyes to pick them out, but it's a challenge. And I don't have the best optics, just adequate. It's good to know some really qualified birders such as Dan Busby and Bill Bunn, and some people with phenomenal eyes like Kathy McKelvey-Brown and Linda Cresswell to shoot with.

I just went through the list at the back of my Peterson's Field Guide and I came up with 84 species that I've seen (I may have seen others but haven't recorded them). I don't necessarily have photos of all of them. I look forward to seeing more!

Grey Catbird, seen behind the Cultural Centre in Minden. There were lots of birds there, I'm looking forward to
going back. 

Brown Thrasher at Carden Plain 

If Dan hadn't told me what this was, I'd never have guessed! But now that I look at it, I realize, well, it's obvious! This is an American Robin fledgling just out of the nest, wisps of down still on its head. Shot right behind my house! 

I have some spectacular bird pictures for you for next time, so stay tuned. To get an email note that a new Blog entry has been posted, please click the newsletter button at top right.

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