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.

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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. 

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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!

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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.  

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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.

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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! 

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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. 

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Surreal Night

A picture is worth 1000 words...

...and I wish I had one to show you.

I find myself in the odd position tonight to be writing about something that isn't directly photographic, but has to do with artistic expression or at least artistic experience.

As you may know (if you've been reading my blog), I am presently camera-less. At least DSLR-less, because I do have a point-and-shoot and an iPhone which are indeed cameras. I also found myself driving home from Toronto after dark, an unusual experience for me because I try to avoid that situation. Oddly, because I actually do enjoy driving in the evening when it's not raining or snowing or otherwise difficult.

There I was, though. Floating along at my interpretation of the speed limit (let's not go there...). At the beginning of the drive, the full moon, just above the horizon directly in front of me, was huge and golden, and dressed in wisps of cloud*. It was hard not to stare at it instead of the road, markedly more difficult when a passing airplane seemed to be on a course to intersect the orb, and in fact it did, but too far away to present a classic silhouette. Two thoughts went through my head: (1) I wish I had a camera so I could capture that, and (2) even if I did, there's no way.

* I only found out 4 days later that there was a penumbral lunar eclipse (the moon was in the earth's shadow). That's why it appeared so different from normal! And no camera, of course...

It gets better, though. Now I'm driving on a deserted road, still into the moon, which is now silver and higher in the sky. With the evening drop in temperature came mist and fog, sporadically across the road. If you looked off to the side, you could see areas of fields blanketed in fog, maybe 2 or 3 meters deep, brilliant and clear above, wispy tendrils that followed the contour of the land. The same across my path, sometimes dense, sometimes thin, certainly not contiguous. Its presence related to altitude, so when the road dipped, you dropped into the clouds, as you peaked a hill, you came out. All the while, the moon glared balefully down from its position straight ahead.

I'm listening to music, stored on my iPhone and played back through the multi-speaker sound system in the car. I'm surrounded by Rhoda Scott's interpretation of "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (Link) (which you may recognize as the theme from Arthur Clarke's "2001, A Space Odyssey" or if you're more classically educated, as Richard Strauss's 1896 tone poem), a maestro performance on the Hammond B3 organ. Her nuances probe your mind like alien tentacles. Surreal. It ends, to be followed by Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", (Link) and Neil Larsen's inspired B3 solo* where he expresses and shares his soul.

* Writing this note after the fact, of course. You should know that I was up until almost 4am, sitting at the keyboard (piano, not computer), trying to emulate this solo without measurable success. I wish (a) I had a B3 and (b) that I could play. OK, I wish (b) before (a). I got some of the emotion into it, but the playback sounds horrible because I don't have the talent. If I could come back in another life it would be as a musician. Just sayin...

PS: if you're into virtuoso music, you have to watch (or listen to at least) Barbara Dennerlein playing "Georgia" (here). When she switches the lower keyboard to piano mode she especially shows off her talent. I get lost in her music.

Now you turn into a narrower back road and suddenly you pass under arched trees, whose branches meet overhead like the crossed swords of an honour guard, like dancers holding hands, and the fog is back. You can't really see the road surface, you are soaring through the misty clouds, tunnelling through the ghostly sentinels of nearly naked trees in the surreal light of the moon.

The road opens up. Trees have been cleared away from the verges so your view ahead is wide and unimpeded. With the brights on, your headlights brush the evergreens, painting them with light so they stand out against the dark sky. Now there's an oncoming car, still below the horizon. His lights illuminate the fog or low cloud, reminiscent of a movie scene where they're trying to imply a distant explosion, just below your sightline. Then he crests the hill and his headlights explode upon your vision. Still shrouded in cloud, you think of alien spacecraft approaching through the mist.

Two thoughts went through my head: (1) I wish I had a camera and (2) even if I did, there's no way I could capture this.

Surreal, to say the least. I wish I had had a camera but then there was no way I could have captured the moment. I wish I had a paintbrush and the creativity to know how to use it. But for now that moment has to remain locked into my memory and maybe some day in another life, I'll be able to bring it out and share it with you.

This looks like a great deal

Normally I'm not a fan of off-brand lenses but the Tokina 11-16mm DX f/2.8 looks like a winner, especially at less than $500, which is what B&H is selling it for now. Links here: Nikon Mount       Canon Mount

Ken Rockwell rates it very high, better than the OEM lenses and it's actually wider and faster. Doesn't work on full frame sensors, though, too bad. It's not a brand new lens, it's been around for a few years, but the price reduction makes it attractive!

Backup Strategy and Tactics

I've outgrown my backup drives. It was inevitable. Like the old saw about hard drive failures, it's not if, it's when. and my time has come. I have over 80,000 images in my archive, all by the way, in a single Lightroom catalog. The pictures are mostly RAW files and they add up to almost 2Tb, and that's the capacity of my largest external drive. I actually have two of those, plus one 1Tb drive, plus a total of about 3Tb inside the two computers themselves. Oh yeah, and a 500Gb drive in the drawer I just remembered.

So what to do? I could split things up, say everything up to 2012 in one place and all the newer stuff somewhere else, but I don't want to. So I decided on a strategy, and I want to share it with my readers in case they need to decide what to do as well.

I just finished going through the 83,000 image Lightroom database. I selected every picture that I had ever given a rating to, whether it's 1-5 stars, or a colour code for status (to be edited, in process, finished, exported, etc) and I marked them all with the "Pick"flag. That means there are some picks that don't have any ratings, but that's OK, I want to err on the side of choosing more rather than less. The sum total is 24,449 images.

I reformatted the 1Tb external drive, and as I'm typing this on one computer, I'm exporting these Keepers (and a new Lightroom 5 catalog) to that drive. All my keepers will be there. It's too big for the 500Gb drive, unfortunately.

Next, I'm going to copy the whole shebang: all 83,000 images to a brand new 3Tb drive I just bought at Costco. Theoretically, the 60,000 images NOT in the Keepers are garbage that I will never ever need. But I can't bring myself to throw them away just yet, at least not in bulk. For instance, there are images from trips I've made which I didn't select, but which contain memories. It will be a slow task to go through those and throw out the real trash, but I'll have the luxury of having them all in one place. I am going to the place where I will only have one copy, not multiple copies of those images.

Now I'm going to bring the "Keepers" back to the 2Tb drive I use as my main storage. So I'll have 3 copies of those, at least. One of the smaller drives will go off-site and the other will get updated with new Keepers every month.

So in summary:

• Grand archive of everything on a 3Tb drive
• Two backups of Keepers on 1Tb and a second 2Tb
• The 1Tb drive is stored offsite, at my mother's apartment in Thornhill
• Working files on a 2Tb external, with the keepers
• The working (Passport) 2Tb drive goes with me in the car whenever I go away for a day or so
• Newly imported files are also in the internal drive in the laptop.

That should keep me going for a while. But given Moore's Law (it applies here too!), watch this space a year from now for my NEXT new strategy! By then, there will probably be 5Tb or 6Tb affordable drives on the market.

Sounds complicated, right? It isn't really, my working files are on the 2Tb Passport with a regular backup to the internal drive in the laptop. I have to harden my heart and be more diligent about throwing away the trash. The 3Tb is a grand backup, the 1Tb is my offsite emergency backup and the second 2Tb is a spare. Of course there's always the second computer and the cloud...

Nice Nikon

As I write this (Tuesday the 29th) I have received my cheque from Nikon and I'm going into Toronto on Thursday or Friday for my D610. A shout out to Mike Krupat at Henry's in Thornhill who puts up with my nonsense. He's a good guy. Call him at 905 886 1020 or email him, he'll be happy to help you out. Tell him you saw it here...

Update: November 2
I got the D610 yesterday. Good news and bad news.
 Good news: I wish I had my D600 in front of me for comparison. I think they ruggedized the camera. My impression is that the finish is different. Also I'm not sure but I think way an AC Adapter gets attached is different. I have to RTFM...
 Bad news:

• Lightroom 5.2 and Photoshop CC DO NOT RECOGNIZE RAW FILES FROM THE D610. For now, I've set up the camera for RAW + JPEG (Fine), and I put RAW on card 1 and JPEG on card 2 –  necessary because if there are raw files in a folder, LR won't recognize the existence of the JPEGs for some reason, so I have to separate them. There's a "Nikon View NX2" DVD in the box but I remember it's a real pain in the butt and hope I don't have to use it. Otherwise, I can't see the RAW files (I wonder if it can batch convert to DNG. I doubt it, but I'll install and have a look)

I hope Adobé comes through with an update soon.

• I diligently saved my camera settings from the D600 on an SD card. You guessed it. The D610 won't import them. I spent almost an hour going through the menus and setting stuff up the way I had it before. Annoying, but I guess it was good to use the opportunity to run through all the menu items and refresh my memory about where stuff is.

FP Flash Sync on Nikons

Ever wonder how the high speed flash sync works on Nikons (you can actually sync your flash at speeds like 1/4000 second, not limited to the 1/250 sec mechanical shutter speed)?

I wondered too, and Google took me to this excellent explanation:
http://nikonclspracticalguide.blogspot.ca/2008/03/10-auto-fp-high-speed-sync-explained.html

Pictures

Without a camera, I don't have anything new. But I do have some older shots for you to enjoy. I call these, Day, Night and Dawn.

After visiting the Ansel Adams exhibit in Kleinburg, I shot this, reminiscent of one of his images called "Birches".  

I put a flashlight in the car but it was way too bright, so I buried it under a yellow rainjacket. Still too bright, but the Milky Way was just right! 

Whenever you get up before dawn, you don't go away empty handed! Horseshoe Lake Road, just before sunrise.  I never get tired of this spot. This makes a superb large format print, available on my gallery at www.faczen.smugmug.com

Next week: pictures from the new D610! TTFN

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Things with 3 Legs

Yeah. They're called "Tripods". I just bought a new one for 3 reasons.

• The Gitzo I have is really big and hard to carry around on my bike
• It's heavy. I think the legs themselves (not counting the ball head) weigh 5 or 6 lbs.
• I saw this one and really thought it was innovative.

So I wanted a tripod that was really light. This one weighs about 2 lbs without the head. It's made of carbon fiber which is very rigid and strong. The head is innovative too, and it weighs less than 2 lbs and can support almost 20 lbs. It needs to be small so I can pack it easily. This one folds down in a really innovative (using that word a lot!) way -- the legs fold up over the head so the overall length is only about 17".

It also needs to be tall enough so I don't have to bend my aching back over to look through the viewfinder. Do you think this one is tall enough?

As I mentioned a couple of blog posts ago, this tripod is made in England by a company called, "3 Legged Thing". And the name of this tripod is "Brian". Cute, eh? Here's a link to the manufacturer's site and here's where you can buy it (at B&H). They say the one with the blue ball head is backordered but the black one is in stock.

I'm really happy with it, although I've had it less than a week. The only issue I'm having is that I tend to grab the friction locks (there are so many of them!) and loosen them inadvertently, so I need to tighten them more. I like the ball head, it's smooth and easy to use. On a scale of 1-10, it's a 9. So far.

When it gets dark...

Don't put away your camera. Instead, take out your tripod and get creative. I like star shots, so here are a few:

I used a little flashlight to paint the tree with light. This is a 30 second exposure at f/4, ISO 800 and 15mm in case you were interested. To keep the stars crisp at that long an exposure you need to use a wide angle.

The moon is really bright. In this picture I tried not to let it affect my exposure so I stuck with the same settings as the last image. I was struck by the pattern of the clouds and never noticed the meteor trail at around 10 o'clock (I suppose it could be an airplane but meteor sounds better!).

Almost the same exposure: a little darker originally because it was 15 seconds at f/4, ISO 400. But I did some processing to bring out the Inn and the sky at the same time.

A couple more hummingbirds. This little fellow is in flight — actually hover mode at my feeder.

Male Ruby-throated hummingbird in flight



Male ruby-throated hummingbird at rest. This looks similar to a shot I did a week or so ago, but I like the sharpness and the composition better. Remember this guy is only about 2" (5cm) long.

And finally,

Attack Squirrel! This guy looks like he's coming after me. Quite the opposite, he's frightened. He should be: this is just after he emptied my squirrel-proof bird feeder.

More to come!

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Magic Time is not just at dawn

When we were in Niagara-on-the-Lake last week, I bought some new wind chimes. And on Monday it was really windy. Not only do they sound great, but they gave me the idea of shooting a long shutter speed flash-enhanced image. The flash stops the motion of the chimes but everything else has a motion blur:

It's a 1/4 second exposure at f/22, ISO 100. You have to stop it down big time to get the long exposure. For a change, I DID ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to this shot: it's exactly as it came out of the camera. It's not even cropped!

The next night, I went out for a walk. It was cold and crisp, there were stars out although it wasn't perfectly clear, and the moon was waxing gibbous (that means it was around half full, heading towards full. It would have been "waning gibbous" if it was on its way to being a new moon. And you thought you knew everything!). I saw the texture in the fresh snow on the parked car and decided to go back in for my camera. And the tripod, after all it was dark.

Time exposures are very cool and they bring out great and unusual lighting.

There's a car buried under this snowbank! It was really difficult to focus in the dark. I had to wing it. I knew ahead of time that there was going to be some colour in the sky because I've shot there before. It comes from the lights of Minden about 10km away. You can't really tell that this is low light: the exposure was 15 seconds at f/4, ISO 1600. There is a single halogen street light about 50m off to the right. I had to reduce the green colour of the light.

After taking a few shots here, I walked down towards the dock, not ready to go in yet... and I glanced up in the sky. Oh, my Gawd! — I did a double take! Here's what I saw:

I had to look this up. Google is your friend. It seems that ice crystals in the air diffract the light from the moon. The crystals bend the light by 22°, red less than violet so you get a rainbow circle effect that's 44° in diameter.Look it up. Wikipedia says this is not uncommon, but I have to tell you I've never noticed it before. Amazing. This is the same exposure as the previous shot — I tried about 20 or 30 different shots but it turned out that this was the best of the bunch.

The message is, it's not just at dawn and dusk that the light can be magic!

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