I'm done shooting fall colours...

... or maybe not! Every year I say the same thing and every year I am overwhelmed by the glory that nature brings us to enjoy and challenges us to capture. I do live in God's Country. It's been 5 years now and this has to be the best one of all.

If you don't like looking at pictures of fall colours, don't read this blog. I have so many to show you, I guess I overdid it! But where do you stop?

I shot this same spot last year, up in the hills behind Minden. This time I added some oil paint effect to make it more abstract because, well, because I can! 

Nature throws lots of stuff at you: some of which you can't capture. In another shot in the same location, there was a rock or stump standing up in a stream in the foreground. I thought it was neat how it looked like a duck, but of course it couldn't be one because it didn't move all the time I was there. It was only when I got home and blew it up to 200% that I discovered it was a large turtle! And a couple of babies.

I never would have been able to figure this out if it wasn't for the D600's amazing resolution.
This was at 100mm, and I had a 400mm with me but who knew? 

The sun selectively caused these autumn ferns to glow! 

I spent the weekend shooting up in Muskoka with Shannon whose hospitality was boundless. In fact, this was Sunday morning's breakfast:

That's Chris at the other end of the table! Shannon and Chris are one of those "healthy" couples (OK, in fairness, I don't know all that much about Chris's convictions, but Shannon is into healthy, organic stuff). Everything on this plate is natural and the pancakes are made from stuff I can't even remember. The green things are sunflower sprouts and the eggs came from her own chickens! It tasted as good as it looks.  By the way, the "Iris Blur" filter in Photoshop CS6 works great.

Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Although this is about the colours, it's also about the D600 and about a really cool venue that I (we) are really going to have to revisit.

On the way to Port Sidney, I took Highway 118. It was late in the day, the sun poking out of the broken clouds from time to time. I stopped to capture the amazing light reflecting off this rock face:

It's hard to capture what you actually see. This soft effect makes it look like I remember it. 

Saturday morning, we went to a place called "Screaming Heads", just outside Burk's Falls, north of Huntsville. This is a large rural property (I guess 100 acres) owned by a retired art teacher by the name of Peter Camani (we met him. An unusual individual). There are hundreds of works of art scattered around the property.

One of the screaming heads. I'm talking about the cement sculpture, not Shannon who posed in it to give the picture a sense of scale. This was not among the largest ones. 

The place defies description. You have to visit his website here to get a feel for it. I could post dozens more pictures to show you the giant hand sticking up out of the ground, the dragon on top of the castle-like house... go to his website, or better, visit Screaming Heads yourself!

Wolves howling at the moon., amid other strange constructs, and surrounded by the colours of fall. 

There was also a large garden where you first drive in, dominated by a sea of sunflowers.

Shannon shooting sunflowers. I showed her how to use "commander mode" to remotely fire an off-camera flash. By the way, it was raining pretty well the whole time we were there. Brand new D600 in the rain... 

Speaking of the D600, I am blown away by the sharpness of the images it produces. At times, I'm shooting with my older Nikon 24-120 f/3.5-5.6 VR lens (not one of the new f/4 models), which is reported to be one of their worst lenses ever. Guess what?

Sunflowers in the rain 

This is a 100% crop out of the above image. Nothing particularly done to it in the computer: it was this sharp coming out of the camera! Click here to see a bigger version of this image.

Anyway, I guess I'm getting carried away. We shot a bunch of other stuff, including a fireworks display in the rain:

Those red spots are water drops on the lens. It's hard not to get them when you point the lens up in the rain! Look at the happy face in the upper right corner! I have NO IDEA how they did this, but that's what one of the final fireworks bursts looked like. This is a composite, by the way, of 7 images. f/16, ISO 100, shutter held open for a couple of bursts, if you want to try it.

On Sunday we shot a couple more spots.

A misty morning lake. 

Slo-mo at a dam in Port Sidney. 1/6 second at f/22. I couldn't do a really long exposure because Shannon had my big ND filter, but this showed some texture in the water. 

One final shot (enough, right? Amazing weekend!). We ran into Russ from Barrie and his Golden Retriever, Cleo. I took a bunch of shots while Russ was fishing, and oil painted this one of Cleo. I'm waiting for him to email me so I can send him the picture:

Cleo's 11 years old and your usual friendly Golden. She wanted to come up and cuddle and be petted, wet fur and all! Great dog! Click here to see a detailed view of the same image. 

OK, I'm done for today. Phew! More fall colours to come next weekend: I can't resist!

— 30 —

The Comfort Zone

It’s been an interesting photography weekend. Quiet, but I’ve been doing a lot of photography-related stuff and I’ve learned a few things in the process.

To digress a little, I've been a touch under the weather -- I think I'm fighting something. It's making me sleepy, sometimes I fall asleep right in the middddddddddddddddddddddd...

Where was I? Anyway I went out and chopped some kindling in the snow, I actually felt better. I spend too much time at this damned keyboard! I actually started writing this last night but got too tired to finish it, so here I am in the morning, getting over my “lack of caffeine headache” (if I don’t have a coffee at least in the evening, I wake up with a headache. I must be actually addicted to the stuff), revisiting what I wrote and rewriting it all!

Oh, and climbing up to fix my satellite dish too!





On Saturday, I visited Shannon, she was exhibiting at a craft show in Huntsville. She sold a bunch of pictures... I'm envious. She has a great eye but she told me she’s weak on the technical side of things. I don’t believe it – a few of the techniques she talked about are beyond me, and I came home to try some of them. I was inspired to write the photo tip below after trying her “multiple exposure in the camera” technique. The results were terrible but I have a little insight in how to do it next time.



In addition to the prints Shannon was selling (and she did well with some very fine images), she had prepared some greeting cards which were selling well. There was another photographer there whose images were so-so and he was selling too! There’s hope for us all. Anyway when I got back I was determined to create some saleable products and I put together some “boutique” size frame able images (my name for it – I’m sure there’s an official name!) which are essentially 3½ x 5 images printed on 5 x 7 paper, with a title and signature. I looked at them last night and realized they are a bit smaller than I would like, so I’m going to revisit it today and make them bigger. 5 x 7 on 8 x 10, I think. I have to redo them because they’re too down-sampled to print well at the larger size. I’ll leave the small ones up but reprice them accordingly.

You can see these images at http://www.faczen.smugmug.com/.

There is now a link on the home page to the featured “Art Print” gallery. Please visit it and BUY SOMETHING! Christmas is coming and these prints make wonderful, thoughtful gifts.

So enough for the commercial. On to the Photo tip of the day.

FacZen Photography Tips All Work and no Play... ...makes me dull. In the sense that you need to experiment in order to move forward. I’m self-taught, for the most part but I do appreciate the value of taking courses to learn new things from time to time. That said, the best way to learn is to try stuff! I joined the Richmond Hill Camera Club a few years ago so that I could learn from others. My first impression was that the club was a bunch of old fuddy duddies but I’ve come to realize that their wealth of experience is a valuable source of learning. Often, when I see how something is done, I want to try it – and that’s what this tip is about. Try things. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Digital “film” is cheap, so what if you burn some shutter actuations? It’s not costing you anything. You will be amazed at the things you can do. Let me give you a few examples. • When I first joined the club, someone showed us pictures taken through “water glass”. I went to a local store, bought a few dollars worth of glass pieces with different patterns in them and played. I got a few acceptable images, but mostly I got an understanding of how it’s done. • Maria, at the club, paints with light. She does studio still life setups but doesn’t use traditional lights, just a flashlight and long exposures. Her work is awesome. I tried it. I now have an appreciation for how hard it is, and I got an idea about trying the same technique on landscapes shot at night. I can’t wait to try it! • “Panning”, or moving the camera to follow a moving subject is an art. There are some technical things you need to know, but how do you figure out what shutter speed you need to get the effect you want? The answer? Experiment! This image was actually taken at 1/80 sec. I was amazed at how much motion blur you get at that speed when you pan the camera! 1/5 sec @ f/36. Again I panned with the bike but you can't be really smooth at that shutter speed. • What about moving the camera when you shoot a long exposure? Or one that isn’t so long… remember that rule of thumb about what shutter speed you can handle? So turn it around. Try shooting at 1/10 second and deliberately moving the camera. Or put a flash on but leave the shutter open for a longer time. 1/5 second stopped right down to f/36 and I deliberately moved the camera while shooting. • Move “parts” of the camera. Like zoom your lens or change your focus while the shutter is open.1/30 sec. I rotated th zoom ring while the shutter was open. Amazing what you can accomplish in 1/30 sec! • “Play” in Photoshop. Do you know what the Art History brush does? Take an image and try all the different filters on it. See what they do. Everyone has a comfort zone. Mine is taking pictures of rocks and trees. I realized that I've taken photos of the exact same log in the water near my house probably 30 times. Sure, I'm waiting for that day when the light will be magic or when a deer will walk out and stand where I want him to. Great, if that's what you want to capture, but get out of your comfort zone and play! You’ll be amazed at what you will learn. I've been shooting 'people' pictures -- some candids and informal portraits; long time exposures at night; camera motion; slow shutter subject exposures and pans; architectural shots; I've been painting in Photoshop and using different adjustment layers; I've even tried printing some images (yeah well, I have a ways to go there!); I'm learning how to judge competitions; learning a new camera, preparing images for sale, researching and writing a blog and technical tips and I'm planning workshops... my bathroom reading is National Geographic and Scott Kelby. In short (OK, it wasn't short!) I'm playing. Learning all kinds of stuff. Now if I were retired, I could spend some real time on it! Let me leave you with something DeWitt Jones said in his motivational video (paraphrasing from memory): "Mother Nature doesn't stand at a forest and say 'there is only one good photo here, one photographer will capture it and all the rest of you are losers'. " If you open your eyes and try to see things differently, there are a million different pictures to take. Go Play!