Happy 2016 to all my friends!

My 2016 wish for all of you:

HEALTH

Because if you don't have that, nothing else matters.

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When I read what I wrote, I realize that I must really be an old man. Those ubiquitous wishes for prosperity and happiness in the new year ring hollow when one has had brushes with problems of health. As I get older, I realize that you can get past the engine in your car blowing up, your basement getting flooded, your business failing or losing your job and none of that matters if you don't have your health.

I'm a cancer survivor. I had surgery for metastatic cancer in 2004 and again in 2007 and several radiation treatments and medications since. It's been 12 years and I'm still here. One day it's going to jump up and bite me but I'm still here. My father had the same cancers I do and he made it to 89. That's a long way in the future. Maybe I'll make it that far, maybe not.

But that puts a perspective on one's life: sure, I want to be fulfilled and content and not lack any of the necessities but mostly I want to not have to worry about my health for a while longer. Because if I have that, I won't sweat the small stuff.

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Speaking of the years going by...

I've been writing this blog since 2006. TEN YEARS! This is my post #345, so about 3 posts per month for 120 months! I don't have a huge audience, a couple of hundred regular readers, more when I have something significant to say. As I look back, I've been pretty consistent and it's pretty clear that my photography, my art, has matured and grown over that time.

It occurs to me that in all that time, I have never made ANY statement about politics. I'm about to break that.

When asked what my politics are, I say that I am APOLITICAL. That means I don't care, one way or another, I have better things to think about. Another way of looking at it is that they are all cut from the same cloth, one is just as bad as the next. But at the risk of alienating some of my readers, I feel compelled to step out and say something now. And the reason is a fellow named Donald J. Trump.

Nothing scares me more than the possibility that this bigoted, racist fascist might get elected President of the United States. At the beginning, you could laugh about him: he wasn't seriously running, he's a joke... but then so was Rob Ford. The scary part is that so many people are taking him seriously – even people whom I otherwise respect – and not only the threat that he might get elected, just the fact that he is running, is probably the most serious threat to world peace since Germany in the 1930's.

The man colours all Muslims with the same paintbrush, all billion-and-a-half of them in the world. He equates them all with violent fanaticism, analogous to Hitler's beliefs about the Jews. The words that come out of his mouth are born in hatred and fear and worst of all, disdain for what anyone else thinks: it's as if no one else's opinion matters. He will cause – he IS causing – a backlash and as some have mentioned, he's probably ISIS's best recruiting tool right now.  

I have always been right-wing. OK, right of centre. I am a firearms owner, I'm very pro-police, the only reason I don't hunt anymore is due to physical limitations. I rode motorcycles, I still drive too fast, but seriously, my American friends and relatives? Seriously? Hopefully you're just having fun laughing at him too, but enough! 

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Minden Wildwater Preserve

Everyone knows my favourite place around here is the whitewater. I dropped by there on Christmas day and again after the ice storm on Monday.

It's a very spiritual place. I often go there and take in the serenity and majestic beauty of the rushing waters. Today, Christmas day, I saw this guy at the river's edge. He was lost in prayer, didn't even know I was there. I watched him kneeling motionless for several minutes and took these pictures to capture the feeling. 

There's a Zen word for this. It's "Shikantaza". Look it up.

Then I discovered what he was really doing... as he reached over and took the Neutral Density filter out of his Lee filter holder (in case you don't know what that is, it fits over your camera lens and lets you do long exposures among other things)! Fooled me. Good story? But without the explanation, I find this a very emotion-filled image.

Of course the white water never freezes. But it creates remnants of ice on the rocks and twigs and trees. I call them "Ice Caps" (sorry, Timmies. Different spelling!)

That 105mm Nikkor lens is pretty sharp! 

Same lens. This was handheld at 1/5 second, sitting really, really still! My long range rifle skills came back to me, control breathing, relax muscles... 

This was one of a series of long exposures (tripod this time). All shot in the same place and all different!  

On the way home, I got this image behind my house

A little post-processing went into this one: it's a 5-shot HDR blended in Nik HDR Efex Pro, then treated with Topaz Impression, then I used Topaz Star Effects to bring out the reflections of the ice coating the trees and grass. Click it for a better look.

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Algonquin Park

I'm blessed. Not only because Algonquin Park is an hour away but because I can still just go up there when the mood strikes me. It did on Sunday, so I hopped in the car and went. I didn't know what to expect to see: not much landscape for me this time of year, but I thought maybe I could find some foxes to shoot and I was really jealous of the pictures I've been seeing of the Pine Martens. A couple of people told me where I might find them. As you will see below, I did.

The other interesting part is the people you meet. John Marshall was someone I hadn't met before, with his friend Charlene?? (bad with names!). Steve Dunsford, whom I've met before: he owns the Mad Musher in Whitney and does some phenomenal photography in the Park. I'm struggling to remember the bearded guy's name, whom we met while shooting the Pine Martens... and his friend Laura (John just told me: Jesse Villemaire). 

Some of the animals are too unafraid of humans. That makes it possible for people like me to get pictures but it makes me uneasy about whether their reliance on people to feed them will prove their downfall. The story I heard yesterday about the foxes on Arowhon Pines road is that they (or their ancestors, I guess) were sick with mange a few years ago and someone left medicated food for them to nurse them back to health. They got used to people feeding them, which I hear many people do (but have never witnessed).

I saw some photos later of the fox kit I photographed and a sibling playing with one of the photographers. Great shots. I don't think that road is plowed in winter. We got snow today so I wonder if anyone will get up there until Spring. Hope the foxes survive. Here are some pictures:

 

And now... a Pine Marten. I'd never actually seen one until that day! Exceedingly cute, and very very fast! S/he scampered through the trees, occasionally posing for a photo.

Not so "cute" when s/he was showing her teeth, upset at the blue jays who were stealing his/her food! 

I was just going to post one or two pictures but I got carried away. They're so damned cute! Prints are available, so are cellphone cases, tote bags, pillows, even shower curtains if you want! Email me and I'll link you to where to get them.

I just realized I updated my watermark a day or two early! Oops.

Anyway, see you all in 2016. Come join me up in Wawa in October. Details will be on the web page at www.photography.to/gales.htm (if I ever get it finished!).

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Epiphany

New Blog Header picture

Some newsreaders don't show the header picture and whenever I change it, the old one is lost. So here's the current picture preserved in the body of the blog as well. This is a rendering of a snowmobile track on the ice of 12-Mile Lake just opposite my dock. I shrunk it proportionally; the original is much taller. I was going to leave it black-and-white but I really liked the tonality of this version.

Contact me if this speaks to you as it does to me. Picture the image (without the text, of course) as a
48" by 12" canvas or matte print on your wall.

Epiphany

No, not the Christian holiday. A "Leap of Understanding". Wikipedia defines it as,

An epiphany (from the ancient Greek ἐπιφάνεια, epiphaneia, "manifestation, striking appearance") is an experience of sudden and striking realization. 

 In my humble opinion, they're rare, and they should be, otherwise they wouldn't be significant. And in my case, stating them can be a bit embarrassing. Because it feels like you're restating the obvious. Cognoscenti will stare down their noses at you and say, "Yeah, and? This is something you didn't know?"

The last one I can recall had to do with motorcycling. For 12 years I taught the motorcycle course at Humber College. There was one really, really basic concept that all motorcycle students had to grasp. I must have used the words 10,000 times. But it wasn't until one day, riding my bike down at Deal's Gap (The "Tail of the Dragon". Google it if you don't know what it is) when I had an epiphany: "You have to look where you want to go". Motorcyclists will understand this, the rest of you probably won't. I can hear my friend George thinking, "like what are you, new?"

Do you understand what I mean? Yes, you know it but do you KNOW it? Robert A. Heinlein coined a word that applies: GROK. (From his book, Stranger in a Strange Land, and if you haven't read it, you should).

So here's my epiphany for today:

"The only people who care how a picture was made are those who are trying to figure out how to emulate it". 

People who don't have that agenda, flat out don't care. They either like it or they don't like it. They either see and appreciate the maker's vision or they don't. Am I restating the obvious?

Look at that banner picture up top. Do you care how many pixels wide it is? Is it noisy? Is the colour balance off? What's that dark lump about 1/3 in from the right? Do you care what technique I used to make it? WHO CARES? It's an expression of MY VISION.

During the time I spent with Rosa, I think she tried to tell me that 1000 times. I didn't hear it until now. She also used to disagree vehemently with my premise, when teaching composition, that "you need to know the rules so you can know when to break them". I still don't get that – she was probably right but I don't Grok it.

How does that change what I do? It's a bit of a sticky wicket, as my British friends like to say. On the one hand, I'm teaching, and that involves giving people ideas and examples of what to do and what not to do. On the other side, I'm trying to express my vision in my art and that involves none of the above. I've stopped submitting images for competitions and yet with the new club, I'm fostering that learning vehicle. What to do, what to do...

So here are a couple more quotes for your enjoyment.

"I'm succeeding admirably in my rôle as a starving artist!"

"Everything hurts. Except the things that don't work anymore."

Attribute the last one to my father (Robert Springer, 1920-2010), who also coined "female dark chocolate" (no nuts!) in his later years! The other two are mine.

You know what would be cool? If years from now you entered these quotes in Wikipedia and they came back attributed appropriately!

Haliburton Highlands Camera Club

We have, as they say, Liftoff! After a snow-delayed launch, the inaugural meeting of the Haliburton Highlands Camera Club took place on a memorable date: Friday the 13th of December! There were 26 people in attendance (good thing, that’s all the chairs we had!), and at this writing, 17 of them have joined the fledgling club. I find this an auspicious number. For one thing, there are no snowbirds or cottagers in the group, imagine the headcount had we done this in the summer! And a lot of people wrote to say they wanted to be there but couldn't make the last minute schedule change.

I have an amazing 55 names on my HHCC list, from a population that would be dwarfed by the number of residents in one city block in the 'Big Smoke'. My assumption that there is a need for a camera club up here in the Highlands seems to be true. The next step is to make the promised programs happen, and we're getting a start at it. First step is to assemble a team to coordinate our activities, and that's in the works.

Part of the group at the inaugural Camera Club meeting. 

So if you're in the Highlands and you haven't joined yet, have a look at our web page and contact me for more information.

Photomatix Pro 5.0

HDRsoft has released version 5.0 of their signature Photomatix Pro software. The world seems to be divided by the three big HDR generating products, Photomatix, Nik HDR Efex Pro and Photoshop HDR Pro (there are other tone-mapping products out there, notably Topaz Adjust). Photomatix is the only one that can run as a standalone, without requiring Photoshop or Lightroom.

HDRsoft has always provided free upgrades to their existing customers, and there seems to be no exception here: I went to hdrsoft.com, downloaded and installed it over Photomatix 4.2.2 and it never even asked for a serial number. They didn't send me a heads-up, though, so if you're a customer, get thee over to the site for an upgrade. Kudo's to HDRsoft for this policy.

I've spent a total of 5 minutes on it since I installed it. I opened a 3-shot/2 stop burst and played with it briefly. It appears to run smoother that before and with more subtle control over the effects. I'll have to do some more testing. My normal go-to has been the Nik product and the one thing it has that Photomatix doesn't is Control Points, although you can do much the same thing with layer masks in Photoshop.

Here's that 3-shot image I ran. All I did to it after returning from Photomatix was to dodge out the bottom of the dirty door a bit, and straighten/crop in Lightroom.

I really should have cleaned the spider webs off the side of the building before winter. Then again, I wouldn't have gotten this shot! 

Topaz Star Filter

If you hurry, you can get the new Topaz Star Effects filter for half price (until year-end). It does really neat stars, but it also does glows: I learned that by watching their Webinar last week, then I tried it on this image:

The glow makes a big difference in the feel of this image. 

I used the star effect on this photopainting of the snowplow after the first snowstorm of the year. 

Go to this link and enter decstar as the coupon code at checkout.

Winter in the Highlands

A day in the life... here's what you have to do when you live up in the Highlands!

...and this

He had no problem with me taking his picture! That's $300 of heating oil being pumped into my tank! I must say the D610 delivers spectacular performance at ISO 6400.

It's not even winter yet officially until Saturday. Looks like we're in for a long one.

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