Temptation!

...musings

Danger, Will Robinson. Danger.

Michael at Red Umbrella Inn across the road from me just got a brand new drone. He was showing it to me then the phone rang and he handed me the controller. Argh!

Damn. You can even tell it where "home" is and it will land itself right there. You can set it to follow you as you drive or ride in a boat. It climbs up to 150m in a few seconds. We couldn't even find it in the sky up there. Take hands off the controls and it hovers motionless. You can rotate it. You can tilt it. You can look through its camera on your iPhone. You can send it to map coordinates or just to a spot you choose on a map.

Thou shalt not give in to temptation. Thou shalt not give in. Thou shalt not...

I didn't. I handed it back to him two minutes later.

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Trends?

It's interesting that every now and then something pops up in the photography community – especially on Facebook – as a trend. I suppose that has something to do with the groups you hang out in, but lately, everywhere I look, people are posting images of the Milky Way.

Some of them are quite spectacular, or they would be if I wasn't seeing dozens, if not hundreds of them. Digitally enhanced pictures of the galaxy with a well-composed, dramatically lit foreground. They set a standard that I sometimes can't reach, since I don't have desert rock arches or fabulous sea formations in range, but they do set some goals.

Hopefully the Weather Gods will cooperate and we'll be able to shoot some star fields up in Wawa during the Gales of November workshops! (Still some space on the second weekend! Visit www.photography.to/gales for details).

Other trends? 360° SmartPhone shots. Long exposure shots of waterfalls and rapids. Fox kits in Algonquin Park and elsewhere. Focus stacked macro shots. And in my case (I'm guilty as well), images altered with plugins like Topaz Impression.

Back to the basics

It's time to get back to the basics. That's really easy to say — when going off in the artistic direction is as easy as clicking the mouse. But it's that time. I'm going to try!

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Last week, I spent a pleasant couple of days with Bruce Peters, a Mississauga photographer friend of Hilary McNeil-Smith. We shot various venues around the Highlands. His presence inspired me to get out and take a fresh look at some places and times I've shot before. 

One of those places was Horseshoe Lake at Dawn. We didn't get a spectacular morning, but the mist on the water and the subtle pastels of the sky were interesting as usual. Here are three images before, during and after sunrise.  I'm never disappointed when I make the effort to get out early!

We visited another spot I like, where Highway 118 crosses Boshkong Lake. I gave into my desire to turn a photo into a piece of digital art...

Topaz Impression 2, Impasto preset (modified). I'm going to try to reproduce this in oil on canvas. Wish me luck! 

We went to some other spots I favour, including, of course, the Minden Wildwater. Then we went to Ritchie Falls. In both places, I mounted my 10-stop ND filter to smooth the water...

Here again I admit to doing a "little" post-processing!

The following morning my attraction to basic landscapes continued and I got up early to shoot this image behind the Red Umbrella Inn. I had actually shot a series of brackets intending to merge them as an HDR but I liked this one on its own, so there's very little processing done here. 

Back to the basics.

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The Highland Yard, 2016 edition

I don't know the actual count, but I'm guessing there were about 150 participants at most, although it looked like there were as many as 50 runners in the 10K race. And that total included a whole bunch of smaller kids in the 2K. Still, it was a nice event and there were some photo ops! I hoped to do some different shots from previous years... at the start, I shot the runners coming at me with a telephoto lens, hoping to catch some good body positions and bright colours. When they returned to the finish line, I shot two ways: wide angle shots from a low point of view, then I switched to a long telephoto to capture faces and expressions. Here are a few images.

 I'm addicted to Topaz Impression among others... here's an image from yesterday's Highland Yard 10K event. However the plugins are so popular now that using them might make you part of the crowd as opposed to showing your individuality. Sort of like Harley Davidson riders who want to be different but they all look alike! 

I want to use my Impression-generated images for inspiration. Maybe I can express myself that way. However, I suck at painting.Harvey has said to be patient... when I have 50 years painting experience, like I do in photography... only problem is, I'll be 120 years old! 

I was a little disappointed this year. With one or two exceptions, there was nobody who had dug deep to run this race. No sweat-stained shirts, no agonized expressions, no ecstatic arm-pumps crossing the finish line. Just a bunch of people jogging in, checking their iPhones or their wrist-mounted stopwatches for their times, smiling and waving to their friends. I'm not sure what that means. Anyway, here are some more images:

Another "artsy" shot that just spoke to me. Candidate for a book cover?

Old man's leg, young man's shoe! 

There were some exceptions. Someone who was proud of her achievement and wanted to shout it out to the world! 

Another exception. This guy crossed the finish line, took one step and collapsed. Race staff hydrated him and he was OK later. 

File this lady under "Perseverance". She should be on a poster with that as the title. She came into the finish line running, not walking and with a look of commitment as you can see. Kudo's, lady. I couldn't do what you did. 

 

I just thought these two ladies made interesting photo subjects. Remember, you can click on any picture to blow it up.

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Focus Pyramid

I bought this "Focus Pyramid" for the club and spent some time micro-aligning my lenses. The 70-200 Nikkor was the closest to zero and the Tamron 150-600 showed the most deviation. Interestingly it was different when I set it to 600mm and part way, around 400mm. I chose the 600mm alignment adjustment because that's the most critical point.

As you can see, you have to look very carefully to see where the lens is actually focusing. This shot was at a setting of +10 and I finally chose +8 as the setting (the range was -20 to +20). HHCC club members are welcome to borrow this focusing target to align their lenses. Contact Gord... 

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Speaking of exercise...

Dr. Ron & Rob K came up for the day on Friday with the intent of bicycling the Rail Trail from Haliburton to Kinmount. I dropped them off in Haliburton (nice car, Rob. Embarrassing how long it took me to figure out that you need to press the brake to start it!), then went home to take a nap while they sweated their way down the trail. When I picked them up about 3 hours later, I didn't join them in their celebratory milkshake/icecream because I felt I didn't deserve it!

The intrepid road warriors, leaving Haliburton. The weather cleared up and it was bright and sunny when I awoke from my nap a couple of hours later! 

Then we went back to Ritchie Falls. It's tough shooting in the bright sun, so I chose to do some abstracts using my neutral density filter. 

A tree at Ritchie Falls that will need a few more visits with camera and sketch pad in hand! 

So that ends another July in the Haliburton Highlands. Lots of stuff going on in August, so stay tuned. And if you're thinking of booking the Gales of November workshop (www.photography.to/gales) better get going, only 4 spots left!

PS: A whole blog post and not one bird picture! Don't get used to it!

— 30 —

First Light... revisited

I went back at dawn to the same spot. Liz had said it was a lousy sunrise, I should come back on a better day. So how do you know if it's a better day when it's black out?

It wasn't. Cloudy, no sunrise. Well the sun did come up, the Earth did turn in its orbit, but no spectacular colours today. It was, however, very cool. Not the temperature, the ambiance. The word "Tranquility" comes to mind. "Peacefulness".

Somehow pictures do have a different feel to them when there's a person in them. I shot one with and one without and there's no doubt which one I like better. This one:



As a regular feature, I'll be providing some photography tips here. I hope you'll come back frequently to read and comment on them.

Here's today's tip:

FacZen Photography Tips Explore your light meter. The modern DSLR (or even a point-and-shoot) camera has tons of computing capability but in the end, you have to make the decision whether your image should be exposed according to the light on a spot, on an average or on some computed combination (often called “matrix metering”). The best example is a backlit subject. If you expose according to the average, you’ll get a silhouette. According to the spot meter, the subject will be well exposed, and matrix metering will give you some compromise. “Digital Film” is cheap. Bracket your shots or switch metering modes and shoot several frames.

By the Dawn's Early Light

Said I was getting up early! I did and ventured out for some sunrise pictures.

Liz, who works at Gonyea Eavestroughs, told me about a spot across from her house on Horseshoe Lake Road. I scouted it out yesterday and came back around 6:40am. I set up the camera on the tripod and captured this first image:



This one was taken at first light. It was about a 10 second exposure. I decided to put a person in the picture so I set the self-timer and walked into position, but I didn't realize that the timer was set for only 2 seconds, so I actually walked in in the middle of the exposure! Kind of a cool effect, huh? I named it "Ghost at First Light".



About 12 minutes later (ain't metadata useful?), exactly at 7:00am (plus 9 seconds), I got this shot:



About 45 minutes later, driving home, I was struck by the light filtering through the trees and stopped to take another photo. The camera decided on a weird White Balance: 3800K with -22 tint offset. Who knows why? Anyway, it took a bunch of colour correcting to come up with this shot.



Then I did a duotone out of it. I was thinking of using this photo to illustrate a short story that I wrote a long time ago, and which I'm thinking of reviving. Watch this space (not yet... too much other stuff to do first!)



By the way, I've taken to reducing the sizes of the images I post here. First of all, my internet connection is quite slow up here in TrueNorth. I have an Xplornet satellite hookup which only gives me about 128K upload speed (and download is blindingly slow at about 500K), and it takes a long time to post a 3Mb image. Also, there doesn't seem to be any copyright protection here. So if by any chance you want a print of any of these images, visit my gallery and you can order one there for a very reasonable price.

Some more images

First of all, you can see most, if not all of my images by going to my photo gallery. Click here, or at right. But since there seems to be an increase in the activity level -- more people reading this blog -- I thought I'd add some images for y'all to look at (too many Southern friends. I'm starting to talk like y'all).

Also I've been getting comments (mostly good, keep it up!) by direct email and in some newsgroups, but did you know you can also comment here? So other people can see them?

Try this image on for size:



My friend Kevin sent me a link, or I found one on his photo site, to some similar shots, and they stuck in my mind. So I wanted to see how I could do. I deliberately went out one afternoon up in Minden, to try to shoot this kind of picture. I found a slough (that's pronounced "sluff" and it means a swamp or a shallow lake. See? And you thought you were too old to learn anything!), I put on my chest waders and ventured out to where I saw some weeds. With every step, my feet sank about 6" into the muck and I was afraid I wouldn't be able to pull them out. There I was, carrying a camera which I REALLY didn't want to drop in the water. It didn't work out. I didn't get the shot I wanted. I took a few lily pad pictures which were "OK" but not great.

Anyway, the following week, we were on the workshop with Rob Stimpson and we went to a spot called "Wren Lake". Rob wanted us over on the south east side but as I was walking there, I spotted these weeds and with his permission, hung back long enough to get this shot.

There is some PhotoShop in it: I cleaned the water a bit (not much), then I used the threshold tool to create a silhouette. Next, using a couple of adjustment layers, including hue/saturation and a graduated screen mask, I added the colour back in the way I wanted it.

What do you think? Does this look like a saleable image?

The following day, Rob got us up before dawn and we watched the sun rise across the lake behind the Frost Centre just south of Dorset. He took a canoe out and told us to yell at him to position himself where we wanted him. OK, so I did! My favourite shot is the background for the header in this Blog, and here's another one:



Yes, the light did look exactly like that (although I may have pushed the saturation up a tad). The sun didn't look good, though. As Rob pointed out, digital still has a ways to go before equalling film for smooth rendition of wide dynamic ranges, so I had to play with some adjustment layers and Gaussian blurs to make it look better.

OK, one more image for today:



I wanted to frame Sally with the trees, but since it was backlit, I had to overexpose to get the detail in the tree bark and a reasonable exposure of Sally as well. So all I did was to create an adjustment layer which I masked, then reduced the exposure on the Sally part. The sky was blown out, so I decided to play with rendering clouds, but I didn't like it until I transformed the sky selection by growing it and laying it softly over the trees to make it look like a low cloud or fog. I was told it didn't look realistic because of the sun on Sally, but hey, there could have been a hole in the clouds, no?

PS: if you blow this up (by clicking on it), check out the detail in the tree bark on the left. I LOVE the new D300!

I'll show you some more images tomorrow. Waterfalls. I LOVE shooting waterfalls!