Resistance is Futile

I’m like a kid in a candy store. No really, I’m JUST like a kid in a candy store. And I’m not even talking about chocolate which has been and will be my downfall and will definitely contribute to my demise, although I’ll enjoy every bite along the way.

No, I’m talking about taking pictures of the fall colours up here in the Haliburton Highlands. How can I NOT take pictures of the colours when they’re so spectacular? So forgive me for posting a bunch of postcard type pictures, I couldn’t help myself.

What’s different about these shots, compared with most of my previous work, is that there is virtually NO PHOTOSHOPPING done to these images. I may have cropped the odd one a little, but I didn’t push the colours, didn’t clone anything out (well I think there was one where I didn’t like the green bush in the lower corner so I did). No Hue/saturation layers, no meddling with curves. I will admit to a few adjustments in Camera Raw – for instance, I increased the saturation of the blue sky in a few images, but I never touched the leaves.

Anyway, enjoy the images. If you want to see them full-sized, go to my gallery, click on monthly photos and then on October 2008.

Did I tell you I LOVE my 12mm wideangle lens? I LOVE my 12mm wideangle lens. Sometimes I point it straight up…
Straight up! That's what a super wide angle lens is for!

This is the same image, but I did a little "perspective cropping" to straighten the trees, just like you would in an architectural shot. Boring, isn't it? I like the first one much better.

This is right behind my house. Two doors away. I always loved old barns, the texture of rotting wood.

Here's today's photo tip. Thanks to Bob Fowler for the idea (he presented a similar one at the camera club a while ago).

FacZen Photography Tips Reset to Square 1 Right after I got my D300, I started having some problems. I experimented with all kinds of things (as well you should with a new camera – learn how it works!), and then I wanted to shoot some pictures and they came out lousy. Exposure was off, focus sucked, even the colour balance was off. I couldn’t understand why for a normal daylight shot the camera chose 1/8000 sec at f/8. Then it dawned on me. I had played with the ISO setting and it was at 3200. Want to see colour noise? Try shooting at that kind of sensitivity level. I was demonstrating the Gary Fong Lightsphere to a fellow photographer, and the exposures were all off. Well not all, about 1 in 3 were OK. What was the problem? I had been trying out “bracketing” and I still had it on. Every time I pressed the shutter release, I got a different setting. So here’s what to do. Make a mental (or even a written!) checklist and reset your camera to the defaults at the end of every shoot. ISO back to normal (for me that’s 200). Metering back to matrix mode. Autofocus set to “single exposure” (not continuous), focus mode back to weighted average or whatever it’s called in your camera. Bracketing off. Exposure compensation back to zero. White balance to Auto (for me). Shooting mode to aperture priority. VR on. Quality back to RAW. Put in a fresh battery and reformat the memory card. ANY ONE OF THESE SETTINGS CAN SCREW UP YOUR NEXT SHOOT. Tell me you’ve never come back from a shoot and said, “damn, that didn’t work the way I thought it would”. So reset all your camera controls to default as soon as you finish a shoot. That way you’ll know where you are when you have a chance for that magic picture.

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.

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.

No pictures taken today -- I spent the day organizing all the stuff I had shipped up here last week. My office (3rd bedroom) is now more-or-less habitable. The trouble with going through old stuff is that you get sidetracked. I spent a lot of time looking through old pictures instead of unpacking.

Anyway, here's today's tip:

FacZen Photography Tips Throw an old pair of socks in your camera bag. If you decide not to take the bag with you on a walk-about and you want to carry an extra lens, an old sock is a good thing to put it in. You still have to be careful not to bang it around, of course. If it rains, you want to protect your equipment. Now your camera is probably pretty water resistant - most of them are well-designed - but water in or on your lens can be a problem, anything with moving parts should be somewhat protected. You can use a plastic bag in a pinch (shooting THROUGH it is not a great idea), pinch the open end under your lens hood or use a rubber band to keep it in place. You might have to cut the bottom out to see through it, but maybe not. I use a commercial product called a "Storm Jacket" that I bought at www.stormjacket.com or you can find them on eBay. Reasonable, easy to use, packs up small and light. Here's the kind of photo you can get if you are not afraid to take your camera out in the rain (or snow or…)

Pictures of Rocks (Not!)

It has been said that I take great pictures of rocks. And trees. In fact, when we did the Rob Stimpson workshop, I was told several times, "no pictures of rocks!" Not only by Rob, but also by the other participants!

The purpose of the exercise was to move out of your comfort zone. Definitely, I'm not comfortable taking pictures of people. So I've been working on it. Here are some examples, I hope you like them.



I took this picture of "George" at the Deep Gorge Center near Lake Placid New York where we stopped for some photos. George was having lunch and I commented how much I liked his beard, and asked if I could photograph him. I got him to stand near a window and used natural light.

The exposure was handheld at 1/25 sec (thanks, Nikon, for VR!), one stop underexposed so that I didn't blow out any of the detail. Really the only PhotoShop work I did was to blur the background (easy to say, not so easy to do: I "extracted" his image and put it on another layer), and some small hue/saturation adjustments.

I only took one image, interestingly.



Nella is a motorcyclist, she's a member of the Acme Motorcycle club. They went on a ride today and I met up with them for lunch in Coboconk. Afterwards, I took a few pictures including this one of Nella.

People think I do too much Photoshopping. Maybe, but I like it and I think I'm getting better at it. This picture only needed a little work, because Nella's skin is soft and smooth, the lighting was great, she has a great smile and I love her hair. Still, I sharpened the eyes, desaturated the whites of the eyes, fixed up a few blemishes and did some work under her eyes. I softened the skin with a blur layer although I didn't really need to. I liked the above image, Nella didn't see it, I hope she likes it. She saw the next image on the camera and said she liked it so I worked on it as well.





Vanessa is Nella's cousin. She was along for the ride (as a passenger, her first time on a bike, BTW) and I tried to get some shots of her both inside and outside the restaurant. Not that successful, until I got home and saw this one on the computer. It was taken inside the restaurant at an ISO of 1600, which made it very grainy/noisy. Also there was some kind of lighting from her left side (stage right!) that was green in colour. So I managed to colour correct that (hue/saturation adjustment layer, select "greens" instead of "master"), then I looked at a crop of the image and loved it. I worked on the whites of the eyes a little, desaturating them, and I turned up the sharpening on the eyes. I also lightened their colour a little.

Before finishing the photo, I looked at it blown up and didn't like the noise on the lips. So I selected them and applied a gaussian blur to smooth them. The same for the whites of the eyes.

Speaking of her eyes, I loved them so much that I had to do a tight crop. Like it?





One more: This is Tom, the blacksmith at Fleming College in Haliburton. He cooperated with us for our workshop, acting as a model and we experimented with various lighting solutions. I used a Gary Fong diffuser on my SB-600 flash, but set it a couple of stops down so that it would act as a fill light not overpower the image.

Wde also ran into a couple from Toronto on that weekend, who coincidentally handed one of us a point-and-shoot camera and said, "would you take our picture for us?" Sure thing, since we were working on "outdoor portraiture"! I haven't worked on those images yet, so I'll have to put them up later.

Reminder: you can see most of my work on my gallery site here, or click at right.

L8R...

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.

Hi from up North!

I'm in my house in Minden -- "TrueNorth", I call it. I came up with another carload of "stuff" and I have my work cut out for me this weekend. All the stuff I moved last week is sitting in my computer room, needing putting away, organizing, etc.

I did manage to find my Creative Zen Vision M which is a good thing, because I forgot my 1Tb backup drive at home, and I only have 8Gb available on the laptop hard drive. I'm waiting for the drive upgrade (apparently Vista makes it difficult to "Ghost" a drive and they want my computer for a couple of days to do the job. I'm going from a 100Gb drive to a 250Gb drive. That should be good enough for a week or two...

I took some time out at dusk to shoot some images. Just a few, I hope you like them:



You know what's interesting about this image? I didn't do ANYTHING to it. OK, I cropped off the bottom a little, but that's all. No PhotoShop. No extra saturation. That's really what the colours look like up here this year, I told you they're spectacular.



This one was enhanced a little bit, but not the trees! I exposed for the trees, so the sky was blown out a bit and the dock was too dark, so I darkened one and lightened the other.

I have to downsize my images a bit... uploading from this location (I'm on satellite here and it's slow) wait right here, I'll be right back.

OK I'm back. These took a lot less time:



I couldn't get this guy to turn around. He was across the water and couldn't hear me. 200mm lens, of course.

Now the following are 4 different treatments of the same subject -- not the same shot, 4 different ones, but handled differently. Which one(s) do you prefer?



I used PhotoShop's "Cutout" filter -- twice. This image was really noisy because I shot it at ISO 3200 just to see what it would look like. Right. It's noisy. So the cutout filter converts it to "art" and the noise is gone.



I kind of like this composition. I dodged the underbrush under the trees a little, and except for sharpening and cropping, that's all I did.



Tight shot, landscape orientation...



...and portrait.

OK, I'm setting the alarm for 5:55am tomorrow and going to try to get some sunrise pictures. I scouted out a spot, let's see if it'll be what I think it looks like.

a demain!

I never promised you a rose garden...

But I did promise you waterfalls. I love taking pictures of waterfalls.



So that red leaf on the rock really adds to the photo, doesn't it? Wasn't it lucky that it happened to fall exactly in that place? Especially since there were no maple trees around? Seems it happened to appear while Linda, or Kate, were taking their pictures. Amazing.

I took these two photos during the workshop with Rob Stimpson that I've mentioned earlier. He actually took us to 3 different waterfalls. Here's another one:



There are lots of ways of shooting waterfalls, but I like to use a slow shutter speed (somewhere around 1/3 to 1/2 second seems to work best for me). Doing this in bright sunlight is difficult: even with the lens stopped down to f/32 and ISO of 100, you still can't get there. So I add a "Neutral Density Filter" to the lens. My favourite one is an 8x, which gives me 3 stops more to work with.

Here's a waterfall I shot in Vermont last July. It's one of my favourites:




THere are more shots in my photo gallery, mostly in the July 2008 and the September 2008 folders (look under "monthly". Click here to go there.

Backups, backups...

Today I want to talk to you about backups. The subject usually only comes up when you have a scare, right?

Yesterday I sat down to work on the Humber College Motorcycle website (it's at http://www.motorcycle.humber.ca if anyone is interested). I did a photo shoot there some weeks ago because they wanted to update the website, and what with moving, working, etc, I didn't get to it until yesterday.

Well that's not quite true -- I edited the photos right after I took them, created a concept and sent them a couple of samples of what I was planning to do. They liked it, so here we go. Now retrieve the samples I sent them... where are they? Not on the desktop hard drive... maybe the laptop? No... that was full so I deleted a bunch of stuff, but I know I backed it up... it must be on the 1Tb portable drive... no... maybe on my USB key... no...

I had to email the customer to send me back the images (montages, actually) that I had sent him. Pretty embarassing. I suspect the files are on my former backup drive, a 500Gb device that I gave to Iris when I got the 1Tb drive. Yes, I have folders in multiple places with the project in them, but not the current latest version.

So I'm not going to preach at you that you need to back up your work. You already know that. But you need to keep your backups current. Find a system. There are lots of them that work, but you need to be diligent about using it.

I used to do a backup by dumping my "my documents" folder (and later under Vista, "my pictures" as well), once a month, onto the backup drive. Not good enough for me. Now I find myself working on the files right on the backup drive. Not smart -- I don't have current copies in the computers -- essentially, I've eliminated my safety net by shortcutting my procedures.

So what do I need to do? First thing is to go back to working on the computer hard drive instead of the backup drive. Then I need to back up each project as I work on it, then I have to burn DVDs so I have a "hard" copy of my work.

Now my friend Jim is working on an article about proper backup procedures, so I'll post a link to it when it's available. He talks about keeping ALL your photos in one place -- that only works when you back that up somewhere else. In the meantime, I have to save my work one way or another, even if it isn't ideal.

What do I use for backup drives? Western Digital "MyBook" external USB/SATA drives. They're available at Costco -- 500Gb is about $100, 1Tb is about $200. Not a lot of money when you need some peace of mind.

All Right! Tons of visitors

I'm honoured (Canadian/British spelling!). 80 distinct visitors so far, and from all over the place. The Philippines, New Zealand, Belgium and of course all over the US and Canada. I attached a neat hit counter that lets me see all that stuff.

Remember, you can see most, if not all of my images by going to my photo gallery. Click here, or at right.

I know where a lot of you are from -- VROC. For those not in the know, that's the "Vulcan Riders and Owners Club", a group I've been a member of for several years and although we're all joined by the common link to the venerable Kawasaki Vulcan motorcycle, we're an eclectic group including some members with discriminating taste (demonstrated by the fact that they're reading this!).

So since there are motorcyclists here, it behooves me to give them something to look at. Here you go:



Now Luc is an RCMP Sergeant (maybe Staff... I'm not sure). I met him at the Police motorcycle competition mid-August at Humber College. He's a friend of a friend of mine, Lori (Twuble) who rides a little Ninja 500. I'll have to find a picture of Lori to post later. Anyway, the layout that Luc was riding -- successfully I might add -- was really really tight. I tried it later on a little Virago 250 and was generally able to do it, but not a chance on my ST-1100. Here's me on the ST-1100:



I'm not as skilled. I'm trying, but I can't do what these folks can do. Of course they can't take pictures... this photo was taken by "Killboy" at Deal's Gap in North Carolina. Quite the place: 318 turns in 11 miles. (I just read that the record amateur time on the Dragon was 11 minutes. I did it in 14. Not as bad as I thought!) here's a couple of links: a video of still images from Killboy and a link to the "Tail of the Dragon" website.

Here's me on a dirt bike last June:


A little Orton effect for you photographers. I didn't take the photo (obviously) but I did do the PhotoShopping! I have to tell you, I was SORE after that day. I used muscles I didn't even know I had! But was it ever fun. Oh, and I did end up planting my face in that puddle!

And here's another friend, Shawna Aron, a couple of years ago on her R6. I took this at Shannonville racetrack right after I got my 70-200 lens. Shawna was the Canadian Women's Superbike Champion that year.



OK, so I promised you waterfalls. Be patient, they're coming! First I wanted to show motorcycles to my loyal followers!

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!

New PhotoShop

If you're in the digital photo world, you know that Adobe has announced PhotoShop CS4. This just after I upgraded to CS3, of course.

There are some interesting new features in it, but not enough to make me run out and plunk down my money anytime soon. I got a glossy bonus issue of Photoshop User magazine (if you're not a NAPP member, you should be) that described all the new goodies in CS4. Most of them are 'way too high end for me -- doing videos and animations and 3D and small stuff like making the dodging and burning tools easier to use, a new adjustment panel and better layers and vector masking. All beyond my needs.

There were a couple of neat things in it, though -- especially that "content aware scaling function". Now here's a picture that could have used that new function perfectly:



What's wrong with this image is the position of the firefighter (it's not as if I could have told him to move...). If he had been much closer to the burning car it would have been a killer image. The new function in CS4 would have allowed me to seamlessly move him closer by cutting out the dead space in between. Of course journalistic ethics would not allow that anyway, but it would have been a much better photo.

The Toronto Star photo editor liked the following picture, by the way, but they didn't buy it because they said the smoke would not have rendered well on newsprint and besides, there was a plane crash that day and they didn't have space. I named the picture, "FireBug". It won an "Honourable Mention" in the annual Greater Toronto Council of Camera Clubs (GTCCC) competition that year.



There are some improvements in Camera Raw (version 5 ships with CS4), most notably some tools that work on selective parts of the image unlike the current RAW programs that will only work on the whole file. So you could darken a sky, for instance, without touching the foreground. Now you have to do it in PhotoShop instead of in Camera Raw. OK, useful to improve workflow, but not that essential unless you're processing lots of images.

Anyway, that's my take on it. It's not worth it to me to upgrade at this time. Perhaps if I learn about some other functions and get much better at using PS, it might be.

I'm impressed

No photos today, folks (I can just FEEL the disappointment wafting through the ether). Not to worry, there are lots more to come!

However, photographically related (I think I'll start labelling paragraphs "NPR" for "not photographically related" when it's about my grandkids or something else personal. If you're just reading this for the photo stuff, you can skip those paragraphs).

PR: The guest speaker at the camera club, as I said yesterday, was Richard Lautens from the Toronto Star. He's an eloquent and communicative speaker and certainly a talented professional photographer. Sometimes people like that hold back -- that's what's wrong with mentoring because the mentor generally wants to maintain his advantage over his student -- but I got the impression that Richard didn't. He was secure in what he does and he knows he's good at it.

You had to be there to get what he was saying. You'll have the opportunity because he's going to be presenting again at the Digital Imaging Show in a couple of weeks. See him if you can.

A few tidbits:

• You really really need to know your hardware inside out. You can't shoot creatively if you have to think about which button controls the aperture setting or how to switch to manual focus.


• You can have a $15,000 lens but it doesn't do you a damned bit of good if you don't know where to point it.


• Think about the shot you want to get BEFORE you shoot. Yes, luck plays a part, but there's no substitute for hard work and planning. I am AMAZED by all the forethought that goes into his pictures.


• While the "rule of thirds" and other compositional elements are important and can add to an image, the purpose in journalistic photography is to tell a story. Inter-club competition rules go by the wayside when you're trying to communicate a feeling with a picture.


• Put people in your pictures. They make your viewers connect with the images much better.

I'm inspired to go out and shoot some more pictures. It's hard to find the time -- perhaps next weekend.

TTFN...

Hockey & Stuff

We moved my furniture yesterday, as I previously posted. We stopped to watch Ryan (my grandson) playing hockey and I brought the camera and the 70-200, planning to try the predictive focus tracking function of the D300. Good test! Hockey is TOUGH to photograph. I'm guessing for every photo in the newspaper there's a couple of hundred rejects -- and that's what motor drives and fast frame repeats are for.

It's not my style -- so I really didn't get into it. The most I shot was a 3-shot burst, but I did get a couple of useable images. Here's one:



Pretty sharp. I tracked this kid all the way from the blue line. Even at ISO 1600, I only got 1/160 sec at f/5.6 (depth of field at f/2.8 would have been too shallow). There are a few more images in my October gallery.

I also took a few pictures of my granddaughter running around. I have to study more about the facial recognition and predictive focusing functions, I'm not sure I got it right. Anyway, this shot was under arc lamp lighting and I let the camera choose the white balance. It was a touch too yellow, so I colour corrected it a bit. Kind of a good feel to the shot, though.





The only other image I took yesterday was of my odometer on the bike, showing "55555" km. I had to take it: my friend Styles obsesses about the number "555", so this shot was for him. I'm impressed with the crisp sharpness of the D300, something that the 6Mp D70 seemed to lack a bit. You had to work at it with that camera. The D300 just does it.



I spent the best part of the day today addressing computer issues. Seems my mouse didn't want to do its thing when I reinstalled my desktop in this location, so I replaced it and the keyboard at the sanme time -- the old keyboard had worn out lettering, so it's a good thing I can touch type! This one seems better. The Microsoft mouse I bought has a neat "magnify" function which is tied into the little sub-button on the right side. Makes it easier to see small type with these old eyes! It's a Microsoft Wireless Laser Mouse 5000, by the way. $60 for a wireless mouse & keyboard. Not bad, they've come down a lot. I had to disable the left sub-button because I kept pressing it by mistake. The trials and tribulations of being left handed...

I had to get an external wireless thingy for the desktop since I don't have a wired internet connection here. The one I bought was $20 at Staples and looks like a typical little USB key. Took a bit of work to get it going. It's not as sensitive as the laptop receiver -- the laptop says 99% signal and the new thing only about 52%, and they're side by side right now.

I still have some technical stuff to sort out. I don't have a TV yet (the TV card for the laptop doesn't work well enough to keep it so I brought it back), and my cellphone reception sucks here so I'll have to look at those two items tomorrow. Maybe I can get some photos of the new place by then.

The camera club meeting tomorrow should be interesting: guest speaker is Richard Lautens from the Toronto Star. I saw him at the Digital Imaging Show and he was pretty good -- he had a lot of tips for photojournalists. You can learn a lot from guys like him.



See Y'all!

Moving Day

These days are always stressful. We need to pick up the furniture in Thornhill, load it on Rich's trailer (my son in law graciously -- no "generously" -- offered to help me move), take part of the load up to King City, go watch Ryan play hockey at noon in Uxbridge, drive the rest of the load North, deliver it there, take a mattress back to Thornhill, then go home. Whew!

I'm riding the bike up North, going to keep it up there where the raods are better anyway!

I'm packing a small camera bag, just the D300, long lens and normal lens. Watch. There will be the perfect shot for the wide angle... OK, I just packed that in too! There won't be a lot of time for picture taking, but maybe I can get some hockey pictures at Ryan's game.

It's 6:30am -- gotta run. Catch you later!

Busy Days

I'm moving tomorrow... well technically I'm only 1/4 moving. See I have two residences, one up in Minden where, I like to say, it's nice all the time regardless of the weather... and one here in Toronto where I spend half my time because I have to be here for business.

I'm moving the Toronto home -- but not all in one day -- hence the "1/4" thing. The new place is technically not IN Toronto, I'm going up to the North end of Richmond Hill, around Lake Wilcox. Hopefully my internet access won't be interrupted too badly.

Actually I won't have access until they give me the codes for the WEP encryption on the network. Hopefully that'll happen tomorrow night. So no pictures for a few days. I'll try to get some shots of the new place soon.

By the way, I decided to hang on to my D70. Everyone needs a spare body, right? Anyway I can hang a lens on it so I can react quickly if the glass on the D300 isn't right for the shot. I have to send it to Nikon for a cleaning, though. There's some stuff on the sensor I can't easily remove and I don't want to do anything silly. We'll see how that goes, and I'll report back here in due course.

Later, folks!

Spectacular Colours

I don't think I mentioned it in yesterday's post, but the fall colours up North are SPECTACULAR. Anywhere North of Minden along #35, the reds are OUTSTANDING as compared with last year's dull yellows and browns. Get thee up there!

I haven't shot any images in the last day or two -- being away for a week plays havoc with your schedule and I've been 'way too busy. And I'm moving on Wednesday, so it will be a little longer before you see new pictures from me. Stay tuned, though!

Oh, and I want to talk about Blurb.com -- I'll do so tomorrow, probably -- out of time this evening.

I'm Baaaaaaaaaack...

I just spent a week up here at the Haliburton School of the Arts (Sir Sandford Fleming College), attending the "Travel & Landscape Photography Workshop" with professional photographer, Rob Stimpson. My friend Sean Shapiro attended as well, and he stayed with me at the house in Minden, about 15-20 minutes away from the campus.

The course started slowly but it spooled up eventually. The problem was, it was billed as an "advanced" course, the criteria for attendance being that you were familiar with the digital photography world and how your camera worked. Some of the participants had little experience, and Rob had to spend some time bringing them up to speed. I was a little guilty as well, since I have been the proud owner of a new (to me) Nikon D300 for about 4 days before the start of the course, and hadn't familiarized myself with all of its awesome features yet. Still, there was a broad spectrum of people there, all with different perspectives. One lady had published her own book (I've been meaning to...) and successfully sells art photos; another has a registered butterfly garden and has won some prizes with her photography; there was a retired teacher just getting back into photography, and more.

Sean and I agreed that we could have TAUGHT this course. Watch this space...

Anyway, if you want to see some of the photos that I took during the course, you can visit my photo gallery at Smugmug. This link takes you to the September 2008 monthly gallery, where some of the pictures are posted. By the way, I had about 1200 shutter actuations during the week.




I keep saying that I'm going to post here regularly. I'll try. I doubt I have an audience (going to work on that!), so it's hard to get motivated to do so, but I'll try.

Good Morning!

Another beautiful day here at True North! That's what I call this place. When people ask me, "where's your cottage", I either say "Haliburton" or "Minden" or "Carnarvon". I can't make up my mind. The house is technically just outside the town of Carnarvon, which is in the Township of Minden, which is in the Haliburton Highlands. All Greek to anyone not from here, but most Ontario-ans have heard of Haliburton, that's why I use it.

Anyway, I said it was a beautiful day -- that's because they're ALL beautiful days up here. The weather has little to do with it, it's just the atmosphere, being here, that makes it beautiful. Today is cloudy and maybe a little damp, temperature in the low teens, but I'm up here...

I'm prompted to write because... well just because! We'll see if I can continue to use this as a medium for posting my thoughts on a regular basis.

So this morning, looking out the window, I'm pleased to see so many different species of birds enjoying my bird feeder(s). When I get back to the city I'm going to try to find a book to help me identify them, there are lots of them we've seen all the time but can't name. Those black guys, for instance, with irridescent green around the head and throat.

I was sitting here minding my own business when I heard a thud at the window. Couldn't figure it out until I looked down on the deck and saw a red headed woodpecker which had knocked itself out on the picture window. That's at least the third -- maybe the fourth -- species of woodpecker that has graced me with a visit. I went out with a pair of gloves on and went to pick him up. He was woozy and let me start to pick him up, then recovered and flew away. He came back about 5 minutes later and landed on the Austrian Pine just outside the window. I got a picture, which I'll work on a little later.

Hey, I just figured out what that black bird is -- it's a "Common Grackle". I don't like them much...

Anyway, enough for now. I've got to get some work done, then I'm heading back to the city. I'll do some photo processing later and put them up on the gallery. The best place to start on my gallery is the "monthly photos". I've got to get that reorganized too...

Starting Fresh!

Wow! It's been over a year since I last posted here. I'm not a "blogger"! The trouble is, I can't imagine why anyone would want to read my daily ramblings, so I don't know how to write it. Who is my audience? Why am I doing this?

Well I fancy myself a writer. I want to share my thoughts and events with people. Maybe someday this will be part of my "Legacy".

That's something I think about. When I die, I want to leave something behind. Until this moment, I thought my photos would be my legacy and I'm looking at compiling them into a book some day. But words can be my legacy too. Again, I have to settle on who my audience is before working out how and what to write down.

Back to photos: that's my passion right now. I don't think I'm great at it, but I'm pretty good. Composition -- seeing that image -- is my biggest challenge. I'd love to be able to take a course and learn more about it. Here's a picture I love, that I took last fall:


So what's new in my life since I last posted? Lots! I'll try to write more about them later, but here's a short list:

• I met Iris and we've moved in together. She's the lady in my life.


• I learned I have another cancer -- prostate. It's slow moving, so I don't expect it will be a problem for a while. I also have a urinary problem that doesn't look like it's going to go away.


• I bought this house up in Minden. I say "this house" because that's where I am while I'm writing this. Here's a picture of the living room:
  
  

Anyway, time to stop for now. I have work to do. I'll try to continue this tomorrow.

Time to wake up again!

I haven't posted anything to this blog in a long while. So I'm just logging in to say hello and remind people that I have some pretty good photo images to look at and perhaps to purchase! Details to follow!

Here's a new picture to look at: I took it at the Orchid show last weekend here in Toronto, then (I guess this will come as no surprise to those who know me) I spent some time on it in PhotoShop. I'd love to know what you think about it (come on, take your best shot!).