Beer and Tires

After two golden-hour posts, back to lights at blue hour we go.

I really didn't know where I was going to head on this morning, but I found myself in the parking lot of the biggest and main grocery store in town. It's a big and wide building, but where I positioned myself with the wide angle lens, I was able to get it all in the frame with lots of room to spare: 10 second exposure.

Long before opening, workers are arriving to stock the shelves for the day.

Off to my right in the above photo, there is another large store, Canadian Tire. This time, I decided not to try to photograph the whole thing but to concentrate on the part by the entrance: 2 seconds.

Until wow, there have scarcely been any clouds in all of my blue hour photos. Normally, photographers really desire them, but I have been liking the electric blue well enough. However, there were a few clouds in this one.

Of note: I do understand that these buildings, which I have been photographing, are not exactly architectural masterpieces, but there has been something redeeming about them in my opinion.  I think that there has consistently been two good elements in all of them – colour and light. If those elements are good enough, so is the photo – not necessarily great, but good enough to for a momentary pause of approbation.

Focus Stacking the Hawthorne

Believe it or not, I have two more golden hour photos for youse or yiz guys. I have strayed from my morning blue hour photos once again. But I urge you not to fret as we will return to the blue hour theme in short order.

I have had this photo op in mind for sometime, and finally around got to it or A Round Tuit. The idea was to photograph the derelict Hawthorne Mill from the opposite riverbank. The other part of the concept was to use grasses as a foreground element. Well, the grassy field that I seen seen previously had been mowed, but I found some weeds to use instead. As they say, needs must.

With the foreground and mill so far apart, I would have to take two photos and focus blend them in photoshop. One version would focus on the foreground and the other on the distant factory. I took the best part of each photo to, hopefully, come up with the seamless result with everything in focus from front to back.

Mission Accomplished: I managed to work the technique, and the golden light plus the reflections make the photos good enough, despite the iffy foreground element, particularly in the first photo.

I finally got A Round Tuit, and here is one for you in case you need it.

Summer Has Left the Building

Sometime last week, autumn snuck (yes, I will write snuck and not sneaked) into my den. Perhaps the better way to put it, however, is that summer, has left the building, just like Elvis used to do.

You may recall that I recently wrote about autumn here, reporting that one can define it either meteorologically or astronomically. I also wrote that my own perception was that autumn unequivocally arrived in my life when the sun no longer reached through the window to my computer monitor.

I noticed the absence of the morning sun hitting my computer screen on Friday, but I thought, in retrospect, that it had probably been a day or more since I had last seen that glare on the corner of my monitor. It was only on that day, however, that I realized that I did not have to adjust the monitor by tilting the screen or going to the window to pull the shades.

One doesn't necessarily notice the absence of something right away unless that particular something were quite important. We are more likely to notice when something happens for the first time than we are to notice that something banal didn't happen, and a wee bit of sunlight on the corner of my monitor really is quite banal.

I can tell you that, as I write this piece early in the morning, the weather agrees with me that fall has arrived, as it is barely above 10C/50F outside. I sit here in my hoodie but with the window, nevertheless, still open. Many months are coming when that option will not be afforded to me, so I am not rushing to shut the window. I will, however, shortly avail myself of a second mug of steaming coffee, which I may sip under the blanket on my chair as I play my morning games of Sudoku.

The 14-day forecast shows that daytime temperatures will continue to be pleasantly autumnal, hovering in the mid-20s, or 70s in Americanese. Nighttime will be quite cool but will remain above 10°C/50°F *. Trees have begun to change colour, a process that will soon seem to accelerate.

* I tend to make note of 10°C and 50°F because those temperatures match up perfectly on the two scales. It is also relevant to me because back in geography class we would use it as a reference point in classifying climate zones. If the warmest month on average doesn't reach 10°C/50°F, we would consider it to be an Arctic climate. To be defined as a Humid Continental climate, which is the zone in which I have always lived, 4 months would have to rise above 10°C/50°F.  A zone with only 1-3 months greater than 10°C/50°F would be classified as subarctic. Territorially, a very large proportion of Canada lies within the arctic or subarctic climate zones, but most of us don't live up there.

Since I have already strayed off-topic, permit me to stray a little further. 

In our local Humid Continental, technically the short summer variety, climate zone here near Ottawa, we have 5 months, May through September, that average over 10°C/50°F, with October coming close. July is the hottest month, with a monthly average of about 21°C/70°F. The average high for the month is 27°C/81°F. Of course, many days can exceed that average high temperature by quite a lot. It does get hot here, and humid hot to boot.

Meanwhile, average monthly temperatures fall below freezing for the 4 months from December through March, January being the coldest at -10°C/14°F. Let us not even talk about how dang cold some days can be.

Phew! I really didn't mean to go there. 

 

Caturday 31: The Traitorous Lacey

Lacey wants to apologize on my behalf. Somehow, I got way behind on my blog reading and, eventually, gave up the chase to catch up. I shall have to begin again from scratch. Sorry about that.

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It is nothing new to you that Sue is Lacey's person. Sue gets lap time and snuggles. Only when I am upstairs in my den do I get any attention whatsoever. Even then it is fleeting and not exactly snuggling. I have learned to live with this.

But when Jonathan visits us, Lacey is quite likely to visit him. This picture shows what I think of this.

But for some reason, JJ thinks this is quite funny.

This happens on almost every visit.

As lagniappe for you, when he was here and helping with breakfast, Sue brought out the chef's hat, which, of course, I never wear. We only have one, so she asked if I could work a little photoshop magic to show us both wearing it. While, I would rather hesitate to call this magic, I did manage to oblige milady.

I Forgot to Post

I was cleaning out my Blogger photo folder when I spied some fairly recent photos that I ordinarily would have deleted by now, had I posted them. I had to question whether I had posted them and then forgotten to delete them or whether I had forgotten to post at all.

Although I suspected that I hadn't posted, I really didn't know for sure. What with also posting to Flickr and FB, I tend to lose track of what I have done where and when. That's why I like to delete those photos once I have used them, and I have three separate folders to help me keep track.

A scroll through recent blogs revealed that I hadn't posted them, so now I will. Oddly enough, when you consider that most of my photos have been blue hour morning shots, these were taken during evening's golden hour. Evening! Can you believe it?

About a week prior to returning with the camera, I had noticed some interesting light on a tree as I was passing by. After some time, and somewhat surprisingly as well, that memory kicked in*, and I headed over with the camera at around 6 o'clock. I couldn't find a clean composition from my original point of view from the car, but I wandered about and did get this photo with the tree at the end of the walkway.

That one ↑ showed the long caving path, which I liked. The next photo ↓ is closer, and reveals the tree more.

Finally, I took a close one of just the branches and the leaves. It's probably my fave of this little shoot – just lines and colour.

* My memory or lack of same is somewhat surprising and unusual. I don't tend to completely forget a lot of items such as this, but they do go into hiding somewhere inside my cranium until something or other retrieves them. Unfortunately, it is then, very often, too late to do anything about it.

Back to School 2021

I almost forgot the first-day-back-to-school photoshoot that the kids' stepmother had planned, but I rushed out at the last minute to participate a little bit. She was busy taking photos of the kids holding signs when I arrived, so I just hung about for a bit. My first snap was of the three older kids, who will be in the same school, with JJ in the centre and Dani on the right.

Later, I was able to get all four of them on the balcony to reprise a photo that I have done in previous years. I did alter it a bit; the youngest on the far left looked better in a different rendition of the photo, so I swapped her head into this one.

When stepmom later posed the pair at the front door, I took a series of quick shots and decided to make them into a strip.

To make a single photo, I took the two snaps on the right, above, and put Danica's head from one into the photo that I liked best of Jonathan.

I think my favourite photo of the brief shoot was a quick candid of Jonathan. I prefer this one in bw, but I will show both versions.

For some reason, we didn't do a proper portrait shoot this year. By that, I mean that we didn't take the time to go a nice location in good lighting and then set up shots with greater thoughtfulness, like these two from 2019, which look good on prints displayed in my den.

Another Blue Hour, Another Gas Station

My sleep patterns have become more irregular in the past few months, so I haven't been getting out as early or as often as I was in June. It's not that I am sleeping worse, and it may even be that I am sleeping better. It does mean, however, that I am sleeping differently. In addition to perhaps sleeping a bit longer, on some days at least, I have been tending to go to bed later. Consequently, I have also been getting up later.

Fortunately, sunrise has also been occurring later. Although I have been more interested in blue hour than sunrise recently, it also means the blue hour is happening later as well. So you have recently seen some photos of a car wash, a medical centre, a big pharmacy, and a gas station.

My most recent escapade took me to another gas station. I didn't quite get the same angles that I got at the first station here, but I like the results well enough regardless. You have to work with what is in front of you. My original idea of shooting from across the street (off left in the photo below) put too many wires in the frame for my taste.

Serendipitously, there was also a bit of sunrise.

I wanted to get more sky, so I turned the camera to take a vertical photo. That meant that I couldn't get the whole building in the frame, so I took a sequence of photos (4, I think it was), and had Lightroom merge them together. Of course, I see that it is better with less sky, as above, but one has to try things. Perhaps if the sky had interesting clouds, I would feel differently.

Finally, I zoomed in on the store in the background. There was sky in the original, but I decided to crop down to the roofline in edit. The black line at the top is the edge of the roof, but I think I should have cropped it away.

As usual, I converted each to mono. Of course, the blue sky is a major feature, but sometimes I like the impact of bw. I'll just post one, however, to save my dear readers some repetition.

One problem with going out later is that morning traffic will soon be heavier. I will miss the solitude of very early mornings.