I am sitting here, reading your posts and things, and really appreciating my second cuppa. It is better than first, not that the first was bad, you understand. Sometimes, I seem to hit the perfect proportions of water, coffee and cream. At least more perfecter than at other times, even though I try to do the same thing every time. It's Belgian Chocolate, by the way.
That's the post, folks. That's it for today. All of it.
Have a good day, y'all.
I have some photos from the past week or so, which I didn't see fit to post then. Either they were not up to par, or they didn't fit my narrative in those blog posts.
When I mentioned in the previous post that I had taken a rather meh wide angle photo, this was it, down by the pond on a very bleak afternoon. This is definitely a not-up-to-par photo, but it is my one and only wide angle photo so far this month, so here it is.
So, there it is — a very ordinary photo. I must use my wide angle lens again, but it is my heaviest lens and the lens that I use least. A panorama stitch, as described yesterday, accomplishes something similar — for the most part, but not totally.
I have a few other photos that I didn't post at the time. The first is the pond/reservoir at Roy Brown Park. They sky is its best feature. Below that is another photo of the 4 geese, in which I deliberately shot through the weeds for effect. I like it just about as much as the first photo that I posted at the time.
Finally (but not really as it turns out), I have a photo of cracks in the ice. I thought the lines and texture interesting enough, but I was featuring macros when I posted on that day, and they were better photos too. However, I guess this is an okay abstract.
Finally Addendum: On another short outing, I took another pano, but not a sweep, just a crop of a regular photo. Except, I did crop in camera, so I do get an extra point. :) It's of a different group of trees than in the previous post, and I left it in original colour. Some people don't see any value in photos like these, but sometimes I really don't mind capturing the day just as it was, and this result actually appeals to me.
Absolute Finally: Big Storm last night. When I awoke this morning, neighbour was beginning to blow his driveway, so I grabbed my handy dandy iPhone.
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| Look at the pile at the end, from the town plow. |
The contractors had already been to ours once, so our driveway pile was not as big as some, but we were still plowed in. They will return for a second pass in due course.
We will not likely venture forth on this day.
I had recently used all of my lenses, at least of the ones that I use on a relatively regular basis, even my wide angle lens although I am not sure that I will reveal that banal photo.
What I hadn't done was shoot an actual panorama. Now, I do frequently crop into a panoramic aspect ratio — basically horizontally wide and narrow vertically — but I seldom shoot a panorama by moving the camera while photographing a scene.
It's so easy with a phone that I was tempted to use it instead of the big beast. With a phone., you just sweep from one side to the other, and the phone does the work on the spot. With my DSLR, however, I must click the shutter, move the camera slightly, and click again. Usually, for me, this involves 3 or 4 separate photos. But that's what I chose to do on that occasion because I am trying to not resort to the phone too much these days as I feel that I overused it last year.
After taking the various shots, you get your software to piece them together into one image. I use Lightroom, but Photoshop and other programs can do the job. In the distant past, software could not do this, so once or twice, I managed to do it by hand. It was a slow and finicky process and not as good a result as the software does now does within seconds.
These were my two panos from Tuesday. I tried another but didn't like it. They are both taken at the edge of Riverside Park near the boat launch. As you can plainly see, I converted them both to b&w, but that didn't need much of a conversion on that gray day.
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| A 3 photo merge with some foreground snow cropped away |
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| A 4 photo merge with much foreground snow cropped out. |
They are very different that this regular not-a-pano photo from January 01, where there is a significant tonal range from black to white. You saw the colour version a week or so ago.
I like both styles, for each fits the day and scene, but right now, I am particularly taken with the gray vibe of the first two.
Sue's Monday prompt involved macros, so I affixed my macro lens as well. I take different lenses on different days and had planned on using the macro lens one day anyway.
Off to the park we went.
Sue says that this ↓ is what she often sees ahead of her on our treks: me in my red coat, with camera and cane.
That coat is anything but new, but red really stands out in photos, so Sue pretty well demands that I wear it. I have another coat that is just as old, but I haven’t worn it nearly as much. In point to fact, I purchased the other coat just a few weeks before this one. At the time, I wasn’t looking for a second coat, but Sue convinced me.
Macros can be hard on old bodies. I should really be down on my knees, but then I would probably have had to stay there.
Outdoor winter macros, for me, call for simple minimalism, and here's what I brought home that day.
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| I see a face |
I like the results well enough. They make me feel artistic, which I am not.
On Sunday, our world went from brown to white in the first meaningful snowfall of the New Year, and a most pleasant change it was, both for the walk and for the photos.
Sue had couple poses in mind for her daily photo project, so she brought her tripod and set up two different bridge scenes.
She would set up the phone, walk back into the picture, and fire the shutter from her watch. She did this a number of times, so she got a fair workout going back and forth.
Of course, I took some photos, but she staged this first one.
Then I took a portrait of my snow queen. I don't get many outdoor photos of her without sunglasses, so this was a special treat for me.
Finally, I directed her to the bench for two more poses. It was a summer photo here that almost made the cut in my recent retrospectives, but I had to make some decisions. This ↓ is what I got for my winter version.
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| I really like the photo but should probably photoshop the phone. |
This park and the others tend to become inaccessible for ancient ones such as I as the snow accumulates over the winter, so it was good to get there while there were only a few inches to plod through.
We've come to the end. Thank goodness, eh? Sometimes I start something that gets out of hand, and I think that's the case with this series. But I must plod on at this point.
November
November is the least propitious month for photography around here. The colour is gone and the snow hasn't arrived. It is pretty bleak. I tried to capture that in this photo. Once I saw the result, I quite liked it
However, on a different day, when we stopped by this little embayment in the river, both the water and sky were blue, and I like it.
November is a good month to look indoors for pictures. As I recently mentioned, I like taking candid people photos, and this one of Al, pleases me.
At month's end, we found a colourful sunset, so I was able to accomplish more than I had thought I would that month. Look and ye shall find.
December
Early in December we took this photo of Sue and me. I attached it to most of the e-Xmas cards that I posted to friends. The lighting was awful, but I managed to rescue the photo in edit. Not that I like taking a poor photo, but rescuing one does bring me some satisfaction.
The next photos may be fresh in your memory banks. I enjoyed the lights at the mill a whole lot, these two ↓ being my favourites. With help from Photoshop, the first one is slightly different than the version that I posted previously. I magicked some fresh snow in the foreground to replace the thin layer of trodden snow, at least until until it got near the fence. I think that it greatly improves a photo that I already liked.
We read online that there were swans down by the boat launch, but as we were passing the park, Sue saw them before we got that far. The swans generally show up sometime in winter, often at a distance, way out in the river. On this day, however, they were in shooting range, especially because I had brought my longest lens.
Actually if I may step back a bit, the first group that we saw was at the far bank, quite a distance away, even with the long lens.
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| This was at full zoon — 400mm. |
It was as we got nearer the river that we spotted another family of seven, quite close to the near riverbank. That is when AC began to press the shutter like a madman.
Here's the whole group, sometimes collectively referred to as a bevy, along with two, chummy mallard ducks. Not knowing anything about swans, we presume that the two white swans are the parents and the darker ones their juvenile offspring.
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| I didn't know that they are Trumpeter swans until I looked it up when I got back home. They are very similar to Tundra swans that also have little yellow markings around the eyes. |
I began to try to isolate some from the whole bevy. This next photo took me down to four, and I like the two up and two down. I remember waiting until the closest swan lifted its head and dripped water from its last foraging.
I was eventually able to capture a single swan, not that I like the photo any better, but I just wanted this photo as well as the others.
Finally, I thought it would be fun to capture a duck with one of the juvenile swans.
Those were a few of the scads of photos that I squeezed off.
