Spring Flowers Outdoors

On Saturday morning before the sun was high, I ambled across the street to try some flower macros. A neighbour has some pretty Heather plants which I wanted to shoot.

I found it difficult because spring flowers stay low to the ground, and I with a bad back don't manage the getting down too well.

Another neighbour has Scillia, another flower which grows even lower. Yikes! I did not nail the focus on this shot, but there is something about it that I like.

On the way back to my place, I decided to photograph our first tulip in our own garden. As it happens, it turned out to be my favourite shot of the morning. How often does it happen that the best shot of an outing is often the unplanned one?

This tulip is not quite the classic tulip shape, almost more like a peony,  and is also not yet fully open. It did open later in the day and may deserve another shot at another time.

As I have mentioned previously, I don't find flower macros easy, but at least inside I can put the flowers on a table and also not have to deal with breezes. It's a bit of a challenge for me for sure.

I should take a photo of how I have to set up one of these photos. Maybe next time.

Outtakes

I posted a flooded tree photo two days ago, but I took a few more photos while at the park that evening. I am titling this post Outtakes because I was disappointed with these attempts at first, but on second sight they seem at least acceptable.

This is one of the wonderful willow trees along the bank where we like to sit in summer. You will notice that the bench is still in the water at this point.

Further toward the west/south end, I liked the path winding its way through the scene.

I liked the backlight on the buds in this shot. I really should have had my longer lens on the camera, but it was back in the car. I opted to give it a bit of an impressionistic effect, which is probably too grand a word for my meagre talents or lack of same. It applies mostly to the background in this case.

Breakfast for the Mother of my Children

For Mother's Day, we go out for breakfast. But after one experience of going out on the actual Sunday many years ago, we reverted to doing it a few days before Mother's Day. Being so close to the day, it still feels like a proper celebration but without the crowds.

Our favourite breakfast place in our town closed up over a year ago, so this time we decided to head into the city to a place we had heard good things about. Cora's specializes in breakfast; as far as I know they don't do anything else.

We took a rural route into town, at least as far as we could, more or less the blue arrows on the map. It was a nice, sunny day, and we enjoyed the trip.

But then we were in the city on the red arrows where the traffic was thick and fast, and there was also a spot of construction. This I did not enjoy.

But we made it.

We leafed through their prodigious menu and then waited for a reasonable length of time. But I had good sight lines in the meantime.

Some of the restaurant.

The food came. Doesn't it look good?

And it probably would have been good had it been hot. Instead, it was just moderately warm. Very moderately. The pancakes were the coolest of the lot, so the server had them reheated, but I don't think their microwave was in good working order.

So, we kind of scarfed our food, trying to consume it before it became completely too cold. Even doing that, Sue didn't quite make it and had to leave some. Pity.

What with tax and tip, the bill was >$40. It wasn't worth it. If we were living closer, we might be induced to try again sometime, but it's too big of a trip to experiment and then be disappointed.

The trip home was nice enough, at least once we got through that second red arrow. On the yellow, we were back in the country and enjoying ourselves. We did have a close call when a deer ran across right in front of us, but I was able to brake enough to miss the dear deer by about a foot or maybe a yard. It was close anyway: too close.

As you can see we had made a circle in effect and were back home after about 40km/25mi each way: 80km/50mi total. Back in town, we did drive to the park to try out the fare from the new ice cream truck, but that day was cold and windy, and it wasn't open, or at least the window slat was down.

Last Night and this Morning

Last evening I went to the park to attempt to get a photo or two. My intent was to get some trees while the leaves were still light and feathery. I was hoping for some nice light on the trees, but if wishes were horses then beggars would ride.

This park can be frustrating for me. It's a nice park, but I find it difficult to find nice compositions there.

After some aimless wandering about, I took this photo of a sunset beyond a flooded tree. That pond usually isn't there although it often appears in springtime.

I waited until the sun was low enough that it didn't give me flares, and the cloud cover helped.

As for this morning, it was overcast enough that I ambled over to the neighbours garden to try to snap their Heather plant. But it was windy, and I didn't do well, so I deleted them all. Also, with a bad back and all, getting low is highly problematic. Sigh.

After coming back inside, it was around 6:20 when Sue saw a full rainbow from the bedroom window. What neither of us noticed at the time was that there was a faint double rainbow. I only saw that in the photo, believe it or not.

Since rainbows disappear quickly, I just poked my head out the back door and fired away rather than try to drive around and look for a better shot. But I did take the time to put on my wide angle lens (which is also what I used for the tree shot above). It's not every rainbow that is a complete arc with a double to boot.

From the back door. Note the double which neither of us saw at the time.

Then I shot from the upstairs window. By this time it was raining, so I picked up the drops on the window. I didn't open the window because if the way that it opens, I would have been obstructed.

I was pleased to get the shot as well as I did after the disappointment with the earlier flower shots.

Sleepover, Arcade Games, and Comic Books

With Danica having to get up very early for a scholastic event on the other side of Ottawa on Saturday morning, we offered to have Jonathan for another sleepover.

Somehow, along the way, he had become 3 sleepovers behind Danica, so it was still makeup time anyway. We had made up 2 nights just 2 weekends ago, and now the kids could be even steven as they say.

On both Friday evening and Saturday morning, he spent a lot of time on my chair and I snapped various of his positions.

More often than not, he was using my phone, but he also purchased a little Atari game which was set up as a mini arcade. It's in one of the images above, but here it is repeated; he is playing on the game while also watching a video of some sort on my phone.

Saturday morning dawned fair after a horrendously windy night in which we miraculously didn't lose power although 200,000 homes in Ottawa did, so the weather was perfect for a stroll downtown on Free Comic Book Day.

We made various stops, including one at the library where they lined him up for a picture which they later posted on FB, and I snapped one too.

But then he met up with friends and soon left grandma and grampa behind. He was across the street already in the next picture, and Sue and I decided to go the other way and sit and wait in a coffee shop.

Sue, however, just had to have her picture taken with this magnificent Transformer character.

Eventually, we got together again, and after a light lunch out, JJ spread out his trophies on the coffee table at home.

He is playing one of his two new arcade games while the other sits on the table with all of the comics that he collected.

A n d . . . two that originally got lost in the shuffle. The explanation for my pose in the second shot is that we are beside a superman display.

One Thing Leads to Another

Yesterday's post where I severely cropped an image has led me to another another photo from the same concert.

This is the original photo, and there are problems with it. I was working at an odd angle, which is partially why the image is a little crooked.  There is also a lot extraneous clutter all around.  But other aspects are not bad. The exposure is about as good as can be expected in very difficult nighttime, concert lighting, and the subject is fairly well placed in the frame. I have also captured a moment with an interesting expression, or at least I think so. You do what you can at such a event: capture a decent base image, and then hope to be able to work something positive in the editing phase.

So, back then in 2016, I did some straightening and cropping as well as processing to taste. It looks much better.

I also experimented with black-and-white and just kept in on file. I don't think I ever showed the image back then although I might have here but certainly not on Flickr.

That was then; now, almost two years later, I decided to crop in tight. I also removed some distractions and added a slight toning to the image which I thought was a little better than straight b&w for this image.

It has come a long way from the original, out-of-camera version. When you don't shoot in perfect conditions, post-processing is your friend. Even when conditions are better and you can take your time and get everything as right as possible in camera, the final version still requires some crafting. All photographers spend some time in the digital darkroom just as in days past and not all that long past, they would craft their images in the actual darkroom.

Addendum: I had this all set to go, and then I took another look at the photo and said to myself, "Self! Why have you left the microphone in the photo?" I replied that I didn't know an that it was silly. So, I took it out.

Get Closer and then Get Closer Still

Do I sound preachy lately? I don't mean to; I just post about what's on my mind or what I'm up to. And so I have another photography bit for your consideration. It has to do with the title: Get Closer and then Get Closer Still.

It's good advice. One thing that I notice anywhere but certainly on Flickr which is where I hang out a bit, photographically speaking, is that there's so often extraneous material in a photo. For example, someone might post a photo in which a blank and uninteresting sky makes up 50% of the image.

It's great to get it right in camera, but sometimes you are at the limit of your camera's zoom or you just didn't happen to see the best composition when you were composing the photo. But you can always crop in post, whatever program you use, and it doesn't have to be a fancy program like Photoshop. Any photo program will support cropping.

Yes, you are losing pixels, but many images will still be big enough if you want to print them, and let's face it, most images don't get printed anyway, and the image will still be fine and dandy to show online.

Having said that, sometimes you want context, so tighter isn't always preferable. For example: if you are taking a portrait of a person, you may want to show where they are.  If someone is sitting on a bench under a tree or by a river, it may (or may not) be important to include the tree or the river. In this photo, the autumn trail was a very important part of the image, so I wouldn't want to crop it. Context can be  important.

However, the exceptions can also prove the rule. Below is an original photo followed by a cropped version. They both have merit, but I decided that I liked the tight crop better in this case as I find that there is less to pull my eyes away from the subject.