October Wallpaper

Well, it's been awhile since I posted on this blog no one reads, but I have been to Ontario for my son's wedding at the end of July, back to work for a month and then my 22 days off that just ended. I haven't had much time to do much. I had a lot of photos to process from the wedding week and then just seem to have been busy.

I never made a September wallpaper and it seems a little bit late to do so but here is one for October that I took recently from the deck at my son's place in Vernon. I thought the clouds were pretty cool. A 1000x667 size can be found in this album.

Here's a funny mistake I made while working on this picture. I cropped it to 1000x667 and Photoshop took forever to do it. I was annoyed at the program or the computer, whatever was causing the lengthy delay. I left the computer and let it do it's thing and came back a while later and it was finished. But, it was huge and I'm going "d'oh, what did I do?" I checked the settings and had forgot to change it to pixels from inches so it create this multi-gigabyte file that was 1000 inches by 667 inches. No wonder it took so long. I fixed it up and it cropped in it's usual fast time and I was just laughing at myself. It wasn't the computer, or the program but the operator. Oh well, live and learn.

RAW and B&W Shooting

My passion for black and white is growing in leaps and bounds. From landscapes to people to anything, I am experimenting with it and trying to learn as much as I can about it and about printing because that is the final output which is more gratifying to me than simply posting on the net.

One thing that most experts agree on is that you should shoot in color and convert to black and white in Photoshop or whatever image manipulation program one uses. That way, all the data is there and this allows for greater flexibility when converting to black and white.

What had me a bit perplexed (just a bit) is how that relates to shooting in RAW. Most cameras have the option to shoot in black and white but, in my mind, if you shoot in RAW that shouldn't make any difference except that the picture you see on you camera screen would be black and white. I'm thinking that this could be a good thing because it would give you an idea of what the image would look like in black and white. But, since RAW captures everything it seemed to me that when you brought it into your software, it would be in color and you would still need to convert although I have never read this anywhere.

So, I went out this evening and gave it a try. I put the camera in black and white mode (still in RAW) and took a bunch of shots of whatever was between here and the video store we walked to in order to return a movie. The screen of the camera showed the pictures in black and white. When I got home I imported the movies into Adobe Bridge and when they came up, as I thought, they were in color.

Just a note here for those who shoot in JPEG, this won't work since the camera converts the RAW file in its own software according to what mode you tell it to, ie. black and white.

This presents an interesting option when I am planning to shoot specifically for black and white conversion because now the viewfinder can give me a general idea of what the final conversion might look like.

Above are two of the shots I took on my little walk and converted to black and white. After conversion, I then use the quadtone option in Photoshop to give a richer look to the image. Sometimes it helps, sometimes not. I also convert using the black and white adjustment layer. The pictures are within 2 1/2 blocks of where I live. On the surface, a boring area but with, I think, some interest to be found. All in all, it was a good exercise and, though I didn't care about what I captured, I ended up with these two shots that I kind of like.

August Wallpaper

Whew! It has been a busy month since I last posted. I spent a lot of time working on a slide show for my son's wedding to his new bride. The show had 400 plus photos and was about 15 minutes long. I used a new program and it was just very time consuming. In fact, I finished it up about 2:00 a.m. on the day of the wedding/reception.

Of course, my wife and I also traveled to Ontario for the wedding and included a visit with my brother and his family in Oshawa before moving on to Peterborough for the wedding festivities.

I grabbed this picture just after we got off the commuter train in Oshawa. 12 of us had travelled to Toronto for a Blue Jays game as part of a stag party for my son. I thought it would make a good August wallpaper.

1/1000 at f5.6, ISO 100, 72 mm focal length, processed in Topaz Adjust for the HDR look.

Just some Fun

I was just messing around a bit this evening with a cloud photo I took a few days ago. I mirrored the cloud and cropped it for the look I wanted and then played around with the filters in photoshop and really liked what the plastic wrap filter did to it. So here it is. I did a whole bunch of other stuff before I got to this point, like converting to black and white and then using a duotone on it. I got the darker looks from using multiply on one layer and then using a layer mask to make the center even darker.

I'm too tired to look up the camera specs, plus the computer is reacting to the big file this became in photoshop and is running a bit slow.

Hope you enjoy my "artful" endeavor.

Black and White

I like black and white. This is from the shoot I did of my daughter and grandson a few days ago. As good as I think it looks on screen, it printed up even better on some Hahnemuhle Fine Art Baryta.

I converted to black and white in Photoshop using the black and white adjustment, then switched it to grayscale and used a quadtone present to get some richness to the image.

Specs: Canon 30D, 17-85 lens @ 38 mm (which is about a 61mm equivalent with the 1.6 crop factor), 1/60 @ f5, ISO 100.

Lighting info: I set up in a room upstairs in my daughter's house. Camera right had a window with light coming in so I used my 5 in 1 reflector using just the diffuser to let some softer light shine through. Behind the camera was another window that had light streaming in. I draped a white bedsheet over my daughters bowflex to soften that light. Then I used a Lastolite Ezybox Hotshoe softbox with my Vivitar flash shooting through it.

Who is a Real Photographer?

No picture today, been busy doing other stuff like printing some 4x6s for my daughter and in between, installing some transition pieces on the new flooring I recently put down.

There is a great post by David duChemin on the definition of a photographer and some great comments following. It's a good read and raises an interesting subject.

Here's some further thoughts on it. As I mentioned above, I installed some flooring recently. It maybe doesn't make me a flooring expert but certainly a DIYer.

When I worked in the warehouse at the mill I told my kids I was a professional driver. Technically, I was because I got paid to drive around the warehouse getting paper rolls for loading. Certainly not on the level of a Formula One driver, but what defines professional versus amateur? Mainly, in my opinion, getting paid for it. The term doesn't define the skill or skill level. An amateur golfer/football player/photographer/floorer may well have the same skill levels or higher that the pros do, but don't get paid for it.

I consider myself an amateur photographer, a hobbyist, whatever. I have been trying to take it to a higher level by learning about lighting, etc. and buying additional equipment. But, I'm not really interested, at this point, in making it all a business with all the pressure, etc.

Just some additional thoughts.

Seth Triptych

I've been busy the last few days but I had thought that these three shots of my grandson Seth would make a good triptych and I mentioned it to my wife and she thought it would be a great gift for a baby shower for my daughter. So, I threw it together and sized it to basically a 16x20 size and printed it out and put it in a frame I had sitting around. My daughter loved it and I was quite happy with how it all turned out.

I was thinking last night that I could have fancied up the text and done it in color, etc. but I like the basic black text. Suits the black background, I think.

Photoshop makes it all quite easy for this simple one.

It's a great hobby!