Christmas Tree Ornaments Here are some of Linda's felt ornaments. The gnomes are done from a pattern but the dog is made from pictures of an actual dog.
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Un-photogenic Willow There is a willow tree growing just below the dam of the pond below my house. It's gnarly and cool looking when it's leaves drop each autumn. I've been trying unsuccessfully to get a decent picture of it for years. The problem being a matter of background clutter robing emphasis from the tree. This year I might have gotten a photo that works. On the day I took this picture a hard rain was adding a blur to the image that I couldn't get in post. There are two patches of color in the picture. A tree with red leaves on the left and a bush to the right adding a slight pop of yellowy-green. This picture is not about the willow tree it's about the last splash of color to leave the trees this fall. However, the willow is there between the color patches and the background is being blurred by the rain. So, I got a respectable shot of my nemesis tree by sneaking it in to an autumn foliage shot. ...
Whither Your Soul
Whither goes your soul? Will you find your only friend? Will you be happy? A Cemetery on a Hill In Southwestern Pennsylvania
The 150-600 telephoto is a good tool for getting close up photos of insects and other critters. This is a small collection of dragonfly pictures I took last week. I generally have the lens and camera mounted on a monopod with a ball head that has the mount plate at a 90° so as to give the lens a gimble actiion. It takes a bigger monopod to handle the weight of this lens and camera so I have an alumininm Sirui P-204S with an aluminum three footed base (chicken foot). It isn't quite the same as trucking around a tripiod but it's still a load. Celithemis eponina or Halloween Pennant Erythemis simplicicollis or Common Pondhawk Erythemis simplicicollis or Common Pondhawk Libellula luctuosa or Widow skimmer Hummingbird Moth Hemaris Diffinis_Aug 06 2020
As anybody would notice, if they live in a place that provides the appropriate view, the sun rises and sets in a different location from day to day. I have watched this cycle play out from the same home location for nearly thirty years. Combined with that my back porch view of late spring to early summer sunsets includes a communication tower that is, according to Google Earth's ruler tool, five kilometers away. I've always had the vision of capturing a sunset with the sun framing the tower. For the past month or so it has rained less than usual and clear sunny days have been common. I had been watching the sunset move along the horizon from the farthest north on the day of the Solstice to a point where I thought I may have a chance to capture the photo I wanted. Here is the result of a bit of luck and some perseverance. The tower is five km from my house. The contrail is from PIT which is about 69 km away. The Sun is about 151.8...
I woke up at about 3:30 this morning and looked out the window to see stars. Comet NEOWISE or officially C/2020 F3 is visible now so I decided to try to get a picture. It took a while to find the comet so I first took a picture of Mars, then Venus. At about 5:00am I walked up the road in order to get a better view of the eastern horizon. I had to quietly creep into my neighbors yard in order not to wake up his dog. It was then that I spotted a dim streak to the northeast. With my tamron 150-600 I was able to get a few different views. Here they are. C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) Comet with some horizon Comet over my house. Mars Venus Wide shot of NEOWISE
Fake Poetry Book
From my new fake book of illustrated poetry. Do not make me stop. Do not look for excuses There is no way back.
The theme for Flickr Friday this last week was "Stacked". On Friday we had some unsettled weather and the clouds got dramatic. Really good timing. Below is the picture I posted. It's a good picture. It certainly fits the concept of "only post your best stuff" because this is about as good as I get. Some other folks thought it was OK as well because it went on to Flickr's Explore page which is the sort of their front page. A lot of other people viewed this photo, a couple of hundred stopped long enough to click the favorite star and a dozen or so took the time to drop a favorable comment. This happened one other time and I find it interesting and to be honest great that people from all around the globe see something I've done and like it well enough to say so.
I have been posting pictures on Flickr lately. As a way to encourage community engagement There are groups that have weekly themes to use as inspiration for photos. This week a group called Macro Monday suggested the theme "On A Coin". Object being, put something on a coin and take a picture. When I started rummaging for a coin I knew I wanted the largest I could find. That way it might be easier to find an object that would fit. The flower is Lamium amplexicaule or Henbit. I remembered having this Kennedy Half Dollar and when I found it I looked at it for a full minute. It’s dated 1971. This forty-nine year old coin commemorates the presidency of a man that won the office almost sixty years ago. Some of the core issues of his time are the core issues of this time we are now living. Those of us that were naive enough to think that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was an end of the struggle to rid this nation of it’s worst disease has been disabused of that ...
I spied this little snail while on a walk yesterday. I'm glad I did because I almost stepped on it. Snail In Clover Looking For Something This is with the A7RIII and the 24-105. At 105mm and f4. This is not a macro lens but I can get a decent close up and with the 42mp sensor I'm able to crop some to find the detail.
There is a spot, just up the road from my house, that is, at certain times of the year, the perfect place to take a picture of a rainbow. It's near the crest of a hill. With the sunset happening in the west, the moisture in the air will generate a rainbow over the farms to the west. Panorama of a great rainbow spot. This is such a good place because I can get the sun directly on my back when a rainbow is most likely to occur. That has the effect of making it seem like your looking down a pipe. Occasionally a double rainbow happens though not a complete one like this. The photo is a series of four pictures snapped with the camera held vertically and overlapped some. The photos are combined in Lightroom and exported as a DNG file. After being edited for contrast and tone I can export again as a Jpeg for publishing here. The hardest thing for me is printing. The biggest print I can make is 13x19. Because the ratio of leng...
The camera is an Argus Cintar. The story was that my dad won it in a card game while on the boat home from WWII. I have no way to confirm that for sure but it's what my mom told me, so... It was the camera that recorded the big events of our lives. It captured pictures of our births, our holiday outfits, meals and gifts. It went along on vacations and captured the posed family group pictures. This camera took the photos you see there plus a few albums full that I didn't have room for here and a pile of slides that we would view projected onto a bare wall in the living room. Exposure was determined by following a chart that came with every roll of film. The flash required Sylvania Blue Dot bulbs that came mounted to a strip of cardboard. While I truthfully can't remember any of these photos being taken I do remember Dad pulling a bulb off that strip and touching the contact to his tongue in order to insure a good connection. Sometimes t...
In the last post I described how I made a picture of my grand sons flying. I enjoyed learning how to do that so much I tried another, this time with Leslie as the model. Starts out the same way. A background layer. Background Layer Next the model. I put the subject in at this time even though I will add another layer that has to be between the background and Leslie because I need to get her position correct and I may have to move her layer. The background here was not edited. It needs to be. At this point I had to look up a tutorial on how to add sun rays to the picture. Photoshop has a filter for doing this. I used this one to guide me through the process. When you add the filter it will drop in on top. Drag it down one so it is between the background and your subject. Other than that just follow along with the text and you will know when to deviate from instructions. Here is the result. Finished ...
We are sort of getting back to normal but I am still convinced the government plan at the federal level is to have no plan at all. It seems as though they are going to just let the contagion run it's course even if a couple of million people die. Yes, couple of million. Herd immunity is 60 to 70 percent of population. That's around 190,000,000 to 220,000,000 infections. At a one percent mortality rate it's going to be 1,900,000 to 2,200,000 deaths. So much for revering the "sanctity of life". At any rate, we watched the grandsons yesterday and I got them to slow down a bit and pose for some pictures. Original Photo This is how we managed to get them posed. I don't have a lot of time to fuss about trying to get everything perfect. The oldest is posing on the saw horse and was not comfortable at all, so I didn't notice his right arm being hidden. He should have been scooched up about thirty centimeters so his head would have be...
From U2's album "The Joshua Tree" song "Where the Streets Have No Name" I want to run, I want to hide, I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside. March 25, 2020: We are on self-imposed lock-down due to the pandemic. I worry, but so far I have held it together. Linda is anxious and justifiably so, having had pneumonia four times, a viral respiratory infection is not something to take lightly. Not being able to see Kade and Reid is a problem for both of us. We missed Tuesday night supper and not having a small one around to look after one or two days a week makes for some long, lonely days. So it's latex gloves at the gas station and grocery store because I had bought a a pile of them for painting the walls. Soon, maybe, masks as well if production can get caught up with demand. So, as Red Green would say, "We're all in this together. I...
Being dissatisfied with the photo of Dawson Bridge I went there today to see if I could revisit that shot. The fog wasn't thick enough to obscure the opposite end of the bridge so that idea washed out. As I was packing up to leave I looked up the river and had to take this picture. What the raw file looked like. The clouds and the reflection off the river create some strong diagonal lines that give some perspective to the picture. The thing that stops the composition is the entire right side of the image is the dark bank of the river and the messy naked trees along the bank. What I'll do here is go through my editing process in order to record how I tried to make something better from this image. All adjustments made in Capture One. Xrite color checker shot. As shot. In the white balance section I pick the eye dropper and select one of the neutral grey squares. After picking the grey neutral square. After picking the white balan...
