Charlie's Fake Blog

For the past twenty-five years that I've lived here our cars have been plagued by the sap raining down from a poplar tree on the edge of the driveway.  We have been looking for someone to cut it down.  A contractor that was replacing the door to our deck recommended a fellow named Art Martello who has a tree trimming service.  We contacted him and after getting an estimate hired him to cut down the tree and trim some branches out of the Maple tree that stands next to the house.  He was here Friday and did a pretty good job. We had agreed to cutting the tree trunk up ourselves so that we could give it to a neighbor for fire wood.  So, there's a pretty big log laying along side the driveway. Newly dropped tree.  My Commander in Chief ( AKA Linda ) informed me that under no circumstances was that log going to lay there for years.  I was to get it cut up post-haste.  This morning I looked at the work I had top do, Looked at my old chain saw th...

Recently I got a Chance to get out my fly rod and go fishing a a tiny trout stream in Elk County, PA.  I decided to make it more about photo taking than fishing and, trust me, no fish were harmed in the making of these photos.  The first thing you notice about streams that are suitable for native wild trout is the fact that they are heavily forested over.  Little sunlight reaches this creek. Since the water sees little sunlight from the time it emerges from ground until the stream wanders into more open farm country it is pretty cold.  As you can see from the picture, at this time of year the flow of the stream is low and slow.  there aren't a lot of nutrients for fish and consequently the fish are small. The wild brook trout are from four to six inches generally.  To find one bigger is rare.  They are survivors and therefore spooky when it comes to trying to present a dry fly.  So while I saw fish here and there and on two occasions I entice...

It's been awhile since I've posted here since I've been using instagram and G+ to post pictures but for this post I need more space to go on about a few things.  The first thing is Panoramas.  I really like making panorama pictures.  It's nice to be able to go to scenic places with a 50mm or 35mm lens and still feel confident that I'll be able to get not only a wide view but a wide view with a great deal of detail and low distortion.  Even with a wide lens there are landscapes that are just too wide to capture with one shot. A panorama in it's simplest form is a fairly easy thing to build.  You only need a sequence of overlapping photos taken from a stable platform of some kind and software to stitch them together.  My A6000 can build a panorama in camera but I prefer to take a series of raw files and use the panorama feature in Lightroom.  I generally set my camera vertically in order to get more pixels in the up-down direction and I generally try to ...

Today was a great day for a walk around the ( brother-in-law's ) farm.  I don't go for walks without a camera so I decided to take two. The little Sony a6000 with a 10-18 wide angle zoom and my a7 with a Canon 100mm macro FD. That pretty well covers the things I really enjoy taking pictures of. The wide lens for everything big and the Macro for everything small. Armed to be able to take a picture of anything means that I will take a picture of anything. Like a leaf nailed to a wooden pallet. Or my shadow. Or some wrinkled berries. Or I'll take that picture I've seen a hundred times. The wide lens pointed straight up at the tree tops. The previous shot is cool only if there is fog and light rays streaming through the trees. I think i managed, however, to get somewhat of a unique perspective on looking up in the woods with this next shot. The distortion from the lens has the trees leaning toward the center as before, however, I tried to use t...

This past week a storm blew through.  I had a blast taking pictures.  I was running in and out of the house, changing lenses, changing cameras, just plain having fun. I also had some fun working on some of the shots I took.  I'm no Lightroom / Photoshop expert, but I enjoy learning how to do things like HDR.

The Moon and Venus were together again tonight.  Not really together but more or less aligned in the sky. The jet flying off to the left added something I hadn't noticed when I took the picture. The tree seemed like a good way to add some scale to the picture.

I woke up early Thursday morning and was treated to this scene from my bathroom window.  It took me about ten seconds to decide to drag out the camera, the tripod and a couple lenses and have a go at capturing the mood of the scene. Snow storm in early March.  I've seen worse.  We could still get more.