Charlie's Fake Blog

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...

This past weekend I woke up to patchy fog and decided to go for a walk.  Here are three images taken near the bicycle trail along the Youghiogheny River near the town of Dawson, PA. Dawson Bridge Sunrise and Fog Foggy morning near the River. Arch of Dying Trees Two Dying Trees