Lights! Camera! Shit!

Never let it be said bad timing isn’t my friend…because it is.

While driving this morning on an errand, I was taken aback by how lovely were the reflections of the recently installed street lamps, as well as the red lights of the traffic signals, upon the rain-slicked road as it stretched out before me.

As I came closer to the intersection I decided the view was too much to pass up without breaking out the always-at-the-ready Canon Rebel XTi/400D. I turned round the car, drove back about a half-mile, turned back around and pulled over onto the shoulder of the road. I pulled the camera bag up to the front street, broke out the camera and began fiddling with the settings to make the most of this cloudy and raining morning.

ISO? 400. White balance? Cloudy. Auto-focus? On. Focus point(s)? All. Aperture? 7.1. Ready!

I checked my mirrors for vehicles coming up behind me and with the all-clear noted I vacated my vehicle and found myself standing in the gently falling rain. About to venture into the oft busy two lane road (so that I might have a nicely centered shot) I look in the direction of the beautifully reflected lights when click:

The street lamps cycled off.

Mutherfu….

I can only imagine how bizarre I must have appeared to those folks driving by as I stood next to my car, facing the direction of the formerly lovely scene, yelling obscenities at the lights.

Really? Has It Been A Month?

Where does the time go, eh?

But I guess it shouldn’t come as a big surprise that I haven’t been posting to this blog about photography when I haven’t really been taking pictures. But that isn’t completely true. I actually have a pretty large catalogue of unprocessed/edited photos sitting on my computer. I have the intent to boot-up the machine and sit down and go through them all, etc., but I just don’t seem to make it to the chair. I wish I understood why the trepidation. But for now I refuse to get too worked up about it. I figure that like many of my creative moments in life it will come to me when it comes to me and there is no point in pushing it upon myself.

That or I’m simply a lazy sod.

I think I’ll go with lazy sod.

But all this laziness doesn’t mean I haven’t been something of a shutter bug. Please note:

I have found myself making no small use of my somewhat recently acquired iPhone and its camera. My previous mobile blowers also had cameras, but neither (the Motorola RAZR and Palm Centro) were of any particular use for taking pictures that one might wish to share in a forum such as the Internet. But the iPhone does a pretty reasonable job all things considered. And there is a wealth of iPhone apps dedicated to photo editing and I have downloaded a fistful and make good use of each on almost a daily basis. The above picture was captured with the iPhone while I was hiking and then edited using an app named Camera Bag.

A worthwhile moment to mention here, on WordPress, is that I both entered a local photography contest and walked away with second place within the category I entered. I haven’t entered an actual contest until this one popped up so I’m quite surprised and excited that I actually won something! The contest was via Woodland Cemetery in Dayton and winners were announced last weekend on the 11th. I had entered this picture:

It is actually a Photoshop Elements processed picture I took back in February (I think). It’s one of the first pictures I ever fiddled with in Elements, but oddly enough and as much as I liked it, I never posted it to Flickr. Probably part of being a lazy sod, you know? But still….second place. Awesome.

Here is a picture of me, looking rather rumbled and weird, next to my winning entry:

After the winners were announced it became known to me that the cemetery was offering one of those walk-about type things where a guided tour is provided of some of the more important or interesting characters buried within the cemetery. At each of the graves of said folks there is an actor/actress who talks about the person as if they were the dearly deceased. Since I was already there I opted to stick around and take the tour, which lasted about two hours. During this time I snapped some pics with my handy Canon Rebel/400, but also clicked away here and there with the iPhone, thus obtaining this picture:

It is actually a crop of the original (I removed the others on the tour) and I know…I know…he really should be in the left of the picture for a better sense of balance, but this was all done on the fly and from within the crowd of folks. The wasn’t a whole lot of time for getting the best angle, etc. so I’m lucky to have what I have. I made use of the iPhone app Photogene to perform the crop and conversion to something akin to sepia. I’m pleased enough with the results considering all things.

Lastly, the other day I was going through some pictures my cousin had uploaded to Facebook of a day trip she and her son took to some park near where they live. Some of the pictures were taken around the shoreline of a small lake and included lily pads. Lily pads always remind me of Monet, which always reminds me of the work of Impressionists. Wheels slowing clicking I emailed my cousin and asked for a full-sized copy of a particular picture, which included my nephew on a dock, laying, while playing with some of the lily pads in the water. Opened in Photoshop Elements (cuz I don’t have the grown-up version of Photoshop) I played around with it all morning to create an Impressionistic version of the image with the end result being thus:

I actually created two versions and I still haven’t decided which one I prefer, but it was a somewhat fun way to spend a few hours this morning. I say “somewhat fun” because I really didn’t obtain quite the result for which I was looking. Both versions are close, but not quite there and I eventually grew both tired and a bit aggravated as my hoped-for results were alluding me. This might explain why I don’t particularly care to do this sort of photo editing, you know?

Away, but just for a bit…

I’m down in Florida visiting my parents and helping celebrate my father’s 70th birthday.

70.

Where does the time go?

For that matter, the daughter turned 17.

Where did that time go as well?

But it’s good that I’m here and not just because I get to see the ‘rents, but because some of the tech support I provide to their burgeoning consumer electronics needs to be hands-on and cannot be done via the telephone or remote desktop like applications. For instance:

Replaced the 512MB of RAM in the desktop PC I built for my father five years ago with 2GB of Corsair memory. I then installed an additional hard drive of 500GB (Western Digital – my preferred hard drive company) to supplement the 120GB already there. Pictures really do begin to take up space, don’t they.

My mother complained that her laptop is rather pokey and she wasn’t kidding. Painfully slow is the only description for her middle-of-the-road HP dv6000. Certainly the AMD Sempron 1.8GHz chip is part of the problem, but the real culprit was the pitiful 512MB of DDR2 PC2-5300 667MHz SODIMM memory. Between the Operating System, the anti-virus suite and the usual things running in the background (and I turned off everything that absolutely doesn’t need to be running) there was only about 96MB of RAM left to run the web browser or Windows Media Player or her e-mail application, etc. Like I already said: pitiful.

So I went out today and purchased 2GB of very, very lovely Corsair laptop memory and installed such without fuss. The improvement in responsiveness on her laptop is amazing. It actually feels like a useful device and not like the lumbering device it was just a few short hours ago.

I know…not very photography-oriented, but it is what’s been happening and it is what I’m reporting and you, my humble readers, should be happy!

Really….I’m trying my best. No. Really.

Having been on something akin to a sabbatical for many, many weeks, I have been, of late, attempting to get back into the full swing of life that is related to photography.

This means not only taking pictures, which I have done a bit of, but catching up on sites such as WordPress and Flickr. It also entails the knowledge that I have loads of pictures sitting upon my hard drive, anxiously awaiting my deft touch at processing.

Ahem.

Besides feeling the simple urge to get away from photography a bit, I have also delved into other matters, which have been keeping me both busy and occupied. Part of the current problem of catching up with photography-stuff is that I’m not letting go of the new things to which I have been engaged. Thus time becomes even more fleeting and is a rather large impediment to any sense of accomplishing tasks both necessary and desired each day.

But I promise, like a holy oath, that I’m working on catching up with everyone’s WordPress and Flickr site as well as moving forward to working on my own photographs and photography blogs. Thus far I’ve found it easier to play catch up with everyone else’s work than on my own. I’m still feeling something of a sensation to push away from the computer whenever I contemplate opening up my folders and going through my own work.

I cannot tell if this is just me reacting to a perceived lack of accomplishment in my photography or if it is something more sinister. No. That isn’t right. There isn’t anything more sinister afoot. You know…..upon reflection (and I’ve spent a fair amount of time reflecting on my photography while not actually doing any photography) I might be willing to concede that there is something of a crisis in faith going on here, which is really quite pathetic.

A number of folks I follow around WordPress and Flickr create fantastic images. Images I very much enjoy and hope that perhaps one day I’ll be able to create on my own. But the impediment to this creativity is myself. As I’ve lamented previously, I’m not a particularly creative person. So, if I know this fact about myself in advance, why should I feel anxious that I’m not creating pictures that are as interesting, etc. as those done by others, who are clearly gifted with creativity?

It would be like me envying Michael Jordan his basketball skills or Thierry Henry his football skills when I’m completely rubbish at sport because I’m hopelessly uncoordinated. And I don’t envy them their skills. But maybe that is because I haven’t ever had an interest in being a sports star, where I have thought it would be nice to be a player in the world of photography. Not a big player, but a player.

But you know something (yes, I imagine you must know something)…..now that I type this thought here, into WordPress, I realize how completely stupid it sounds. Not that my assessment is stupid, as it’s likely correctly. No, what’s stupid is that I feel this way at all.

Maybe I have to look at creativity from the context of who I am. Am I being creative for my own purposes instead of judging such against those whose work I admire and think of as being creative. I guess it is, in part, that we all aspire to believe or feel that we are really good/great at something and photography is one of those things for me. But I can live without being good or great at it. As long as I can derive pleasure from the act of photography then I should be happy enough and this is where I should be focusing my energies.

There….all better.

Scientific progress goes “Boink!”

For the most part my Flickr account has been used to upload photos taken with both my trusty Canon 40D and Rebel XTi (400D for our overseas readers). But I have uploaded some photos taken in the past with my Canon point-n-shoot devices: the Powershot A95 and A630.

But I, like so many others, have a cell phone, which includes a camera. My first camera phone was the Motorola RAZR; a decent phone in most regards (if only it had been a reliable phone). My next camera phone was/is my very trust and handy Palm Centro. It shoots both images as well as video and has proven to be a great phone for the particular reasons I purchased it.

But I have now moved on after almost two-years with my black and silver-accented Centro to the latest incarnation of the Apple iPhone. It too shots video and pictures. It shoots better pictures and video than does my Centro. But my problem is I don’t know what to do with the pictures.

Clearly I can save them on my iMac. Clearly I can e-mail them to friends and family alike. One day, hopefully soon, AT&T (the only carrier for the iPhone in the United States) will finally get its shit together and allow for the sending of media (including pictures) via text messaging. (“End of summer,” they keep promising, but not definite date has yet to be announced)

But should I upload them to my Flickr account? Flickr is for sharing photographs and a photograph is a photograph, whether it comes off a dSLR, a point-n-shoot or a mobile blower. But for some reason I feel that my intent for my Flickr account would be violated, if only gently, by the inclusion of images from the iPhone.

I see some sleepless nights ahead of me…

Creative juices flowing…but it makes for a messy keyboard

Neither Flickr nor WordPress (at least this particular WordPress blog of mine) have seen much action since May. I spoke to such about a month ago here, on this WP blog, but haven’t returned as I still continued to feel uninspired. Uninspired to photograph or go through the hundreds of pics I already had loaded onto the iMac, but hadn’t yet viewed, etc.

But today, while putting together my contribution for the month of July’s group project, I suddenly felt…well…inspired. Okay. Maybe inspired is too strong a word, but I felt something akin to pleasure and/or happiness as I puttered around with my pictures; first in Lightroom and then in Elements. Yep. I used BOTH Lightroom and Elements. Unheard of for me, which you would already know if you have followed my blog for any period of time.

So I’m hoping this means I’m ready to return. Maybe not to jump in with both feet, but maybe to drop a toe or two into the waters that are photography and see what comes of it all.

Here’s to getting my toes wet!

Photography….ain’t it a bitch?

Funny…my last post said something about normal service being resumed in a week. That was well over a month ago. Believe me…I’ve thought almost every day about getting on the iMac and processing pictures for posting. I’ve frequently thought about going out and taking pictures even though we have moved into summer and I am not fond of being outside when it’s hot. Alas, nothing has motivated me enough to do anything photography-oriented.

The problems have been numerous and diverse. First, I left for Wisconsin for my grandmother’s funeral and cousin’s wedding (the former unexpected, while the latter was planned) and spent what seemed like 24/7 with my camera in hand. I took a bit over 1,200 photographs over the 10-days I was in Wisconsin. I still haven’t gone through them though. I think part of it is the emotional attachment to the moment: my grandmother’s funeral. I was happy for my grandmother in her passing. She was 94 and had become quite tired of being in constant pain. Passing was precisely what she wanted and I was happy for her that her wish finally came true. However, that doesn’t solve my problem: I want my grandmother back. Since I know that isn’t possible I’m having something akin to separation anxiety and I don’t yet feel comfortable going through the pictures. This is weird. Or so I think. I wasn’t prepared to feel this way about the photographs. But there you are.

I also confess to feeling incredibly uncreative of late. Granted, I’m not normally creative in the first place. And certainly not creative on-demand. I usually become inspired out of the blue and only a few times a year. Creativity, as I often state, is not one of my strengths. Oddly enough I wouldn’t normally consider creativity to be a component of my process of handling pictures. Shoot. Review on the computer. Delete the trash. Process (“tweak” as someone might say) and upload to Flickr. Hardly the stuff of Art, eh?

Yet, I might argue (not very well, mind you) that the process described above is, in a manner, creative. Maybe it would be better to say it’s destructive considering the number of image files that find their way into the round file cabinet (“trash”). Regardless, the process serves to create a final product: a JPEG. But I’d hesitate to call it creative when I think the term “process” sounds and feels more correct.

There is also the issue of weather. As folks who follow my Flickr site are aware, I love the winter and I very much enjoy being outside during such. I am little bothered by the cold and look forward to almost any opportunity to head out of doors with my camera. The same cannot be said of summer. Of course, summer just started, but the weather has been unseasonably warm for the most part during the months of May and June. As such I have felt little compunction to take my dog and pony show outdoors, especially when combined with the other reasons I have outlined above.

Finally, and perhaps oddest of all, there is the issue of burn out. I didn’t realize it until I was back from Wisconsin and looking at two memory cards filled with RAW image files. I suddenly realized how much time I have been spending in front of a computer and behind a camera for the past year. WordPress blogging about photography. Flickr uploads of the fruits of my labour. Reading other folks blogs. Viewing their Flickr wares and leaving behind comments. It doesn’t really sound like much when I read the lines I just typed, but I was easily spending two to four hours of each and every day doing something related to photography.

Now I imagine some folks might be incredibly jealous of my free time and wonder how it is I’m complaining about such. But if you look carefully you’ll find I’m not complaining, but simply stating I’m tired. Burned out. In need of a diversion, a vacation if you will. So instead of a vacation (which we cannot afford to take) or a diversion I instead elected to simply refrain from doing what I had been doing for the past year. I took a break.

But now it feels like it’s time to get back onto the horse and ride again. And in honour of such feelings I’m posting here, on WordPress, and heading out to take some pics later this afternoon. Now if only I can remain motivated enough to process and upload them within a reasonable time frame!

Temporary Detour…

Hello all.

Just a quick note to say that I’m not available for posting or reading over your sites, etc. I’m out of town, having attended to a funeral, and will be attending a wedding in a few days.

Busy, busy, busy…

Never-the-less, normal service will resume some time next week.

~Forkboy

Damn it, damn it, damn it, damn it…

AUGH!

I absolutely hate it when I do something stupid. Then again, I imagine most everyone hates it when they do something stupid. But this blog is about me and not everyone else, so at the moment I’m very busy hating myself for doing something stupid.

Yesterday (Saturday, 25 April 2009) I hooked up with fellow Flickrites Edgar and Ron at Aullwood Audubon Center and Farm. We were going to stroll about the grounds (and then head over to Aullwood Gardens) in hopes of finding interesting things to photograph, but before we even got started Edgar realized he had accidentally left his camera at home. Not completely his fault, mind you, as they were waylaid by a last-minute telephone call, which put them off their game.

For this photographic adventure I had elected to instead make use of my car-camera: the Rebel XTi (400D for you European types) with accompanying lenses, instead of my more usual kit (the Canon 40D and such). As I had just been to both Aullwood Audubon Center and Aullwood Gardens the week previous, I didn’t feel the need to carry my more serious equipment and looked forward to the much lighter and more transportable Rebel. But now we had a man down, so to speak, and as such I did the valiant thing and offered my Rebel to Edgar. He was hesitant at first, but Ron convinced him to accept my most generous offer, especially since I was able to use my 40D, which was in the car anyway.

As Edgar uses a point-n-shoot camera we made adjustments to the settings of my Rebel to better reflect the way his camera would shoot and the way he uses his camera. One particular adjustment to the settings was to turn off shooting in RAW and engage shooting in JPEG, which I no longer do at all. For the most part Edgar was satisfied with the adjustments and went about taking pictures for the afternoon.

Once we returned to the cars and said our goodbyes I immediately set out to revert the Rebel XTi to my preferred settings so that said camera would be ready-to-go at a moments notice, as is its typical usage. Except for one thing: I forgot to switch back to RAW.

Damn it! Damn it! Damn it! Damn it!

And I’m all “damn it, damn it, damn it,” because I took a quick trip today to a park which I had not yet visited: Charleston Falls Preserve (part of the Miami County Park District, Ohio). I called it a recce and as such wasn’t going to bring any camera, but at the last moment elected to bring along the ready-to-go Rebel. And I’m glad I did. I may have obtained a handful of decent photos from the excursion, but it was when I was only minutes away from the end of the trail (the return leg as I had been in the park for about 2-hours by then) when I realized that I had been shooting in JPEG all day!

Don’t get me wrong…there’s nothing really wrong with shooting in JPEG. Lots of folks never do anything but shoot in JPEG and they take awesome shots! That said, I much prefer shooting in RAW because it allows me greater control over the final product and, perhaps most importantly, allows me to sometimes salvage photos that might have been designated to the round file otherwise.

Damn it.

It was bound to happen one day…

Lately I’m behind in all matters regarding photography. I haven’t quite gotten hold of the manner in which Lightroom likes to organize my files and this is frustrating me to no end. I guess I could read the manual a bit, but I wasn’t looking to have to read about file management damn it! This is, in part, why I avoided purchasing such software. I was quite happy with my own system and it served me well. Now I have a robust piece of software that thinks it is helping me, but thus far it, in conjunction with some bone-headed moves of my own, has just made life unexpectedly more complicated.

And then there was the trip to Aullwood Gardens I undertook early last week. I had been charging my camera’s battery expressly for the photo shoot, yet walked right out the door without having grabbed the now fully charged battery. Of course I didn’t realize I had left behind the battery until after I had arrived at the gardens, grabbed all my gear, surveyed the gardens (for maybe 20-minutes) and selected the shots I wanted to take. Setting up the tripod I was humming a little tune to myself and thinking about how lovely was the day and how nice it would be to capture some nice close-ups of the blooming flowers. Imagine my surprise when I turned on the camera, but nothing happened.

And never let it be said that Mother Nature doesn’t have it in for me as well. A few days later (late last week) I returned to Aullwood Gardens so that I might finally snap some pictures, and while walking from the parking lot at Englewood MetroPark I came across a very large blue heron standing quite serenely in the Stillwater River. It was close enough that with my 100-400mm I should have been able to grab a supreme picture. Supreme I say. So I quietly and quickly broke out the tripod and got it set up. I broke out the camera and swapped into place the 100-400mm lens and mounted same to the tripod. And JUST as I framed my shot and considered which aperture I wished to use the damn thing took off. It’s a good thing there were no small children within ear shot.

However, not all is completely lost for I did not yet know that I had some nice heron shots, but from a completely different outing and camera:

Two weeks ago I had ventured to the east banks of the Stillwater River where it runs through the Englewood MetroPark (part of the Five Rivers MetroParks district here in the Dayton, Ohio area). I had with me my Canon Rebel XTi and was hoping to capture some shots of mallards feeding near or along the banks and shoreline. Instead I was treated to a sole heron who was slowly making its way in the river not some 50-yards or so from shore. One thing I have learned about herons is that they are fairly skittish birds and if one sees a heron one should start snapping as soon as possible. With this mantra in mind I trained my camera upon it and fired away. I wound up with a series of photos like the above and below:

I confess that I didn’t think much of the pictures as I looked over them on the tiny LCD screen attached to the back of the camera, but once I was home and had the images opened in Lightroom (and on a nicely sized 24-inch iMac screen) I was much more impressed. Quite impressed to be frank. The low sun was creating great reflections off the water and left the heron in silhouette. My only criticism of the series that look like the first above picture was that too often the heron’s head disappeared into the black area of water just above it. In the end, of the eight or so I took this was the only one where the head was clearly separate from the water. I guess I should clarify though…there was another issue with the picture, but it didn’t rise to the level of problem and that was the strong glare of sunlight off the water.

Fortunately for me I’m finally getting a handle on the use of the Graduated Filter effect in Lightroom and was able to use such to decrease the exposure in a limited area of the image. I was able to keep the colour and strength of the reflected sunlight without the completely over-exposed nature of it. I used this to good effect in both of the above pictures, working the left-side of the above image.

It was also during this scouring of the banks in hopes of photographic opportunity that I came across this reflection in the water:

I snapped the picture less because I thought it was photo-worthy (in terms of its impact), but more because of what it said to me in that moment in time. The long thin cloud is actually a contrail from a passing jet and I was having these thoughts about how strange it was that I was watching the plane and its passengers flying off to who-knows-where to do who-knows-what, but that I was sharing this moment with them from afar. In the end I like the photograph, but I’m more intrigued by the moment itself.

Finally, there was this:

I don’t know about anyone else, but I really enjoy this photo. I had taken position behind a tree in hopes that a couple of nearby mallard ducks would make their way towards me. While standing there waiting for the ducks I noticed this single strand of spider web gently rocking in the soft breeze. I soon became semi-mesmerized by this solitary strand and eventually realized that it was, at least for me, photo-worthy. I switched the lens to manual focus and made the shot. I’m quite pleased with it to be honest. It speaks to me. Unfortunately though I’ve learned from experience that those pictures which speak to me do not usually speak to others. I wonder why that is?