Image of 2021

 I'm starting to look at images shortly after selecting the November image of the month. I've got about 150 four star images to think about, and they're all good in one way or another. Some are better than others, or so I think, and then when I look at them later it's a different group that's better. 

As long time readers know, Image of the Year is an opportunity for some major league dithering. Five of the image of the month winners are in the running for the big prize. Like a door prize, all the tickets go back in the hat. 

Dec 6 (more)

The plan is to work with the images, sit with them a bit as a group and individually, and think about them, which is best and why. This usually involves a review of my star ratings.

Christmas I'm down to 18, pondering. A lot.

Jan 1, shortly after posting December Image of the Month. Still at 18, because it's going to actively hurt to take any of them out of the running. Here's the finalists.

I just counted, 2/3 of them were taken on Neil field trips. Which seems to prove the rule that if you want more interesting photos, you go stand in the way of interesting. Of the other 6, 5 were in the garden or near the house, and the dragonfly was in Fish Creek. No trip to New Zealand, or anywhere else for that matter.

A little while ago I was reading a photographer who talked about the value of printing your work. How it was a different experience holding a piece of paper (or canvas, or many other materials) and looking at an image, as opposed to seeing on screen. One of my buddies has had difficulties in printing books because the image looks different on paper. 

I've printed several images (Image 2017, Nov 2016, and all three in March 2017) plus number 18 above was printed for the Christmas exchange, and I was pleased to see Sean end up with it. I can't wait to see it on paper. My thinking was that I'd print a few but display most of them on screen using an old computer. That part didn't work out as well as I had hoped, and I'm now going back to the idea of printing some shots. It seems to me that finalists for the Image of the Year would be good candidates for printing. There's lots of wall space, right? Except I need to get more of the cool hanging mechanism, where there's a track along the top of the wall, and clear hangers to hook the photo frames to.

Jan 3, I think I'm down to 4. Two for sure, and then I have to decide between a pair of images that give me a similar vibe. At least I think so.

Sean has talked about photos that have heart. I'm not entirely sure what he means, since there are a number of possible meanings. In any case, it seems to be a good thing, and he has mentioned that some of my photos have it. As it turns out, Sean and I did a walk along the Bow River on the weekend, and that involved visiting his place to look at the steel wool print. I'm quite pleased with it. 

As it turns out, the version that was printed is not quite the same as the version under consideration. The printed version had to be cropped to fit a predetermined size, which did not include the native size. There are some subtle differences between the print and the display version. He asked me to sign it, which is always nice.

I'm thinking that heart means a photo should evoke an emotional response of some kind. That's kind of tricky for the photographer, since they were there, and can place the image in the context of the surroundings, who was with you, how you were feeling at the time, and everything else. All a viewer gets is the image itself.

Several of the flower shots from this year made the cut to the finalists, but none of the bright colour ones. Many people think of a photo with more colour as "better", and it's certainly one way to catch the attention of a viewer. But I'm trying to get beyond the quick like on Instagram photos. I'm trying to get to photos that people will want to return to, and take some time with, as opposed to the near infinity of other photos out there and all the distractions the world has to offer.

I continue to return to the question, what is best? How to get better photographs? I can't stand it when people say a photographer got lucky for a shot. Odds are they put work into being in the right place at the right time, with the right equipment, and if outdoors, hoping the light and everything else works out. I've been part of a group to get ho-hum photos while someone else in the group got THE shot. They knew how to take advantage. They knew how to set the camera to get the shot, with no futzing about while the moment disappears. Sometimes it's being patient, waiting for a cloud to move. Sometimes it's looking in the right direction.

Part of it is being able to recognize the raw materials in the wild for a good photo, and knowing how to work with it to get what you want. Perhaps it's getting into a particular vantage point (inches matter sometimes), or getting the sun in exactly the right spot, or using specific camera settings, or tweaking the scene to remove distractions. Knowing to put a model exactly there, as opposed to nearby locations. Realizing a scene might be far better in the fall instead of the spring, and remembering to come back.

So after much dithering and considering, I'm down to my final three. For the curious, choosing between number 11 above, and the second runner up below was the tough decision. I considered giving 11 an honourable mention, and I guess this is a way of giving it a semi-honourable mention. There's lots going on in the photo, as I noted in the August image of the month blog. Maybe if I'd been a little closer, so the train was bigger, and there wasn't as much empty field...

Second Runner Up

Taken during a Zeller tour of the Foothills. Those that saw the photos on the blog at the time know we had terrific light all day. I fell in love with this landscape as soon as I saw it. It reminds me a bit of Tombstone Park in Yukon. The light on the field, the shadows, the farm building that is almost completely hidden, the cows and hay bales, so much detail to look at! This panorama would print out about 3 feet wide in exquisite detail. I think I would do it on canvas.

First Runner Up

I just love shooting bees. They're so beautiful, so detailed, and so hard to capture. A bee just hanging there wouldn't have done it, but the light on the moving wing was perfect. I wish I could say I sweet talked the bee into posing, and got the settings just right, but it was much too busy to listen to me. Some people might be interested in knowing this photo captures 1/640 of a second.

Image of 2021

Another Zeller night sky tour. It was a windy night so I spent part of the night in the lee of a building shooting southward. A little later the skies cleared a bit and we moved into the next clearing to shoot SW towards the galactic core until the clouds rolled in again. Then as a reward, Neil went out onto the little spit of land into Clear Lake, and spun some burning steel wool. 

Everybody else got close, and you can see them lined up. I think for most of the people it was the first time they had seen this sort of thing. I chose to stay behind the group, with two cameras running. One with a wide lens and one with a long lens for the closeup. This is one occasion where I saw the shot before I took it, and it worked out. In hindsight I could have been a little closer, but I'm thrilled about getting everything right.

A bit more about Loungecat Productions

You may have noticed a new logo on my other blog, and it also appears on this one. So what's that all about?

It's been brewing for a while. There's lots of times I'll want to show someone a photo I've done. Unless it was within a couple days, finding it on the near-daily blog is impossible. I wanted a place to put my best work where it was easy to find photos. 

For a while that was this blog site. There's a bunch of tabs up top with varying number of photos in each. It was hard to come up with those tabs, and I'm not sure how relevant they are now. Some of them haven't been updated in a while because I haven't taken any of those kinds of photos for a while. Just as an example, Abstracts, Cats, and Cityscapes haven't been updated in a couple years. Now that Loungecat Productions is up, I'm not sure what I'll do with it. It's main use now is collecting Image of the Month, and photos from Community Association events. 

In another thread, I've done some work for clients who asked for my logo to put on their website or on the music album that is being produced (Yay me!) Except I didn't have a logo. I've been musing about it for a while, and have doodled some sketches, but hadn't really got anywhere. 

So putting the two things together I wanted to get a logo, and put it on a portfolio site with my best work. It would be easy to point people to it, or show someone on my phone. Except then the question became where to host it. I dithered about that for a while, making lists of the various advantages and disadvantages of sites like Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, 500 Px, Adobe Portfolio, and others. 

Do you want the whole evaluation and decision story? I thought not. I ended up with Adobe Portfolio for a couple reasons. The main one is that it's free to me since I already subscribe to Lightroom. It also seamlessly synchs with Lightroom, which is a bigger advantage than it first appears. The disadvantages don't affect me, at least not so far. I had my problems setting up a trial run at it a couple years ago and got myself all confused and upset, but decided to have another go. And it turned out to be slick as grass through a goose, including buying the domain name. 

So now it's up. You had a sneak peek earlier this week and I've added considerably to it. The main addition is Green Fools photos. You haven't seen them unless you follow them on Instagram, and even then you might not have known they were me. I've added a few other photos here and there that were overlooked for whatever reason.

But do me a favour, please and thank you. Go to the personal eclectic page and look at that first photo of Curtis. If you roll your mouse over that photo, you'll see some text pop up. What do you think of that? Does having some pop up text that is relevant to that photo enhance it, or detract from it? Fill in the contact form and let me know what you think, P&TY again.

In other news the 50 project is going well. Still rounding up models. A few have been a bit hesitant, but nobody has said no yet. This will keep me going for a while. I haven't moved forward on the hands project.

And no, I didn't get any photos of the aurora the other night. I was out the next night with some buddies doing a night sky workshop with Neil Zeller, but no aurora. I got a long sequence that I'm going to see how it looks as a movie. I don't think it will work as a star trails photo, but it's easy enough to try and see.

Lastly, to give you some photos to look at (after all, this is about photography) I did a fun exercise with some photo buddies. The challenge was to find a good spot and take 24 photos without moving your feet. I took that to mean turning around was ok, and since it didn't say anything about lenses, I'd use different ones. I ended up using 150-600mm, 70-200mm, 24-105mm, 100mm macro with and without extension tubes, and 14mm. That good spot turned out to be on top of a bluff in Fish Creek overlooking bridges 5 and 6.

The retirement projects

My normal photo process is to take the camera with a particular lens and go for a walk. Sometimes I have a specific thing in mind, and I'll take the appropriate lens. Sometimes I'm just out to see what I can find and have occasionally found I'm carrying the wrong lens. 

Of the few that I actually select to be edited, almost all get global edits and light tweaking and are called done. A very few get special treatment. Some of the edited photos see the light of day via my blog or social media, or get shown to a client. Some never actually get seen by anyone else, but I'm still pleased by them. I'm trying not think about the tree falling in the forest not making any noise conundrum, like, if a photo is never seen does it actually exist? 

But some photographers see an image in their head, and work to create it. That might involve a model or models, make up, a set, lighting, props that could range from a pair of shoes to an expensive car, smoke or fog machines, or whatever else might be necessary to get that image. Some shoot an image, or part of it, knowing they can drop it into Photoshop and create the rest of the image there.

I've got two projects in mind. Each involves a specific portrait idea, and I'm busy rounding up models. A few people might show up in both, but I'm thinking that isn't going to happen much. The plan is to produce two books, one for each project. I'm fine tuning some of the details to make it more than a selection of photographs. I'm hoping that each project will produce photos that tell a story in themselves, and maybe on the facing page the model will add some text. Like I say, still working on the details. 

Generally my thinking when doing something new is the best way to learn is by doing it. This has sometimes led me to think, in the middle of the project, "crap I wish I'd thought of that situation, now I have to redo some stuff." So I'm trying to think this one through first. 

That bit was written a little while ago, and now I've got some models interested in more details, and a few have signed up. They're thinking about prop details for what I'm calling The Handy Book, and we'll get a date organized. I've done the formal first shot of what I'm calling The 50 Book.

Regular readers will know this is the famous Michelle. I'm so pleased with this photo, and it's a great kick off to the next phase of the project.

There isn't a really good shot of the other project that I can use here. It's a permissions thing, not a photo thing. The next actual task is to draft up a model release. 

There are other projects. I've 3 more dates for a theatre company to shoot a kid's circus camp. This is amazing fun! I'm getting a zillion photos out of each day so far.  Some of the kids are amazingly photogenic, amazingly talented, and are naturals in front of the camera. The photos almost take themselves. The hard thing is the selection process. I was happily surprised by one young woman who looked familiar. I asked if I'd seen her at a particular camp a few years ago, and yes! She had been wondering the same thing, if I was the photographer.

You know how on IMDB you'll sometimes see a particular actor listed as participating in 'an unnamed project'? One of my buddies and I have loosely discussed a collaborative project. We know it's called 'Defect 29', but we know very little else about it. This might be a longer term work in progress.

There are the community association events. It's only taken several years, but people are getting used to seeing me and my camera. A few people have asked about family portraits, or other group shots. In a couple weeks I'll be giving the senior's group a presentation of my New Zealand photos. There's more than 15,000 to choose from, so, speaking of a selection process...

Plus, as I alluded at the start of this post, my own photos. Some of you might know I recently spent some time in Fish Creek chasing dragonflies. They photograph easily and beautifully if you catch them relaxing on some object, especially if it's in contrast to their wings. Catching them in flight is a major challenge. This one might be old in dragonfly terms, given the ragged wings.

And Linda's garden. I'm out almost every day as new flowers bloom, or they catch the light in a new way. Here are the newest lilies.

Lastly, this photoblog is updated only periodically, while the personal blog is updated every other day or so. If you're already signed up to get my blog notification emails, you'll know when this one updates. If you'd like to be notified when either of my blogs are updated, send an email to keith at nucleus dot com and I'll add you to the list. Subscribers sometimes get extra tidbits in the email.

Snowy image thoughts

There I was, drying the breakfast dishes (typically 2 each of mugs, bowls, spoons, knives, plus the French press for coffee) when I looked out the front. I didn't quite run for the camera, but did stop drying.

I was loving how the light was playing on the snow across the road. Snow is a difficult thing. We know it's white as white can be, at least until the city starts spreading sand on the roads, or it melts into the mud. Even shadows on snow, we see as a white tending towards grey because we know the snow is white. However the camera often sees it as blue, which can look sort of weird. 

Trying to correct it can get tricky, but I wasn't so fussed about that this time. I was after the textures of the snow and the interplay of light on them. It looked like the wind had blown the snow smooth, then deposited little ice crystals on top. Some of them were doing the rainbow thing. Then there were the footprints and blocks of snow, and the gentle curves. I was loving moving back and forth trying to capture what I was seeing.

The other day we were out for a walk, looking at the texture of snow along the berm. It was looking almost scaly, and glinting nicely in the light. I didn't have the camera with me though, so I wasn't tempted to stop our walk and try to capture it. Just as well, since I was pretty dubious that it would work the way I was seeing it. 

I've been by this log several times, but don't think I've ever got a photo I liked out of it. But on photo day the light was nice, and there was some snow adding interest to the shot. The snow helps give some depth and adds interesting shadows. Of course, the very moment I'm about to take the shot, an absolute herd of cyclists zoom past. I'm just glad they didn't disturb the snow. And yes, this is a pareidolia photo.

Of the Day

Driftwood

Sometimes the sand can look like snow, and behave a little bit like it, particularly with the help of the wind. As I look at this one now, I'm wondering if I should have cropped it 16x9 to get rid of the top bit.

And since I was thinking of it, why not? What do you think?

A kind of family? A new direction?

I took these during a walk the other day. I've been eyeing them for a while, thinking there's a nice image there. One of the 'rules' of photography is to put 3 of a thing in the photo. I'm not sure if any of these qualify on that front. Perhaps one day I'll bring snowshoes and carefully explore up the slope to see if there are better angles.

I've been thinking about the blogging thing and will be making some changes. This blog is going to feature photos from walks or trips where I've deliberately gone out to get photos, and have put some time into composing the image. 

I don't want to say the photos on this blog will be "better". Rather, they are works in progress towards becoming a better photographer. Some might actually be poor images, but are illustrative of a point I want to make, or a lesson I learned. Maybe a before and after, exploring Photoshop and the tablet.

There's likely to be some overlap between this and my other blog, but I'm still working that out. This blog is likely to only appeal to other photographers, and I'm welcoming comments about what worked or didn't work for them, and why. Sean and I have spent some time exploring photos that we didn't care for, and yet someone has decided they are good enough to be hanging on the wall of an exhibition. My thought is that I can learn from that, perhaps coming to a better understanding of why I like certain photos, and how to create better photos.

Both blogs are likely to be a bit erratic over the coming months, what with changing COVID restrictions and my own busy life. I hope it's worth hanging around.

Of the Day

This feature is continuing from my other blog. During the summer I'll have lots of flower photos showing up here. There may be other subjects showing up from time to time. In the past, that's included Curtis and Michelle.

This is a huge chunk of driftwood on a huge rock. The piece is easily taller than I am as I stood beside it. I went around and around, looking for good shots, on two separate occasions. Brighton beach is awesome!