Friday, January 31, 2014

Looking Out On Puget Sound

These stalls line the sidewalk to the east of the Pike Place Market in Seattle.

These are backlit - I actually wish I'd bought a heart. I think it would look good in our kitchen window.

Thursday, January 30, 2014

Starting to Settle In

There's always an adjustment period with a new camera or lens. I would say that the adjustment period for the D700 was short - it was so much more capable than anything I had previously that I mostly spent the time saying 'wow'.

The D800 is different. It is revealing itself to be very demanding - of the best lenses, and the best technique. But when you have those, you can get some wonderful results.

This is about 60% of the frame. I shot this with a borrowed 105mm 2.8 Micro-Nikkor, at ISO 400. There are few adjustments here - a little boost to contrast, a sharpness mask (high pass filter), and a small bump in saturation, about 5% as I remember.


I spent more time on the photos of the milk.

There will be more, I think.




Tuesday, January 28, 2014

The Cheese Post

This is the first of what I hope will be a series of images from our recent trip to Seattle.

I have a friend I used to work with some years ago. We have stayed in touch - I probably chat to her a couple or three times a week. She lives in Montreal, but comes out for work twice a year.

She's out in BC now, and on Saturday Chris and I took her to Seattle. The weather was glorious - a beautiful clear winter day that got up warm enough that there were people on the street in shorts. Stupid people, I'll grant you, but a non-zero number of them.

Josee not having been in Seattle before, we did the area around the Pike Place market.

This was shot at Beecher's Cheese across from the Market. It's not perfect - I need to tweak this a bunch more. There were people standing with us at the window and their shadows have crossed my image...


Wednesday, January 22, 2014

The Panoramic Image

We went to Mission to the riverfront because it was foggy, and fog can be interesting. However the Fraser here is wide enough that the far shore gets pretty indistinct, and half the time you might as well be at a lake or the ocean. There's little river-ness about it, if you know what I mean.

I decided to try a panoramic shot. Unfortunately I didn't know the requirements and so my 5-shot plan became a 3-shot because I didn't leave enough overlap on the final 2. 

Photoshop does a pretty good job. In this shot there is the problem of moving water, and while Photoshop did a good job of lining things up and blending the exposure, you can see where the edges of the composing images are.

This isn't a perfect image - it's decent, a decent first try, but it needs more - more sweep, more pull. The bridge is too high, and there's nothing to really anchor the shot. Still, I'm reasonably pleased with it. As a starting point it's not too bad.

Saturday, January 11, 2014

Friday, January 10, 2014

Also, While Out Geocaching

I took this.

Or, I took it, and then I spent some time messing with it in Photoshop. It isn't an award winning photo, or one that will adorn anyone's wall, but for me it evokes the day.

Also, I want to point out that I seem to have a bit of a thing for landscapes with high cloud and an included sun.

We're on this topic (or rather, I'm on this topic) because I bought a new camera.

Yes, yes I did. It's not here yet. I have to get it from the postal outlet, who somehow manage to be a retail postal outlet while boasting short hours. But the new camera will let me make photos like the one above, but more so. Much more so.


Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Geocaching

Christine and I have discovered geocaching.

Well, not discovered, really. I've known about it for years, as I suspect Christine has. But for some weird reason (it's weird because I don't know what it is...) I suddenly became interested in it, and we went out.

We don't have a GPS, but we do have Christine's Nexus. That's it in the purple cover in the first photo. So after I got the idea that we should try this, she loaded up an app called, I think, c:geo. We picked two near our house, and set out.

Alas, we didn't find either of them. Turns out that nobody else had found one of them for months and it was almost certainly gone, and the other one was listed as a 'special' container. I found what looked to be a perfect special container, but there was nothing inside.

After our initial disappointment, we headed out last Sunday morning on a cold but otherwise lovely winter day.

Find one.

Find two.
Find three.

After this one it was almost noon and we had pathetic children at home who won't eat unless you tell them to, so we headed back. Plus I was hungry and needed food rather badly.

But our second geocaching day was a success.