Sun Sets On 2015

Another year is about to come to an end.  Last year I ended things off with a sunset, and it seemed like a good idea to do so once again.  This is another shot of the Jacques Cartier Bridge.  I live right near it and it ends up being a favourite model of mine in the Spring and late Summer when the sun starts to set.  It was taken at f/5.6, 1/400sec, ISO 400 at 80mm.  I must admit that there is a little trickery involved.  I used Photoshop, specifically the Curves tool as well as Color Balance, in order to add a bit of punch to the sky.

It's been a good year here on the Blog.  I had my photography exhibition back in March, and also posted all kinds of different photographs for you all to see here.  I managed to get my camera in to a few more concerts this year, as well as taking it to a couple of free shows outside as well.  For the first time, I managed to photograph every one of the La Ronde Fireworks Competition shows in July from a different location, and I shot some winter fireworks down at the Old Port in January as well.  Got in to a few hockey games to snap some of the action on the ice, and also got out to a couple of football games this fall.  The year got off to a good start thanks to my ice fog photograph down by the Victoria Bridge.  It ended up being featured on CTV news back then, and is currently on display at the Saint-Lambert Library, though it will only be there for one more day.  In between, there have been the wide variety of bugs, lights, car parts, some food and even a Blood Super Moon.  I guess you could say that I kept my camera busy this year, and that's a good thing.  Thanks to all of you who stop by to read the words that go with my photographs.  Thanks also to My Lovely Assistant for having the patience to sit through some of my photography sessions, be they in frigid temperatures or bombarded by loud fireworks explosions. Also for giving me the kick in the pants that I sometimes need in order to go outside and get some of those shots.

Chocolate And Pear Yule Log

The arrival of the Christmas Holiday season means that all kinds of tasty treats tend to appear on the diner tables of families near and far.  Such is the case in this household and the season allows the cooking and baking talents of My Lovely Assistant to shine.  It also means a little bit of performance anxiety on my part as I try and take nice photographs of the tasty treats she creates.  Her pièce de résistance was a couple of Christmas Yule Log cakes, known as bûche de Noël in french.  This is the first of the two bûches.  It was nicely decorated with homemade gingerbread trees, some sugar balls and cranberries.  To add a little bit of the holiday feeling to the photograph, a little Christmas themed table centerpiece was added.  I suppose that I could have also used some kind of place mat or table cloth to add something to the photograph, but I really liked the look of our wooden table in this instance.  It was late in the afternoon when I took these photographs, so I had to go to my dreaded enemy, 'Flash'.  I've been practicing my flash usage, and in this instance, I bounced the light off of the ceiling and used a slower shutter speed than usual.  I think the results came out pretty well.  The first photograph was taken at f/4, 1/160sec, ISO 100 at 24mm.  The second photograph was taken at f/4, 1/125sec, ISO 400 at 24mm.  I tried several different angles while taking the photographs, so much so that My Lovely Assistant may have mentioned that it was taking me longer to photograph the cake than it took for her to make it.  Though time needs to be controlled in the baking game, it's a little more felxible when it comes to photography.

Merry Christmas To All

I had been hoping to put up a nice snowy Christmas photograph, but Mother Nature decided that snow wasn't in the forecast.  So, I decided to try and create my own little Christmas image.  I grabbed a little Santa Claus that has been sitting on our television and a porcelain Christmas tree that lights up.  I placed them both on the floor, a good distance from each other.  I then grabbed a flashlight from the drawer, put a little wax paper on it to act as a diffuser and gave two quick blasts of light to Santa, one from low on the left and a second a little higher on the right.  The photograph was taken at f/4, 15sec, ISO 100 at 60mm.  The large aperture allowed me to blur the lights of the tree, as well as to get the reflection of the light on the floor.  Using the two quick bursts from the flashlight allowed me to get enough light on my Santa during the long exposure, without the light overpowering the rest of the image.  It was a fun little project.  Speaking of fun, I hope that you all have a Merry Christmas.

Roll The Dice

This is one of my favourite photographs that I took during the Saint-Lambert Classic Car Show this past May.  So, naturally, I waited about six months before finally putting it up here on the blog.  This car was an El Camino and the owner obviously liked to roll the dice a little bit as he had some fuzzy dice over the rear-view mirror, but I was more impressed with the dice he had installed on the lock for the front door.  I tried to frame the photograph in a particular way so that the dice on the would be in focus, and the background would be blurred.  I didn't want the background to be blurred so much that you couldn't make out the details in the dash, so I moved in real close to take the photograph, but still used a small aperture.  I also tried to keep a little streak of the green of the car in the bottom of the frame to add a little slice of colour.  The photograph was taken at f/16, 1/100sec, ISO 1600 at 52mm.  I'd kind of like to think that this car had been won on a bet and had made several visits to Las Vegas or Atlantic City, but that kind of fiction should best be reserved for another kind of blog.

Scruffy Looking Nerf Herder

I guess you could say that I've had a love/hate relationship with this little guy over the years.  When I was younger, I enjoyed watching as they would struggle to find their way into the various bird feeders that my mother would have set up around the house.  Now though, I've grown to like these little buggers a little less as over the last two years they've found their way into the little garden that My Lovely Assistant has worked on and have managed to get away with various cherry tomatoes, red peppers, raspberries, large tomatoes, cucumbers and even watermelons that we've tried to grown.  Well, the crops are long gone, but these guys are still scurrying around.  This one in particular was hanging around the yard, looking for various things to snack on.  I'm not sure if he thought he was going to find another meal on our steps, but if that's the case, he was surely out of luck.  I can't really say that I felt that sorry for him.  But, I figured the least he could do in order to pay for the food he had eaten was to pose for a few photographs.  I snuck my lens through the openings in our curtain and snapped away while he ate.  The first photograph was taken at f/5, 1/50sec, ISO 400 at 200mm and the second photograph was taken at f/4, 1/50sec, ISO 400 at 200mm.  I admit it, I wouldn't have minded shooting him in a non-photographic way, but since that's not really legal, I limited my self to making little 'bang' noises in my head while taking these photographs and thinking of all of our lost fruits and veggies.  I hope that he enjoyed them.

Experimenting With Steel Panther

As hard as it may be for those of you out there who know me to believe, I tend to spend lots of time in front of my computer.  I can only imagine the shock that admission might be causing some of you.  Some of that computer time is spent trying out different things with my photographs in Photoshop.  I particularly enjoy trying to play with different Filters in the program.  One filter that I have learned to have fun with lately is the Sumi-e filter.  Sumi-e is an ancient Japanese art form of brush painting, which I would have probably never discovered had it not been for Photoshop.  I like the effect that the filter has on my photographs, making them look kind of like a painting.  I've tried it with a few of my photographs now, but the debut on this website will belong to this image of the band Steel Panther.  I attended a concert by Steel Panther and Future Villains back in May of this year.  I managed to get my camera into the venue and took lots of photographs.  You can see the shots I took of Steel Panther here and the shots I took of Future Villains here. Getting back to the transformation, while using the Sumi-e, the Photoshop program asks you to use different kind of brush strokes.  After trying out several different combinations, I ended up using a short stroke width with a high stroke pressure.  The final result is what you see in the second photograph.  The original photograph was shot at f/4.5, 1/320sec, ISO 3200 at 50mm.  You can also see that I cropped the second photograph a little bit to get rid of the microphone stand and to put the cell phone that is in the foreground of the photograph more in the corner.  I tried other brush stroke filters on this photograph as well, but I've yet to get them where I like.  Maybe we'll see this image up here in another form some day.

Fun With Daffodils

The year is quickly coming to an end as I begin to face the cold hard fact that I'm once again going to end the year with a large collection of photographs that I have yet to post up on the blog.  I think I mentioned here one time that I probably have enough photographs in my hard drive to go an entire year without taking another one.  That's obviously not going to happen as I'm often at my happiest when I've got my camera in my hands.  So, I'll continue to dig around that hard drive and be thankful that in the digital age, I can store all of those photographs rather easily.  Which bring us to these photographs.  Taken back in the month of April, these are some close-ups of Daffodils.  I had bought them because the Daffodil is sold by the Canadian Cancer Society as a way to raise funds for Cancer research.  Sadly, this terrible disease has touched my family, and it's probably, and sadly, a safe bet that it has touched those of you who are reading.  Over the years I've lost family members, and friends to the disease.  I wanted to do something nice with these flowers, and I really like doing close-ups.  I focused on the stamen of the flower and tried to get as much detail in the shots as possible. I took two different photographs.  The first, taken at f/9, 1/100sec, ISO 400 at 60mm  I wanted to capture the detail of the stamen and the pollen, as well as the yellow colour of the Daffodil.  With the second photograph, taken at f/20, 1/80sec, ISO 400 at 60mm, I was more interested in the petals and the texture of the flower.  To get both photographs, I simply moved the flower around.  I had the Daffodil facing the sun in the first shot, while in the second I put the sun behind the flower.  It's all about placing your light.  Now, back to the hard drive to see how many more photographs I can unleash on you all before the calendar turns.

I'm Dreaming Of A White Christmas

I don't know what things look like where you live, but over here, we're several days into the month of December, and there isn't a flake of snow anywhere to be seen.  The temperature was five degrees above the seasonal norm today, and the forecast calls for a temperature in the double digits Celsius before the week comes to an end.  That doesn't bode well for any snow this week, and there's even talk of not having a white Christmas this year.  So, since I have no snow, I went digging into the archives and pulled out this photograph that I took waaaaay back in 2007.  It was taken at f/8, 1/125sec, ISO 400 at 27mm.  Just a little reminder for all of you out there about what the outdoors is supposed to look like at this time of the year.  Back to dreaming of a white Christmas I go, while I also take a moment to wonder if Santa's sleigh can be equipped with wheels, just in case.

Colour Injection

It's been a rather grey month of December.  For the record, the month of November wasn't very colourful either.  So, while we wait for some snow to arrive, I thought you might all enjoy a little injection of colour into your internet lives today.  Since today also happens to be my Mom's birthday, I thought it would be appropriate to dig out a photograph from the archives from her old flowerbed.  My parents recently moved into a new house with a large yard so I'm thinking that I might have some new flowers to photograph next year.  These flowers are from a few years back and one of those photographs that I intended to post, but then got lost in time.  I guess it works out for the best.  I now get to use them to help celebrate my Mom's birthday, and as I mentioned, to give you all a little dose of colour.  This photograph was taken at f/2.8, 1/2500sec, ISO 100 at 45mm.  I've always been a fan of having blurred backgrounds in my flower photographs.  Especially when the backgrounds have lots of colour in them.  To achieve this, I try to focus on a flower that has a either lots of other flowers behind it or to a side.  I then move so that the flowers that I want in focus are near the bottom of my frame, use a large aperture and snap away.  This one worked out pretty well.  Happy Birthday Mom!

On The Wall

As previously mentioned, that's a photograph of my photograph hanging on the wall in the Saint-Lambert Library.  It's up there as part of an annual holiday art exhibition.  This is the third year I participate in the show, and even after three years I still find it pretty cool to see one of my photographs hanging on the walls of a building I used to visit to borrow books when I was a kid.  Again, if you'd like to find out more about this particular photograph, you can go back to my original blog post about it.  A big thank-you to My Lovely Assistant for the photograph.  A big "I'm sorry" to my Mom for the beard.  If you happen to find yourself in the Saint-Lambert area and would like to have a look, my photograph is hanging in the back of the first floor in the computer area.  While you're there, check out the other works.  That jazz guy behind me is pretty cool as well.

At The Saint-Lambert Library

Yes, you've all seen this photograph before.  Those of you with long memories will remember that this photograph debuted here on the site back in February, despite the fact that it was taken in January.  My backlog in photographs has grown longer than one month since then.  It's back here on the site because as of today, it is on display at the Saint-Lambert Library.  For the third year, one of my photographs will be part of their annual holiday art exhibition.  If you'd like to find out more about this photograph, feel free to go back in time and visit the original blog post from February, or even check out the video from when it was chosen as a CTV WeatherPix.  The photograph will be in Saint-Lambert until December 31st.  If you missed the chance to see it during my personal exhibition back in March, head down to Saint-Lambert and take a look at it as well as all of the other pieces of art that are on display.