Pano and extras day

Many of the images that pass through my camera get transferred to a RAID drive, and after a quick look to see if I like them enough to work with them, live quietly forevermore in the digital darkness. A fairly small percentage get edited, and some of those get exported as a JPEG that I could show someone. That could be on this blog, my photoblog, Instagram, or various places on Facebook.

Many of those are what I think of as ordinary photos. They show a person, a place, a thing, as it was at a particular time. Some of them that's the actual intent, such as my photos of a community association event.

Some very few make my day when I finish editing them. I think they are particularly good for whatever reason. I aspire to create photos that are more than just a pretty photo, though that's nice too, but ones that tell a story, or have a hook that draw in the viewer and create a reaction within. I do not succeed as often as I'd like to, but I'm going to keep at it.

Then there is a different stream, where extra work is required. Many of you are familiar with panoramas, where several photos are stitched together to make a wider or taller image. Some of you may know about combining 3 different images of the same scene, one bright, one dark, and one in the middle, which are processed together to produce one image. These are done when part of a scene is really bright, and another part is really dark. One image is likely to lose detail in one of the bright or dark parts of the scene, or worse, both. One can, if you're careful, combine both these techniques.

One can do all that and still end up with an ordinary photo. Extra effort doesn't guarantee extra special results. Some of these are winners, some are not. That they have not been blogged to date is not an indication that I dislike them. They may not have suited the topic at hand, or they've been displaced by others I liked more, or I didn't feel like sharing.

So today, you get a sampling of these photos that haven't made it onto the blog for whatever reason, and a bit of the story around them. Oldest to newest.

 1.
A sunset looking south from last winter.

2.
From a walk in Fish Creek with a buddy. Hers turned out much better than mine.

3.
The next several are from Larnach Castle in New Zealand. Mostly because it had become a brilliant day, and I was trying to capture some of the shadows.

4.

5.

6.

7.
Our car in Fish Creek, trying to capture the reflection in a puddle.

8.
Frank Lake after the Sheep Valley tour. Most of the people were off in the bird viewing blind, and I was off on another little peninsula looking for a landscape, or a cloudscape. This is as good as it got, and I'm not especially pleased with it.

9.
Fish Creek, working with tough light.

10.

11.
Part of the Yukon River, playing with light and software settings for an abstract image.

12.
Near Kathleen Lake, loving the texture of the wood, and struggling with light. The top part of the image was in full sunlight, and the bottom part was in dark shade.

13.
This one is special. It's made up of 16 smaller images stitched together to produce what is called a gigapixel image. This is reduced to 2048 px wide for Facebook, but Lightroom thinks it is 16936 x 12480 px, or 56 x 42 inches at 300 dpi. When I look at it in Lightroom at 100% I can see the moss and lichen growing in the cracks of the rocks. From a stop along the Dempster highway.

14.
A wide open space along the Dempster. I'd hoped to have more images in this pano, but it didn't work out.

15.
Fish Creek, trying to get the colour, with some of the darker trees, and the clouds in the sky.

16.

17.
Another view of my favourite bridge 2.

18.
The fall colours during the big snowstorm a week or so ago.

19.
There I was, hoping the sunset would light up the sky, but no. This is as good as it got.

Lynx of the Day

Deadwood of the Day
Even though there is some old wood in the first part of the blog, you still get the regular feature.