Wednesday, March 30, 2022

Several moons

I was wondering what to blog, looking over the recent selection of unblogged images. You need to know that Celina is 'helping' me, her tail flicking over the keyboard, which is her way of indicating which image numbers to select. 

There were two recent moon photos in the list, and I got to thinking if there were any others that I had not tagged as blogged. I have these keyworded in Lightroom so they're easy to find, if I haven't forgotten to keyword them back when they were edited.

Some of these probably have been blogged along the way and not tagged, or ones really similar to them were blogged. If anyone were to bang on my door to say, "Yes, Keith, you blogged image n below on such and such a date, and therefore have degraded the blog reading experience because of duplication", why then, I'd have to crack open a bottle of wine to share with you as we discussed images and blogging, and probably much else. French Press coffee if not wine. Or herbal tea. Whatever.

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2. I used to drive or ride my bike past this all the time, and now that road dead ends. In fact, I'm not even sure if this facility is still there. When they put in the new ring road highway, there was a new utility corridor beside it. I know they've removed some other electrical utility stuff near the ring road.


3. One of my first night shoots when I got the T6i.


4. What's interesting to me, now, about this image is not the moon. It's the diffraction patterns in the sky created by digital processing, sort of centred on the moon. The problem is that I don't know if you'll be able to see them in this version. They are more than clearly visible in the various edits within Lightroom, not so clearly visible but still there in the jpg version. Normally of course, such patterns would render an image unusable, which is why I didn't at the time, and I didn't know how to remove them. Now I could go back and create a nice, if boring, photo of the moon with a black background.


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The moon is a tough photographic target, which I suspect is why so many photographers try to capture it, in so many different ways. Between the moon's phases, all the different positions in the sky it can occupy, the various atmospheric conditions, and things to juxtaposition it against, there are a near infinite number of photos that could be taken. Plus the whole 19 year cycle thing. If you have a very specific shot in mind, there might be only a few days out of every 19 years that it works. Bad weather, and you have to wait for the next time. 

Of the Day
Driftwood
Many people see the 'man in the moon' face. Can you see a face, or faces in this?


Peony

Lily

Celina

Film (6x9)

Friday, March 25, 2022

Recent Books

Tax time. Sigh, but it has to be done. As planned, I ended up owing a big tax bill. My thinking is that if you get a refund, you've given the government too much money and lost the use of it in the mean time. Now I can move on to shut the company down. Hopefully in April that will all be put to bed.

Libraries are wonderful. I recently put a batch of books on hold, and they've been trickling in. The first several are from a while ago, and I just haven't got around to blogging about them.

by Prix Pictet. Photos and stories about the Corona crises. I think that Peter Turnley's book is much better.


I actually don't have much memory of this book, but I think it was aimed at newcomers.

I didn't like a lot of the photos in this book. They seemed more like off-hand snapshots than any serious work. It makes me think about asking strangers if I can take their portrait.

Lots of good stuff in here, though it's a bit outdated on some of the software, but that's to be expected.

A fun read, bending the Holmes canon badly, but nodding and winking along the way.

Chrystia Freeland is currently Canada's finance minister. I haven't read this one yet, but browsed before buying. For people that haven't grasped the difference between a million dollars, and a billion dollars, this would be a good read.

I've seen a bunch of his videos for Lightroom stuff, and mostly like them. The book has lots of good tips, and not just related to landscape photography. I roll my eyes at the dad jokes.

This didn't tell me anything I didn't already know. Much of it could be dropped into a book on digital photography without changing a word.

Of the Day
Driftwood

Peony
But first a serendipity pano from 2106 during a walk with Sean. This is the pedestrian bridge over the very west end of the Glenmore reservoir.



Lily

Celina

Film 
From a walk in East Village with the GL690. This is the second try at a scan, getting better at avoiding dust and hair on the negative or on the lens. In other film news I got my GW690 back and was out for a walk with it earlier yesterday. Photos from it will probably go on the photoblog because there are some comparison shots. Still figuring out what belongs on this or the other blog.



Sunday, March 20, 2022

Spring in Calgary means

Of course it's snowing. What did you expect? People who have lived here more than a few years know that spring in Calgary can happen many times in a year. Mostly it's between January and May, but don't bet the farm on it.

This morning as I was taking the last few sips of coffee, looking out the window at the sidewalk and street I was struck by the curve in the snow. It was beautiful, and almost in the same instant I realized that to get the photo I wanted of it, I had to be standing on our roof. Our metal roof, of which we were told was extremely slippery when wet. Slippery enough that it isn't possible to walk on it without safety gear, so don't, and don't let anyone else.

But then Linda suggested that shooting it from the back garden might change the curve but still be interesting. The possibility was there, and what do you know? I found other shots in the back garden. I was thinking of them as a group showing, with the title of 'Awaiting Spring.'

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2. In the last week or so I've done bison burgers, rack of lamb, lamb burgers, and steak.


3. This is the curve, not quite so pronounced from this angle, but then the diagonal lines show up better.


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Of the Day
Driftwood, but first a serendipity from late 2016.


I was thinking that with the snow, my readers might like a reminder that warm beaches do exist, just not here.

Peony

Lily

Celina
And yes, I need to tidy my desk. Today, as I'm gathering up T slips and other tax related documents.  I realized only after the fact that the one doc had private info, so I blacked that out. 


Film (6x9) some of you might have seen this on Instagram. I'm still sorting out in my head what goes in my photo blog, and what goes here. I'm thinking that the photoblog will mostly be film stuff, probably in a bit more detail about the process and learnings than a non-photographer might want. Then again, they can just scroll the pretty pictures and ignore the text.
This was shot on a loaner GL690 while my GW690 was sent off for servicing. This is a ravine west of Turner Valley as I was taking the scenic route home on inexpensive B&W film.

Wednesday, March 16, 2022

A Banff road trip morning

As I alluded in my photoblog here, Banff is over exposed as a photo destination. (See what I did there?) Still, I had wanted to meet up with Sean before he got deeply involved with a personal project, and he suggested a road trip to Banff area. We explored up the road to Lake Minnewanka, and Vermillion Lakes, which I had never been to.

The important part of the trip was the chat, mostly about our various projects, coping with the stresses of early retirement, and other topics relevant to our age, hobbies, and former profession. From that point of view the trip was a complete success. Not so much from a film perspective, but you can read about that in the link above.

Some of the chat has made me think about the changes to the world. It's common for the elderly to moan about how the world has gone to pot, and it's been happening since writing was invented. I referred to that a little here in a response to Janice. Since then Trump is out of office, the writing is on the wall for Kenney, Ford seems to have improved though I'm not following Ontario news and could be mistaken, and the biggest bully has stepped into what has turned into a huge pile of dog shit. Putin will never scrap this invasion mess off his boots. To be clear, it's the invasion that's the dog shit. Ukrainians are the scrappy underdog here, fighting for their homeland, and more power to them. I've donated some money.

Are things getting better? I'm an optimistic person and would like to think so, though I have to admit the 'Freedum Convoy' and related events have shaken my faith. There are still people protesting about COVID restrictions that no longer exist. Why? Because they think Kenney will re-impose them, just to personally inconvenience the protesters. Yes, that really is as stupid as it sounds.

Don't get me started on gas prices. There was a guy in the hot tub the other day on about the price of gas. He was convinced that the 'natural' price of gasoline was about a dollar a litre, and everything over that was the Trudeau carbon tax. The latest jump, from about $1.46 to 1.66, according to him, is a carbon surtax imposed to drive Albertans to their knees. (That's a quote.) Never mind that prices elsewhere are higher. Meanwhile, the Costco across the road has had to hire staff to direct traffic on the entry road. People are waiting in a long line for gas that is a few cents cheaper. Is their time worth nothing? How much gas are they burning as their car idles in the line up?

In the meantime, I'm keeping a low profile, working on my various projects. Linda is eagerly awaiting spring and making plans for the garden, but knowing full well spring is still on vacation in the tropics, working on her tan, sipping one of those tall fruity drinks with the little umbrella. 

I digressed there. Mostly on the Banff trip I wanted to shoot some film, and that didn't go so well, but there's some digital images I liked from the trip.

1. Sean contemplating his composition options.


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5. I liked the tree against the mountain background and tried several times with different lenses. What was really needed was the tripod.


6. We were astonished to see open water, with a bit of mist every now and then. There's a hot spring somewhere nearby.

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8. Near Bow falls. There's probably a million of these three photos out on the web.


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Of the Day
Driftwood
I was pretty sure that wasn't a squid trying to lure me into tentacle reach. 


Peony

Lily

Film (6x9) There I was with the loaner camera at the downtown public library, after checking out the swanky new parking lot. For much of my time here that was a surface parking lot used mainly by people going to City Hall. We parked in it many times. During my time at Penn West I had an ironclad rule that I needed to be out of the office by a certain time so I could meet Linda getting out of her office. The Salvation Army Center of Hope is just across the road, and with the Mustard Seed and Drop In Center only a few blocks away, and that clientele sometimes leads to interesting street life. There's another view of this here, and I had to wait a few minutes so that some of that street life was not prominent in the image.