Spring? A rescue

We have this in our front garden. Is it spring? I fear not. Spring time in Calgary is cruel.

The back yard still has lots of ice in it, though one corner of that garden has a tulip poking up. What's important is that I can get to the BBQ and back without breaking my neck or dropping the offerings.

The rescue happened because I'm tall. A buddy of ours moved to Ft Mc$$$ because of work. Their house is conditionally sold, and we're all fingers crossed. However they asked us to drop in and see if they had forgotten to pack a couple things. A basement wardrobe drawer was mentioned. Nothing there, but I could see something on top.

I didn't think that what I saw was what I asked me to look for but I pulled it down regardless. There was something else, and it turned out to be a scroll for a degree in electrical engineering, nicely framed. We brought it along to give back to them. It's weird seeing the house so empty.

I can just imagine that scroll sitting there, gathering dust in the 8 or 8 inches between the top of the wardrobe and the ceiling. Maybe the house gets sold again. Someone finally decides to take out the wardrobe or finish the basement. I hope nobody gets bonked on the head by the frame as they try to move the wardrobe. I can picture them looking at the date, and wondering if that guy is still alive, and trying to find him. Meanwhile, the guy has got used to living without his framed certificate, and yet there is a tearful reunion, maybe coinciding with his retirement from the industry.

One of the COVID things is video calls. I've had several Zoom calls with my community association, (hint, all activities are cancelled), one Zoom call concurrent with an online version of Cards Against Humanity (hint, it's more fun in person when people are drinking), and several video calls with buddies. Here's the most recent call.

We haven't seen them in person for a while, but we can't blame COVID. It was great to get caught up with their news.


Curtis has been on a photogenic tear lately. The camera just loves him. Here's just one of the dozen or so from recent days. Maybe I should start a Curtis Photo of the day feature. Hmmmm.

A random rock from Nanaimo Neck something park, since the driftwood there is almost done.

Driftwood of the Day
All the same chunk of wood. One more to go, then on to NZ!

Look harder

I went through the star photos from my one night shoot in New Zealand, and found this. Note the faint curtain effect in the aurora. I was looking through the many star shots and it turns out there's only a couple shots where the curtains show up, in the middle of a long sequence of shots. Add in some reflections on a temporary calm sea, and I'm loving it. My eyes saw nothing of the aurora.

Looking through star photos on a laptop with a filthy screen is really hard. Even on a desktop it takes longer since the computer has to work harder building the fine details of the image, and in star shots, it's all fine details. This was shot from the same place as the others, about the middle of the beach on Corlac Bay, looking a little south of east. Shot with a Sigma 14mm lens at f1.8, exposures are about 13 seconds at ISO 1600.

1.

 Compare that to this one. Close, but not quite the same. This is the reworked version of the original galaxy and aurora over Invercargill. The white light at the bottom right is Corlac Bay.

2.

Or this one. A narrow panorama to combine several images and try a different editing process.

3.

A slightly different angle, looking a bit more west of south, giving a better look at Corlac Bay and the reflections. The Milky Way is just to the left of this photo.

4.

 Or this one. A  different angle, looking north and up. Just below the bottom of this photo is a hill, and there was someone driving a car up a set of hairpin turns. I suppose I should try a time lapse movie of it to see how it looks. Maybe later today.

5.

Driftwood of the Day
The Milky Way is a giant arch overhead, if you're in a place dark enough to see it. Here's a smaller arch.

Spring? Dare we hope?

Today is supposed to be sunny and 14. At last! Solid spring-like weather, though Calgarians know there's going to be more snow. Perhaps lots more. I'm hoping to get out for a run in shorts and t shirt.

So you get a front garden tulip shot to start the morning. At least Linda says it's a tulip, and who am I to disagree?

In the spirit of new growing things, there's this happening on Brighton beach. Of course I don't know what is growing in this chunk of dead wood. You go little plants!

The serendipity shot, same file number as the next one down. Celina giving me her usual dubious look.

Another plant growing out of dead wood. This is in the Orakonui Ecosanctuary.

Linda dodging the rocks at the end of Aramoana beach. While I love the big wide open spaces that some of the beaches have, I also like the confusion at the ends of some beaches, where the stone, sand, and water get all jumbled up. Catch it with time to play when the tide is just right, and the light is magical, and maybe a willing model, and you can end up with an amazing shot. This one isn't, but the potential was there, if I'd been willing to hang out all day.

Driftwood of the Day
Only a couple more from Nanaimo, then onto NZ driftwood.

So I tidied my desk yesterday

I had these big plans for the quarantine. The photo editing was first priority. But then getting some of the clutter under control was going to be a thing. And reading, which would help the cats meet their lap quota and maybe take off part of one of the many eternities we are going to suffer in cat hell for being such bad humans. (Hey, I can dream!)

Photo editing was harder than I thought it would be. I marked myself really hard, and still ended up with lots of 4 star images, and a few 5 star. I was thinking I needed a 3.5 star rating for those that are nice but not quite 4 star. I still have to work on the dark sky shots. They're even harder.

Dealing with tax paperwork is always really stressful, though it's been getting better in some ways. There's a bit of a system, and having an accountant to do the actual filing is probably the best money I've spent over the last couple decades. Doubly so for the corporation.

So putting together all the paper and electronic documents was a start on the desk. Yesterday was the serious excavation. I'm down to the regular working clutter as I think of it. Soon, I'll tackle the harder stuff. There's a shelf between the speakers for reference material. You know, Strunk and White and the other two Elements books. The Canadian Oxford. The QPB encyclopedia of words and phrase origins. A couple others. The problem is that I have to reach up and open the book. If I'm sitting here, I'm on the computer. I can open a browser window and type faster than I can open a book. So do I need the books?

Let's not get started on the drawers beside the desk. I've done periodic excavations of those, mainly for paperwork relating to tax stuff. Much of the older stuff now had a May date with a shredding truck, except that event got cancelled. I know the bottom drawer has the CD for a computer game that won't run on this computer, (the photo editor) or the next most recent one (the writing laptop). Neither has an optical disk reader. It won't run on the next oldest, which is the email computer. It will only run on the old Cube down in the basement, gathering dust. I used that one to play videos while on the bike trainer, and I haven't done that for some time, and may never again. Anyone want the Cube, or the bike (and trainer and other tri gear).

I digress. Back to the drawers. Every house has a junk drawer, and these are a bunch of them. Really, I need to take everything out of the drawer, and decide what needs to be kept handy, what needs to be kept but not handy but not lost, and what needs to be thrown away. I'm pretty sure at the back/bottom of one of the drawers is a bottle of isopropyl alcohol that was used for cleaning tape deck heads. We haven't had a tape deck in this house for several decades. A tape deck, for my younger readers, is a, oh heck, look it up yourself.

 More digression, sorry about that. (Not!) The alcohol is to clean the back windshield of the car. The idea is to install some stickers I got from a buddy. You know the stick figure family thingies you see on lots of cars? This is for photographers. I'll post a photo when I find the alcohol and get them installed.

Back to the drawers. I'm likely to be amazed at what I find. In previous excavations I've found pay stubs a decade or more old. Maybe I'll photo the detrius and blog about it. Once all that is done, it's time to tackle the basement. By then the snow will be flying again, I'm pretty sure.

Back to the quarantine plans. Somehow much of that didn't happen. Not much else happened. It's been a quiet time. I'm sure a graph of our internet usage would have spiked over the last several weeks. Streaming several seasons of Big Bang Theory will do that. (Just started season 8!)

One of the things I  mostly like about Youtube is streaming music. Today, for example, I woke up with the Hymn of the Red October running through my mind. No idea why. So I played that as I was starting the blog. The next thing suggested was a compilation of the songs from "Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo". No idea why.

 Here's a couple photos that got 4 stars that have not yet been blogged or seen on social media. I think. I wasn't entirely consistent with my tagging during our travels. This is part of the Kuri Bush beach, near where Linda found a trove of driftwood. This shot is at 50 mm to approximate what the human eye would have seen. I just loved that tree with that sky in the background, and played with several different focal lengths trying different compositions. This also explains why I often wore shoes on the beach.

Looking the other way, same beach.

Driftwood of the Day
The same chunk of wood with slightly different treatments.

Day 25

Don't be fooled by the sweet exterior.

There's another side.

These cats are sick of us being in their snooze time. We've had a few afternoon kitty glares, like the one above. It makes it clear to us we need to keep the food supply coming or the predator within will work on the two large sources of lunch.

They like the evening TV time, though. They settle in and cuddle. Celina never pays much attention to the TV, but Curtis often does. He seemed fascinated by Elementary, and knew when the last show on the disc ended, even before the closing music, and would trot off to get fed. He wasn't so fascinated by Big Bang Theory, but seems to be coming around. (Middle of season 7 and going strong.)

In other news it's snowing this morning. Again. Sheesh! Enough already! I think it's snowed at least a bit almost every day since our return. The only consolation is that I usually don't have to shovel. Today is looking iffy at the moment. So you get a flower. Try to overlook that it's mostly white.

 I've been thinking of a new COVID graph, a complicated one. The major problem, of course, is that we don't have reliable data. We know that the number of cases and deaths is (adverb) understated. One could discuss if the correct adverb is grossly, dramatically, enormously, feloniously, politically, or something else.

Whatever the numbers, I'd like them reduced to a per capita figure for each country in the world, with breakdowns for Canadian provinces and American states, mainly because I live in one, and close to the other. (That I'm pretty sure we'd look good in comparison has nothing to do with it.)

And then, I like to correlate that to the leaders of those countries, considering gender, age, and political party. (Note as well that I'm not fond of the traditional left-wing/right-wing descriptors for political parties. I like  plotting political parties on a chart like this.)

As you can imagine, this works out to being a complicated graph. I'd love to see someone like Hans Rosling have a go at it. I suspect that there would be some clear conclusions coming out of that in terms of public health policies and who we should trust. I think those conclusions would carry over into other parts of public policy, like determining where public money should go and where it should come from. All of which should drive our voting patterns, but if people can believe bullshit when it comes to life and death policy, they'll swallow political bullshit without any sweetener.

There was a news article about the difficulties of rescheduling the Olympics. Bah! Cancel them. All of them. Forever. They are a relic. Set up annual world level competitions that take place in the same venues from year to year. If your country wants to participate, you pay part of the upkeep costs. Clearly define what amateur means. Test everyone 7 ways from Sunday from the moment they enter the competition stream. Random, on the spot testing, any time of the night or day. Audit the labs and the staff.

We are still doing fine. Only going out for essential groceries. Just now that's not so bad, but as spring gets closer I'm going to get itchy about getting out there with my camera. We got our tax paperwork all lined up ready to go to the accountant, that was yesterday's major task. This transition between some places sending paper, and some electronic is a pain in the butt. It's really easy to overlook a tax form, then we get the dreaded question, last year you had an slip for xyz but I don't see one for this year. Can you send it please? Which strikes horror into my heart because while I might have overlooked it, we've been simplifying our affairs and it simply may not exist. Or, they may be sending it out later this week.

Serendipity photo from last autumn.

Driftwood of the Day
All the same chunk of wood, and indeed, even the same curve. But I was totally in love with the textures and lines and the late afternoon light. I was trying several subtly different shots to make sure I got at least one good one. The problem there is that when they work out, you have a tough choice. So I chose.

Comment and blog questions, answers

It depends. Yes. No. Maybe. Always. Never. Sometimes. 42.

More seriously.

But first a flower to put you in the mood and take your mind off the snow.

The other day I discovered the little thingie down at the bottom of the blog that suggested several other blog posts you might enjoy had disappeared. It was called LinkWithin and I liked it because I know some of my readers used it and it was periodically handy for me.

At first I thought it was upgrade degradation and I could fix it, but no, it's gone for good. What's worse is there does not not seem to be a replacement. All the Google suggested replacements are themselves gone. Another symptom of the decline of the blogging world.

My usual browser is Safari. But overnight it started being fussy. I couldn't add photos to the blog or see the photos in the Google Photos folder that I use to share photos. I was beginning to froth when I remembered there are other browsers. It's been a while since I've used Firefox on this computer, a quick upgrade and voila! Back in business. That's when I figured out LinkWithin was really gone.

For a while, back when I got lots and lots of comments on the blog, every day, I had a thingie that made commenting threads easier. Then that got unworkable and I made it go away. That's why some of the comment threads in older posts look so chaotic.

Now I have one main commenter, and several others that comment periodically. I have several that will text or email saying they commented asking if I see it. Sadly, often the answer is no. Blogger still seems to be really pissy about comments from mobile devices. Sorry about that, but there's nothing I can do. This is something that should have been fixed a decade ago, and never will be.

But really, in spite of all that, I love getting comments, and I do thank the people that comment. If you even thought about commenting, but realized you were on your phone, and you meant to come back on a laptop, and then life happened and you forgot, I thank you anyways.

There's a daily blog Linda always follows, and I periodically do, that gets several hundred comments a day. It's moderated, and every day there are at least several comments that only have the word deleted. Given the toxic spew in some of the published comments, I can only imagine what it takes to get deleted.

In my blog I loved the active comment, but admit that moderating hundreds of comments would get old. For a while I was responding to comments, then I realized that the commenters most likely didn't see the response.

One of my main commenters is someone I met at a work that seems like not long ago at all, but in fact is. We went our separate ways, and then he bubbled to the top of my awareness at another job, when my boss asked what I thought of this guy. He ended up being hired. That was fun, and as was life in the contracting corporate oil and gas world, we both went our separate ways again, except this time we stayed in touch with periodic lunch/beer/photo expeditions. Several of his comments merit serious discussion over beer, and I regret that shouldn't happen for a while. So here are some responses, inadequate though they might be without the lubrication of beer.

From the March image of the Month.
He asked "As much as I love a good panorama, 2 feels like it is too wide (especially on the left side) for its height - mmm interesting. 3 is great and worthy of the "Image of the Month" honour. I have a technical question. Is that a single frame or a composite of multiple exposures?"

Here is the photo under discussion.

This beach panorama is assembled from 3 landscape images, and is 8237 x 3276 px, for a an aspect ratio of 2.5:1. I used my 24-105 mm lens at 24 mm. It will be no surprise that I did this handheld, thus the height is somewhat less than the expected 4160 px. I was trying to do it quickly so I didn't get ghosting in the waves, or have the waves mess up that utterly gorgeous reflection.

 Here is a similar image not published on the blog, though I think it appeared on Facebook.

This one is assembled from 5 portrait images, and is 8397 x 5455 px for an aspect ratio of 1.53:1. Note that a single image from my camera comes out 6420 x 4160 for an aspect ratio of 1.5:1. As a further note, a 16x9 image (typical widescreen tv ratio these days), is 1.77:1. Many of my images get cropped to this ratio, and it seems natural for me. However, as regular blog readers know, I'm not tied to that; I do love me a wide image, even when it isn't of a typical wide screen subject.

As should be clear, they were shot about 10 minutes apart, from somewhat different locations on the beach. Both were at f7.1 to balance depth of field with the intense sunlight and still capture the darker parts of the image.

Back to the wide one. It's quite easy to crop the left side a bit to just left of the main cloudbank. This is 7661 px wide (2.33:1). To me, this feels a little constricted, given I see the open image. Sean might think it perfect.

One of the things I love about NZ beaches is the sense that they go on forever, all that sea, and sky and beach, forever. (Note, this is Muriwai and it really does go on for the better part of forever.) Having that bit of cloud taper off into almost nothing on the left helps bring that feeling of openness.

Now if there were something, or someone at the focus of the leading lines, or along them, that would change the dynamic of the photo. It would then be about that focus point. As it is, it's about all of the photo, all the different elements that we know go on forever. I want the viewer's eye to have a chance to wander around all that, explore the reflections, follow the ripples and flecks of sea foam, enjoy the fluffy clouds.

In the more square photo, the same elements are there, but it's more about the reflections. I think the first one is a beach scene that includes clouds, and the second is a cloudscape that happens to have been shot on a beach. A subtle difference. Viewers might disagree. Much beer could (and maybe should) be consumed in the discussion.

I took many photos of this scene as I was walking along. They're all subtly different and these are the two I like best. Someone else might look at the choices and think I'm an idiot for not editing one that is the most amazing beach photo ever. Such is life.

The galaxy over Invercargill is one exposure. Normally I don't discuss settings, but since you ask so nice. Sigma 14 mm, f1.8, 13 seconds, ISO 1600, careful editing. The image of the month version is subtly different than the ones published earlier. The difference is editing on a big (mostly) clean desktop monitor, as opposed to a small filthy laptop screen.


Given my copious free time, I'm about to tackle the star shot images. I've seen assembled photos of the galaxy that look awesome, and I'm tempted to try some of those just to see what happens.

There was another comment on What is Normal that merits further discussion, and would be much better for beer lubrication. I have an idea. Stay tuned.

Two artsy photos. Somehow they seem related to me.

Driftwood of the Day
Different views of the same chunk.

An easy blog today.

After the heavy duty blog yesterday, something lighter.

Starting with serendipity that I thought appropriate, matching one of the driftwood photos.

No, this isn't from last night, but it could have been. I'm so over the snow, and it keeps coming. Your second serendipty, matching the art display.

On the beach, but not driftwood. I can't remember now if it's a leaf or a bit of seaweed.

Driftwood of the Day
The same log. This first one is one of the micro-landscapes I keep an eye out for.