Unconventional

Some of you are probably scratching your heads, wondering what that photo is. It didn't quite work out like I intended, but the blog version I see as I type is better than the Lightroom version I edited. Not sure how that works. In any case, it's not my most successful image, and that's fine. I may revisit it and have another go.

I've been looking at the world around me, trying to open my mind and get past the recognition part of my brain saying 'that isn't anything dangerous, look somewhere else for something dangerous that might pounce and eat me.'

This is an example of that. As soon as I I saw it glinting in the light, I knew what it was. Being a guy, my first thought was NOT that the house needed vacuuming. My first thought was to move on and think about the next photo trip, or something else. But then I dragged myself back for another look, and tried to think about it as sunlight refracting off a semi transparent substance. Would it be a good image? Could I tweak it Lightroom to make it an interesting image?

At the time I was thinking of a sort of reverse image of solar flare prominences with the sun part being blacked out. No surprise it didn't come out that way, but in the bigger version I see lots of tiny rainbows, which was a bit of a surprise. That's why I'm willing to try these shots, just to see what will happen.

 Anyone that's been to our house knows whats happening in this next photo. There's lots of people going to be taking poppy shots over the next little while. I'd like to think this one is unique, showing a reflection of poppies (with all that implies) buried amidst the knickknacks on something we look at many times a day, and not just on Remembrance Day, but all year.

And last, just because. Curtis! Some days I think he's the real star of this blog.

In followup, don't forget the contest running here. So far I have zero, count'em, zero entries. So your odds are pretty good.

Macro Monday 11, metal

A contest! These two things are not the same. Neither are as clean as perhaps they should be, but it's not terribly important. The first is pretty obvious, so no prize there.

The second though, in photos 3 and 4, is a bit more obscure. If anyone can specifically guess what it is, they can choose any image of mine they like for a prize, (there are about 35,000) and they'll get a file suitable for printing. I would suggest at Resolve, but some of you live elsewhere. Or if you would prefer a medium quality shot for a good desktop image, I can do that too. If you have a nice frame you want to fill, I can usually tweak the image to fit it. The framing is the expensive part.

I know people sometimes read my blog in batches, so the contest will stay open till Monday November 13 at midnight, then I'll draw between the correct answers. You can enter by commenting below on the blog, by commenting on the Facebook post, by private messaging me on Facebook, or sending an email to keith at nucleus dot com. If you know my cell number you can text if you want to do that. I'm not going to notice anything via Twitter. The winner will hear from me, and then once that's all sorted I'll announce the results. No comment till then. Bonus points if you mention which image you would like.

All of these were shot at 5x (except #3) all with extension tubes, which messes up the magnification numbers a bit. I'm not sure how much, but at 5x without the tubes, the camera sees about 4.5 mm wide, and with all the tubes it's about 3 mm.

1.

2.

3. About 3x mag with tubes.

4. Remember, you are seeing about 3 mm worth of this object. The white substance would wash off.

Missed my own bloggy-versary

How could that happen? Ten years is a long time in the blog universe. Just a few days and 10 years ago I started this fitness blog. Oct 27, 2007. 2530 or so blog posts later, one every 1.44 days on average, here we are. Much has changed.

We won't get into how much I've changed, other than saying I'm way, WAY more healthy now.

The blog started as a way for my fitness coach to keep track of what I was doing. One of his other clients was already a friend, and several others have become good friends. Some of the readers that started with me way back then are still reading, at least some of the time. (Hello!) Some have drifted off to other activities and don't do triathlon anymore.

Lots don't blog anymore. Blogging doesn't seem to be as popular, both reading and writing, OR commenting, as it once was. Maybe they've migrated to Facebook or other platforms, but those other platforms piss me off, what with fickle article ordering and (gag) advertising. My readership has stayed fairly constant, maybe slowly growing over the years. I've gained some readers and lost others.

I enjoy writing it. I figure if you didn't enjoy reading it for whatever reason, you wouldn't be here. Thank you for coming. Essentially, I plan to keep on writing it. What you have seen is what you will continue to get. A bit of fitness, lots of photos of various things, some wine, a bit of news, a rant every now and then, but no dancing girls or click bait. This is a quality blog.

To celebrate here's one of the first photos with the good camera that I really liked. I can do better now.

And more blog fitness related, one of the very first photos to go on the blog, my bike Estela. She is just coming up on 10 years as well, and has been a great bike for me. Pity I'm not out on her more often this summer, but maybe next. I am being encouraged to do an Oly next year, perhaps Chinook. I haven't had such good luck with their half, maybe the Oly will be the trick.

Oh, and don't bother going back to the beginning and reading the first posts. They're pretty dreadful.

Now it's your turn. Who are you? Leave a comment, or or a Facebook reply if that's where you saw the link. I'd love to know what you like about the blog, or what makes you cringe.

The cats are ganging up on us

Yes, these two.

For a while Celina was a bit picky about canned food, but she was having some issues with her teeth. That all got cleaned up and she was eating with a good appetite again. We worry a little about her eating enough.

Curtis, on the other paw, is a big inhaler. He always wants more food, and is willing to be helpful about finishing off Celina's. Or ours, if we don't keep an eye on it.

What started happening is that Celina would be eating slowly, then Curtis would come along and push her aside. We started separating them at meal time. Then it seemed like Celina would wait a bit, and then would eat, slowly, while Curtis watched, while we kept him back. She would crunch a crunchy or two, while watching him, then look over the remaining crunchies, pick one, chew it, think about it for a while, and meanwhile Curtis is well on the way to being around the bend with frustration.

We've always been willing to give her more food when she asks. She's a bit of a snacker. But then we realized she was leaving it for Curtis, and he was plumping up again. Now we're back to watching them to make sure she eats it all, and if not we set it aside for her. Well, unless there's just a mouthful or two.

Celina was being a coy subject, and I was playing with manual focus, just because.  One photographer video I was watching suggested that rather than playing with auto focus points, or getting focus then re-composing, why not learn how to focus manually so what you want is in focus. Clearly this wouldn't work for fast action, but it seems like a useful skill to have. As a beginner tip, it works easier with lighter lenses.

Gateways

In the movie Arrival, (close your eyes for a second if you haven't seen it and still want to, and don't want to be spoilered) the premise is that by learning an alien language people can learn to remember the future. This isn't new, lots of science fiction stories have seeing the future as a premise. Even the ancient Greeks had that idea, though Cassandra was cursed that nobody would believe her. (BTW, Arrival is a terrific movie if you haven't seen it yet. All photographers drool at the composition of the opening scene.)

But the theory often seems to be that you would remember everything about the future, and why should that be? How much of the past do you actually remember? Pop quiz, what were you doing at noon, a week and 5 days after your 12th birthday?

(Crickets.)

Now, you might end up having a memory of the future that includes a look at a calendar that shows you planning an event for a particular time and place in 2047. Maybe that's a possible future you, and there are other branches of you that die a week tomorrow in a car crash. That's why you wouldn't have any memories from then.

We choose our future every moment, often without realizing it. Sure, picking a school, picking a job, deciding which city to live in opens up a path to a future you, and simultaneously closes off other paths. Maybe you'd have met the love of your life if only you had taken that short term contract in Vancouver. It rolled over to a longer term, and you met that cute co-worker, blah blah blah. Or maybe that's where you died in a car crash and by staying here you got a long fulfilling life but you slide into senility with nobody but a paid nurse to change your diapers.

We usually don't know the results of our choices, though some are obvious. Getting into a car being driven by a drunk is a really bad idea. No brainer there. I think it's a no brainer that voting for Jason Kenney or anyone in their new political party is a bad idea, but then again, some people are so demented as to think that Trump is doing a good job.

There is an open gate. Inviting, provided you don't trip over the leaves, or run into the obstacle just past the gate. But there's another gate right beside it, closed. Someone in a rush might not even notice that closed gate. Maybe it's closed because going that way is a bad idea, or maybe, just maybe, the prize for opening it is substantial. You get to choose, and you probably won't have as much information as you'd like.

Again and again, you get to choose. Which shirt and tie to wear to work today? Doesn't matter. Oops, maybe it does, there's that big meeting with the new boss. Which route to take to work today, car or transit? Did you think about how long the egg salad sandwich you grabbed as a meeting leftover had been out of the fridge, or who had breathed on it? What kind of toothpaste do you get on the way home, you'd think you'd recognize something you pick up every day for several weeks, but no, and your spouse will get cranky with you if you get the wrong stuff, and therefore doesn't want to have sex and that's the day you'd have got pregnant.

On and on, decisions, decisions. Big, little, and unknown. Go through this gate to this path, but not that one. Oops! Goofed, but now it's too late. Live and learn.

Sometimes I think this getting old thing is just getting tired from making so many decisions. I remember talking to older people, and them saying they liked things slowing down as they got older, living a simpler life by excluding choices. I didn't get it then. I do now. I've really enjoyed this 4 months off. There are days so busy I don't know if I'm coming or going, and days I do very little. The balance is nice.

There are some gates beginning to loom up in front of me. Their shadows are becoming more clear, but who knows for sure? In other news, our financial advisor is building us an income allocation plan to get the money we need out of our various investments, while triggering as little tax as possible. The assumption being made at the moment is that there is no other work contract for me because, really, until there is an offer on paper to be signed, there is nothing and I'm free to go photograph whatever seems good. But life changes. All the time. Stay tuned.

You didn't expect an apple

Winter has arrived, snow and all. We can't complain; it's been a wonderful long autumn in Calgary. We've had some spectacular sun rise and sun sets, and I captured some lovely fall-coloured landscapes. Things are just a bit whiter today, but there's still colour.

Our neighbour's tree still has some apples on it. Most have been picked by birds, or fallen off, but a few are still hanging in there. I'm not sure what kind they are, but they are tasty.

The deal on Facebook is B&W, no people, no explanation. You'll see a few more of mine over the next week or so. This isn't Facebook, so you get an explanation. Nobody was out in this if they had any choice about it. I was leaning on my front steps and deliberately going with a bit of a long exposure, trying to capture the motion of the wind and snow. I didn't mind if the camera moved slightly.

Along the way I got this nice serene half moon photo. A bit later was a nice sunset. That cloud amused me, looking sort of like a giant moustache.

Here's part of that sunset you haven't seen yet. I was quite taken with that grouping of trees and the yellow backdrop.

This is such a durable flower it will stay in bloom all winter.

I've spent some time today watching Thomas Heaton videos. I just loved how he responded to a guy complaining about water drops on his lens during a stormy shoot. He quickly said that of course there were spots, and that technically it wasn't a perfect image, but so what? He goes on from there, you can hear him say it better than I could repeat. 

It's another step along the way of thinking about what I'm taking photos of, how exactly, and why. A work in progress.

October Image of the Month

Ok, I admit it, I struggled with this one. The choices from this month had a bit of everything I like, skyline, sunsets, sunrises, cloudscapes, flowers, reflections, landscapes, macros, and some combinations. Some are panorama, HDR, and even a black and white. I did some experiments with depth of field that turned out well. All in all a fun month.

But my rules are, there can be only one. How to choose? Decisions, decisions.

First runner up. Even dying blooms can have great colour and texture. Plus I like the matched curves.

Second runner up. I'm a sucker for wide sweeping vistas with dramatic skies. There's lots of room here for your eye to wander around in and get lost. This is 19,317 x 5,914 px, and thus would print out in exquisite detail at 64" x 20".

And the winner! We've had some spectacular sunrise and sunsets lately, but this one is my favourite. Once I got the 8 shots merged together and the borders fixed, it didn't need much tweaking. It's 14,978 x 5,963 px, and thus would print out in exquisite detail at 50" x 20". You could bump it to 5 feet by 2 feet and not notice the difference in image quality.