Toys for little and big kids

I like looking around familiar places at night, or when there's lots of snow, or when the light is different. Even the familiar can be striking. Like this playground. I've run, walked, or biked past it countless times, and never thought of taking a photograph till now.

While I'm on the topic of photographs, I think I have my image of the year. Gonna sleep on it, and make sure. I've been dithering for a while.

Of course, bigger kids have bigger toys. I'm not sure how long this truck has been sitting here. What's odd is how it looks bluish in the shot, when in life it's a dull flat black.

I don't have a photo of it, but one of my neighbours is building an airplane in his garage. Not a model,  a real one that him and his wife can fit into. He's enjoying the process, and I love chatting to him about it.

Everybody has their own toys, and other people usually don't understand. I didn't get adults playing with lego till I realized they had built computers into them, and one could build complicated machines. One of my buddies (this was back in the mid 90's) was so excited for his little boy to get old enough to start playing with the Mindstorm lego. That boy now maintains jets for the military. Talk about your BIG toys!

Lots of people don't understand cameras. There's days I'm not sure I yet understand them, but it's a voyage of discovery.

I love looking through the Lee Valley Tools catalog. I suddenly yearn for tools I hadn't known existed. It makes me want to take up hobbies so I have an excuse to buy the tools. We get it doubly, since they put out a garden catalog as well, full of everything one could want related to gardening. Then there's the tools for the kitchen, and the gifts. It never stops.

What are your favourite toys?

Before it's too late

More of the night shoot just after Christmas with my buddy Sean. We were out near an old workplace of mine. It's changed a lot, as has just across the road, but much of the nearby area is much the same as it ever was.

I like the when the crane operators dress them up. The sky really isn't purple, that's just a camera sensor artifact.

The intent was to get the building and steam plume as a lighted smeary background to the tree. The problem is the wind was quite strong just then, and I was freezing my tail off, so I wasn't inclined to play with the settings.

I wonder how often this gets used?

Now that I think about it, maybe this should have been an HDR shot.

Yes, I'm still working on the image of the year. I'm down to 3, so I've made big progress, at least I think so. A winner and two runners up seems reasonable. But which is which?

The last of the hidden gems and a summary

The first phase of the great 2017 photo review is done! It ends up that I took 28298 photos in 2017. Along the way I deleted however many, and they aren't counted. Right now there are 1518 (just over 5%) sitting in the rejected folder, waiting to be deleted. I edited 2004 (about 7%) altogether, with 187 ending up with 4 stars, and 18 with 5 stars. These 205 are the big pool for image of the year, and the 18 have to be thought of as the short list. I need to mull over my criteria.

I fixed a lot of star ratings and keywords along the way. If you take just photos of your kids and vacations, you can skip this next para, though you might not want to. It used to be that getting a photograph done was a serious business. You had to sit still for several seconds while the film did it's thing. The equipment was portable only in the sense that camping equipment is portable.

Now the technology is so small the biggest part is the interface is for our fingers and eyes to work it. Consumer grade cameras can take dozens of photos a second, and video as well. Memory chips can hold thousands of photos, and people take lots and lots and LOTS of photos. There are almost certainly children only a few hours old that have more photos of them than exist of me. I would be astonished to discover there are more than several hundred photos of me (excepting security camera footage) altogether.

Many photos just end up in a big folder. Apple tries to help with sorting and organizing, and for me it just makes things worse. Theres lots of things Apple is doing that I just don't understand. iTunes, for example. It used to be simple and clean, then it got bloated, and now you need a degree in computer science backed up by a mojo hand to do anything with confidence. I want to make huge changes to my digitized music, mainly because I'm sick of most of it, but I'm afraid to touch it.

How often has someone wanted to show you a particular photo on their phone, and ends up scrolling through many photos, and probably not finding it? I've been on both ends of that.

Lightroom is one of the ways of processing the raw files from a DSLR, and it also manages the information. There are star ratings, colour codes, keywords (which can get very involved) and collections. I've talked about my system before, such as it is, and I'm not as consistent as I'd like to be. (Which reminds me, still no Ask Me Anything questions! Get yours in.)

But if you're using Lightroom or any similar system, one of the things you should do right from the start is to figure out some system for finding photos again. You will want to find them again, trust me. Maybe it's to show a relative that amazing shot of your kid, or what that wiring looked like before you took it apart, or that photo you finally know how to fix with Photoshop, or all those star shots you can now make into a time lapse because you figured out the software. Something. The sooner you figure it out, the easier it is to be consistent. Go back up and look at those numbers again. I'm not a particularly prolific photographer. Anyone who aspires to sell their work will be taking far more photos, and have even more urgent need to track them.

It's easy to get rid of the ones that are badly exposed, or are blurry, or that shot where you covered the lens so you'd know the next three shots were HDR, or the beginning of a panorama, or multiple nearly identical shots where you were experimenting with exposure settings. It's also easy to edit the winners and do whatever it is you do with the winners, like publish them on a blog, print and frame them, give them as gifts, try to sell them, whatever. There are some documentary shots, such as the bridge number so I know where I am, or this is what the garden looks like today. Not art, but of a certain value anyways.

Then there are all the other ones. I am undecided about them. The in between ones. Just a blah photo, maybe the space to the left of a winner photo, interesting but not a winner itself. Maybe I just need to be more ruthless. Then again, I now have lots of hard drive space, (and just cleared up another 38 GB) so it isn't that big of a deal.

There were a couple more hidden gems found along the way, along with some I looked at again, and made the same decision I made when I saw it the first time. Sometimes you need to edit the photo a bit to decide it really isn't a winner.

I remember this one, though. I was going to run it through Photomatix and see what that did, when something came up and I left it. When I came back I probably thought I'd finished editing it or something, or started on the next day's photos.

I'd always meant to come back to this one and consider how those stripes got there, and how the rock itself got there. So far I haven't seen another rock like it anywhere in Fish Creek. Maybe it's a rock that has lead a life of unprecedented rock adventure, and is now lurking here, thinking about it's next adventure.

The Fish Creek Tree

Here is a new year, well underway. Sunny, starting cold but getting warmer. News flash! Calgary is no longer colder than either of the poles. People have been emerging from their homes, blinking at the light, and trundling around without quite so many layers on.

The pool has been quiet my last few visits, but today is getting back to the usual form. A few new people but I don't know if they are resolutionistas or what. A couple swim clubs were in, but they seemed sort of half hearted about the whole thing. Maybe the coach is just getting them back into the groove to start working off the Christmas flub.

I certainly need to do that. Holy Doodle! Dialling back on the run might have been good to give my legs a rest, but it's been bad for the gut flub. Starting to work it off. We should have given more of the GF cookies to BRBE. She has the discipline to freeze some, hide some, and ration them out. Not me. I see cookie, I eat cookie. But so far this year I've been to the pool twice, and I've been out for two photo walks (see below.)

I took this photo a while ago, and I've been meaning to put it into a blog, but somehow other, older photos have been muscling it aside. Yes, still working on the photo review. This isn't of anything in particular. It's just pretty, or I think so. I like the colours gradually fading into one another. You can try to guess what the base image is, if you like.

Fish Creek is an interesting park. The west end, closest to where I live, is hilly and thickly wooded with evergreens. It is stunningly beautiful any time of year. There are some meadows here and there if you know where to find them.

The east end is more of a plain, wide open grasslands. A couple times riding my bike home from work I've struggled through that area, head down into the wind, churning along at a mighty 15 KpH. A couple times I've baked my brains out 'running' the last leg of a half iron down there.

Along the way is one tree out in the middle of the plain. I've looked at it many times as I've run or rode my bike past it, and have wondered about it's suitability as a photo subject. I wonder no longer. I shall return.

More recent hidden gems

The great review continues. Here are some more that were not edited at the time because I was out of my mind or something.

I've rejected more than 800 photos now, mainly for over or under exposure that somehow escaped the initial cull, or being inartistically out of focus, or being one of a sequence of shots where there is already an edited one that is clearly better than the others.

Linda during a hike up to the Ink Pots. This was a couple weeks after her last day in the office.

Taken from the Harold Chapman bridge. Sorry, but I have no idea who he is/was, and why they named the bridge after him.

Recent hidden gems

As I've been going through 2017 photos, there have been any number of times I've thought to myself, "what on earth was I thinking?" Most of them it's a bad photo, and I can't imagine why I clicked the shutter. But there have been some winners that I can't understand why I didn't edit them at the time. In no particular order.

Oh, and you may have missed the December Image of the Month, since I've snuck in an extra blog today, so my readers could see these gems before I lost them again.

Most rose hips are bright red, but I liked the almost diseased look.

 I love the these peachy orange tulips.

Celina on the hunt.

No idea what flower this is.

This one is more what you'd call a documentary shot, of my buddy Sean hard at work capturing a photo you can see here.

December Image of the Month

This time it was easy. Only 1500 or so to choose between, and only a few of them really rang my chimes. Without further fuss and bother, here it is. I'd like to tell you I spent hours sculpting the smear of ink.

There were a few Fish Creek landscapes that were pretty nice, but they were so recent you'd probably be bored if you saw them again.

So, going forward in 2018, what can you expect from this blog? In short, pretty much more of the same, if all goes well. When I got the good camera, I set a goal of posting at least one photo every day, and I've more than exceeded that. I can just imagine some of my readers saying, 'what, MORE of that??' I'd still like to be sharing my photos, but there might be some changes.

I used to go out, take photos, and post whichever ones appeared good. Now I'd like to be a bit more focused. I'm thinking of putting a 'recent' tab on my photo blog for the good shots as they happen. The ones I think of as being artistic. This blog will have what I think of as documentary shots, (me/buddies were here and had fun), shots that either illustrate the point of a blog or drove the creation of a post, (like the 2 shots in Nowheresville). Shots of the cats, because I know that's the main reason many people come here. I'll still do photo of the month here and on the photo blog. Macro Monday will happen periodically.

There have been a few rants along the way, and those will continue as the inspiration strikes me. There might be a few more thoughtful essays about whatever topics take my mind. A couple people have asked about novel publication, and I have to admit I suspect that isn't going to happen, as such. I am considering creating a separate blog specifically for extracts. I'm thinking of publishing chapters, or short story sized chunks and the readers, if any, can put them together as they will. I need to think about ensuring my rights are secure, so don't hold your breath waiting.

I love comments and want to hear from my readers, but there are a few things to know. I turned off allowing anonymous comments because the spam-bots found me. Blogger is pissy about people trying to comment from a mobile platform. I'm sorry about that, but there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it. All comments are moderated, but I'm usually pretty quick about seeing them coming and approving them. If you want to comment, feel free to say it on Facebook, Instagram, or text me, or email me, and I'll copy it to blog.

Other social media. Tweeting won't work, I've turned Twitter off and don't miss it. I'm still figuring out Instagram. I hate that it trims my panorama shots, so I won't post them there. It isn't the best platform for displaying nice photos, where I want to embiggen them and appreciate the detail. I'm happy to read any advice you might have about Instagram.

Image of 2017 is going to be tough. I'm still working on it, and want to reflect on it a bit. Like image of the month, the criteria for the choice drives the decision. Not a decision to be made hastily. Whichever it is, I'm likely to get it printed.

Lastly, welcome to the new year! Hope it's everything you dream it will be. Now go kick ass and make it happen.