Trips, VI, not driftwood

I take lots of photos on trips. Some are ho hum, there I was, this is what I saw. Documentary photos are all very well, and some are more interesting than others. Some photos indulge my tastes in the photographic world, which explains driftwood and other distressed wood. I love the shapes and textures. And some, the circumstances or light or subject make it impossible not to capture the moment, even if it isn't something I'd normally be interested in.

Part of being a photographer is to show only your best work. I sort of do that. What anyone sees of my work is only a small fraction of the many photos taken. Just as a number, my Lightroom catalogue just passed 200,000 photos, and I've only edited about 20,000 for the blog, and not all of them appear. Of course I have some that are garbage because they're badly out of focus, or over or under exposed. Hunting dragonflies, for example, I might take 1000 photos, and end up with only a couple good ones. The rest get deleted.

Sometimes I try to tell a story with the photos, or that relate to the photos. Then I forget, and use one of the photos, which breaks the flow. I try not to re-use photos, other than image of the month. There's lots of photos taken on trips, and that usually accumulates good stories, some of which cannot be shared. Like the "this van smells like wet photographer!" story.

So for today's blog I'm going back to February this year, when we visited many of the beaches between Sooke and Port Renfrew, on Vancouver Island. Driftwood will not be included, since they show up in the Of the Day feature below.

1. That seagull was giving me the eye, and I liked the sheen of water on the rocks.

2. There are often photos of Linda on the way to the beach. She is so eager to scope it out.

3. I liked the windblown texture.

4. On a beach, scrambling up and over the dunes of coarse beach pebbles. She's not so fond of this kind of beach, preferring the soft sand.

5. Warming up trying to find the time lapse composition that appeared in an earlier blog.

6. Trees and sky, often a great contrast.

7. I took a photo of these people with the Fuji film camera, and this is the digital version. You can see the film version here, along with other photos and commentary about the GW690. 

8. Not sure which beach this is. 

9. This is actually a triple waterfall, with the other two falls just out of frame. Here's me playing with different camera settings. This happens a lot, tweaking settings for different effects. Usually I'll land on the one photo I like, but sometimes the ones leading up to it are good enough to keep.

10.

11. Sometimes the path to the beach is a scramble. Sometimes not. This is one case where the light on the steps that the camera saw is different than what my eyes saw.

12. Part of the path that's a bit of a scramble.

13. Hoping for a nice sunset, but not. That happens.

14. The view from beside the hot tub, camera pointed nearly straight up. If possible I'll set the camera up and let it run by itself. I might get several thousand photos out of it, all of which I'll have to look at. Sometimes I'll assemble them into a time lapse movie, or overlap them to get that circular star effects. Sometimes the Northern Lights show up.

15.

16.

17. I like the little streams that form on a beach as water drains away to the sea.

18. Linda, liking a flat and sandy bit.

19. Trying different settings and liking what I got.

20.

21. Linda trying to cross a bigger stream.

There's still lots of non-driftwood photos to come, mainly the forest walk to Mystic beach that we bailed out of, and the Galloping Goose Trail. Stay tuned!

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (BC)

Peony

Flower

Yukon

Celina

Film (new)

Part of the bike path near Fish Creek. 

Film (old)

And people wonder where Linda gets her eyes.

September Image of the Month

For new readers, (welcome!) I like to review my photos every month. I think it's a good practice to see what worked or didn't and why. I don't want to be doing the same old same old. My idea of best might not be yours, and that's just fine. Sometimes my photo buddies agree with my choice, sometimes not. 

There's a tab on my photoblog where I put all the Image of the Month photos, with a link to the blog for that particular month. It's one way to see some of my best work. That page also shows a link for Image of the Year, where I usually explore the topic of "best" in more detail.

There's two points here. One is that "best" is a slippery definition at best. It could be best because it was technically difficult somehow, or the lighting was spectacular, or the subject was amazing, or maybe just because it tickles my particular fancy at the moment of choosing.  Sometimes there's several photos ready to step onto the podium, and I have a tough choice. Other times there isn't much choice. Two is that not all photos are in the running, so you won't see community association, race events, or private clients on the podium, no matter how good the photos are.

I almost always do the image of the month and two runners up. Sometimes the choices are more difficult than other times. This month I'm spoiled for choices, though many really good photos from the Ontario trip are not in the running because they're private family photos. 

2nd runner up

The Brockville railway tunnel, all dressed up in LED lighting, and with reflections. What's not to love? There's more from the Ontario trip that will show up in the blog.

1st runner up

Dinosaur Provincial Park (near Brooks, not Drumheller) is an other worldly place in ordinary light, and with lovely sunset light it becomes spectacular. Some of those will be posted on blog in coming days. And yet this black and white seems to capture the textures and strangeness even better than the colour photos.

Image of the Month

The ship's foghorn woke me up shortly after sunrise. I scrambled into clothes and ran out onto the dock. I got several lovely foggy sunrise reflection photos as I waited, some of which only just missed the podium, then it mostly emerged from the mist.

It's been a minute. Or two. Many

Today is a bit of a roundup, it being so long since the last blog post. I almost don't know where to start. 

Let's start with books. I've been working on a novel for decades now, and it keeps growing in the telling. It's up to 5 inter related works of various lengths. Don't hold your breath waiting for it. Photo books are another thing. Starting late August and throughout September I've been working on photo books. A couple of them are test books, done to see how my photos look in print. The advantage of calling it a test book is that you aren't under the pressure of perfection. Nobody else need see it.

A couple are big lay flat books from travels to Yukon and New Zealand. All who have seen them have complimented me on the quality of the photos and the books. During our recent pre-Thanksgiving trip to visit Linda's sisters we distributed a book of family photos, and that went over very well. During our trip another book got delivered, and it's due to be passed on to the recipient at the next opportunity. 

I'm not sure what the next book will be. There's some ideas percolating. There's a couple considerations here. One is to have the photos that will make up a coherent collection. The photos might relate to a trip, a person, or a particular subject. The other is the discount. Blurb sometimes offers discounts, and that might affect what I work on. The New Zealand book had a fabulous discount that applied to the book and shipping. That very much encouraged me to go big. But a 10% discount on a $20 book doesn't make much difference. My thinking is to have a book or two in the pipeline, ready to go when they have a promotion.

Over the first bunch of years for the blog photos were pretty rare. Then about this time of year in 2010 I got an iPhone and photos started showing up a bit more often. Then a 'real' camera in 2016, and the photos began to pick up, in both quantity and quality. Somewhere along the way I started a second blog that's more oriented to photography, with tabs for races and community events, plus the Image of the Month feature.

Which, as you've probably noticed, is not today's blog, even though it's October. I'm still going through the nearly 1000 photos from the trip. One of them will almost certainly be IotM. I just don't know which one yet. Hang tough, it might be a couple more days. The problem isn't the actual editing, it's the selection of which photo to edit, out of any number of similar photos. For example, I've never photographed a lake freighter cargo ship before, and Linda's sister lives in a house with a great view of the St. Lawrence Seaway. There's several photos of ships, but I'm not sure I've figured out the best way to go about it. I'm pretty sure I could become a boat nerd, hanging out on their dock waiting for ships, trying different ideas, waiting for the light. I'd probably learn to start drinking margaritas, and things might go downhill fast.

I'd like to welcome some new subscribers to the blog, and hope you enjoy the experience. I've been thinking about the decline in blogging overall, and the decline my my blogging. For most of the blog I put out a new blog post every day and a half or so on average. In 2019 I peaked out at a new blog published slightly more often than once a day, with 367 over the year. Going to New Zealand for nearly 2 months, and Yukon will do that. Both are amazingly photogenic places. 

Blogging in the 2020's has been tough, and it averages out to a blog every 2.5 days or so. I'd like to blame COVID, but that dog won't hunt. It seems I don't have as much to say as I once did. When I was doing regular workouts and working for a living the blogs almost wrote themselves.

But I'm going to continue. I'm not sure exactly where it's going to go. I think this blog will be more day to day, topical depending on my moods. I'm sort of thinking the blog might be a way to group photos and do some trial writing in prep for a book. The photoblog will be for the IotM, community and race events, and a bit of a portfolio of my better photos, plus talking more about film photography or more technical digital photography topics. The Loungecat site is designed to be a portfolio of my very best work, and it needs to be updated a bit.

Some photos from a July road trip south east of Calgary. Look back in the blog roll to July to see more from this trip. For new readers you missed a steam locomotive in the wild and the owl.

I like getting photos that nobody else on the trip gets. So the one right above this, I'm pretty sure everybody else got it. But this one, by definition, nobody else got.

I can't now understand why this one didn't end up on the podium for July IotM.

Of the Day

Driftwood (NZ)

Driftwood (BC)

Linda

Peony

Flower

Celina

We had some friends taking care of Celina in our absence. There were several videos of her happily purring away on the fuzzy blanket she loves. On our return she of course simultaneously claimed to be the most abandoned cat in the history of cats, and that we're the most rotten humans ever and where are the good humans that took care of her. I don't think we're quite forgiven yet.

Yukon

It was fun watching the pilots and passengers loading up a plane for a trip to somewhere out in the bush. 

Film (new) Fish Creek.

Film (old)

Linda, from the trove of B&W negatives. It was fun to look at them with Linda's aunts. They remembered the photos of them as young women, and were able to identify some of the people in the photos.