Winter floral and cat reaction to Christmas

Linda did some lovely arrangements in the flower vases, using cedar boughs, evergreen branches, and all sorts of artistic odds and ends around the house. Then she did some smaller bouquets, here's one example.

The cats don't care that it's Christmas and the world is going nuts. They just lie there in a heap looking cute. I want to do the same, preferably cuddling them and listening to them purr. It's very soothing.

For the swimmers of you, BRBE is working to break some of the bad habits in her stroke. Now, the first thing to recognize is that stroke got her through the IMAZ swim like a champ, much faster than she expected.

But. BUT! (But not butt.) We both know she can swim faster and she asked me to help. I see no reason she can't swim as fast or faster than I do. So much better streamlined leading to less drag, higher muscle to cross section volume, to say nothing of younger with a still functioning metabolism.

As a general rule, most people have several things wrong with their stroke. Sometimes it's a muscle weakness, sometimes it's a range of motion issue, and some simply don't know better. But the big thing most people do wrong in freestyle is thrash their arm forward with a plop, let the elbow sink for a while, then try to grab a handful of water and drag it to their hip. It hurts my soul to see this happening, so I try not to look.

Of course, only the best is good enough for BRBE. She gets a detailed analysis of what needs to be fixed. The first thing to work on is elbows and catch. Then elbows and catch. Maybe something else and back to elbows and catch. She is going to get sick of me talking about high elbows, water feel, and the subtleties of the catch. We might go into the teach pool to swim in really shallow water and see if her manicure survives.

The plan is to take apart BRBE's stroke right down to the fraction of a second then build it up again to be more efficient, stronger, more friendly with the water, with a side of a Jedi swimmer mind trick. There is something to think about every fraction of a second, and usually multiple things going on at the same time. It makes for complex explanations sometimes. And people wonder why I'm never bored swimming.

Last week was the introduction, as it were. Today was the first working day. She says she's having fun and the big grin backs that up.

No, there are no current photos or videos of her swimming. Maybe later.

Dark streets and Dawson

I've had a few people comment with their ideas for image of the year, thank you very much. Now that I've got all my images on one drive it's much more convenient to review, and so I've been doing. Who knows what's going to show up in the next while?

There's a lot of photos to go through, almost 28000 for 2017 alone, with just under 1800 actually edited. Of those, I've assigned 4 or 5 star ratings to 191 photos. That comes out to one photo every 150 or so that I think is a bit beyond my ordinary. About a dozen make me go wow and get 5 stars. I could go on a quest to take more photos, doing things just the way I do now. Every 150 or so should be a winner.

Or, I could get better at taking photos. That's the route I'm trying to take, thinking about all the photos I see. Why do I like them? Where are my eyes going, and why? What would I have shot if I was standing there, and why? When I'm out in a group I usually spend a bit of time watching the others, trying to see what is catching their eye and how they go about capturing it.

I especially like looking at work by pro photographers. Even without editing tricks, and discounting long daytime exposures via filters, the pros consistently get better shots. There's generic advice of course. It's not like there is some secret to all this. The trick is to do your research to be in the right place (inches matter sometimes) at the right time for the right light with the right camera settings for the shot you want, and apply everything you know to get it in camera. Then comes editing and that's a whole other game.

It's kind of fun to go back through old photos and see what I've done with them. Some are overlooked gems that were never edited for whatever reason. Some have star ratings that I no longer agree with. A few times I've winced at the edit job and know I could do better now.

These are from the evening photo ramble in Inglewood a week or so ago. I love the mystery of dark streets. My writer's imagination starts working, wondering if one of my characters is lurking just down the way. (And some of them are lurkers, all right.) Wondering if something or someone interesting is in the shadows. Wondering what could happen.

Here's a panorama of Dawson City. I'd always meant to put this together and never did. This is where we got those super aurora shots on the last night of our trip.

Same viewpoint, looking a little further along the river.

One of the evenings I was out doing some city night shots, and want to take another look at those. Plus the bazillion aurora shots I've been meaning to revisit.

I found a few other undeveloped Dempster photos and will be sharing them along the way. It's been 3 months, and I still get chills looking at some of the photos. That trip was certainly event of the year.

Full frontal cats

Here they are, the only reason some of you read my blog.

Celina was in great light and for once didn't mind the camera pointing at her.

Curtis loves the camera, and it loves him. I think I could take photos of him all day long.

For those of a photographic philosophical bent, you may have missed an exchange on my buddy Sean's blog.

In other news I'm taking a break from transferring files from a cobbled together storage system involving several external drives and folders here there and everywhere. I got a great deal on a 4 bay enclosure with 6TB drives. Like half price. For RAID 5 it works out to 18 TB of storage space. That should keep me going for a while. Copying files is a bit slow, but that's ok. Once there working with them is fast. I'll spend a bit of time making sure everything is all set up properly, and maybe tweak my workflow a bit.

Fish Creek reflections in search of a tree

After finding the tree I wandered back towards bridge 3 trying to take paths I've not seen before. I found a few reflection shots in the river, which was a bit of a surprise given the flat light.

No bridge shots though I saw bridges 3, 4, and 5. Some of you appear to have missed out on the weekend bridge shots, one of which is a leading contender for image of the month at the moment.

Today was retirement stuff, thinking about money, and taxes. This will be an ongoing feature, to keep our money working for us and not the government.

It was also another step in upgrading the house lighting. I've stuck in a couple of LED bulbs in the basement to see what I think. Now we've started to convert the halogen pot lights to LED. Today was replacing a florescent fixture in the basement. It was cheaper to buy a whole new fixture than replace a ballast. Retirement fun!

Some of the upcoming features that you will want to watch for, and possibly provide input.

Image of the year is coming up. I already know which photo a dear friend would pick as image of the year, but I'm curious about which image from the year is most vivid to you? Feel free to let me know which one you think should be image of the year. You've got some time. That might come up as late as mid January, depending how much I dither over the final choice.

Also in January I do an Ask Me Anything feature. You ask the question, I'll do an answer, and fair warning, it might be more than you expect.

Revisiting a Fish Creek tree

You may remember a little while ago me and a buddy met up for a photo ramble through Fish Creek. Along the way we discovered this great twisted tree. None of the shots I took then turned out to my satisfaction, so I made a mental note to return.

But first a sunrise! I had hopes for it getting really spectacular overhead, but the wind blew the clouds to the east, and this is about as good as it got. The photo is about a quarter of the sky.

Looking south there was this.

Back to the tree. Today was the day, even though the light wasn't that nice. Sort of flat. But even now, one of the shots I wanted still didn't come out quite the way I want. Yet another visit in the wings.

Still, it was nice to get out for some fresh air and stroll the park. I was surprised how nice the creek is, and took some photos of that (duh), some which seemed to suit the flat light. It's a dangerous time to be walking on the creek though, there could be all sorts of soft spots from the warm weather. The surface is ever so slightly melted so it's extremely slippery.

It's almost like spring. The air is warm and windy, but it's still cool in the park, and all the shade means the ice is slow to melt. Even if it does melt it has nowhere to go since the ground is still frozen, so the smaller paths slowly ice up.

If I go again tomorrow afternoon, I think I'd wear the traction aids once I got off the paved paths. I had to pick my way very carefully without them today.

Here's some more tree stuff. I liked the almost knot work pattern in this bit of tree wreckage.

Grass and trees. For some reason in that part of the park the trees have really thick and corrugated bark.

Macro Monday 14, gold and red

Calgary has been having amazing weather lately, so it's been a little tough to hunker down in the basement doing macro shots. But last night I was sort of stirring around after it got dark, and decided the time had come for macro. 

 In real life, those rectangular bits of design in the middle of the knot work are about 1 mm x 2 mm. In this first one, on screen in Lightroom without any cropping, it's just under 5 cm x 10 cm, or 2" x 4" for those stuck in an old fashioned measurement system. I'm not sure what mag this is, probably about 3.

In this one a bit closer, on screen it's about 9 cm x 17 cm, or 3.5" x 7". What's interesting to me is all the scratches. You don't see them in real life, unless you look really closely. Then again, it's 14 ct gold so it's not that hard, and I've worn it every day for about 30 years. When we first married I had a job working with my hands, putting them in tight places and pulling on wrenches and stuff, so I didn't want to be wearing a ring. This is about 5x.

I was surprised how hard it was to have the gold colour come up on screen. I had to play with the lighting a bit, and get everything just so.

That last one, when I blow up Lightroom to 1:1, that bar is about 16 cm x 31 cm, and the scratches are almost like artwork. Maybe I should tweak the angle that I mount it at, put on the extension tubes, and have another go at it, maybe making it into an abstract that takes up the full screen. Hmmm.

I always think of eyeglasses as a delicate thing because I've broken so many of them over the years. But this looks sturdy, doesn't it?

All along, I had no idea I'd been displaying some other guy's name on my glasses. Good thing I never lost them. Those white flecks aren't scratches, they're salt. These are the glasses I wear on my bike.

I'd been shooting another ball point pen, but it didn't show up well, so I got this one. Seeing the red come up on screen made me happy! Love that red, and red is often difficult for cameras. That ball is under a mm in diameter, on screen in Lightroom, at 1:1, it's about 11 cm in diameter. That was at 5x mag, with 68 mm of extension tube.

Upcoming

This was a contemplative day, both before and after a butter tart hunt and a dear friend came to visit to pick out some photos for her own purposes.

I got a great deal on a RAID drive last week, and I'm hoping it will get delivered this week. Then I can shuffle images around and make it easier to do some of the planned organizational work. Just thinking about this is a bit daunting, but I want to weed out some of the images, review star assignments and keywording, and build a better system for keeping track of photos for various purposes. I've been sort of making it up as I go along, and the shortcomings of such an approach are becoming obvious.

As always I'm working on the next Image of the Month, but I'm beginning to think about the 2017 Image of the Year. Yes, the best photo I've done all year. To make the selection even harder, It's not just the 12 monthly images in the running. There are several runner up images that are better than some of the monthly winners. I'm going to give all the 4 and 5 star images from this year a critical look to try to think about what made them good photos (at least in my mind) and what needs to happen to make better photos.

I already know which photo that dear friend would pick as image of the year, but I'm curious about which image from the year is most vivid to you? Feel free to let me know which one you think should be image of the year. You've got some time. That might come up as late as mid January, depending how much I dither over the final choice.

Also in January I do an Ask Me Anything feature. You ask the question, I'll do an answer, and fair warning, it might be more than you expect.

I've got plans for some more macro photos to show up on Monday. I just need to actually shoot them. Guess what I'm doing tomorrow...

Just for you flower junkies. The hibiscus in the back has bloomed once again! I was going to try to catch the bloom fully open but missed it. You have to settle for this instead.