geocaching | photography | adventures
217/365: Hello Inky!
Last of the big summer music festivals for me today. We visited the Mill Race Festival in Galt (Cambridge), Ontario. Here we’ve wandered away from the action a bit and toward the river. I noticed a bit of retro graffiti on the river side of these buildings and decided this would make a great photo-de-jour. Have fun looking for Inky the Ghost.
216/365: Moonrise over Promenade.
All done in camera here. I was out BFL caching / Munzee hunting at Lakefront Promenade Park in Mississauga. While one can get a view of the city from here it is obstructed by the old breakwater for the Lakeview Generating Station, so I pointed the camera off toward the moon for some long exposure flatten out the water type photos. I need to refine this a bit but I had a lot of fun with it.
215/365: Blue Line Special.
Well, another day that has life taking over from photography hobbies. This time I find myself in a WalMart an hour from home at 10:30pm. So it’s one of those days where I’m armed with my iPhone and I’m stuck thinking what can I get within the confines provided. The answer always seems to come back “lots”. For example, here’s what you get when you point an iPhone at a stack of baskets near the cash register.
214/365: Mocha Texting.
Late day – very late day – at the office today so not much opportunity for a photo today. Well, not until I got home. Seems Mocha has been borrowing my iPhone for some text messaging.
213/365: After the Storm.
Another tree along the commute home. Tonight I ended up driving home at sunset, after working late. While I was in the office a whole bunch of thunderstorms rolled on through, safe in the knowledge I could not photograph them. So, I did what I could – I caught their backside from the Halton/Peel boundary on my way home. This is an HDR image, and while the tree shows a little ghosting I was actually aiming for that to show some of the motion of the breeze that remained after the storm..
212/365: Lonely Tree.
Another tree that I see on my way to and from work. I’ve always liked this one during the growing months as the farmer always plants something different on each side of the line running up the middle of the photo. It catches my eye as there is often a contrast between right and left that is punctuated by this tree at the end of the field. I shot some colour images, then a couple black and white (in camera) and at the end of the day the black and white one is the version I prefer.
211/365: Torrance Walk.
This is an image that I had in my mind for a couple days as I wandered around Torrance Barrens. It’s a view of the starscape, and the Milky Way as seen from the boardwalk on the east side of Torrance Barrens Dark Sky Preserve. To achieve this photo, I used a flashlight to paint the boardwalk in during the 30 second exposure. I had to take this as a composite, as I couldn’t run beside the boardwalk (deep mud and water there) so I ran down the left side, retriggered the camera and ran down the right side. This enabled me to keep my feet more or less out of the photo.
Since I’ve had a couple people ask already, I’ve posted this one on my 500px.com site if you want a print of it.
210/365: Torrance Watchers.
Well, I’ve got lots of pictures of stars and such from the weekend trip to Torrance Barrens. This was a spur of the moment photo to turn on the group and capture some of them capturing. Steve is in the background reading his iPhone while waiting for a long exposure photo to complete, while Paul in the foreground has his MacBook open with software for reviewing the constellations in the night sky. The red light is coming from that screen image. For the image, I cranked the ISO up to 1600 and dropped the shutter time down to 6 seconds, so they didn’t have to stay still quite so long ….
209/365: Hanging Around the Stars.
This was the sort of thing I got my D800 for in the first place. Landscape photos in challenging light. This weekend, I took my first trip to Torrance Barrens Dark Sky Preserve, with the explicit intent of shooting the stars with minimal light pollution. I went and rented the Nikon 14-24 f/2.8 lens for the outing and took a few geocaching friends along for the trip. Since we’d be awake until the wee hours of the morning, it was decided that we would camp onsite. The first night we were there the clouds came in as the night wore on but we did manage to get a few cool star photos in. Actually, I rather liked the clouds on the friday night as they added some interest to the sky. This photo is a composite of two photos that I took while the camera was on the tripod – I had a heck of a time getting the light painting on my hammock tent to work out in one go, so I took a couple “goes” and used photoshop to clean up some of the light spill. The subject is my hammock tent, that’s exactly where I camped out this weekend, between two trees with a rather impressive night sky to look out at.
208/365: Vanishing Point.
Another dramatic sky, so another trip out to somewhere with few sky obstructions. Tonight, I went to a spot I found earlier in the project, a set of barely used railway tracks off Old School Road in Caledon. After composing and shooting a few typical HDR bracket shots, I decided to see what would happen if I used my “strong contrast/red filter black and white” picture control preset in the D800 to do the black and white conversion … before the HDR and tonemapping. Here’s the result, which demonstrates quite handily how HDR is about the differences in light, not about cranking the saturation out the window (unless, of course, you want to do that deliberately … it is art after all). I did tweak the levels a bit in Aperture after Photomatix did it’s thing as that one bright part of the sky was a real bugger to brighten without blowing it out.