City of Angels

Hi Folks:

On most evenings, around sunset, you’ll see groups of people gathered along the Dallas Road walkway that runs along the south shore of Victoria. Every sunrise and every sunset is unique, but sometimes the Earth just outdoes herself. This was January 24, 2019, at Holland Point.

Marcia’s image first. This is a composite of 10 cell phone images, joined up with Autopano Pro and pushed around a bit in Lightroom.

City of Angels 1

Mike recently received a new Sony A7RIII camera and has been playing with it a bit. Three images here, at different focal lengths:

City of Angels 2

57mm

City of Angels 3

24mm

City of Angels 4

12mm

Obviously, the sky and the ocean deserve most of the credit here. Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,

M&M

Photo of the Month – Fun With Mirrors

Hi Folks:

This being April 1, I thought the image below would be appropriate for the photo of the month for March.  Back in the film days I used to do things like create photo montages by sandwiching two slides together into a single frame, but when I first got into graphics programs (CorelDraw 3) I started being more creative with a few of my images.  One technique is to take an image, cut it in half either horizontally or vertically, take one half and mirror it, then stick the two halves together again.  The results are always unknown and often unexpected.  I did a blog post a while back on ‘Making Mirror Images With Lightroom‘ that showed one way of making such images while making them look realistic at the same time but ‘realism’ isn’t always a necessary goal. Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month – October

Hi Folks:

End of the month again, and while Hallowe’en is tomorrow, I’m not going to post pictures of zombies, ghouls, ghosts or other Hallowe’en characters.  I thought I’d mention something else entirely: serendipity.  Roughly defined as a ‘happy accident’, serendipity from a photographer’s perspective often comes about from having a camera at just the right moment, to capture something you might otherwise have missed.  Most of my photography is landscape work, and while I do go out on photographic expeditions, I usually have a camera with me wherever I go – even if it’s just the camera in my cell phone. Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month

Hi Folks:

In our last ‘He Says, She Says…‘ post I mentioned that we’re currently house sitting for a friend, and that our new (if temporary) home is only six houses away from the ocean.  Therefore, it only seemed fitting to make November’s ‘Photo of the Month’ an image of the mountains in Washington across the Juan de Fuca Strait.  I was walking by there yesterday and the light was so incredible I had to stop and make a few images.  This one is combined from 7 images using Autopano Pro, and finished in Lightroom.

Juan de Fuca Strait

I think this image turned out pretty well.  I’ll definitely be back.

Now go out and make some photographs!

Mike.

Telling Tales – New Year’s Eve

Last night we caught the bus downtown as we wanted to be near the water. There’s one place in town that’s on our ‘dream list’ and we went there first. It was raining yesterday, but although we brought our umbrellas with us the rain stayed away. The sky was a blanket of cloud however, and Marcia said, “It would be nice to see the Grandmother tonight.” Well, where we were going there’s a bench and we sat down there and looked over at our ‘home’… All of a sudden the sky cleared in a circle around the moon and she shone down bright and beautiful and directly over our home. The clouds were like veils of mist coalescing around her, but there were also rainbows from the light shining down. It was the only clear patch in anotherwise cloudy sky. We both sat there going, “Wow…”, glued to our seats.

A little later on we were walking down by the docks and we were met by this beautiful long-haired orange and white cat. He wouldn’t let us approach him at first, but he was quite content to be our guide as we followed the path around the harbour. At first it was quite a treat to have him as our guide, but we began to grow concerned the farther we went as he showed no signs of going back home. As we walked, he walked, sometimes in front, sometimes beside, sometimes trailing behind but always keeping pace. He walked about 1 1/2 km with us, and nothing we said would dissuade him, even though he was getting farther and farther from his ‘home’. If we sat, he sat beside us, even gaining some lap space at one point. We finally read his tag – AZAN – and called the phone number on the tag, but being New Year’s Eve there was nobody home. When we reached a busy street his fear overcame him and he would go no farther. We kept going north, and after a bit of hesitation he began to follow another couple walking back the way we had come. We trust he made his way home safely. We finished our night down at the water, each holding a candle, lit from a place of peace within us.

Love,
Mike.