Category Archives: Photography

Posts regarding photography and related topics.

Photo of the Month – July

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

In honour of the 30th Annual Moss St. Paint-In, we’re celebrating art in our photos of the month for July!

Marcia’s image is first. We came across this scene and, as writers ourselves, recognized it as everything the modern travel writer needs! It’s perfect!

Everything the Modern Travel Writer Needs

For Mike’s image we have his favourite artwork from the day. Frame courtesy of the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria; we’ll let you guess who the pretty woman with the parasol is. 😉

Moss St. Paint In

Okay, that’s it for now. Go out and make some photographs!!

Hugs,
M&M

Photo of the Month – June

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

We had a fairly busy month photographically in June, including some time at the Oak Bay Tea Party and several walks along Dallas Road. It can be a challenge selecting one image from each batch for the month, but we’re happy with our choices. Marcia first:

St. John's Wort

Marcia’s image is a bit different from our regular work in that it was not only made with her phone, but processed using phone software as well. Prisma was used to create the slight graphic effect, and then that image was overlaid on the original image using Snapseed. Phones don’t have the memory or processing capacity of a computer, but used well they can still provide good results!

St. John’s Wort grows with wild abandon here in Victoria (although it’s not as invasive as some other species), and while we love its bright yellow flowers, it also reminds us of a short clip from the wonderful book ‘My Brother’s Farm‘ by Doug Jones. In the book he mentioned that his brother had tried to grow St. John’s Wort on the farm, but it wouldn’t take. His thought was, “I don’t know why…maybe it’s depressed.” 😉

Dallas Road clouds

We get some great clouds here in Victoria, both in the inner harbour and along the Dallas Road walkway, paralleling the Juan de Fuca Strait. This is a composite image made of four exposures, combined and pushed around some in Lightroom.

Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!!

Hugs,
M&M

Photo of the Month – Big Skies

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:

We thought we’d do a themed post for May’s images. Although Marcia is mostly renowned for her flower photography, she does in fact shoot a wide variety of other work as well! As we’re both big fans of clouds and cloud watching, we thought we’d use clouds as the basis for our photos of the month. Marcia’s first.

Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month – April

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:

Eek! Already mid-May and we haven’t done a Photo of the Month post for April yet! Just so much happening in this town… At the end of April we had the opportunity to go out to Finnerty Gardens at the University of Victoria and wander around for a couple of hours. We had a great time. There’s one place in the gardens where four saplings have grown together, and where the stems join they form a perfect bowl. Victoria’s spring rains filled the bowl with water, and falling camellia flowers completed the scene. Here’s Marcia’s image!

Treebowl

Okay, that’s it for now. Go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,
M&M

Photo of the Month – March

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

Under the ‘better late than never’ category, we wanted to present two alternate views of spring here in Victoria. We had a late spring this year; our own personal Flower Count at the beginning of March was about 3% of what it was last year. However, as the month wore on the weather improved and we’ve been able to enjoy our ‘normal’ plethora of sights and colours and sounds!

Marcia’s image is first. This is one of our flowering plum trees, growing downtown on a very lucky street corner!

Flowering PlumEntire neighbourhoods of the city are thus transformed every spring. It’s quite a sight to see!

Mike’s image for March was made in Mount Work Regional Park, just west of Victoria, and shows how the warmth and rains of spring transform the wild landscape as well.

Spring Glow

Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,
M&M

Softproofing in Lightroom: A Quick Tip

Posted on by — 1 Comment ↓

Hi Folks:

In my opinion, digital photo printing is equal parts art and science. It covers much greater depth than can be contained within one blog post, so if that’s what you’re looking for, there are plenty of other resources on the ‘net. If you want an introduction to photography and colour management, you might want to start here: Photography and Colour Management.

Okay, this is going to be a quick (for me) blog post. Assuming that you have some understanding of colour models, you know that while Lab is completely device independent, CMYK is completely device dependent (RGB is somewhere in the middle). As Vincent Versace has been known to say, printers are default devices: they only work with the information you send them. As such, the colour on a print relies on the printer and the inkset it contains, the paper chosen and the .icc profile for that paper. The printer profile is a set of instructions that translate the RGB colour space from your monitor into a CMYK colour space that your printer will recognize. Every printer/ paper combination has its own .icc profile, whether custom made for an individual machine or provided by the paper manufacturer for their stock. Now, while the only way to know 100% what your print will look like is to print it (known as hardproofing), one can get most of the way there by softproofing. This simulates (as much as possible) what the print will look like on your computer screen. Once you have an idea what the print will look like, you can modify the settings to make the print emulate what you want. Keep in mind that monitors are emissive devices (they project light) while paper reflects light.

Continue Reading →

Photo of the Month – February

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:

One of the things we love about Victoria is that there are always so many things to do (we have to choose from at least eight events that we know of for this Saturday). In February we like to participate in ‘Be A Tourist in Your Own Hometown‘, and as part of that we invested several hours at the world-famous Butchart Gardens. We even got shuttled there in CVS Tours‘ EV550 electric bus!

February was also bitterly cold (We had snow! In February!!) but being the brave pioneers that we are, we soldiered on. Because of the cold the flowers this year are severely retarded, but we had a wonderful time. There wasn’t as much colour, but still lots to see.

So, Marcia’s image first. In addition to the gardens, Butchart also has an inside floral display, which was packed full with orchids and so many different species of flowers of all shapes and sizes. There was our colour! Amidst the hustle and bustle of all of that beauty she found this quiet point of reflection:

Overflowing With Beauty

Overflowing With Beauty

NB: Mike suggested several other (and equally fascinating) titles, like ‘One Good Urn Deserves Another’, ‘Taking an Urn for the Better’ and ‘Urn, Baby, Urn… Disco Inferno’ but she rejected them all in favour of her own idea (heavy sigh).

Since Marcia’s image was all about stillness, Mike’s was all about movement. Within the gardens there’s a building that houses an old-fashioned carnival merry-go-round. The children (and adults) riding on it had a lot of fun. Unfortunately there’s no way to capture the squeals and giggles in a still image but they’re there nonetheless.

Trans-Dimensional Fun

Trans-Dimensional Fun

Okay. That’s it for today. Now go out and make some photographs!

Hugs,

M&M

Photo of the Month – January

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:

January was somewhat of a month of recuperation for us, and as such we didn’t make a lot of images. We did get out some, however! As always, Marcia’s image is first. This is a close-up image of some frost (uncommon for Victoria) on the glass of a bus shelter. Marcia loves her flower photography and although we did have flowers blooming in January, today we’re presenting some ‘frost flowers’ instead.

Frost Flowers

Frost Flowers

This second image is Mike’s and shows the reflection of a Garry oak tree in a tidal pool in Victoria’s inner harbour. In more ways than one, the branching patterns are ‘returning to the sea’.

Returning to the Sea

Returning to the Sea

Both images were made with our phones, and both were pushed around a bit in Lightroom.

Okay, that’s it for today. Now go out and make some photographs!!

Hugs,
M&M

Using Dehaze with Lightroom 6.x

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:

One of the features available in Lightroom CC 2015.x that’s not available with Lightroom 6.x is the Dehaze tool. I’m not sure what magical coding is going on behind the curtain, but if it’s possible to duplicate this effect using the other sliders, it’s neither inherently obvious (at least to me) nor easy to do so. If you have a Lr CC subscription, updating to the latest version should give you access to the Dehaze tool. If you’re using a standalone version of Lr 6, all is not lost – thanks to Stu over at Prolost.com – as he’s made a series of presets available for download. You can buy the Dehaze presets as part of a larger preset package here, or you can download only the Dehaze presets for free (or by donation) here.

If you have Lr CC2015.1 or later the Dehaze slider will be under the Effects panel in the Develop module (below Grain). It’s also available as a slider with the mask tools (Graduated Filter, Radial Filter, etc). If you’re using Lr 6.1 or later, using Dehaze will only be possible using the downloaded presets mentioned above. As such, one of the limitations is that the presets are in graduations of 10 – i.e. one can add 50 or 60, but not 53 the way one could set the slider in Lr CC.

Continue Reading →

2017 Photo Calendars

Posted on by — 2 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

This is the seventh year now that we’ve made our MS Word photo calendar templates available, and as with the past couple of years, we’ve also created a series of templates and calendar images you can use with Lightroom or other graphics software. As we did last year we’ve also added a full-page calendar option, below. 

I created a template in MS Word that allows people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars, so we’ll cover that first; the Lightroom stuff is below that. I used MS Word 2007 to make the template, but saved it as both a Word 2007 file and a Word 97-2003 compatible file. Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this:

Continue Reading →