Hi Folks:
This is Twinkles.
Happy Holidays!
Hi Folks:
Whether you celebrate Christmas or Festivus, Solstice or Saturnalia, the arrival of Sinterklaas or Grandfather Frost, Hanukkah, Mawlid Un Nabi, Kwanzaa or something entirely personal, we send you love. Create an amazing 2016!!
Victoria’s Public Menorah Lighting
Hi Folks:
The other night we were both pleased and privileged to attend Victoria’s public Menorah lighting at Centennial Square – the same place where we’d been a couple of weeks before to celebrate the annual Christmas tree lighting and Santa Claus parade.
Victoria’s Public Menorah lighting (click the image to see the video)
Photo of the Month – November
Hi Folks:
One of the (many) benefits of living in Victoria is that we generally have flowers in bloom all 12 months of the year. A favourite thing for us to do on New Year’s Day is to go to the Lieutenant Governor’s levée (reception) and then wander the grounds, making images of the flowers (images we dutifully send back east, to remind friends and family of what is coming for them). 🙂
We’re not entirely without winter’s chill, however. Marcia made the following image of hoar frost on English ivy leaves one November morning on her commute through Beacon Hill Park.
Okay, that’s it! Go out and make some photographs!
Hugs,
M&M
“You Are Beautiful”
Hi Folks:
This is well worth sharing. Shea Glover, a student at The Chicago High School for the Arts, conducted a social experiment where she asked her fellow classmates and teachers if she could make photographs of them. What they didn’t know was that rather than shooting still images, she was recording their reactions to when she told them she was photographing people she found beautiful. The video is less than five minutes long, and worth it!
And remember, you are. Beautiful, that is.
Hugs,
M&M
Lightroom 1.4 for Android
Hi Folks:
When Lightroom Mobile (Apple only) was first introduced you needed a CC subscription to use it. Adobe eventually introduced Lr for Android, and with Lr Mobile 2.0 for iOS in October they dropped the requirement that you have a subscription. Lr 1.4 for Android was introduced today and it also has the same lifted restriction. If you have a CC account you can link your device and your Lr catalogue on your computer, but it’s not necessary.
Lr for Android 1.4 is available for free from the Google Play store so I downloaded it and tried it out. Continue Reading →
2016 Photo Calendars
Hi Folks:
This is the sixth 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. This year we’ve also added one more option, which we’ll get to 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:
The Thanksgiving Reader
Hi Folks:
This Thursday is Thanksgiving Day for our neighbours to the south, but every day is a good day to live with gratitude. Since Thanksgiving is about more than eating turkey (or tofurky for those vegetarian types) Seth Godin has made the following Thanksgiving Reader available to everyone. For free. Click on the image below to go to his Thanksgiving Reader page, and you can download the .pdf from there (but be sure to read the entire page 😉 ).
And to Seth, thanks for providing this for all of us!
Hugs,
M&M
It’s Our Birthday!!
Hi Folks: Well, it’s been six years since our son Nick first helped us get M&M’s Musings onto the world stage… something for which we are (almost always) grateful! In these past 6 years we’ve posted 469 blog posts and 138 pages (mostly our short stories) on a variety of topics. According to Google Analytics we’ve had 122,253 views over 87,358 sessions, with people from 180 countries coming to visit our little corner of the ‘net. To us that’s simply amazing. But enough about us!
In those six years we’ve traveled some, grown lots and changed quite a bit, and so has our blog. We’ll continue to share with you thoughts and ideas that are important to us, and trust that you continue to find some interest here too. The real reason for this post is for us to say thanks to you, our readers. Thanks for showing up, thanks for reading our (often very long) posts, and thanks for sharing your thoughts and comments with us!! Here’s to our continuing journey!!
As Marcia says, Love and Laughter!! Party on!!
Hugs,
M&M
Shooting Fall Colours… sort of
Hi Folks:
If you live in the northern hemisphere then autumn is upon you, and if you’re fortunate enough to be in an area that has deciduous trees, then they’re likely in the process of turning the glorious colours of fall – reds, yellows, oranges, browns… (NB: if you want to know why the leaves change colour in the fall, click here). This is a great time of year to be a landscape photographer, and it’s easy to become seduced by all of those colours. However, it’s also a good time to look at the underlying skeleton of your photographs, and one way to do that is to remove the colour and move to a monochrome palette. (Yes, this is an attempt to put off the ‘learning to see in black and white’ post I keep thinking I should write, but for now this will serve well as placeholder. 🙂 ) By shifting away from the colours of the leaves we can look at shapes, at form, at movement, at textures, at light and shadow… All of these essential components exist in colour images as well, but they can get moved to the background of your compositions if you’re not careful.
The images below were all shot in nearby Beacon Hill Park on the same day. All were shot with my cell phone as I was walking through the park, and they all share similar processing in Lightroom. They all reveal what lies behind the colours that are so wondrously revealing themselves right now.
Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!
Hugs,
M&M
P.S. It’s important to remember that unless you have a camera with an achromatic sensor (since there are only a few companies in the world that make them, if you had one, you’d know) with digital you’re always capturing colour information even when you’re shooting in B&W. As such you can adjust the luminance values of the various colours (shown as grayscale) to change the contrast and overall look of a B&W image either in camera (when shooting jpg, by choosing a different recipe) or in your raw file conversion software.