Tag Archives: clouds

City of Angels

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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 – June

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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 – October

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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 – September

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Hi Folks:

One of the basic tenets in photography is that every image has to stand on its own merit – as the saying goes, “Nobody cares what you went through to make that photograph.”  Still, I’m reasonably proud of the image below because of the circumstances in which it was made.

About the middle of September Marcia and I took the ferry over to Saltspring Island to take in the market and the Fall Fair, and we caught a late afternoon ferry to return.  There was a storm brewing, so, fool that I am, rather than being safely ensconced in the cabin I was out on deck making photographs of the clouds.  This image is a panorama stitched together from 19 images, shot handheld on a moving ferry.  The 19 images were stitched together in Autopano Pro, and the final image was pushed around a bit in Lightroom.  I trust you’ll enjoy it!

Now go out and make some photographs!

Mike.

Saltspring Island Storm Clouds

Saltspring Island Storm Clouds

Photo of the Month

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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.

Photo of the Month: Thunderhead

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Hi Folks:

October 4th already and I just realized this morning that I didn’t do a ‘Photo of the Month’ post for September.  Yeesh!  So, in the ‘better late than never‘ category…

September’s image wasn’t very hard to choose.  I wish I could take credit for the clouds, but someone else gets that honour.  It was one of those ‘grab shot’ images; I was downtown and walking along the Inner Harbour and the clouds were just amazing.  I made several series of images for panoramas, but this one was the best in my opinion.  I use Autopano Pro to combine my images into panoramas and process everything in Lightroom.  If anyone’s interested, this image was converted to B&W in Lightroom, and then ‘coloured’ using the split-tone settings of:

Highlights
Hue: 41
Saturation: 23

Balance: +100

Shadows
Hue: 0
Saturation: 0

It’s a sepia effect that I like.

Here’s the image:

Thunderhead

Okay, now go out and make some photographs!

Mike.

P.S.  I entered this image in the recent ‘Tip Squirrel Lightroom Competition‘.  If you want to see the original (before) image and Lightroom-processed (after) image together, you can do so here.

P.S. II, the Sequel: You can find more of our posts on photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find links to over 200 other sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.

Telling Tales – New Year’s Eve

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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.