2025 Photo Calendars (part one)

Hi Folks:

As we’ve passed mid-November, we’re slowly closing out 2024. That means it’s time to make our photo calendar templates available, both for MS Word users (for those who don’t use graphics programs) and as .png files for those who do. As before we will be making our own calendar available in .pdf format for those who are interested, but (as we did last year) we’re doing the post in two parts. For our calendar we use images made in that month (i.e. the image for May 2025 was made in May 2024). Since we haven’t yet gotten to December our calendar isn’t yet complete, but we wanted to make the templates available so others can work on their own calendars. Continue Reading →

2024 Photo Calendars (part two)

Hi Folks:

This is just a quick update to our previous calendar post as we’ve gone through the (5000+) images we’ve made this year and picked out 12 for our calendar. As usual, some of the images were made with our cell phones and some were made with the Sony a7rIII camera. Half of the images were made by Marcia and half by Mike, but none of that really matters. All of this year’s images were made in and around Victoria, BC except for October’s, which was made in Tofino, BC.

Combined, our calendar looks like the image below. If you’d like to download a copy for yourself, click the image to link to a .pdf version.
A composite image showing all 12 of our calendar pages for 2024. Each calendar occupies on letter-sized page, with the image at the top and the calendar portion at the bottom. —–
This is the fourteenth year that we’ve made our photo calendar templates available, both for MS Word users (for those who don’t use graphics programs) and as .png files for those who do. As before we will be making our own calendar available in .pdf format for those who are interested, but (as we did last year) we’re doing the post in two parts. For our calendar we use images made in that month (i.e. the image for May 2024 was made in May 2023). Since we haven’t yet gotten to December our calendar isn’t yet complete, but we wanted to make the templates available so others can work on their own calendars. Continue Reading →

2024 Photo Calendars (part one)

Hi Folks:

This is the fourteenth year that we’ve made our photo calendar templates available, both for MS Word users (for those who don’t use graphics programs) and as .png files for those who do. As before we will be making our own calendar available in .pdf format for those who are interested, but (as we did last year) we’re doing the post in two parts. For our calendar we use images made in that month (i.e. the image for May 2024 was made in May 2023). Since we haven’t yet gotten to December our calendar isn’t yet complete, but we wanted to make the templates available so others can work on their own calendars. Continue Reading →

2023 Photo Calendars (part two)

Hi Folks:

This is just a quick update to our previous calendar post as we’ve gone through the (5000+) images we’ve made this year and picked out 12 for our calendar. As usual, some of the images were made with our cell phones and some were made with the Sony a7rIII camera. Half of the images were made by Marcia and half by Mike, but none of that really matters. All of this year’s images were made in and around Victoria, BC except for October’s, which was made in Tofino, BC.

Combined, our calendar looks like the image below. If you’d like to download a copy for yourself, click the image to link to a .pdf version.

—–
This is the thirteenth year that we’ve made our photo calendar templates available, both for MS Word users (for those who don’t use graphics programs) and as .png files for those who do. As before we will be making our own calendar available in .pdf format for those who are interested, but (as we did last year) we’re doing the post in two parts. For our calendar we use images made in that month (i.e. the image for May 2023 was made in May 2022). Since we haven’t yet gotten to December our calendar isn’t yet complete, but we wanted to make the templates available so others can work on their own calendars. Continue Reading →

2023 Photo Calendars (part one)

Hi Folks:

This is the thirteenth year that we’ve made our photo calendar templates available, both for MS Word users (for those who don’t use graphics programs) and as .png files for those who do. As before we will be making our own calendar available in .pdf format for those who are interested, but (as we did last year) we’re doing the post in two parts. For our calendar we use images made in that month (i.e. the image for May 2023 was made in May 2022). Since we haven’t yet gotten to December our calendar isn’t yet complete, but we wanted to make the templates available so others can work on their own calendars. Continue Reading →

2022 Photo Calendars (part two)

Update!!

Hi Folks:

This is the twelfth year now that we’ve made our photo calendar templates available, both for MS Word users (for those who don’t use graphics programs) and as .png files for those who do. As before we will be making our own calendar available in .pdf format for those who are interested, but this year we’re doing the post in two parts. For our calendar we use images made in that month (i.e. the image for May 2022 was made in May 2021). Part one of this post featured the templates for those who want to make their own photo calendars; this update includes our version of the calendar, which can be downloaded as a .pdf (see below) Continue Reading →

2022 Photo Calendars (part one)

Hi Folks:

This is the twelfth year now that we’ve made our photo calendar templates available, both for MS Word users (for those who don’t use graphics programs) and as .png files for those who do. As before we will be making our own calendar available in .pdf format for those who are interested, but this year we’re doing the post in two parts. For our calendar we use images made in that month (i.e. the image for May 2022 was made in May 2021). Since we haven’t yet gotten to December our calendar isn’t yet complete, but we wanted to make the templates available so others can work on their own calendars. Continue Reading →

2021 Photo Calendars

Hi Folks:

This is the eleventh year now that we’ve made our photo calendar templates available, both for MS Word users (for those who don’t use graphics programs) and as .png files for those who do. As before, we’re also making our own calendar available in .pdf format for those who are interested. For our calendar we’ve used images made in that month (i.e. the image for May 2021 was made in May 2020). Because 2020 has been what it was, we didn’t do any significant travel off of Vancouver Island this year and 11 of the 12 images were made in and around the Victoria area. We did manage to trade Victoria for Tofino (on Vancouver Island’s wet coast) for a bit in October, and the image for that month was made in Ucluelet.

click on the image to access the .pdf file for download

I created a template in MS Word that allows people who don’t have Photoshop, Lightroom, Affinity Photo or the equivalent to make their own photo calendars, so we’ll cover that first; the graphics stuff is below that. I used MS Word 2016 to make the template and saved it as a .docx file. Basically it’s a series of tables, one for each month, that look something like this:

Continue Reading →

Cell Phones, HDR and Panoramas

Hi Folks:

This started out as an idea for a blog post, evolved into a one-hour presentation for our local camera group, and now I’ll try to compress that into a blog post. We’ll see how it goes.

There are several questions to begin with, the first of which is: why do this? The answer is to extend or expand the capabilities of your camera, no matter the camera. There are at least five different reasons that I know of to combine multiple exposures into one image. These are two of them. The second question is, why cell phones? This post doesn’t only involve cell phones, but cell phones are ubiquitous. Some people only make images with their phones, despite the technical challenges, but the bottom line is that it depends on how you’re planning to use your images.

Continue Reading →

Focus Stacking for Landscape Photography

Hi Folks:

We’re certainly not the first to entertain this idea, but while most people associate focus stacking with macro photography (at really high magnifications one’s depth of field (DoF) can be 0.05mm, or less) focus stacking can have value in architectural and landscape photography, even product photography as well. It’s something I’ve only recently tried so I thought I’d share some experiences.

For any image there’s one point (at most) in the frame that is in exact focus. Depth of field is the range of distances within any particular image that appear to be in focus. We’re not going to weigh you down with the details, like Circles of Confusion, Scheimpflug principle, etc. There’s more than enough information on that available on the web.

Focus stacking is a process whereby one takes a series of images with different points of focus and then uses software to choose sections of each image to create a composite image. Here’s an example:

Continue Reading →