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 – Rithet’s Bog

Hi Folks:

Somehow I missed the ‘Photo of the Month’ post for June so I thought I’d do something a little different this month.  I was out at Rithet’s Bog the other day, making photographs of the butterflies, bees, dragonflies and other little critters and I came across a number of Lorquin’s Admiral butterflies.  Since my June 2010 post was on butterflies, it seemed only appropriate to do another one.  This time I selected four images and combined them into one 4-across image using Lightroom’s print module. Continue Reading →

Looking for Butterflies

Hi Folks:

Yesterday marked the 16th anniversary of the day my sister Liz passed away. The details of that are irrelevant for the moment but her soft, gentle nature always put me in mind of butterflies, and tiger swallowtails were a favourite of both of us. You can read more about that here. It was interesting because before Liz passed away I had only seen a few tiger swallowtails in my life, but when we flew out for her last days and for the services after, we saw tiger swallowtails everywhere. Marcia and I would go for a walk and one would follow us down the street. We’d get in the car and drive somewhere and one would be there wherever we stopped. If we were sitting in the backyard a couple of swallowtails would come cavorting by. When we flew back to Ontario I saw three swallowtails in the first 48 hours, and I’ve seen several every year since. Continue Reading →

Photographing Moving Water – Revisited

Hi Folks:

Last month I did a blog post on a technique I’ve been playing with for ‘Photographing Moving Water‘. I’m not going to reiterate that technique here so if you’d like to read that other post first, I’ll wait…

…welcome back!

Now, I’ve used this idea on several photos and it generally works pretty well, but I’d only used it on wave action down at the shore of the ocean. I’d been wondering how well it would work on a stream, waterfall or other moving water, so I went out yesterday to make some more images. This is my second ‘winter’ here on the island and I’m still not quite used to the idea of using ‘January’ and ‘spring’ in the same sentence, but the skunk cabbage leaves were already starting to unfurl when I was out… Anyway, I digress. Continue Reading →