Sproing!
The gap between these entries seems to be getting longer, but hopefully that phase is over. The weather has turned to spring, ice is melting, geese are returning and squabbling for nesting rights, and the sky has become more dynamic. Winter skies tend to be either flat overcast, or bright blue; but spring skies run the gamut.
Once again there are a lot of black and white pictures. I just love it. Before it was kind of an afterthought, now it’s my first thought, and I find I’m usually looking at a scene with B&W in mind. I think it has been helping me “see” light better. Sometimes though the scene is all about the colour, so I’ll “settle” for that.
I’ll start off with an urban walkabout around The Forks from a couple weeks ago. I’m still self-conscious when using my larger camera, so these were taken with my Olympus, which is smaller and feels more discrete:
I’m enjoying using the Olympus more often, it does a surprisingly good job, even though the body (bought used) is somewhat outdated. I like the next shot, even if I have doubts about it’s artistic merit, it just looks “fresh”. I also learned a valuable technical lesson:
There are many advocates of “expose to the right” in the photography community. It means you should increase your exposure to push the histogram as far to the right as you can without losing the highlights. The result out-of-camera might look over-exposed, but the idea is the camera sensor gains more “true” information if you give it more photons to work with, and you get less noise in your picture. Once you’ve exposed to the right, when you get back to your computer you have to drop the exposure to make it look “real”.
It’s a fine idea to get around some of the technical limitations of the camera sensor, but I’ve tried this with the Pentax with only poor results. I seem to lose colour information, and dropping the exposure back to realistic levels results in a flat grey mess. However, the Olympus responds really well to this technique. The original of the above was definitely “over-exposed”, and the clouds were little more than a sea of white, but dropping the exposure once I got home recovered everything. So it depends on your equipment. A valuable lesson for me, and it’s making me rethink how much I want to use the Olympus (ie: more often).
Anyway, enough tech talk.
Also a couple weeks ago was a hike in Bird’s Hill Park. The snow and ice had been steadily melting, and skiing is done for the year, which opens up paths I haven’t been able to use all winter. There’s a series of ponds well-managed by beavers, and it’s always worth a visit.
On the way, peeling birch bark, I just love the texture:
The edges of the pond have been melting. Last year’s grasses grow over stumps of beaver-cut poplars:
Compressed snow from some large animal’s footsteps melt slower than everything else:
I really like the texture and lighting of the footprints themselves:
Then last week it was back to Grand Beach. First I did a hike, which also passes through a marshy area with beaver dams. The sky was striking. I like the colour version, but I couldn’t help myself converting it to B&W and playing around, and I really prefer the result (though some might find it overdone):
I spent quite a bit of time there, sitting with the telephoto lens. A pair of whooping cranes flew over (whooping all the while), but the pictures were blurry from my own movement. By the time I left I was blessed with 5 ticks…truly spring has arrived :)
After the hike it was down to the actual beach, where the sky became even more impressive. A couple of weeks ago everything was still frozen over, but already the sky had started to shift, as this approaching squall indicates:
Only a week later, and the scene was quite different, with the edges of the lake in full melt, and the sky upped the drama:
A pair of mergansers flew past. I was able to track them even at 1/25th shutter speed, so while their wings (and the background) are blurry, their beaks are sharp:
Meanwhile, the sky went nuts. Looming over the lake was a massive dark cloud (which ended up raining), but the wind was kicking up lighter swirls like candy floss. It was changing so fast it was hard to frame up a good composition, but I think I managed with these:
One semi-technical note on the above skylines: if you click the images they should expand, and you may notice the horizon is “lumpy”. This is from heat waves over the distant ice. Beyond the looming cloud the sky was clear, with the sun shining hot and bright. Just in case you thought my camera was faulty… :)
Finally, a silly shot: a “selfie” of my equipment:
Thanks for reading, and stay well!
Cheers!
