Taking stock..

Well a bit of a play on words...

I haven't posted in a while because of work being rather hectic. We just did our full inventory count. Something that happens 4 times a year and I rather detest.

It's just awful. Not only do they underpay us for it, but it's from 1pm to 1am with nothing but the sound of "bee-doop.... bee-doop" to keep you company. No music allowed. No cell phones allowed. Nothing that will distract.

We used to have a nice bonus at the end of the year to look forward to if we did a good job. But times are tough and they nixed that last year, and I doubt it'll make a re-appearance when things level out.

Consequently I haven't really had time to do much in the way of picture taking.

Courtney and I finally managed to snag a bit of time to ourselves and went out for a walk on the shore of Lake Ontario at Rotary Park.

There were some nice fall colours out. Not much in the way of wildlife unfortunately.. I don't think I saw a single squirrel the entire time.. so I resorted to shooting seagulls.

So in light of that. Here is one of my seagulls, and one of the fall pictures.

HDR

Photofinishing is a daunting prospect at the best of times.

I've tried certain techniques before, but one that continues to elude me is HDR. High Dynamic Range pictures are actually 3 pictures taken in variable exposure then compiled into a 4 Billion:1 contrast ratio or there abouts. Nothing out there other than $50,000 HDR monitors can see all these colours but we can compile it into something that lets us see more colour and contrast while eliminating all the block shadows and burned whites.

It is hard to master though. I'm starting to play with it.. but I've met with mixed (very mixed) results.



For now, what I've had some reasonable success with is Sepia, so here is a picture of that, and I'll update on the HDR progress as it comes.

Oak Ridge Moraine

My mom is in town for the holiday weekend, and she'll be cooking a turkey for us.

I love my mom. Not only does she come visit but she brings the big meal with her :)

The three of us went out for a drive after church this morning. I was taking picture after the service again, although we finished quickly this time.. only a few passport photos to take for the church site today.

The fun was heading up to the Oak Ridge Moraine, an area in the North of the Durham Region, that is replete with Conservation areas and trails and quarries and the like. It was Courtney's idea, one I am very thankful she had, she seems to be subtley (or not so subtely sometimes) encouraging my creativity. We trekked up Westney in hopes of finding some areas to take nice pictures up there. Now.. that sounds great but once you get above Highway 7 on Westney it turns into a dirt hell of a road full of potholes. Pavement cannot be found for miles in any direction so getting up there was not enjoyable. On the way back however we found an ENTIRELY paved way that would have saved a lot of aggravation. lol.. Oh well.. the fall colours weren't especially resplendant anyways today, so we'll take another trip some time and probably take the much easier way up Brock.

We went out in search of fall, and found only a fraction of it. However we did see a few other very interesting things. Some cool birdhouses that I'm sure you'll see soon, and a couple of nice plants. Some daisy like things, and a snap dragon that tried to hide, but Courtney spotted on our way back to the car.

On our way home we found some horses, and that was probably one of the highlights as they were right on the other side of the electric fence. I managed to not shock myself, and snap a few nice shots of the group. There were 3 of them all cozy in their little horsie blankies.

So in honor of my first trip up to the Oak Ridge Moraine, here are horses and daisies (sorta)

THAT's not a duck!

Just a quick note.

So apparently after a little insight from someone else, we've discovered that my duck is not a duck.

My duck is a Double Breasted Cormorant in actuality... which makes me really happy actually...

At one time in Ontario there was only about 125 nesting pairs of the birds and they were not considered ecologically viable anymore meaning they would die off without direct intervention.

Now there has been an unexplained population boom of cormorants in the great lakes region, to the point where ecologists are concerned about the damage they are doing to the local flora and fauna.

MUCH more interesting than a duck..

So here it is again.

We want....a shrubbery!

We are the Knights who say Ni!

Well not really but they were very entertaining.

The only reason I bring that up, and this will probably be short, is here is a picture of the shrub from the front of my house in the rain.

Further Ministrations..

I'll be posting some more shots from the walk on Sunday, so here is a lady bug again, and a duck.

There is always a duck of some kind it would seem available to be snapped up. Unfortunately he was out on that post in the middle of the water so he was hard to get at a decent size, and with what I own that was as good as it was going to get.

I ended up shooting some headshots for the church, for the new community website. It was strangely unnerving.. maybe because it was the first time I was required to take decent pictures rather than for my own sense of self indulgence.

Regardless, they weren't anything special.. but they will do the job. creativity is somewhat limited when the mandate is to shoot a passport style photo...

Out in the rain

Courtney and I went out for a brief walk along the waterfront, and it really highlighted why I want a macro.

The weather was ugly, it was hard to harness the beauty of birds in flight when you're shooting seagulls against a grey sky...

But there is a much smaller world out there, that is very vibrant if you can find it.

I took this with my 55-250mm IS, or the nifty two-fifty...

It turned out quite well, but I can only imagine what I might have seen if I'd been shooting with a macro lens.

Post Processing

Yesterday I learned a new side of the art of photography. I'm sure it'll take a long time to perfect, and I would not pretend to have it down pat, however it isn't that complex.

Post Processing.

Some people I've talked to make it seem like a dirty word, and to be honest it does feel a little like cheating. Sharped this, saturate that, oops a little too much colour here, de-sat! Quick!

But apparently with photography shifting from analog to digital a number of years back, all the cool kids are doing it. Now my mom told me not to give into peer pressure, but it does have visible differences.

To highlight this, today I'm going to post the same picture pre and post processed.

It's another of our trip to the zoo. It's Ben, I've vignetted the picture, sharpened it a little and resaturized him a teeny bit.

Here we are: