Print of the Week

A triptych of three of my gull photos from last week (13x19")

Gulls on the River

When I was out running I noticed there was a big flock (a "screech") of gulls on one of the sand bars. So Sunday morning before the sun got too high I headed down there with my tripod and long lens and took a ton of photos (almost 400).

(click to view 27 photos)


Sadly, most of them were underexposed (too dark), not sure why. I corrected for this in Lightroom but the result isn't as good as if they had been correctly exposed to start with. Also, none of them were very sharp. That was a little disappointing after going to the effort of using a tripod. I'm not sure if it was focus problems or camera movement or something else. Obviously, the birds were moving too, but that's understandable.

I struggled with trying to track flying birds - that's a challenge with a 750mm (500 x 1.5) equivalent lens.

On the positive side, I got some good action shots. I just need to work on the image quality. It's all good practice.







View a slideshow or an overview of the 27 photos.

What's Up Doc?

I was walking home and I spotted something on a lawn. At first I thought it was a cat, but as I got closer I realized it was a rabbit.



I thought it would run away but it seemed quite calm so I stopped and pulled my camera out of my pack. As usual, I started taking photos from a distance in case that's all I got. But I moved slowly and it let me get quite close.

(click to view larger)


Finally, when I got within about six feet it ran away.



I haven't seen any rabbits recently so it was nice to get a good look at this one.

These were taken with the new RX100. The closeup shot is surprisingly sharp considering it was handheld at 100th of a second. (late afternoon on a cloudy day)

New Camera

I've been considering the Sony RX100m2 (or II) since it was announced a few months ago as an upgrade to the original RX100. I've been happy enough with the Canon G12 as my "small" camera, but I was attracted by the small size and high image quality of the Sony. I finally gave in and bought one on Friday (From Don's Photo since I believe in supporting local retailers even if it costs a little more).

It's substantially smaller than the G12, but it has a larger sensor, higher resolution, and better low light performance (high ISO). It doesn't have a fully articulated screen like the G12, but the screen does tilt up and down which is almost as useful. And the screen is double the resolution. What I will miss are the external controls on the G12. It had separate dials for many functions whereas the RX100 relies more on on-screen menus.

My first test was of a flower from a bouquet on the dining room table. It was quite low light, but it came out pretty well.

I took a few more shots at the Farmer's Market Saturday morning, somewhat awkwardly because I had a shopping bag and a coffee in one hand and was trying to operate an unfamiliar camera with the other hand.

It was a beautiful sunny day so when the sun got a bit lower in late afternoon I wandered down the back alley and over to the nearby community garden to see what I could see. I took a bunch of closeup shots. The RX100 does quite well at this but it will only focus close when fully zoomed out to wide angle. The G12 is similar but it will focus closer than the RX100 when you zoom. However, the RX100 has double the resolution so you've got more leeway to crop.



slideshow or overview of set (31 photos)

It's going to take awhile to get accustomed to all the features on the RX100, but I'm definitely impressed by the quality of the images. (All of these images were shot Raw and processed in Lightroom.) And the tiny size will be great for everyday carry and travel.

One of the factors in choosing the RX100 is that it's one of the top rated compact cameras for underwater photography. There are several companies making underwater housings including Ikelite, Recsea, and Nauticam.

The user's manual that comes with the RX100 is pretty skimpy, especially considering how many features the camera has. I picked up Gary Friedman's guide (in ebook) which is helpful.

Print of the Week

I thought I'd pick something with a fall theme. As usual I like the flowing water and the reflections, and the yellow leaf adds a nice splash of bright color.


(click to view larger)

This was from my Wells Gray Water set.

Alberta Travel Notes

Some places we stayed or ate at on our last trip.

Edmonton

Matrix Hotel - Not cheap, but not bad for the big city. I picked it because I was avoiding big chains, it was in a reasonable location, and there was a coffee shop and a good restaurant on the same block. The lobby and the rooms were nice but nothing outstanding. They have free wine and cheese in the evenings in a nice lounge with an outdoor patio, which is a bonus. I avoid most free/included hotel breakfasts because the food and coffee are usually crappy and they tend to be an orgy of disposable cups, plates, napkins, etc. I almost didn't bother with the Matrix's breakfast, but I was glad I did. They had real plates, cutlery, and even cloth napkins. And the food was actually pretty good - even a frittata. I also had an excellent supper at the Wildflower restaurant next door.

Jasper

Syrahs - We've been meaning to try out this restaurant since we often walk by it on the way to Coco's Cafe where we go for coffee. It's a small, fairly classy restaurant beside a wine shop. They didn't have a lot of vegetarian options, but what I had was good. It
didn't seem as touristy as most of the places in Jasper.

Bow Lake

Num-Ti-Jah Lodge - We had stayed here once before and enjoyed it, and we had a lovely stay this time as well. It's not cheap, but the off-season rates aren't bad by Banff / Jasper standards, and it's a beautiful spot with a good restaurant.

Banff

Brewster's Mountain Lodge - Most of our time in Banff we camped at Tunnel Mountain, but mid-week we decided to have a break. Brewster's is right downtown in Banff, within half a block of some of our favorite places to eat (Wild Flour Bakery, Bear Street Tavern, Bison Restaurant, Nourish Bistro). Our room was nice and it was great to be able to leave the car in the underground parking and walk everywhere. I wondered about the noise level in downtown Banff, but our room was quiet. We made the mistake of going for the breakfast here, sadly it was the usual disposable assortment.

Calgary

Fairmont Palliser - I was searching for a smaller, non-chain hotel, but the Fairmont actually had the cheapest special rate ($129 for an upgraded room) and a good location so we figured we'd give it a try. Our room was certainly luxurious and the hotel is a great old heritage building. It was Saturday night and all the good nearby restaurants were booked up so we ended up eating in the hotel restaurant but that turned out to be a good choice. The menu had a whole page of vegetarian / vegan / gluten free options and they use healthy local ingredients. If you can get a good room rate like we did, I'd definitely recommend it.

See also: blog posts from this trip and photos from this trip

Prints of the Week

Saskatoon has been building a new police station and they were looking for pictures to hang on the walls. Shelley sent them links to some of my photos and they ended up choosing four of them. It's always interesting to see which photos people choose. In this case I assume it wasn't just a matter of what they liked, but also what they thought would go best in the station. I'm flattered that they liked my photos enough to want to use them. (If anyone else is interested in a print of any of my photos, just let me know.)









I printed them 16x20 on Epson Exhibition Fiber paper on my Epson 3880 printer using Lightroom and I was pretty happy with how they came out. The paper is about $5 a sheet and it takes a fair bit of time (and probably $5 worth of ink) to print this size so I do test prints at 4x6 and 8x10 before doing the final prints. I'm getting better at judging how a print will look but there's still some trial and error.

I was a little nervous about the one of the path (second one) because it was quite old. Not that digital images fade, but that meant it was taken with my previous always-in-the-pack camera - a Canon SD700 IS. It was a decent camera when it came out, but it was only 6 megapixels which is not a lot for 16x20. (Less than my current iPhone's 8mp) But I enlarged it with Perfect Resizer and it came out fine (IMO). Apart from the resolution, I also wish that I had a raw file to work with rather than a jpeg since that would have given me more leeway to process it.

I had major problems trying to get the manual rear feed on the printer to work. I had just used it with this size of paper on the weekend, but this time I just couldn't get it to work. Either it would say the paper was not loaded correctly, or it would appear to take it and then when I went to print it would give an error. It kept saying there was a paper size error, but I double and triple checked all my settings and still couldn't get it to work. In the end I just used the regular sheet feeder and it worked fine. On the positive side, it would reject it before doing any printing so I didn't waste any paper.

Bow Lake Sunrise

"Photography is not about the thing photographed.
It is about how that thing looks photographed.”
- Garry Winogrand

(click to view 13 photos)

After meeting up with Shelley in Lake Louise on our last trip, we spent the night at Num-Ti-Jah Lodge on Bow Lake. We'd stayed here once before quite a few years ago and enjoyed it.

Despite a good supper in the lodge restaurant accompanied by a bottle of wine, I managed to drag myself out of bed early to take photos around the lake during sunrise. It was cold (-5c) so I put on a warm jacket and toque but I should have put on some gloves - my hands froze. (bringing back memories of ice climbing!)

There were several other people out taking photos, all of them with tripods. As usual, I didn't get out my tripod, but I did use my new Jobu Designs monopod. The other photographers were set up waiting for particular shots but I'm much more of an opportunist, preferring to wander and see what catches my eye.

It was a beautiful morning but I wasn't sure I'd made any great images. Glancing through them after downloading to the computer, I still wasn't too impressed, which is partly why I haven't processed them till now. But going through them again, I find there are a few that I quite like.

Photos of the Day

The sunshine tempted me outside for a walk this afternoon. I wasn't thinking of photography, but of course something caught my eye. For a moment I thought "darn, I didn't bring a camera", but then I remembered I had my iPhone, which I used to take this batch. (I still tweaked them a little in Lightroom.)

(click to view 8 photos)


There are two places I know of along the trail that have these seeds. I'm not sure what it is or if it's a native plant. Does anyone know?

Getting the ladybug in focus was a fluke. It's what I was trying for, but it would have been hard to manage even with the DSLR, let alone with the iPhone. I was poking at the screen trying to get it to focus on it, but I didn't think it would work! Another good example of the value of trying multiple shots. After all, it doesn't cost anything.

Wells Gray water

One of the highlights of Wells Gray Park is that it has a lot of waterfalls, including Helmcken Falls, the fourth largest in Canada. I love water and waterfalls so, as you can imagine, I took lots of photos. Here are some of my favorites:

(click to view 31 photos)


The salmon jumping up Bailey's Chute were a challenge to photograph since they only jumped every few minutes. I ended up resting the camera on the railing, aimed in the right direction, and when I'd see a salmon I'd fire off a high speed burst and hope to catch something. I couldn't zoom in much since I didn't know where they'd jump. When I was reviewing my photos, at first I was wondering why I took so many of just water. Then I realized those were all the shots where I missed the salmon!

As usual with flowing water I was playing with both slow shutter speeds to blur the water, and fast shutter speeds to freeze it. Some of the images I converted to black and white since the color didn't add much.

See also: Blue River Photos and Details of Wells Gray Park from the same trip.

Banff Rock

We just spent five days rock climbing around Banff using the new Banff Rock guidebook by Chris Perry. We hadn't rock climbed in the Banff area for a while and it was nice to find a bunch of moderate stuff to do.

This guide is a long awaited update to the old Banff Rock Climbs by Murray Toft. I'm pretty sure I bought my copy when it came out in 1985, probably at the Banff Book and Art Den at its old location in the Clock Tower Mall. (Sadly, this bookstore is no longer with us.) This guide led us up a lot of great climbs in the Banff area. My copy eventually got so worn from use that a friend had it rebound hardcover for us.

We arrived in Banff after lunch the first day so we just went to Robbie's Rock - about a 10 minute walk from the Mt. Norquay road. There are four bolted routes - a 5.7 and three 5.8's. It was a good warm up.

The next day we went to the Black Band area on Tunnel Mountain. It's another short approach. We did the two 5.8's, the two 5.9's, and two of the 5.10a's. We gave up after that because it was just too darned hot in the full sun! We hadn't expected +30c in the middle of September in the mountains!

Aftonroe is on the right hand buttress

Thursday we did Aftonroe - a nine pitch 5.7 sport route in the Guides Rock area of Mt. Cory. It's pretty cool to have a long easy bolted sport route. It wasn't especially challenging, but it was a lot of fun and great views. It took us about two hours to climb the route. (Some of the pitches are quite short.) We had the route to ourselves until the descent when we passed two other parties coming up as we rappelled the route.

We followed with a day at Sunshine Slabs and Paddock Wall. These are just at the start of the road up to Sunshine. The road was closed due to flood damage, but parking at the gate only added a few minutes walking to the climbs. Again, we climbed till the heat got to us.

Our last day we went back to the Black Band and did the rest of the 10a's and the 10b. We both agreed that these are some of the easier 10a's we've done. Not that we're complaining!

Shelley rappelling off one of the Black Band routes

Blue River Photos

Driving from Jasper to Wells Gray Park I stopped at Blue River. I had planned to go to Clearwater, but the weather looked threatening so I figured I'd get my tent up before it rained. As it turned out, it only sprinkled in the evening. (It rained more in the night.) I've passed through Blue River on the train and the bus, but never stopped. There's not much there, but I enjoyed wandering around and taking photos of the sunset and the reflections in the lake.

In the morning it was very foggy in Blue River, but the road went over a pass and emerged out of the clouds. I actually passed the viewpoint and stopped and turned around to go back to take some photos. The other side of the pass I was down in the fog again by the river.

(click to view 21 photos)


These photos actually precede the previous batch - Details of Wells Gray Park

Details of Wells Gray Park

The southern part of Wells Gray Provincial Park is mostly forest. It's hard to take good photos of "forest" so I concentrated on small details - leaves, moss, flowers, etc.

(click to view 40 photos)


More photos to come from this trip.

Mt. Robson

Decent views of Robson today on the way by. 

This was taken with my iPhone, more shots to come from the big camera. 

I'm posting this from the campground in Blue River. Hard to escape the Internet these days, other than voluntarily :-)

Should Wilderness Have Rights?

I'm headed out to BC to attend Speak to the Wild. I'm looking forward to both the speakers (including Candace Savage and Trevor Herriot) and to visiting the wilds of Wells Gray Park.

One of the topics is whether wilderness should have "rights". It's a good question.

Traditionally, wilderness has been something to be conquered, subjugated, tamed, extracted from, and profited from. The idea of it having "rights" was not a big issue.

To me the question is somewhat nonsensical. It's a bit like the mice trying to decide whether the other occupants of the house have rights. (Fleas on a dog might be a better analogy.) I'm one of those "traitors" to the human race that think that nature and wilderness are actually more important than people.

Of course, the other side of the question is what the chances are of actual getting wilderness rights into the law. I'd say slim to none in our current political climate of democracy by the money, for the money. We are far too full of greed and lust over extracting and selling our natural resources. If anything we're more likely to continue the trend of weakening ("streamlining") our environmental laws.

In some respects Canada has lots of wilderness left (unlike many countries). But the sad fact is that there is nowhere remote enough to escape destruction if some extractable resource is found there.

Highway Hawks

When we're driving on the highway I always see hawks on fence posts or hay bales or telephone poles and I think I should stop and take photos of them. Since I was by myself driving today I thought I'd give it a try. It's harder than you might think. First, you have to spot them in time, which is challenging at 100 km per hour. Then you have to make sure there aren't any other cars too close behind you. Several times I passed some gorgeous hawks but there was no way I could stop.

The hawks always look so peaceful sitting there as you whiz by at high speed. However, as soon as you stop, especially with the rumble strip to cross to the shoulder, they tend to get spooked and fly away.

The first one I stopped for was perched on a hay bale. He was a little ways from the road and didn't take off when I stopped. However, I didn't have my camera out or the long lens attached. I was just about ready when he lazily launched off the hay bale. He landed in some trees, a little too far away to get a good shot. And he didn't stay there for long either.

(click to view larger)




My next few tries the hawk flew off before I even got stopped. This was my best attempt. I stopped a bit past him, which meant I couldn't shoot out the window and use it to brace the camera. I took this shot from just beside the car. As soon as I tried to approach closer he few off.



Pictures or not, they are beautiful creatures and I'm glad to see them.

Birds in the Yard

Partly as practice in using my new telephoto lens I've been taking some photos of the birds around our feeder. Mostly we get sparrows, but also some black-capped chickadees, red-breasted nuthatches, and occasionally colorful house finches. The downy woodpecker was a fluke - I heard something in the tree beside me, looked up, and there he was. I swung the camera around and got off a few quick shots before he disappeared. I  caught a few of them in flight, not really intentionally, just because I was shooting high speed bursts.

(click to view 17 photos)


The birds tend to be quite skittish so I set up peeking around the side of the house. Of course, it's the front yard and they still scatter when someone goes by. Here's me with the new lens, tripod, and gimbal head. You can see the feeder in the tree. I was sitting to get a lower angle - when I stood up I got ugly cars in the background.

Balloon Ride

I'm finally getting around to posting my photos from our balloon ride on August 1. This time we took off from Archibald park so we could walk over. As usual, it took us a few tries to get good enough weather to fly. Even that morning it seemed questionable since there were rain clouds around and the wind was unpredictable. But in the end we took off and had a great flight. The light wasn't quite as good as our previous flight, but it's still wonderful to get an aerial view of things.

(click to view 30 photos)


I posted a few of the photos previously in Clouds

See also Shelley's post Flight of the Balloon and my post from our previous flight in 2009

More Flowers

When I arrive at Innovation Place for work I like to walk through the pond area to see what there is to see. They must water early in the morning - I like the shiny reflective drops of water on the flowers. As summer progresses the sun is coming up later and there's nice low light. I love the bright colors. (My recent Print of the Week came from this set.)

(click to view 12 photos)

Print of the Week

As the end of summer looms, I decided to print something bright and colorful.

(click to view larger)


This is another one of my Innovation Place garden photos taken with my always-in-my-pack G12. (more to come from this batch)

See also other Print of the Week posts.

Four Generations to Grey Owl's Cabin

Recently I joined Shelley's family for a trip to Grey Owl's cabin. The group included four generations and ranged from 2 years old to 85 years old. Five of us started Friday afternoon and moved our two kayaks and a canoe over the portage to Kingsmere Lake where we stayed at the south end campground. The water was beautifully calm and I went out in my kayak after supper to enjoy it.

(click to view 21 photos)


The next morning the other three joined us with a rented motor boat, which turned out to be a lot bigger than we expected. But we got it across the portage with the help of the winches and a couple of other guys who showed up. (The portage has rail carts.)

It was a little rough for the paddle down Kingsmere Lake, but manageable. It's a big lake and it doesn't take much wind to stir up the waves. Thankfully it was reasonably warm since we regularly got splashed by the waves. It took us about four hours (including a quick lunch break) to get to the north end campground where we stayed Saturday night.

I forget how minimalist Shelley and I have become on our hiking and paddling trips. We don't usually take a stove or make fires. Our kayaks and their storage space are quite small. It would not even occur to me to take a large picnic cooler on a backcountry trip. So it was a bit of a contrast to travel with a considerably less minimal group! On the positive side, the food was good!

From the north end campground it's a 3 km hike to Grey Owl's cabin. (Or you can portage 500m to Ajawaan Lake, but it's hardly worth it.) We checked out the cabin and Grey Owl's grave. Ajuwaan Lake is a pretty little lake.

I've been on Kingsmere Lake a couple of times before (Paddling the Bagwa Loop and Paddling into Autumn) but it's been late in the fall when there's almost no one around. This time there were more people, mostly at the north end campground. Most people seemed to be hiking in rather than paddling. There were only a few other boats and canoes.

Sunday we headed home. Shelley and I were quite impressed that the group only took an hour and a half to pack and have breakfast.

We were lucky and the lake was very calm for our paddle back. The rest of the group took the shortest path straight across the lake. I chose to follow the shore - longer, but a lot more interesting. There were grebes, loons, gulls, great blue herons, and kingfishers.



My favorite sighting was three river otters coming down the shore into the water. (At first I thought it was beavers.) They swam around a bit and then headed back into the trees. Actually, only two of them went back in the trees. The third spotted me just as he was about to get out of the water and immediately dove back under. He surfaced off shore and kept bobbing up to see if I was still there. I was happy to see them since I haven't seen otters in Saskatchewan before. A bit later when I stopped beside a small creek I found lots of otter tracks in the sand.



The belted kingfishers were also taking advantage of the calm clear water to go fishing, something I haven't seen before. I was too far away to tell if they were catching anything but there were quite a few schools of little fish around. Sometimes they seemed to be fleeing something. At one point a large (2 feet?) pike went by that could certainly have been a source of fear for small fish!

See also Shelley's post about the trip.

Focus Stacking

When shooting close-ups, especially with a fair bit of telephoto, you end up with a very shallow depth of focus. I took these two shots to see whether it would look better with the focus on the bud or the larger petals.

But neither of them really excited me. Flipping between them, I realized they were so similar that I could probably "focus stack" them in Photoshop. i.e. merge the two photos, retaining the best focused parts of each. It was a good opportunity to try a new technique. The result still wasn't one of my favorites, but it's pretty cool how well it works, especially since the process is fully automatic.

The normal advice is that you need to use a tripod to do focus stacking to ensure that you don't move between shots. But this seemed to work ok even though it was handheld. You'd also normally take more than two shots.

It would be nice if my K5ii had a focus bracketing feature - that would make it a lot easier to get just the right focus (or to do focus stacking). Exposure bracketing is more common, along with the equivalent stacking for HDR (high dynamic range).

[My apologies to the non-techies and non-photographics. If I'm not careful this is going to turn into a photography blog.]

Morning Light

I've been wanting to get out with my camera in the morning when the sun is low and backlighting the flowers. Here are the results - lots of colorful flowers, some turned abstract or otherwise heavily adjusted (in Lightroom). Most of these are from the community garden along with a few from the back alley.

(click to view 25 photos)


My father took lots of flower photos and often brought them into the house where he could control the background and the lighting. I prefer to just take them as I find them and see what I can do with it. Of course, I have the advantage of playing with them on the computer.

Clouds

I've looked at clouds from both sides now,

From up and down, and still somehow

It's cloud illusions I recall.

I really don't know clouds at all

-- Joni Mitchell, Both Sides Now

(click to view larger)








Stylized reflections of clouds in the river, from our recent hot air balloon ride.

Print of the Week

I figured my first print after we got back should be one of the eagles with the big lens. I had a tough time choosing which one, but I knew this was a favorite of Shelley's.


(click to view larger)

We were driving from Skidegate to Masset on Haida Gwaii when we saw some bald eagles down on the beach - not an unusual sight, but there were a number of them and it seemed like a good chance to try for some photos. It had been raining and they were all quite wet and bedraggled. This one was sitting on a log quite a way down the beach. I started taking photos of him, gradually moving closer. I got quite close before he took off. In this photo you can see he had definitely noticed me! Shelley got some photos of me gradually getting closer. (I was squatting to take the photos to get a lower angle and be more stable.)

It's not quite as sharp as I'd like (more noticeable in a big print) but considering it was handheld at the equivalent of 750mm in quite low light at ISO 3200 it's not bad.

I also like the next shot as he prepared to take off, although I wish I had had time to zoom out a bit so it wasn't cut off. (This is cropped to horizontal, I was still shooting vertically when he decided to go.)  I like how his focus is so intently straight ahead and I like his heavy duty yellow feet. I'm tempted to print this one as well at some point.



See also other Print of the Week posts.

Lunchtime Photos

I sat outside by the pond to eat my lunch yesterday. As I was leaving I wandered around a little to look at the flowers and plants. I stopped to look at a flower on a water plant and I spotted a large spider on the water right beside it. That was enough to get me to pull my camera (G12) out of my pack and start taking some photos. Of course, once I started I took a bunch more :-) The succulents aren't as colourful as the flowers but I like the shapes and textures. Innovation Place puts a lot of efforts into its gardening and if you like that kind of thing it's worth stopping by and wandering around the pond and the fountain.

Anyone know what kind of spider this is?

(click to view 13 photos)


This set of photos is part of my Saskatoon Nature collection.