Forest Fire!

We just got back from a wonderful couple of weeks at our cottage in Haliburton, Ontario. Early one evening, Trish and I decided to take our kayaks out and paddle to the end of the lake. We came out of our bay and turned to the south, spending a lovely hour splashing along, paddling into the wind. As we made our way down the lake, pushing through the waves, we were vaguely aware of a float plane doing circuits behind us.

Float planes are a common occurence on our lake. In fact, the family who used to own our cottage have a float plane and they moved across the lake to a deeper anchorage so we see their plane taking off and landing quite often. However, this plane was a fairly large, bright yellow twin otter and it kept on taking off and landing.

When we turned around to paddle back home, we noticed that the twin otter was actually dousing a small forest fire to the north east of our lake. It would swoop in from the east, taxi down the lake to take water into its pontoon tanks, take off and bank over the east shore of the lake and then do a run over the fire where it would empty its tanks over the fire. The plane kept this up seemingly for hours and, sure enough, by the next morning the fire was gone.

Here are pictures of the airplane taking on water, banking and then pouring water on the fire.







The call letters for the plane are C-COGA. It is a twin otter owned by the Ministry of Natural Resources.

Where Have All the Boomers Gone?

Yesterday, I took a walk at noon hour to stretch my legs and buy some lunch at a nearby sandwich shop. It was a nice, sunny July day and I walked out of the office, down a fairly busy city street, into Liberty Village (an area of condos and shops) and into Select Sandwiches. During my walk, I saw lots of people going about their daily business. There were cab drivers, people riding bikes, pedestrians, shoppers and panhandlers. Maybe I'm a little slow on the uptake, but, for the first time I was struck by the thought that everyone in sight was younger than me! Much younger.

I was fascinated. I kept looking around for some grey hair in the crowd - maybe a business guy out for a stroll like me or a senior citizen driving by in his Buick, but to no avail. I remained the oldest guy in the neighbourhood. A 56 year-old codger surrounded by babies.

Where have all the baby boomers gone? At one point, we dominated everything. You couldn't move without bumping into a boomer. But almost overnight we seem to have melted into the woodwork, leaving the world to a bunch of kids. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it all seemed to happen so suddenly. It's going to take a little getting used to, like having your first grandchild or realizing that all the women in the bar are staring through you like you don't exist any more.

Maybe that's it. Perhaps we're just invisible and I was surrounded by boomers on my walk, but just couldn't see them. Or maybe there's a hang-out that I don't know about where all the boomers go on their lunch hour, a place where they play psychedelic music and we all wear bell-bottoms and give each other the peace sign.

I wish it were true. Looking around my office from my sixth floor perch, I see a sea of shining, young faces. There are a handful of boomers still hanging on to our jobs, trying to keep up with the pace of change in this crazy world. The rest are retiring early, unable to keep up or tiring of the daily grind. Soon, we'll be hanging out in shopping malls with our running shoes on, doing laps on shiny linoleum before the shops open. We'll be having coffee and talking about our investments and the benefits of income funds versus annuities.

And so the world turns...

PS: the lovely young lady in the picture at the top of this post is Maggie, a friend of my grandson The picture is called Maggie and the Fan.

My Art Show

Sometimes fortune smiles at you and good things happen. Over the week-end, an art show opened up in the village of Blue Mountain (near Collingwood) featuring local artists and I'm one of 'em!

Each artist gets to hang their art in a window in the village. My window had six images, each 16x24. The images are from my "The Road North" series that looks at things that you might see out your car window on the way to the cottage or the ski hill. There are three winter landscapes and three summer landscapes.

Here are photos of the exhibit:



And, here are the photos in the exhibit. There are three winter scenes (Tractor Show June 3rd, the green house and the white house) and three summer scenes (Phonehenge, Lunar Gravity and See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil):

Phonehenge

Interesting photos often come out of nowhere. I've been working on a series of images called "The Road North". My main interest is to photograph the ebb and flow of life - capturing the wave-like nature of our existence. In Canada, we have this strange habit of disappearing into the country to the north of us each and every week-end to ski, camp, canoe or cottage (yes, in Canada, to cottage is a verb). Motorists jam the highway on Friday night and Sunday night, up and down the road in a weekly migration. They are intent on their destination and often don't notice the odd things by the side of the road. But, I do.

It might be a particularly funky barn tumbling down despite the efforts of the farmer. Or, perhaps a white house on white snow. Or, a sloping barn roof pointing at the moon. Or, an old tour boat sitting on someone's lawn. Each of these images tells a story that begs to be captured.

One day, I was driving along a country road on my way home from the cottage and I happened to spot something very odd out of the corner of my eye. I parked the car and walked into a farmer's field and found this image:


It looked like someone had started to buy up old Brit phone booths (now a protected species in the UK) with a view to fixing them up and selling them as decorations. A neighour in our area has one half way down his driveway. For some reason, the project looks to have been abandoned.

I was struck by the beauty of the rusty phone booths, the mystery of their presence in a farmer's field in Canada and their resemblence to Stonehenge. Who knows, an archeologist might stumble on these in the future and speculate that they were arranged in a circle for religious reasons.

Hence the title of the work: Phonehenge.

Photos of Animals

I enjoy photographing animals, mostly because I've been surrounded with pet dogs and cats since childhood and also because of the lure of capturing images of wild animals in their natural habitat. This must be a carry-over from my hunter ancestors because I really do enjoy stalking my prey and snapping photographs. I can bring home my "kill" on a compact flash card and display my trophies as photos, either on my wall or online.

My friend Mary Taylor recently returned from a holiday in Africa where she participated in a safari and captured some pretty nifty images. I'm jealous as hell. In comparison, I can only claim success in hunting down a mangy moose in Algonquin Park and a beaver swimming in his pond near my cottage. Somehow, that's just not the same as capturing a cheetah eating its kill.

I make do with visits to the zoo and nature preserves. The beauty of these environments is that you can get up close to the animals and, with a suitable lens (e.g. 70-300 mm on an APSC-sensor camera), you can get some good shots. You can also pick your weather and lighting conditions and go back several times to make sure you get the photos you want.

Mouflon - Toronto Zoo



In contrast, a trip to Africa typically lasts 2-3 weeks, the animals are free to come and go as they please and you just might not encounter good weather and lighting conditions at the time your "prey" decides to appear at the watering hole.

One of my favourite places to photograph animals is the Haliburton Wolf Reserve near Algonquin Park in Ontario, Canada. There is a typical wolf pack kept in a 75 acre reserve that is very close to their natural habitat. The wolves are fed by humans, but the feeding schedule is kept fairly erratic so that the pack is not allowed to lock into a schedule. When the pack is hungry, the wolves hang out near the food source, conveniently located next door to the viewing gallery. The gallery has thick glass that reflects the people in the gallery, presenting a challenge to the photographer.

Alpha Male watches from the woods



The best time to photograph wolves is in the wintertime where the trees are devoid of leaves, affording a good view of any shy wolves who stay back in the trees.

Strictly from an ecological point of view, zoos and reserves are probably a good thing. A trip to Africa carries a pretty hefty carbon consumption with it. Far better for the environment to bring the animals to the crowds instead of the crowds to the animals. Of course, there are many that argue that animals kept in artificial environments are disadvantaged somehow, but I'm not sure that the animals know or care whether they live in Africa or a suburb of Toronto.

Lion Couple Resting their Eyes



From a photographer's point of view, it is certainly more challenging and exciting to capture animals in their natural habitat. In the case of birds, it requires a great deal of patience and preparation or dumb luck. However, it is certainly possible to capture excellent images of animals in captivity that convey the essence of the beast. I don't think photographers should be ashamed of stalking animals in zoos or reserves and the popularity of the various zoo lover groups on flickr attest to the enjoyment that people get from this passtime. However, it just doesn't seem the same as chasing wild game in a land rover and shooting animals living life in the wild.

Industrial Landscapes

It has been awhile. I've been going through a stressful time of changing jobs (again) and haven't been in the mood to write.

Things are starting to resolve, so here goes a new post:

My daughter has a Scottish boyfriend, Ben, who works at Poscor, Canada's second largest re-cycling company. Ben is an avid amateur photographer, although he is a misguided individual who prefers Nikon to Canon. I guess he just likes soft lenses :-)

Ben was kind enough to invite me to tour the Poscor site. Re-cycling companies have been photographed by some famous photogs, including Edward Burtynsky. If you visit his site, navigate to the urban mines section of his works to see photographs of Poscor. In fact, the one entitled Densified Scrap Metal 3a is hanging on the wall of the Poscor office boardroom.

The day we visited was rather overcast, but it was bright enough to get some nice light on the subject without the harsh glare of direct sunlight. We did a tour of the Poscor yards in a pick-up truck, stopping every now and then to see the big machines at work processing scrap metal.

Poscor is a scrap re-cycling exchange. The company finds sellers of scrap (e.g. junkyards, auto plants) and buyers of scrap (e.g. steel companies). If possible, it merely gathers scrap from the source and re-distributes it to the buyer, collecting a fee in the process. Sometimes, the buyer requires that the scrap metal be processed, usually by chopping it into smaller chunks. This is done using several different techniques, ranging from sophisticated mechanised methods to manual brute force.

The most interesting machine on the lot is the shredder. This behemoth takes flattened car bodies as its raw material and uses a spinning rotor with huge hammers to pound the car bodies into shrapnel. The small pieces are then separated into steel and non-steel, with the steel being shipped to a local mill for re-cycling.

Great photographers don't work by taking a quick trip around the lot in a pick-up truck, getting out occasionally to snap off a few shots like I did. I'm told that Burtynsky spends a week or so in a location scouting out subject matter and shooting angles, then waits for the light to be perfect for realizing his vision.

Nevertheless, I did get a half dozen shots that would pass for Burtynsky photos if you squinted from a distance and didn't look too carefully at the colour balance. Here is a selection:

Large Metal Bales



Assorted Sprockets



Mountain of Junk



Old Parts



Bales of Wire



The Gears

Lightroom and Fashion Photography

This is a continuation of my last post, where I recounted my experiences as a newbee fashion photographer taking pictures of the beautiful models at the L'Oreal Fashion Week in Toronto in March.

When you take around 1,500 photos in two days and have to get them ready for web galleries overnight, a heavy duty tool is called for.

I've been using Lightroom 1.0 for a few weeks and watching the tutorials that I'd purchased from Luminous Landscape (see the LL tutorial site here). If you are not familiar with Luminous Landscape, it is a site created by Michael Reichmann, a Toronto-based photographer who has created a virtual industry around educating photographers through tutorials, a quarterly DVD and master class trips to exotic photogenic destinations like Antarctica.

Michael collaborates on the Lightroom tutorial with Jeff Schewe of Photoshopnews fame. The tutorials are terrific, with lots of tips and tricks balanced with photogeek repartee. Imagine two Santa Claus lookalikes exchanging photography humour and you get the picture.

My experience with Lightroom had been limited to processing my usual attempts at fine art photography and I'd discovered several things that endeared the product to me:

• The database that underpins the Library module allows photographs to be categorized to the nth degree. Not only can you import photos following their original folder structure, but you can also assign them to collections (very much like Flickr sets). You can also create virtual copies of your photos and stack them. This is very useful if you want to have multiple crops of your pix. Best of all, there is only one master copy of the original raw file, so disk space is conserved. All editing changes are stored in the database as metadata.
• The Development module is very easy to use. All the screen panels that contain information about the photo can be hidden so that the photo can occupy a lot of the real estate. The development controls for things like exposure, saturation, vibrance etc. are very intuitive and, given enough memory, seem to perform in real time.
• Cropping is very intuitive. You can also easily touch up dust spots and blemishes.
• For more advanced processing, it is very easy to undertake a round trip to Photoshop for things like noise reduction, local contrast and sharpening. Lightroom creates a copy of the image for Photoshop, passes any changes done to-date and stacks the resulting photo with the other versions of the photo.
• Printing with Lightroom is very easy. You can create custom profiles for each type of paper and image placement.
  

All this was fine, but how would Lightroom support the processing of 1,500 photos as rapidly as possible?

This is where the software really shines. Here are some highlights of my experience:

• It was very easy to set up Lightroom so that I could zip through all the photos using the arrow key to advance to the next image and the numeric key pad to assign a rating to each one.
• After assigning a rating, I could filter the photos to select the 5 star versions and create a collection of selects.
• I could further subdivide the selects into collections for each fashion show (each show had its own lighting characteristics that needed separate processing).
• After building the collections, I was able to go through each photo and crop out extraneous stuff. I was shooting with a 24-105 lens and sometimes was unable to zoom in close enough to the models.
  
• For each fashion show, I was able to edit the first photo and adjust white balance, exposure, brightness, contrast etc. I then selected all the photos in the collection and was able to synch my adjustments and apply them to the entire collection.
• I then went through each photo to fine tune all the development settings.
• Since these were going to be displayed in a gallery on the web, I exported each collection to a folder as JPEGS. I was able to specify the compression level and restrict the size of the exported photos so that they would fit in the gallery. All this was done as one batch operation.
  

All this went very rapidly and smoothly. The results were very good, especially considering my experience level.

In conclusion, if you are a working photographer with a need to process thousands of images in a short time, take a look at Lightroom. It has lots of features that make batch processing fairly easy. It also allows the flexibility to fine tune individual photos.

What would make Lightroom 1.0 even better? My wishlist would include a plug-in API like Photoshop's so that the Noise Ninjas of the world can be invoked without a round trip to Photoshop. It would also be nice if there was some way to increase local contrast. But, I was pleasantly surprised with the level of functionality in the 1.0 product and with the general stability of the product.