Daily Photo - Day 9

Yet another mushroom. A "Memory from a Year Ago" popped up on my Facebook page this morning and guess what... I was posting mushroom photos. Over the years I have accumulated hundreds of photos of mushrooms/fungus. The variety and colors fascinate me. They also make good abstract patterns like this one combined with the green ivy-like plant at the bottom.

Daily photo - Day 8

It is the second week of posting an image a day and I'm still going. How long? Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen.  This is the mushroom I mentioned in a prior post. There are 4 of them on this tree. I looked up Lobster Mushroom n Google Images and am no longer sure that this is one. It bears some similarities but it isn't a dead ringer for any of those pictures. It is about twice as big as a couple of days ago.

Here is another photo from this morning's hike, again it is a mushroom, and I have no idea of the variety. I liked the soft texture and color and the way the smaller one leaned toward the larger one.

Daily Photo - Day 7

On the Pumpkin Hill Rd. there is an interesting barn that I have been meaning to photograph as a reference for a drawing. It is long and quite close to the road so I had to shoot several photos in sequence to get the full width. Because I walked along as I shot the photos the view angles changed so it doesn't make a good panorama when stitched. The software can't resolve the different angles but it will be adequate as a drawing reference. Some parts of the barn, like this one, are interesting in themselves. I liked this one the best.  Just for fun, I made a toned B&W version as well. I think it suits the subject matter.

Signed prints are available of either version. A  small print (approximately 6x9 image area) matted out to 11x14" is $50 plus postage/shipping. I can print up to 12x18" if you want a larger print. Contact me if you are interested.

Daily Photo - Day 6

Daily photo - Day 6

Because the forecast for today was for 90°+ I decided to do my daily walk/hike early and set out right after breakfast. It was awesome. NO ONE ELSE IN THE WOODS. :-) I took a nice long dip on the way out. The photo of O'Malley Brook Falls was made on the way in. I saw some new mushrooms, Lobster Mushrooms I think but I have mislaid my mushroom book so I won't swear to that ID.

Today's photos were made with my EOS M3. Camera phones are handy but the M3 is better.

Daily Photo - Day 5

Daily Photo - Day 5
Once again the photo is from yesterday, not today but I like it better than either of the photos I made today. Looking straight down at the geranium next to the back porch steps. It is in a recycled birdbath. The birdbath blew over and cracked a couple of years ago. I sealed it up (mostly) last summer but we replaced it this spring and now use the old birdbath as a plant stand. And yes, those are my sneaker toes on the top step.

What I Saw Today - Day 4

What I Saw Today - Day 4
You are going to see a lot of flower and garden photos for a while because tending them is part of my daily routine this time of year. Today's photo is of the flowers in a large tub planter by the front porch. The flowers were in a hanging planter that Stephanie gave Diane. We spread the plants out in the much larger tub (about 2 feet across). They have filled it in and are spilling over the edge.

What I Saw - Day 3

What I saw today - Day 3.
Today is easy. We went out to pick tomatoes (over a dozen) and water the garden. Of course, I had to exercise the phone camera. I didn't even plant this sunflower. We feed the birds on the other side of the house and the local chipmunk population gathers seed under the feer, carry it all the way back to the garden area that I had kindly dug up for them and "store" the seeds in clumps here and there. I pulled a lot of them but left the ones that were not in the way. They grew better than the ones I planted.

I took more than one photo. Here are some bonus images:

The last isn't actually the garden. It is 'volunteer' wildflowers (yellow daisies and hoary alyssum) that grew by the back of our barn and I leave them because they are pretty even though some people call them weeds.

Daily Photo - Day 2

Okay, this is semi-cheating. I said yesterday I was going to try to post a photo a day for a while. Implied in that was that it would be a photo It made that day although I didn't make that part of the deal and I suspected that there would be days when I had to reach into the archives but I wasn't planning to have it happen quite so soon. Anyway, this wasn't shot today. I made this photo about a week ago and edited it today. It is Spotted Knapweed, of which I have a whole back field of, along with other wildflowers. I'm told that farmers hate this stuff because their animals won't eat it (it is coarse) and it crowds out stuff the animals will eat. I don't keep grazing animals and I like the flowers.

Photo a Day - Day One

I'm going to try posting a photo each day for a while. We'll see how long my discipline holds up. Like this one, most will likely be phone photos. Today's is of a painting on a rock face next to where I sometimes swim in connection to hiking on a local trail. This is not meant to imply that I approve of painting on rocks in nature, I don't, but I find this one interesting in spite of its inappropriateness to the setting.

The Stones of Stone Valley

Two or three times a week (occasionally more) in good weather I walk about 4½ miles on the nearby Stone Valley trail system https://adklaurentian.org/?page=stone_valley_trail.html. I usually carry my camera and photograph whatever catches my eye and brightens my day. Here are three from yesterday.

The two above are actually the same rock from different angles. On the top photo, I was taken by the crosshatched lines with the vertical lines being indented cracks and the horizontal ones being raised ridges. If you click on the images you will get a larger version that shows it better. I also liked the interplay of the fallen logs, the pine needles and the cones on the ground. I converted the photos to B&W and applied a slight tone to only the shadow areas in Lightroom (37 hue / 7 saturation) for a touch of warmth to the images.

Feel free to share by directing people to this page. Do not repost anything from this site elsewhere without my express permission, a matter of both copyright and common courtesy.

Car Show

Every year during Potsdam's Summer Festival there is a car show in Ives Park. I like old cars and I go most years to see the show which is free. If you have followed my blog for a long time, you have seen my car photos before. I tend to photograph details rather than the whole car. There are two reasons for this. One is purely practical. Between the milling crowds and the fact that most of the cars are parked close together, it is difficult to do justice to a whole car photo. The T-Bird below is an exception. It was parked off by itself and I only had to wait briefly for people to move on and give me a clear shot.

The second reason is that I really enjoy finding beauty in just parts of the cars, details that stand on their own as compositions. The remaining images are all details of cars. At the end is a photo of a tub of hand dyed yarn from the neighboring craft fair.

Enjoy. I sell prints if you see something you want to hang on your wall. Send me an email specifying what size print you want and I'll reply with a price. That applies to all the photos on this blog, not just today's.

Mini Adventure & a Photoshop Tip

I have been goofing off on posting again. I didn't realize until I checked that it had been more than a month.

Yesterday a hiking friend and I engaged in a mini adventure. It was more mini than planned because of the heat. We originally intended to go to the pastel show at VIEW in Old Forge and climb the Rondax fire tower on Bald Mt. on the way home but with the temperature in the 90s and a heat index in the 100s we settled for visits to Buttermilk Falls and Bog River falls instead (no mountain climbing involved). These photos are all from Buttermilk Falls, several are of the small cedar island in mid-river below the falls. None are the fall. I have numerous photos of he falls and the light was not good for photographing the falls. I was intentionally looking at the surrounding area to see what else was of interest the immediate area. Answer? A lot, huge rocks, roots, trees. I especially like this island of cedar trees that somehow survive the spring runoff year after year. You can see where ice flows bash them on the upstream side when the ice goes out in the spring.

The Photoshop tip I want o share involves the use of text in Photoshop. Once upon a time when adding text to an image, in my case a watermark, I could click the spot where I wanted text with the text tool and then right-click to get a dialog that included "Paste" to paste some saved text. Somewhere several versions ago in the updates to Photoshop that changed and a right click instead deleted the text layer I had just created. When I first experienced this Edit>Paste didn't work either but now it does. I know others have had problems with this because I have searched Google for solutions and found lots of frustration over it. The bad news: I have to unlearn my reflex habit of right-clicking to paste text. The good news: Edit>Paste is working again so I don't have to retype the watermark text for every photo in a batch.

Below are the rest of the photos from our outing. Buttermilk Falls is below (South of) Long Lake in the Adirondacks on North Point Rd.

As always, please respect my copyright and do not repost or otherwise use the photos elsewhere without my permission.

Book Review - Zen Camera

Zen Camera by David Ulrich is a series of six lessons for finding your own personal visual expression. David is a photography professor in Hawaii and a Zen practitioner. His lessons are derived from both. He explores six aspects of photographic expression in individual chapters with exercises at the end of each. The intent is for the reader to treat the book as a semester's course spending 12-13 weeks going through the lessons and exercises as if you were in one of his classes.

I will confess that I did not do all the exercises, in part because I am already an experienced photographer (not that I didn't learn from him, I did) and I find that my approach is already very similar to his. A number of his comments really struck a chord with me, particularly those concerning connecting with the essence of your subject matter.

There are no discussions of technique in the book but he does recommend shooting RAW (as do I) and learning to use editing software such as Lightroom and/or Photoshop. If you are looking for technical instruction, this is not a book for you but if you are concerned with finding your photographic voice, I highly recommend Zen Camera.

The photo above is mine, it is not in the book and is not related in any way to the book. It existed before reading the book. It heads the page because I like it a lot. It was made while walking the River Walk in Saranac Lake last year. A large print of it is currently in the Northwind Gallery's juried show (Woodruff St., Saranac Lake, NY) through this coming Friday, May 25th. If you dash over there before the show closes, the framed print is for sale or I can make you a print if you prefer to frame it yourself. Just post a comment to that effect and I will reply by email with the particulars.

Disclaimer: I was not asked to review the book, I bought the book from Amazon, David Ulrich is totally unaware of me or the review. I get nothing for writing the review. I only review and recommend things I truly believe have value to my readers. Please respect my copyright and do not repost any portion of this post without my consent.

Just playing in Lightroom

While going through my photos from the last 12 months to decide what to enter in SLCAC member show I got sidetracked playing with this one I shot while climbing the Saranac Six. I converted it to B&W with a modified version of infrared filtration.