Hallowe'en again

Well, Hallowe'en is all said and done. The costumes are worn, the candy is aquired and the bellies are sore. I think it's safe to say a good time was had by all. I probably had the most fun, as the reactions to my costume ranged from the slightly confused to the belly laughs of the big red guy himself. And those were just the people giving out the treats, the kids were a whole different story, especially the little ones such as Logan, who was literally in tears when I put the costume away. I get the feeling that I'll be breaking it out again soon. Until then, have a good one.

Dan

HAPPY HALLOWE'EN!!!!

Just a quick shot of this years Jack-o-lanterns. Tommorow I'll try to post some shots of the boys in their costumes and maybe some older Jacks. In the mean time try to save some candy for the kids and have a good Night!

Dan

OK, I think it's time to get rid of my ugly mug off the front page! See, I told you I wasn't great at keeping these updated. I do plan to have a slew of new images over then next week or so, with Halloween and all. These were taken on the weekend while at the park with the kids and my parents. It was a little chilly, but the colours were nice so I snapped a few shots. I'm posting them mainly cuz I downloaded the trial version of CS4 and was playing around with it. I'm very impressed with the ease of use for converting raw shots, though I have no idea what I'm doing. I just fiddled with some of the sliders and ended up with some pretty decent shots. My video card is having trouble keeping up, but I'll get that fixed soon. With both of these shots I tried not to do too much, apart from a bit of colour adjust and some clarity around the eyes. Enjoy, and see you soon :)

Dan

Camera Shy

One of my favorite things about photography (not really but go with me here) is that I am almost never in the frame. I talk about Kristie not liking the camera, but I notoriously absent from most vacation pictures and such. So here you go, I took these today, and did more to them then I can fit in this space, and I am, while not happy with them, at least satisified enough to share them. I also have one more from yesterdays series of Mac getting ready to kiss Kristie. Enjoy!

Dress-Up

Sorry it's been so long between posts. I haven't had any new shots to work on, and just life has picked me up and swept me off like so much fast water. Last night we were just goofing around as a family and I had to pull my camera out and take some shots. Logan is obsessed with Cinderella, and disney in general. He has this Cinderella doll that has very interesting hair. Last night started with me seeing if I could get Kristie's hair to sit like her's. Once we got it kind of close, we started talking dressup. She was going to go throw on a dark dress, but recently I had a conversation with a friend at work about wedding dresses, and I remembered that Kristie's was still sitting in a suitcase in our basement. So I dared her to try it on. Hilarity ensued. Logan was in Awe of her in that dress, which mostly still fit, as impressive as that is. Immediately out came my camera, since Krisie on camera is an elusive thing to begin with, but Kristie all dolled up, literally, is even rarer. And I even got approval to post a few of the shots, so here they are. The First one I didn't do a lot to. I used the channel mixer to convert the image to black and white and then added a curves layer to tone the image slightly. The dress also required a bit of darkening as I was forced to use a flash and the dress was completely washed out. In the second image I did a lot of toning of individual layers using masks and played around with curves quite a bit. I'm very happy with both shots, and I hope you enjoy the rare treat of Kristie on your screens!

Dan

Sinking

Do you ever feel like you are sinking? It's a strange feeling...it starts with your feet, they're too heavy to lift. It's like a few pounds of mud caked on each foot. Anyone who played in a construction site as a kid knows what I'm talking about, sometimes you even have to leave a boot behind cuz it's too heavy to pull free. Next it's your legs, the start to feel like jelly. Eventually your arms even feel the pull, the weight on your shoulders isn't coming from above, it's because you are being pulled down. It starts to get hard to breath, as though there is a weight on your chest.
I know that feeling (obviously, lol) and I'm sending out this lifering to pull you to safety. Keep your head above water and keep trying to pull free.
Please don't take the stuff I say here too seriously. I'm not sure yet if my mood reflects the pictures I post, or they reflect what I'm feeling...I suspect it's a little of both. But mostly it's just talk, let's some feeling out, getting them off my chest so to speak. The whole thing is rather cathartic (sp check?) and really helps clear the head, so don't worry to much about me if you read something dark in what I'm saying.
As for the shot, I didn't do a whole lot to it. I desaturated the clouds a bit, they looked a little too blue first thing in the morning. I added some contrast and a masked curves layer to make the clouds a littlemore dramatic. Also did a quick rotate cuz apparently I was standing a little off keel.

Dan

A little light hearted fun

I could use a little light hearted fun. Fortunately tonight is the premier of a few of my favorite sitcoms. How I met your Mother is one of my favorite shows. It's great cuz a lot of it is mindless silliness, which suits me just fine everyone once in a while, like say every Monday at 8pm. Sure it'll be the same predictable jokes, but it will still be Legend....wait for it....dary! I'm definately looking forward to it.
On to the pic of the day. This is a shot of Logan and My Dad. This was taken back in July, and they were horsing around having a good ol time. Logan was stealing my Dad's baseball cap and putting it on, which made for some fun shots, but this one I felt was better. Just a moment of tenderness which really comes across with how comfortable Logan is. The picture was actually better in colour except for one crucial issue. Both Logan and my Dad had sunburnt faces and were blotchy. The b&w conversion using the channel mixer in photoshop can get rid of blotchy skin by setting a value in the red channel of about 100. I also burned the image a little around Logan's face because he's so much paler then my Dad, the joke is that my kids are so pale they are transparent, but sadly, photographic evidence supports that theory.
I'm off to enjoy my show now, have a good one guys, and I'll see ya's tommorow.
Dan

What a week!

What a week. I guess that best thing that you could say is that it's over. But I guess that's not really fair. I actually had a pretty good day yesterday, and last night we had a really good time. We had a little family dinner for Kristie's Birthday just us and the Kids. It was nice. Afterwards Kristie opened her presents. Mac planned like 2 months in advance and got her a cute little necklace made of Amethyst from a fair he went to in July. He's very thoughtful, I'm always really impressed with him. He loves giving and making people happy. I think that's part of why Logan idolizes him so much. No matter how Logan behaves, Mac always just loves him and treats him special. It's an amazing relationship to be part of. If you can't tell I'm in full kid worship mode today. I'm not saying they are perfect, they're kids after all. But they're pretty good!

I know I promised a shot of Kristie on her Birthday, but she is very camera shy and the shots I took of her she wasn't thrilled with. I'm still working on it, but for now you get this little shot I took on Labour day. I love the look on Logans face, observing his big Brother. The shot itself was a little too bright and dull. I played around with the channel mixer and added some contrast and blurred the water a bit. On the second shot I mostly focused on their eyes. Lightened them and made them the focus of the shot. I think in the end both shots turned out pretty nice. I'll go back to shooting some more frest stuff tommorow I hope :)

Dan

Fresh

I'm running out of fresh images....which is kind of silly really. I have several hundred pictures on my hard drive. But to me all of them are old except for the ones I've taken in the last few months. None of you have seen the vast majority of them, but the still smell like old sweat socks that have been sitting in the laundry pile to me. I'm going to go nuts this weekend and see what I can capture. It's Kristies Birthday tommorow so I'll see if I can get a good shot of her to post. That will be tricky cuz she usually hides when the camera comes out. But it's her birthday damn it and I need pictures.
As for todays shot, a few weeks ago we visited the Canadian National Exhibition. We had a really good time and saw some cool stuff. I have a lot of pictures of the petting zoo and of some musical instruments that Logan was playing with, he had a blast there. I got this one shot of a street performer. She was playing the statue, and would move whenever people got close. It was actually kind of interesting...if you ignore the whole mime aspect of things of course... I really didn't do much with the image other then the initial black and white conversion.
I'm out....happy shooting :)

Dan

It looks worse then it is!

So my car is going to cost $1800 to fix...the timing chain is gone amoung other things. So lets focus on something else. The above image is another angle (much wider) of the shot from last night. I really like how the sky dwarfs the old barn, it feels vast to me. I want to take a night shot of this barn at some point, but I'll have to sneak into the field at night to get a little closer...not sure if that'll be legal or not so for now I'll just envision it. This shot I did a number of adjustment layers to the sky the field and one to the barn to just lighten it up slightly.

I apologize for the below image to those who don't like it. I always take shots of injuries to my self and my family. Not sure why, guess I'm just a little bit creepy. I don't know why I made the image black and white except for the cut, but as with usual I just played with the image until it felt right. It seems to be bugging Logan a little less today so I think he's on the mend. I'm out, so try to have a good one, and I will too.

Dan

Rural Paradise

It's been a rough week so far...and we're only at Wednesday...Logan has finally started to react to the stiches in his wrist, and is not liking the sensation. He's been quite crabby as the pain starts to wear on him. My car is acting up, so I'm taking it in to the shop first thing tommorow. Anyone know what a new fuel Pump costs? I bet it's not cheap.

But hey, things gotta start looking up, right? Eventually the clouds clear and what you are left with can be magnificent. For those that don't know, I live in a somewhat rural area outside the city. There is a lot of farmland surrounding my little town, and I love it. First off it's clear air, you can breath up here. I never knew how blue the sky could get or how bright the stars could be until I moved here. I thought a couple of shots to focus on that aspect of my life would be cool. The shot of the old barn I took on my way in to work today. The clouds were kind of wierd, in that they only seemed to be sitting directly over this field, which I guess somewhat reflected my mood today. I have another wider shot where you can see the blue sky just off to the north. I may post it another time. Both of these images were somewhat tricky to work with. I'm not really happy with the sky in either shot, I think both were kind of back lit, which is really problematic. Overall though I like the shots, they make me think of home. Maybe good times are just around the corner. Let's hope :)

Dan

Bad Day

Sorry I didn't post yesterday. I had a classic bad day. It began with a cranky little boy who didn't want to get an xray done of his hips for an upcoming doctors appointment. He fought me tooth and nail getting dressed and ready, until we got in the car and the tunes came on. This is my youngest Logan I am reffering to. He adores music, and the great thing is generally he likes to listen to whatever I am listening to, as long as it has a beat. So we go do the Xray with little difficulty and then head home a little behind schedule. We get home and I put Logan at his table to give him lunch and set him up with his favorite snowglobe to admire. Ok, a little back story, Logan is obsessed with snow globes....ok wasn't that much backstory, but it is important to the story. So he showers his love on the snowglove while I prepare and feed him his lunch. Then I pull him down from the table and get him dressed for school. I go into the Kitchen for a second to check on my soup and as I'm coming back into the room I can see disaster looming. Logan is trying to lift the snowglobe down from the table, but it is much too heavy for him. He drops it and it smashes on the floor. The momentum of the snowglobe pulls him down onto the broken glass! I watch this happen in slow motion with horror, and I am to him a fraction of a second later, but the damage is done. I can clearly see my little ones blood on the floor and immediate check his hands, a couple of minor abrasions. Then I see it, a gaping wound on his wrist, maybe 2 milimeters away from the big artery. I immediatly clamp my hand down on it and pick him up. I realize that the first aid kit is still in the truck so I grab paper towel and terry cloth and wrap it around. This is just as Kristie gets home from work. I run out to meet her and we zip to the local hospital. The story slows down here, we look like a car wreck coming in, blood everywhere, but after the nurse checks him out and pronounces it minor (a matter of opinion really) and bandages it up we go clean up and wait. And wait....and wait. It's a hospital after all that thats kinda what you do there. The room is even named waiting room, kind of a state of limbo. But Logan sits patiently through most of it, falls asleep for a while even. Finally we get called in, about 6 hours later. The Doc checks him out, and determines he needs stitches, applies some topical freezing. Doc comes back a few minutes later with a nurse and they do an amazing job sewing him up. They are great with him and he is the bravest boy ever. He doesn't upper a peep while they take care of him, just stares at them with his solumn eyes. THey finish quick and we can go home. He's tuckered out and falls asleep quick and thats about the end of it.

And now for some totally unrelated info about the totally unrelated photos. Both are of my brother Ryan's Weimaraner puppy named Maverick. He's probably the prettiest dog I've ever seen and really sweet too. He's a huge suck. The guy with him is my brother of course. I converted both shots to B&W with the channel mixer with a bias towards the red channel. Then I did a number of masked curve adjustments to fix parts of the shots. The sky was completely blown out on the bottom image so I couldn't do much, but I like the composition of the shot, so I had to keep it.

Here's hoping today is a better day, have a good one!

Dan

Night

Finally the weekend is here. It's been a long week, and I'm looking forward to it. I get to sleep in, to chill with my boys...and clean...well, 2 out of 3 isn't too bad right? We have a big fall cleaning that we need to accomplish today, get us caught up on all the summer stuff that we let slide cuz we were busy living life. But it's still morning and before I got going I figured I had a bit of time to play with some more pictures :)

I thought over last weekend I would give some night photography a shot. I always wanted to try but didn't have the right equipment until now. I just picked up a remote shutter release which made it a lot easier. Now I just need a stop watch. Night shots are very time consuming. Shutter times on these two shots were 56 seconds and 20 seconds. I'm not entirely happy with the shots, but they are by far better then any other night shots I've taken. I like how bright the big dipper came out in the first picture, and the ghostly effect of the dock is just cool (you are going to have to click on the shots to enlarge them to really see the detail). I wish I could have got the angle right on that one so that I had more in focus in the shot. As it is it's one small area of the dock, and the moon's reflection in the water. I didn't really add anything to the bottom shot. The big dipper shot at the top was saturated and had contrast added to bring out more blue in the sky, while I masked the treeline to preserve the look of them without them getting too dark. I'm going to try again soon I think, just have to find a darker place to shoot, and maybe someone to come with so It's not so damn creepy standing alone in the dark counting seconds and stars.

Dan

For the Birds

Sometimes leaving an image alone is the best thing that you can do. Both of these shots I played around with and manipulated and never really got what a wanted...until I looked at the original image... It sometimes is too tempting to change an image just for the sake of changing it. But sometimes what you have is worth preserving. That is the case with both of these shots. Both had changes to the contrast levels in the shots, but that's about it. I think they both work quite well on their own. The Rocks in the bottom image still don't feel 100% right to me, but they are better o'natural then they were B&W or colored or changed in really any way. Let me know what you think.

Fast Water

When I was a kid I loved going down to the fast water when I was camping in Burleigh Falls Ontario. Sometimes we swam in it, sometimes we rafted, sometimes I accidentally fell down a shute and disappeared for a few minutes...but that's another story. All the time I spent down there I never really understood the raw beauty of the place. There is something so powerful and compelling about water and the path it has carved through these rocks over the generations. I take pictures of it every chance I get, and I've never had two shots turn out exactly the same. These are two pictures I took there this past weekend. The first is of the falls right at the end of the fast water. The other is of the Dam where the fast water starts. Both of these images were very flat and somewhat uninteresting when I started working on them last night. I wasn't feeling too hot and couldn't sleep so I just kind of let my mind wander while I manipulated them. In the end I probably went too far, and created almost what is called an HDR (high dynamic range) photo. I however am very happy with the result. Most of what I did was mask various parts of the image, the forground, the background, the sky, and adjust the brightness and contrast. Both black and white conversions are done with the channel mixer in PS and biased towards the green. I also had to do a bit of a burn in on the water in the bottome right corner on the image of the falls. The whole bottom corner of the image was blown out, and I think it looks much better now. In the end I just hope these images convey the sense of power I feel at this place.

Big Steps

We Survived!  First day of school for Logan went pretty good.  He even made it through his first fire drill without any trouble.  He enjoyed most of the activities and participated in most of them, in his own way.  We'll see how day two goes today.  It's gonna be even stranger today, since I'll be at work late and won't be able to see him off to school or pick him up.  Fortunately he has the best big Brother ever!  Mac looked for Logan at recess and came to help pick him up after school.  He's so happy that his little brother is at school with him.  

For the two pictures I posted today, the one of Logan (below) had the least amount of post processing done to it.  I liked it as a picture on it's own, so I didn't want to do too much to change it.  I like the story the big step he's taking tells to me.  The only adjustment I did was to the contrast of the image.  The B&W of Mac was a different story.  The image was a little awkward to process due to backlighting.  The sky is still really washed out, but I'm happy with the rest of it.  I had to create several masked layers to adjust curves in the background, the forground and around his eyes, as well as the conversion to black and white.  To me Mac looks like he knows something I don't.

	I know something...	Big Steps!
Camera:	Canon Rebel XT	Canon Rebel XT
Lens:	18-55mm	18-55mm
Focal Length	28mm	21mm
Apeture	f4	f13
Shutter Speed	1/200	1/400

Contrast

Good Mornin' All

This morning has been a little more stressful then I thought it would be.  Today is Logan's first day of Kindergarten.  For those that stumble across this blog and don't know me well, Logan is the younger of my two boys.  The Elder is Mac, who is 8.  Logan is 5.  I'm certain if you stick around you will see many....MANY, picture of these two.  They are my favorite subject.  You would think that I would be old hat at the first day of school thing by now.  We've done it 6 times for Mac.  Mac started when he was 3, and he took a bus.  He was too small to get up the steps of the bus on his own.  Now he's a man on a mission when he goes to school.  It's pretty awesome.  Logan I don't think will be as easy as Mac, but I'm sure that it all will go well.  Don't be shy about sending some good thoughts out just in case though.  

As for the two photo's I've included, both of them have very little post processing done to them.  Both had a little bit of contrast added to pop out the detail a little bit.  The bottom also had the B&W conversion (obviously, lol)  Appart from that there was no cropping, which is really rare for me, and no other little fun effects.  

	Orangeflower	B&W Basket
Camera:	Canon Rebel XT	Canon Rebel XT
Lens:	75-300mm	75-300mm
Focal Length	160mm	300mm
Apeture	f5	f5.6
Shutter Speed	1/320	1/1000

Don't know why I post that data, but I guess it's cuz I'm always interested in it when I look at a picture.  Anyhow, Have a good day, and I'll post again soon :)

Little Blue Flowers

Welcome to my new blog.  Mostly it's going to be about photo's that I have taken.  I'll try to keep it fresh, but I won't guarantee it, I'm not the best at keeping these updated.  The main reason I'm doing this is I really have a passion for Photography and I'd like to get some of my work out there and maybe some comments on it,  if you'd all oblige.  I'm starting probably with a few shots of flowers that I've taken recently.  I like shooting flowers.  They don't move, they usually are in gardens and have good lighting.  Each one is unique and the detail you can pull out of them can be stunning.  Oh, and did I mention they don't move.... Some details about this shot.  It's shot on my Canon Rebel XT with the stock 18-55 lens.  Shot at a focal lenth of 55mm, with an apeture of f5.6 and as shutter speed of 1/400.  Obviously I did some post work in photoshop.  Mostly just some recolouring and a slight crop.  Enjoy the shot and see you soon.

Dan