Photo of the Week 2022-04-04

With some time to spare during a visit to Eastern Ontario and the Ottawa area, I headed to Pakenham, somewhere I had been meaning to revisit for almost 10 years ...

 

' spring arches '

 

For me, the main attraction in this quaint little village is the Five Span Stone Arch Bridge, reportedly the only stone bridge of it's kind in continental North America. I'll leave you to use the link provided or Google it yourself to enjoy learning about this unique, historic, Ontario bridge.

A dull and overcast sky had me thinking of black and white at first, but then I imagined a splash of false colour using infrared. Looking for a n interesting composition, I went about making images on both sides of the river and both upstream and downstream of the bridge. Water in Ontario's Mississippi River was high from the spring melt, flowing fast and full through all five of the arches and I tread carefully on the slippery riverside rock to get this feature image.

 

DJE

Photo of the Week 2022-03-21

With spring on the doorstep and a decreasing number of days for snowshoe hikes out on the ice before it gives way to open water, I took advantage of a sunny afternoon ... and of course I took a camera.

 

' ice breaker '

There was much to enjoy as I trekked along the snow and ice covered shoreline. Smaller areas  of open water were beginning to appear in locations where the currents work their way around shoals and exposed rock. Sunlight sparkled off the wind blown ripples of these surfaces. There were interesting patterns and shapes sculpted in the surface the snow by winds off Lake Huron. There were huge mounds out at the edges if the shelf ice further from shore where I dared not tread.

The crunch of my snowshoes on exposed ice became a muted "crump, crump, crump" when I transitioned onto patches of powdered snow. Otherwise the only sounds were from my own heartbeat and breathing. For a while, I sat on an exposed rock and just took it all in.

 

Knowing that this may be the final opportunity for such a trek this winter, I made my way around into China Cove but not before stopping where waves had crashed up driven by the north-west wind as winter strengthened it's grip months before. Now with snow cover gone, melting in the warmth of a bright sunny day, one spot reminded me of a breaking wave frozen in time. 

 

DJE

Photo of the Week 2022-01-31

 

Continuing with this year's creative foray into winter IR photography.

' wonder winterland '

 

The shapes sculpted by wind and snow are wondrous, and in infrared become otherworldly ...
 

Picking up on the conversation from last week, the challenge of lens performance in IR can make things quite interesting. For the image above, I used the Canon EF-M 18-55 standard zoom. The performance of this lens for infrared depends on shooting conditions given my experience. In harsh sunlight it can produce a 'hot spot' in the centre of the frame at medium to small apertures. My default aperture for most shooting is f/8 and for IR, this lens performs better at f/5.6 or lower, making depth of focus an issue for some shots. Taking the image above as an example, I was able to get reasonable focus sharpness at 18mm with f/5.6 for the foreground snow drift, which is the main subject. The background however is nowhere near sharp and this was acceptable as the birch tree and distant cottage chairs provide some context without challenging the main subject for the viewer's attention. No seen, is the hot spot that required some tweaking in post processing to remove a colour and brightness shift. Given the subject of the photo, this was not difficult however with different subject matter it could prove quite challenging.

 

The journey continues ...

 

DJE

Photo of the Week 2020-08-24

Another weekend, another weekend hike with Jordan. This time, we hiked in Forks of the Credit Provincial Park and headed for the mill ruins at Cataract Falls.

Unfortunately, the trail past the ruins and viewing platform have been closed and well fenced-off while replacement of the platform is under consideration. Not to be thwarted in our attempts to get a view of the ruins and falls, we followed the trail to the north side of the river and turned onto the Elora-Cataract Trailway and found a path down the upper slope of the gorge to the rail line and crossed to a fenced location where we could overlook the ruins and river with a view upstream.

 

Credit River Upstream at Cataract Falls

 

 

 

Canon EOS M - Kolari Dual Spectrum (IR & vis) Conversion

Canon EF-M 11-22 f/4-5.6 IS STM @ f/8

Kolari 590nm Filter

1/100 s, ISO 100

 

It was 5 years since I had last visited and 10 or 15 since I first visited. Sadly, the increased foot traffic and use of the park over that time has changed it's character ... not for the better. Like many parks and trails that see overuse, footpaths are well worn but the infuriating signs of disrespectful visitors, ignorant of their impact, were far too numerous. Discarded used diapers, food containers, dozens of empty water bottles, tissue and toilet paper were to be found in the trailside bushes ... without having to look very hard :-(

 

DJE

Photo of the Week 2020-08-17

 

 

A trip to Silvercreek Conservation Area for a weekend outing had me reaching for my infrared modified camera and hoping that the lush green of the forest would provide suitable scenery.

A short way into the hike I noticed a small sapling bending over the downstream watercourse and thought to make it the main focus of a composition. I found a route down to the creek from the adjacent trail and started framing up the scene. Realizing that the 11-22mm lens I had would require me to get closer to the subject tree, I started working my way along. When I next experimented with a composition, I was still too far away to emphasize that tree ... but ... a larger serpentine trunk made for a perfect additional point of interest and the main focus of the image.

Shot with my EOS-M dual-spectrum modified camera with 590 nm Kolari infrared filter. Custom white balance set to green foliage with reds desaturated in post.

DJE

Photo of the Week 2020-03-09

Shooting as much as I do, it's easy for images to slide further and further back into lesser seen sections of the catalogue. I've taken to flagging images in various ways in an effort to minimize this. Some are flagged for future processing, others are processed and flagged as candidates for posting, still others, the best, are flagged to be printed.Still, some fall through the cracks and it's a pleasant surprise when they are "rediscovered".

Recently while performing some file maintenance on the image catalogue recently, I spotted shot that I had planned to work on but, as happens, had found a crack. Perhaps because it is and infrared capture that typically needs some processing to evaluate properly, I had not flagged it, perhaps because I was focused on another series of images. I can't recall.

"Rediscovered", I immediately flagged it and later processed it with standard Red-Blue channel swap, cropped in the Golden Ratio and processed it with a little contrast tweak.

Spring Creek - IR

This week's photo was captured one morning while exploring the backroads of the Bruce Peninsula. After making some conventional exposures of the scene, I used the infrared modified EOS M to capture this scene with 590 nm filter. 



DJE

Photo of the Week 2019-09-09

Inspired by photographing and researching the history of the "Stone Road Bridge", I've noted the locations of a number of other interesting bridges to photograph in the Grand River Watershed.

After returning from a photo outing, I found the paper "ARCH, TRUSS & BEAM - The Grand River Watershed Heritage Bridge Inventory. Previously aware of some of these bridges, I've decided to add them and others to a list of locations to photograph.

The project started with captures in Infrared (IR) and may continue in IR, or it may wander into something different. We'll see ...

In this post, I continue with these images of Chamber's Bridge, a bridge I had visited several times previously. The first visit resulted in a favourite image of a fly fisherman casting his line.

This time I wanted to capture the bridge, in infrared

DJE

Photo of the Week 2019-09-02

Finding your way forward in a creative life is challenging, even vexing at times. The journey is fraught with choices, decisions of where to go, what to do, which path to take. There are as many options as imagination will allow.

Having these choices provides near unlimited freedom of where you may go, literally and figuratively. Making a choice can be daunting if you over analyze as I am known to do, or ...

... it can be as easy as just taking the next step, one step at a time as they say (whoever "they" are, I've never been sure).

I've learned that for me, there needs to be some purpose in those steps. Without purpose, it's really just wandering around and although that can be alright for a brief time, if left too long, yo can wander off. The end result being that you end up just going through motions. This is where I think I've had been the last while ... how long? It doesn't matter.

What matters is getting back the feeling that I am on track and creating with some kind of intent. Hence my recent decision to get out and visit some locations that I've had on my list for a while. Last week's image was made at one of those locations and that outing spawned an idea to photograph other vintage bridges to tell their story.

This week's image is from a location that catches my ever and my interest every time I pass by. With a plan to photograph it in infrared and explore what it is that intrigues me, I set out with some purpose ... and a way forward.

DJE