Photo of the Week 2025-08-18

 

I feel my increased awareness of scenes, subjects and the surrounding world around is a symptom of having caught "photographer's eye". 

 

' morning light on small spruce '

Just when, during this journey I caught it, I'm not certain. Though I am certain it is not fully advanced and likely never will be. There are assuredly stages of the condition, mine moderately advanced I think.

 

There is no clinical test to verify the condition. One must just accept the visual joy of distractions such as morning light on a small spruce.

 

DJE 

Photo of the Week 2024-05-27

 

Sticking with images from my recent Algonquin excursion, I've chosen a couple of the iconic Algonquin Moose. What trip to Algonquin is undertaken without fingers crossed in hope of seeing one of these large wild animals?

 

' late for dinner '

' late for dinner II '

Fingers crossed or not, we had not seen a moose since the very brief (too brief to get a photo) encounter with a skittish male very early that morning. It was late in our day and we were heading across the park on Hwy 60 and back to the hotel with minutes left in our window of opportunity. Sun was officially setting, it was within minutes of 8:30 pm when the excited shout of "moose" resounded in the vehicle.

 

At a roadside marsh pond, a decent sized male with sprouting antlers was having a late dinner. He allowed us to approach while continuing to munch away, looking up only periodically to check that we were still there.

 

The light was poor requiring me to shoot at ISO 6400 handheld with a shutter speed of only 1/40s in burst mode to get anything resembling a sharply focused shot. We were close enough that I zoomed back out to less than max 400mm of my EF 100-400 L II and pulsed away with short bursts whenever there was an opportunity for something different which wasn't often as this big fells just wanted to dip his snout into the water for another tender mouthful.

 

Hit rate at ISO6400 f/5-5.6 and 1/30-1/40s exposure was low as to be expected but I had to try. Thankfully these couple were good enough for some follow up processing with Topaz DeNoise AI and some finishing touches in PS/ON1

 

DJE

Photo of the Week 2016-03-14

I've been down with a cold since last weekend. Finally starting to feel better by Saturday, I had to play catch up with preparation for our kitchen reno that starts on Wednesday. That meant clearing out the garage to make space for our old cabinets to be stored until they head off to a new home and making sure we were prepared to take delivery of new appliances in about a week. This left little time or energy for a photo outing this week ... so it was back to the photo library.

While having coffee Sunday morning, I started browsing back through my photo library and wondered what I was up to last year at this time. I checked and came up with an interesting image from a morning drive where I was racing sunrise.

mystic morning

What I was doing was racing to get to a decent location with an interesting foreground, before I lost the colours and patterns in the morning sky. If I recall correctly, I was on my way in to the office for work, having chosen the more leisurely backroad route. When I noticed the sky, I re-routed a bit to a location I had visited before at sunrise. I found this old tree and fallen limb at the edge of a farm field and stopped to make the shot. Dressed in casual shoes and pants, I waded through knee high snow in the roadside ditch so I could get a composition shooting over the fence so it was removed from the shot.

I think my shoe came off in the snow a couple of times as I tried to get back to my vehicle. I remember turning on the heater and resting my foot by the vent for a few minutes to warm it up and dry my sock before continuing my otherwise uneventful morning commute.

DJE