Photo of the Week 2023-03-27

 

As we enter the last days of March, spring is truly upon us. No matter what the weather may throw at us, the Spring Equinox has come and the season has changed. Sunny warmer days with the emergence of leaves and flowers is not far off ... but before I get there with my photography, I have one image from the frigid depths of winter that I'd like to share.

 

Back in January, while looking after the farm for the youngin's, with a major winter storm forecast to slam Eastern Ontario, an idea for an image came to mind. With a fresh blanket of snow, I had thoughts of a night shot with the lights of the house glowing in the pitch black of night. Well ... add in blizzard like conditions with extremely heavy snow blowing off the roof of the workshop and here you have it !

' on a dark winter's night '

And here's the backstory ...

 

In the weeks and months leading up to my time at the farm, I was hoping for wintry, snowy conditions as they would figure prominently in my plans for photography. As luck would have it, the snow came and in a healthy dumping starting earlier one day and continued through that night.

After dinner, with cousin Steve who had come for dinner and a first visit to see the place I had talked so much about, I went around flicking on the interior and exterior lights. Then we donned the warm winter gear, checked for a charged battery plus a spare, grabbed the camera, tripod and headed out. Trekking down the lane and around the garden area I wanted undisturbed in the foreground, we made our way to the corner by the cedar rail fence. I set up a couple of compositions I liked and captured a number of frames for each, varying exposure so they could be combined in post processing to control the dynamic range of the scene. Done, I picked up the gear and headed in to continue with the after dinner conversation and adult beverages.

When I got around to processing the captured files a few days later, I was met with an unexpected challenge. For the composition I preferred, I had not captured an exposure where the brightness of exterior lights of the workshop were controlled. The lights and workshop wall were blown out beyond recovery in all the frames I had made. Undaunted, I grabbed one from another composition, fiddled for quite a while to manually adjusted the size and perspective to suit my preferred composition and meticulously aligned it as a layer with the others in Photoshop. Then I blended the portions of several frames together, adjusted exposure, highlights, shadows using a variety of steps in several work sessions.

All of this done, in the end I wish I had spent a little more time in preparation for the outing, paid more attention to the images as I was capturing them and confirmed rather than assumed that I had captured everything I needed. I normally don't spend as much time processing my images as I did for this one but  still, I'm very pleased with the result even though there is room for improvement.

 

DJE

Photo of the Week 2023-01-09

 

I haven't been out shooting much in these grey, dull first days of 2023 ... the absence of winter wonderland scenes and scapes finds me devoid of inspiration. While I reboot and reset my expectations, here is an image from a few years ago as a winter storm approached over the ice forming on Hay Bay.

 

' winter cometh '

What does mother nature have in store for us? There is still time for her winter witchery ... I hope.

 

DJE

Photo of the Week 2022-05-02

 

After a beautiful sunny end to April at the cottage, May started with a passing storm ...

' An approaching May storm '

With the storm threatening, I downed my coffee and donned the rain gear to take Murphy out for his morning walk before the downpour began. Certain that I would get drenched, the camera(s) stayed safely stowed in the cottage ... until we got back that is.

At one spot along the road, a lot has been cleared in preparation for a build. The clearing through the trees provides a great view of what is going on out over the bay to the west. This is where I began coaxing Murph to get on with things so I could get back and capture the heavy skies and storm approaching from the west across northern Lake Huron. He didn't seem to understand, but he did eventually respond to my urging and I made it in time to capture some images before the deluge began.

 

 

DJE 

Photo of the Week 2020-07-20

Saturday night after dinner, the winds got up, the trees started to buffet around, the skies started to darken, there was thunder and then this passed overhead ...

evening stormfront

The rain started before I could get back inside and it came down, boy did it come down. Then in the morning, the skies were grey and heavy and it started to thunder and rain heavy again.

This image is a panorama stitched together in LR Classic from 6 vertical orientation frames, providing a wider view of the scene than I could capture in a single frame at 18mm on the M5 crop sensor.

DJE

Photo of the Week 2018-10-01

Weather always makes for interesting photography, images and experiences ...


As a recent system pushed through the province, it was severe enough to batter some areas with thunderstorms and a number of reported tornadoes. In Tobermory though, high winds were the main feature.

My objective, as gusts up to 90kph whipped up spray off the whitecaps on Hay Bay, was to make images capturing the feel of the storm. With late day sun providing sidelight from the right, the spray was nicely highlighted and I used a 100-400 zoom to narrow in on a series of small islands and the far shore facing the brunt of the wind off Huron.

windswept waters

2018-09-21

DJE

Photo of the Week 2018-09-10

Always on the lookout for a storm coming in off Lake Huron, I find it somewhat of a challenge given that our cottage is set back into the trees and faces south, south-east. Monitoring the weather forecast and keeping a eye to the west as much as possible and of course being up on the Bruce Peninsula had yet to prove successful.

I'd seen many images of storm fronts coming in across Huron from locations further south on the Bruce, Oliphant, Southampton, Port Elgin and further down to Goderich. I wanted something from further north where I spend a lot of time ... and then Lynn came back from picking up some things in the village saying "you should see the black sky heading this way!"

... I ran for the camera.

Just approaching the tip of the peninsula and about to pass right over us was a dramatic shelf cloud at the storm front. I made a large series of images capturing the various stages of the storm from slightly different points of view around or shoreline. Above is a collage of select images in sequence that shows the passing storm.

DJE

Photo of the Week 2018-04-16

Winter fights to hang on, spring fights to break through ... a snow and ice storm threatening historic proportion moves in to blanket the ground and throws a late chill into the forest.

snowy spring forest

Lousy weather? No worries, dress appropriately and go outside to get some exercise and fresh air, there’s always the option of a hot drink when you get home ... in my case a tasty matcha latte.

There's a very different feel to the outdoors when the weather turns bad. Gone are the usual sights and sounds. You could be surrounded by the hiss of the wind high up in barren trees and blustery waves that whoosh along side, the tick, tick, ta-tick of ice pellets hitting frozen trunks and your weather-proof jacket shell, and the unique crunch of 'sugar snow' under your feet as you work to find traction in the slippery granules.

Spring snowstorms attempt to blanket the life that has begun to emerge after the long winter. Signs of the new season can appear completely obscured in the 'snowy spring forest'.

DJE

Photo of the Week 2016-12-19

A solo jaunt up north this weekend settled my separation anxiety and provided some much needed time to decompress. Yes, I need to get up north regularly lest I become restless and fixated on getting to my 'happy place'. It seems the more I'm there, the more I want (and maybe need) to be there.

With "the whole" weekend to myself, I had plans to take advantage of the many photo options available and to get a handful of items completed to be sure things were ready for our annual winter getaway between Christmas and the New Year. Oh where did the time go .....

On the photo front I decided to take a drive down some side roads I hadn't travelled in a while to see how winter's early snow had transformed the scenery ... but first I stopped at the Park Visitor Centre. I've had moderate success with multi-image stitched panoramas so I decided to climb the observation tower and capture the angry skies out over the islands and Huron.

Tobermory Skies 2017-12-17

Oddly enough, it was very calm while I was up there. Perhaps the calm before another squall came through because I could even hear bird life in the treetops. At one point I heard an eagle's cry but failed to put my eye or lens on it.

I stood at the top of this tower in  howling winds at -25* with the windchill for a photo on New Years morning a few years back ... maybe a panorama this New Years for "First Light". Hmmmmm .....

... and then it was off for a drive.

Photo of the Week 2015-11-02

Sunday morning after Halloween, I decided to get out for a hike along some local trails at the Ignatius Centre, north of Guelph. When I started out, there was a blustery wind pushing the unsettled skies overhead. Now and then a break in the cloud would come and the sun would stream through. Quickly it's warmth would rush over the ground before heading off in the distance. Over and over the sky darkened and I thought I would certainly get caught in a downpour, particularly when I was in the fields far away from where I parked. Each time the wind hurried the heavy dark cloud away.

As I rounded a corner at the edge of a field, along the treeline, the sun burst through to set off the golden glow of several small tamarack at the bottom of a slope. I quickly grabbed a couple of images and then the sunlight was gone.

golden tamarack

For this image I used some different software that I'd been experimenting with (ON1 Photo10 and a plug-in called Smart Photo Editor) to process the RAW file giving the dramatic result above. Fitting around Halloween I think ...

DJE

Photo of the Week 2014-09-22

On a rainy Sunday after shopping for groceries in Tobermory, Lynn wanted to take a trip to the lighthouse before returning to the cottage. With the wind out of the NE, waves were crashing up and onto the rock that normally provides a dry place to stand and admire the scenery. We stayed for a while and I made some images before getting back in the car. While driving to the cottage, Lynn suggested visiting another location to check out the waves after lunch ... and I'm glad she did.

The location I chose was Little Cove and as we approached the water, descending along the wide path we could hear the rhythm of the waves crashing on the shore slowly becoming louder until we left the protection of the trees and onto the cobble beach. Just as I had hoped for, the waves were coming in on a slight angle, crashing along the east shoreline.

I shot the scene both wide to get the overall feel and tight to isolate details of the breaking, crashing waves and there are a number that I am happy with. The image below, my choice for this week is not one that shows the spray thrust high above the steep rocky shore, but one that gives an overall sense of what it was like along the shoreline.

late summer storm

The waves coming in off Georgian Bay were intensified as they were blown into the narrowing bay, reshaping, restricting, confining them. Once every several minutes, a few larger waves would push through the turmoil and make it to shore, either running well up the cobble beach or crashing into steep rock faces sending water high into the air.  

Summer is just ending ... could the gales of November come early ?

DJE

Photo of the Week 2014-09-08

Time to dive into the library an pull out something from a year ago ...
 
It seems there was some unsettled weather blowing in off Lake Huron early last September too. This little inuksuk kept a vigilant watch.

Watching Whitecaps on Lake Huron

DJE

Leamington & Point Pelee Scenes

Following are several images I want to share from my recent visit to Leamington and Point Pelee National Park. The weather was unsettled throughout the day and the sky had clouded over completely then broken up more than once. I had envisioned a sunset captured from the tip of Point Pelee but the weather needed to cooperate.

As I left Windsor heading for Leamington the sky had cleared (again) and thanks to the flat topography (boy is it flat in SW Ontario, I had forgotten just how flat) I could see isolated storm clouds all around moving through the area. When I arrived in Leamington and parked at the ferry dock, a light rain was being carried by gusty wind. As timing would have it, the rain increased just as I got out to get some camera gear out of the vehicle hatch and sent me back to inside until it let up. Fortunately it did not last long and I was able to get out and get a shot of this ...

Storm off Leamington


heading for the dock


Moving on, I arrived at the park gates under clearing skies and the appearance of the sun. My first stop was at the marsh boardwalk to check out the view from the tower. Thunderstorms moving off to the east provided a dramatic background with the sun on the still brown marsh grass.

marsh boardwalk


passing storm


I was eager to press on to get to "the Tip", that was the main objective for this outing and I wanted to be sure I had enough time for the the hike and to make some images. I found the tip without the characteristic curving sand spit reaching far out into the lake. The tip is always changing year after year, with the ebb and flow of the currents on Lake Erie. On this day the tip was a tapering point diving below waves that swallowed the land in their turbulence.

this land's end


the tip


solitude (last man standing)


... a return visit is a must.

DJE