For Photo Friday's current theme of disorder, I sat down and took a close inspection of one of my favourite Christmas gifts this year – this small, but heavy, scrap-metal bird sculpture. I absolutely love the seemingly chaotic and carefree manner in which it was constructed, knowing full well that quite the opposite was the case. There's bumps, drops and general disorder everywhere I look on this fellow, yet it exists as a cohesive and well-designed piece of art.Both portraits used the 100mm macro lens. The portrait on the left was taken with the bird atop a faux-leather portfolio case, with our dimly-lit foyer in the background (but a touch of light on our red IKEA cabinet). For the portrait on the right, the bird was perched atop a stack of jewel cases and positioned to peer downward at the camera, and a window, receiving full afternoon sunlight, blanched the background out. Higher quality versions of the respective portraits can be had here, and here.
Just goofing around, experimenting with this 2005 shot of Kerry's niece taken at Batoche National Historic Site north of Saskatoon. The interpretive centre there had a tickle trunk of sorts full of vintage clothes, and Anna – camera-shy on that particular day – was proud to show off.
The edge effect I pilfered from Renee Robinson's (aka the immensely talented Playingwithbrushes) Flickr page. Her photostream is stuffed to the dusty rafters with elegant, delicate portraits and other imagery – the perfect treatment for Photo Friday's current theme of old-fashioned. A closer look at the original photo can be had here.
More creative fallout from my visit east. My sister's house is smack in the middle of the Nova Scotia interior, nestled in mixed woods on the shores of a long, slender lake. Beavers. Loons. Blackflies. Hooting owls at night. It's the great outdoors.And so, for Photo Friday to offer up their current theme of the great outdoors, I have to admit this one pretty much fell right into my lap – much like this poor red-eyed vireo nearly did, dazed as it was sitting on the deck following a window-strike. Torn between leaving the little guy be and using the opportunity to again play with my sister's macro lens ... I chose the latter.
Not known for flashy displays of colour, members of the drab green vireo family can be hard to distinguish from one another. This one is likely the most ubiquitous, easy to spot with its blood-red eye (if you can get close enough to see it) and nonstop, day-long singing. Getting as close as I did for my shots, often lying on my belly while the bird regained full consciousness, I caught a good glimpse of the bird's textural and tonal subtleties. Because the deck was so bright, I was easily able to dodge out the wooden tones to create the stark, white background. I really like these shots – I combined the two here for my current desktop display at work. Click here, and here, respectively, for a better look at the feather detail.
Biding my time, blogwise, on the last days leading up to my first visit with new nephew Avery in Nova Scotia (with a whistle stop in Toronto to witness the majesty of Leonard Cohen). I have a couple of items to post in the near future before taking a blog break to work on the next GDC Manitoba e-newsletter. One, a submission for the second issue of local art zine Paw In My Face (bearing a theme of hate), and two, an illustration I sketched for fun while trying out a new set of watercolour-inspired Photoshop brushes from the relaunched Design Bureau of Amerika. These will be posted shortly, no doubt alongside photos from our quick-but-memorable jaunt east. In the meantime however, Photo Friday's current theme of minimalism brings to mind this shot (above) of a bonsai trunk, taken at the Assiniboine Park Conservatory a couple of years ago. One post-processing note: I dodged the original darkened background to a pure black in Photoshop, then added extra black to make the image a square (click here for a more detailed look).
From May to September, leg-banding of songbirds is conducted every Friday morning where I work (weather permitting). Using mist nets (much like ultra-fine badminton nets), the birds are snared in clearings between willow bluffs, carefully placed into individually-sized cloth bags – then banded, identified, aged, measured and weighed before being released. May is the best month for variety as many birds pass through while heading further north, so I staked out a spot at the table this past Friday with my camera. Small warblers like these are prized catches, though in the hour I stuck around I also photographed a bank swallow and three species of sparrow.
In the realm of professional bird photography, this is deemed 'cheating'. I make no bones about it though: I am no professional, and these warblers were all hand-held while I shot. Even still, there is much difficulty in "keeping my eye on the birdie" through the lens. The birds can sense impending freedom at this point of the procedure, flighty and anxious to flee the scene (many outtakes reflected this). Selective cropping eliminated the human presence, then a quick run through Photoshop (primarily dodging and blurring of backgrounds) helped to create further focus.
Respectfully then, I submit this for Photo Friday's current theme of difficult shot. Pictured are (from top to bottom) a magnolia warbler, blackpoll warbler and Wilson's warbler (click on the species names for closer looks at their feather detail).
Photo Friday's current and far-reaching theme of art has me digging, not too far back, into the vault. Rather than displaying an sublimely abstract or bokeh-heavy piece of photography, the theme reminds me more of this literal take on the subject – a tidy vignette of a moment I caught last spring while Kerry and I were at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Resting my tired feet on a bench in a hall of gigantic Jackson Pollock works, I watched this kid – huge Pollock fan, it appeared – incessantly urge his parent to take this rigid pose beside this piece. Flash off, I snuck this snapshot off without the camera-toting guardian noticing.
Photo Friday's current theme of two was the inspiration behind a Saturday afternoon fruit shoot on our kitchen stovetop. I attempted recreating a seamless single super-pear from red and Bartlett pears – harder than it looks, judging from my skills with the knife – and I suppose I could have smoothed some edges off in Photoshop, but in the end I like the stacked effect here. I also tried a similar stunt with a lemon and lime (with less favourable results), and an apple and orange that didn't even make it in front of the lens. Perhaps another time.
Fruit procured from De Luca's on Portage. That place smelled so good today.
Click here for a closer look (lemon/lime jobbie coming soon).
Photo Friday's current theme of fantasy brings me to this adjusted image taken not too long ago at the beach in Matlock, Manitoba. This is Kerry's nephew, monkeying around in the lake for me and my zoom lens (positioned on a pier about fifteen feet away). I would instruct him to submerge, then to explode through the surface of the water as high as he could. And of course, an experiment like this depends highly on the moment – nabbing the position and expression just so, otherwise losing it – which in itself relies a great deal on hope. The moment lasts milliseconds. Fortunately for me I nabbed this still (click here to see the original, untouched version), and then modified it in black-and-white largely using Photoshop sessions with the dodge and burn tools. Be sure to click here to view a larger version.
While I take some time off to craft a new HOWieZine submission (theme: robots ... yes!), here's a grab from the vault to represent me for Photo Friday's current theme of vacation. If there's one thing I have, it's pictures that represent this theme. I adore vacations. And this is a snapshot, plain and simple, from a grand vacation Kerry and I had in Ireland in 2003. It was taken on bulk ISO 200 film with a point-and-shoot Pentax at Inch Strand in County Kerry, during a tour of the Dingle Peninsula. We had what could quite possibly be Ireland's first and last cloudless day, start to finish. It was in my favourite month of September, and I was dripping sick with a head cold, nicely sedated by European meds (soon she would be, too). An absolutely fine vacation day.
A shot of Kerry on the swings is almost an annual ritual for me. This vision, on the swing set at Half Moon Beach in Matlock, Manitoba, was taken in the summer of 2003 using my hand-me-down Minolta and slide film – and is my submission for Photo Friday's current theme of active (a similar 2006 swinging photo was used for Photofortnight's theme of transport, seen here). The original photo contained a strip of Lake Winnipeg horizon just below the bottom of the crop shown here, but was removed to heighten the illusion of ... well, height. A closer look at the detail can be had right over here.
Photo Friday's current and all-encompassing theme of the country made me head into the vault for a suitable image to represent, and also give me an opportunity to "paint with pixels" (as the Photoshop nerds say) – a technique I hadn't given much of a go ever before. And even this shot dabbles on the surface of what more patient people can do with this form of photomanipulation (click here to see another recent attempt I did, posted on Flickr), essentially a base image, along with a duplicated layers set to screen and multiply modes that were then modified to create this end effect.
The image itself is of a cultivated, early-autumn field at sunset outside the hamlet of Stevington, England where a whole branch of my family tree resides, taken in 2003 with my old point-and-shoot camera. Below is what the manipulated image started as; decent, somewhat washed-out, but still the elements that I exaggerated with light and shadow were all there to begin with ... just, you know, exaggerated. Click here for a closer look at the final black-and-white image.
This image I've searched out for Photo Friday's current theme of heat is from an interesting time and place. Manitoba is not known for unrelenting heat, even though it's a region of extremes – and at times in the summer it can be quite sweltering. But this picture is from a different time of year, my favourite time of any year – a rare, hot, dry day in September, this one in 2004 to be exact. I'm not certain what kind of flower this is to be blooming so late, but this is the Spirit Sands in Manitoba's Spruce Woods Provincial Park, a unique relic left over from the Ice Age (listen to me, I sound like the brochure here). It may not have even been that hot that day, I can't remember, but I still like the illusion it provides. This also happened to be the day my niece was born, which just made for a great day all around.
Click here for a better look, if'n yer interested.
Storytime, as inspired by Photo Friday's current theme of alone: this is a composite photo, stitched and seamed together in Photoshop from two side-by-side snapshots. The place is Mt. Edith Cavell, in Jasper National Park, taken in May 2004. Kerry went on a week-long work-related trip to Québec, so I ventured out on my own, taking my bike with me on the train to Alberta and beating the Rocky Mountain tourist rush by a couple of weeks. I would spend my days there with no real schedule, riding the trails and highways and seeing what I could see.
On this day, the weather was good and I rode out of town early in the morning. At the park gate, a warden told me the steep, switchbacking road to Edith Cavell was still closed for the season. At road's end in the higher altitudes, everything was still winter and snowbound. Out of sight though, I would lift the bike over the barrier and continue on.
I'm a prairie boy, I won't lie: the road defeated me in minutes. The nagging, constant climb forced me off the bike, but knowing it would (or rather, should) level off within a few kilometres, I began to walk. It was sunny and warm. I had nowhere to be. And I had all day, with no one around to prove my lack of prowess when it came to hills. Following a couple of hours like this, the road did reason with me and I began to ride again. Until I reached the snow line, and then I was back on foot (OK, by this point you can call me a fairweather rider).
The narrow, winding road ran about 20 kilometres to its destination at the foot of one of the country's most popular and picturesque sights (Google it, you'll find many a postcard). On this day though, I was the only person for miles. And when the road became too slippery to even bother with the bike, I left it and carried on, shouting occasionally for bears and what-not else. Nobody knew I was there, and it was deathly quiet.
After what seemed an eternity, the mountain's famous face finally came into view. I may have been only a couple of kilometres from the base, but it was near that point that I sensed the weather turning. Clouds began to boil over the peak, and it smelled of snow. I wanted so badly to make it to the end, but my conscience – and lack of decent clothes – told me otherwise. I took this photo, and headed back to where I dumped the bike. From there, I received my reward: 15 kilometres, downhill. What ended up taking me three and a half hours to reach from the road's barricaded entrance (fine, including a lunch break) lasted a considerably more enjoyable 35 minutes in return.
Click here for a better look at the photo.
