Category Archives: Photography

4th of July Fireworks

July 8, 2012 Tom Dills 10 Comments

I finally got a chance to spend some time at the computer today and decided to work with some of my fireworks photos from July 4th. I knew when I took the photos that I would be making some composites in Photoshop. These were all taken handheld with the 5D Mark III and the 40MM 2.8 pancake lens, f4 at ISO 3200. My shutter speeds ranged from 1/5 to 1/50 of a second.

All the photos had some initial processing in Lightroom, including a little sharpening and noise reduction, then were composited in Photoshop. Once I brought the composited file back into Lightroom I added a little more punch in contrast, vibrance and saturation.

There’s no question that these are more than a bit over-the-top from the standpoint of reality, but that’s what artistic license is all about. This is what I saw and this is what I felt, so here it is!

This was the first time I had used Photoshop on any 5D Mark III files, and I must say that I seriously challenged the capabilities of my 5 year old iMac. Each file is around 1 GB, and I had some serious beachball action (it’s a Mac thing) going from time to time. If I do much more of that I’m going to need to look at upgrading the computer hardware a little sooner than I planned.

Photography

The Canon 40 2.8 as a Macro Lens?

July 7, 2012 Tom Dills 1 Comment

When I saw Canon’s announcement of the new 40MM 2.8 “Pancake” lens with a price of only $200 I decided it was a no-brainer and I ordered one. Then I read some reviews that indicated that it is a pretty fabulous lens, especially for the money, and I started looking forward to getting it. It came late this past Tuesday (the UPS man was working overtime!) so I had a little time on the 4^th to work with it.

I already had planned to take it out for a little fireworks action later in the day and evening, but I wanted to spend some time under controlled conditions to test sharpness, depth of field, bokeh, etc., all the usual stuff. So I set up the tripod in my office and laid out some objects to shoot. At some point during my session I was playing around to see how close I could get to an object. Minimum focus distance is rated at just under a foot, and with a 40MM focal length the field of view was still pretty wide. That’s not really suited to closeup work if you are trying to restrict your background. I don’t remember now what prompted it, but at some point I decided to throw on my 25MM extension tube. Wow! I was then able to focus down to about 3.5 inches.

Now I realize that my friends who are serious macro photographers will probably scoff at the idea of using this combo for macro work, and I realize that people have been using 50MM and other focal length lenses for macro for years, but I don’t have a 50MM lens. For the kind of occasional macro work I do, and considering that my usual macro setup includes my 70-200, 2X Extender, Extension Tubes and a 500D close-up lens, this lightweight little setup is pretty darned cool!

What I’ve found is that depth of field is predictably shallow wide open, but gets progressively better as I stop down. At f11-f16 it’s pretty darned nice, and even beyond it is pretty useable. All without the weight, light loss and bulk of the Mac Daddy setup I’ve used.

Conclusion? I need to do some more real-world work with this combination, but since it’s such a small and light lens I’ll probably carry it with me all the time anyway, the extension tube weighs practically nothing, and it seems to work pretty well, I’m looking forward to working with it some more and see what I can get. Who knows, maybe I’ll eventually spring for a “real” macro lens, but for now this seems to be a pretty good way to go!

Photography, Travel

Long Overdue

July 1, 2012 Tom Dills 6 Comments

Kathy & I had been trying to find a weekend to head to Waynesville, NC – our favorite little town in the NC mountains – since March. With the exception of our Alaska and California adventure, things just haven’t been very conducive to getting away for the last several months. We finally had our chance this past weekend and took advantage.

As luck would have it we didn’t get a lot of relief from the high temperatures, as Waynesville – while about 10 degrees cooler than Charlotte – was still unseasonably hot, to the point where most of the HVAC systems were doing their best to keep up. Most of them were up to the task, a few were not.

We wisely headed out early and got our in-town sightseeing done early. In the heat of the afternoon we headed up to the Blue Ridge Parkway for a few hours, and while it was 97 in town, it was an unusually warm but relatively cool 84 at Waterrock Knob, an overlook and visitor center at 5,820 feet. After a stop for ice cream it was back to town for a nice dinner and some rest in our thankfully-air-conditioned room.

Sunday was spent getting back to reality, and after a stop in Statesville here we are. A couple of work days with a holiday sandwiched in, and before we know it we’ll have another weekend!

No serious photography this trip, but I had a camera with me at just about all times!

Photography, Travel

July 2012 Wallpaper

July 1, 2012 Tom Dills

This photo is all about “HOT” to me. And wow, is it hot! We made plans to escape to the mountains for the weekend, and while it is maybe 10 degrees cooler, it’s still HOT!

Hopefully July will moderate a bit, but for now, we have heat aplenty. Enjoy this wallpaper for the month, and we’ll see what August brings.

Photography, Travel

Wine Country!

June 24, 2012 Tom Dills 7 Comments

This vacation was our first visit to California, so naturally our visit to California’s Wine Country was our first visit there as well. It was something we had been planning for a long, long time and as we sailed back to San Francisco from Alaska we were very anxious to get the next step of our vacation started!

Once we disembarked our cruise ship in San Francisco on Wednesday morning our first order of business was to get a taxi to the airport to pick up our rental car. This was sort of bass-ackwards as the airport was the opposite direction from where we wanted to go, but that turned out to be the cheapest place to rent a car. Plus we wanted to be able to drop the car off at the airport on our return as it was much more convenient. After an exciting ride with a Greek cab driver (You like my driving, no?”) we made it safely to the airport and navigated the rail system to the rental car desk. Soon we had our car and were back on the road.

We had Wednesday afternoon, all day Thursday, Friday and Saturday for our adventure, so we wanted to make the most of it. Our first order of business after crossing the Golden Gate Bridge was to locate Highway 1 and head toward the coast. Our intention was to stop at Muir Woods National Monument, but for some reason the place was packed – on a Wednesday! The main parking lot was full, the over flow parking was full, and the overflow for the overflow parking was full and people were parking on the road. We decided to drive on, and people were parked along the road for nearly a mile from the entrance. We hadn’t done any research ahead of time, so maybe the place is always that crowded. I’d sure hate to go there on a weekend if it is even busier. Amazing! We’ll have to do that another time.

After a brief stop at the Muir Beach overlook to get a view of the Pacific Ocean from the land side, we headed on North along Highway 1. What a view! Nothing like we get along the East Coast, that’s for sure. We stopped at a little restaurant in the town of Stinson Beach for lunch, then headed inland toward Santa Rosa, where our hotel was located.

We knew that with nearly 4 days, we would have plenty of time but we also knew that we had a lot to see. We also decided that we didn’t want to have a “death march” through wine country, although how hard is drinking wine, right? Seriously though, this was less about seeing how many wineries we could visit or how much wine we could drink and more about seeing the countryside, exploring side roads and having plenty of time to enjoy our time there.

We had started planning our visit several months in advance, and with the invaluable advice and assistance of our good friend Jon Dressler of Dressler’s Restaurants in Charlotte, we had arranged private tours of 4 wineries. Two of our tours were on Thursday and two were on Friday, with one tour each morning and one tour each afternoon. We purposely left Saturday completely open in order to see what else we wanted to do. As it turned out we used Saturday to visit Napa, as none of the wineries we visited were located there. We had an 11:00 flight on Sunday, so that day would be spent solely on travel.

We used the four scheduled tours as the framework for our visit, and I think it worked out very well. We got an early start each day in order to have as much “piddle time” as possible with plenty of time to get to our first destination. We left time between tours for lunch, with plenty of time to drive to our afternoon destination. Our standard practice after the second tour of the day was to head back to our hotel, make a dinner reservation on Open Table, then take a nap. Like I said, no Death Marches for us!

Three things stand out to me from our visit:

(1) Distinctive geography – we always hear about the differences in climate, soil and terrain and how those differences affect the grapes and ultimately the taste of the wine. It’s one thing to hear, but to actually the area is to appreciate the descriptions. When someone describes a wine as coming from grapes “planted on a steep mountainside at 2500 feet” or coming from “the sandy and rocky soil of the Carneros Valley, it really drives home the distinctions that each area has to offer.

(2) Each winery has its own very distinctive character, from the style of the building, the layout of the winemaking area to the design of the bottles and labels. What I love about this is that it really allows us to enjoy the wine as a unique statement of everything that goes into the product. Each bottle is a representative of the winery, since every decision about every ingredient and every step of the process has some kind of an impact on the final result. Just like photography, everyone starts with the same basic set of tools but ends up with their unique expression of those tools.

(3) Thirdly and perhaps most importantly, is the amount of passion that people have for their business, from the winemakers to the tasting room people to the staff in the restaurants we visited. The people we encountered were visibly passionate about their work, and that passion is contagious. This made visiting the wineries, dining at the restaurants, and generally visiting the area a very pleasurable experience.

I’m going to have more to say about our experience in future posts, but the time since we’ve returned has slipped by in a hurry. I wanted to get this post wrapped up so I can “put a bow” on the overview and get back to some specific commentary about other parts of our vacation. Hopefully this collection of photos will provide a bit of a sampler of the 4 days we spent in wine country.

Photography, Travel

Victoria, BC

June 17, 2012 Tom Dills 9 Comments

For a lot of cruisers, Victoria is little more than a fuel stop and a way for the cruise line to comply with the Jones Act (also known as the Merchant Marine Act of 1920) that, among other things specifies that a foreign-flagged vessel operating out of a US port must call at a non-US port before disembarking passengers back in the US port. It makes things a bit more complicated and interesting for cruises originating from a US port and going to places like Alaska and Hawaii.

Situated on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, which interestingly the city of Vancouver is not on, Victoria is the capital of British Columbia. The locals say that on a clear day you can see across the channel to the Seattle area, the Olympic Mountains, the Cascades and Mount Rainier. I’ll take their word for it! We could barely see the water, let alone the US, it was so rainy and cloudy. No problem, though. We were going to see a castle!

Our tour started, ominously enough, with a visit to the highest point in Victoria, Mt. Tolmie. But the peak was socked in with clouds and rain, so other than a few photos of blurry yellow flowers and some wet rocks, there wasn’t much to see or photograph. We spend some time driving through town and looking at the sights of Victoria through raindrops on our bus windows, so not many photo ops there!

Craigdarroch Castle is an interesting attraction, and its history is full of intrigue, family feuds and probably some steamy romance. Check the website for details! Located in a residential neighborhood, buses are not allowed to come to the castle, so we were dropped off a few blocks away and walked there through a very nice neighborhood. We didn’t have time for a leisurely walk because we were late for our scheduled arrival, plus it was raining (still) and we wanted to get to the shelter of the castle. That sounds so romantic!

The castle was fairly dark and full of people, so my photography there was rather limited and shot at a pretty high ISO (thank you 5D Mark III!). I don’t think there’s much here that I’ll frame and put on the wall, but we’ll certainly have a few frames to remember our visit. The furniture was beautiful and the woodwork was extraordinary, most of it original but some of it added recently during renovation.

Our visit to downtown Victoria was complicated by the fact that it was Victoria Day – British Columbia’s version of Memorial Day – and downtown was rather congested due to closed streets for a parade. And it was raining pretty steadily, so except for a few grab shots from the sidewalk outside our bus, I don’t have much to show. It’s definitely a place I’d like to return to and spend some time, hopefully in better weather.

I’ve reached the end of the cruise portion of our vacation, so I’ll start shortly posting about our visit to wine country. I think I have more to write about our visit than I have photos, and I haven’t decided exactly how I want to present it, but I’ll be working on that soon. It’s been fun reliving our vacation, and I hope those following along have enjoyed the recollection of it as much as I have!

Photography

Ketchikan

June 13, 2012 Tom Dills 4 Comments

On our first visit to Ketchikan several years ago we did a boat tour around the area to look at “Lighthouses, Totems & Eagles” then we took in the Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show. Kathy wanted to see the lumberjacks, and I wanted to see Annie Oakley.

For our day in Ketchikan this time we decided to try a boat tour to Misty Fjords National Monument. Dubbed “Yosemite of the North” for its similar geology, many of the glacial valleys are filled with sea water and are called “canals”, but they are not man-made in any way; the walls of these valleys are near-vertical and often rise 2,000 to 3,000 feet above sea level, and in some places drop 1,000 feet below it.

We sailed about the ‘St. Nona,’ one of several vessels operated by Allen Marine Tours, a family-owned tour company and one of the longest running operators in Alaska.

One of the landmarks of Misty Fjords is New Eddystone Rock, which is actually a pillar of basalt that came from fractures in the floor of Behm Canal in the last 5 million years. The broken, haphazard texture of these basalts indicates that New Eddystone Rock was part of a volcanic vent where magma rose repeatedly to the surface of the earth.

After returning from our adventure we took some time to explore the shops on Creek Street, which at one time housed the “red light district” of Ketchikan but that now takes your money in different and possibly more legal ways. We bought a few genuine Alaskan souvenirs then set out in search of ice cream. Amazingly we came up empty-handed. Not to say that there is no ice cream shop in Ketchikan, just that we didn’t find one. Hmmm, could be a business opportunity!

The next time we go to Ketchikan I think I’ll plan to spend some more time exploring the area right around the town. There were a number of commercial areas that were too far for us to walk in the short time we had, some that might be good places for lunch and some more genuine Alaskan handicrafts and art. That’s one of the problems with being on someone else’s schedule – so much to see, so little time!

Photography, Travel

More About That Boat

June 12, 2012 Tom Dills 5 Comments

Questionable Boat in the Ketchikan, Alaska Harbor

Several people commented about the boat I used to illustrate my last post, and as it turns out I had taken some other photos of it but hadn’t gone back and looked at the rest of that day’s photos until yesterday. I thought it would be amusing to post a few more. I can’t imagine that the person who owns this boat pays dock fees for it, so I can only guess that he works for the marina or for one of the tour boats that operates from there. Hopefully he doesn’t have far to travel.

I don’t know much about boats but I don’t think this one would pass a Coast Guard inspection.

I’m slowly catching up on my processing after a momentary slowdown. Stay tuned for some better subject matter very soon!

Photography, Travel

Attitude Adjustment

June 9, 2012 Tom Dills 7 Comments

Scrap pile behind the Great Alaskan Lumberjack Show in Ketchikan, Alaska

At work the other morning, someone asked me how I was doing. She was somewhat taken aback when I replied that I was doing “fantastic.” She looked at me like I had just spoken to her in Swahili. I then said that having just gotten back from a 2-week vacation that I was loving life, even though the benefit of the time off was quickly fading. Cue the “must be nice,” “wish I had your money,” I could never take 2 weeks,” etc., etc., etc. commentary. Then she said something about “coming back to this place” to which I replied that I would gladly come back to work in order to be able to do another vacation like I just did, that I thought it was a fair trade. More Swahili.

We all know and work with people who are, let’s say, “happiness challenged.” Not that they are depressed or anything – although it’s possible that some of them are – but mostly they just spend a lot of time with negative attitudes – toward work, their spouse, their kids, their cars, etc. And they’re not too shy to talk about it. But that attitude carries over to how they live their lives, to the point where, for many people, they don’t seem to have the ability to understand the concept of doing things that make them happy. Sometimes I meet up with friends for lunch or dinner, and way too often all they do is complain about things.

We all have stuff that makes us angry or drives us crazy. But I have come to the conclusion – and this was a long time coming – is that it is not all of these outside things that bother me and make me crazy. It is my reaction to those things that makes them intolerable. So I’ve been working really hard at managing my own attitude, and I’ve found that it really helps. Don’t like the way people are driving? Back off and think about something else. Don’t like your cube neighbor’s Polka ringtone on his cell phone? Laugh it off. Neighbor’s dog barking endlessly while they are away? I haven’t solved that one yet, so I just turn up the music. Blue jeans in the cruise ship dining room? Whatever! I can’t change any of it, so fix the things I can fix, and for those things I can’t fix, I accept them and move on. Works for me.

The great thing about taking a vacation is that it does tend to put things in perspective. There’s a lot more to life than work, and there is way more to life than finding things to complain about. So look for the positives! While coming home and going back to work can be difficult, I would gladly trade a few months’ work in order to take another nice vacation. It’s a worthwhile trade.

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One of the best sayings I saw or heard on our trip to Alaska: “There is no such thing as inclement weather, only inappropriate clothing.” That pretty much says it!

Photography, Travel

Glacier Bay

June 6, 2012 Tom Dills 10 Comments

Our day in Glacier Bay was my single best day, photographically, in a long, long time. I don’t know if that is a result of the place being so photogenic, or the fact that I was prepared for my time there, with my only goal for the day to make photographs. It’s probably a combination of the two, since Glacier Bay is certainly an amazing place and I found it quite inspirational on my first visit several years ago. I have to imagine that what I experienced was a confluence of my own openness to the place and the renewed inspiration I felt from being there.

The Tourist Approach would be to slap a wide angle lens on the camera and shoot the huge expanse of icebergs, blue water and glaciers. But what I was feeling was more intimate, although even with a 400mm lens, the actual slice of landscape I captured was still quite large. The scale of the place never ceases to amaze me.

One of the most striking things about being in Glacier Bay aboard a cruise ship is how quiet everything becomes. They mercifully turn off the sound on the outdoor “Movies Under The Stars” entertainment system (it’s just a big television), the ship slows to maneuvering speed, and except for a few comments from the onboard naturalist, the place is silent. And I crave silent. Silent makes me happy.

Only one ship at a time is allowed in each area of the park, which is huge (3.3 million acres!) with several “inlets,” so the captain is able to essentially stop the in front of the glaciers, and when the ship moves from one place to another it does so slowly, barely creating a wake. The slower movement of the ship makes using a tripod very easy, both for composition and for holding the camera still. People ask me why I use a tripod on a moving ship, but it really does make a difference. Other than a couple of videographers, mine was the only tripod I saw on board the entire cruise.

I scouted ahead of time and found a great spot on the aft of the ship that had good, unobstructed views, access to both sides of the ship and had enough room to get out of the way. You would think that, with 2000 people on a ship in a place like Glacier Bay it would be crowded, but except for the time in front of the major glaciers and the times when they were giving away free hot chocolate on deck (there are always crowds around Free Food) I had the place pretty much to myself. Most of the people hung out in the center of the ship, closer to the pools, the restrooms and the bars. Silly me, the bars!

The onboard naturalist told us that one of her most frequently asked questions was, “what’s the best side of the ship to be on to see wildlife?” To which she replies, “the OUTSIDE!” She also stated that wildlife watching involved a lot of wildlife “waiting.” But amazingly, most people didn’t like the idea of waiting. I saw dozens of seals, sea lions, dolphins, porpoises and whales, and often I was the only person around to see them. Once in a while someone would walk by, see all my gear and ask me if I had seen any whales. When I replied that I had, they looked at me like they thought I was lying. Most of them were too far away to take photos of them, but they were still fun to watch through my binoculars.

Even on a ship large enough to hold 2000 passengers – small by modern cruise ship standards – I was struck by the enormous scale of the landscape and how small I felt within it, the ability for it to remain relatively undisturbed and how quiet it was.

My personal favorite photos from the day are the abstracts. They really speak to the quiet and calm I felt that day. I seem to have a thing for moving water, and some of the patterns are simply spectactular. I’m thrilled that the photos reflect them so well. I also enjoyed finding patterns in the glaciers and on the mountainsides along our route. Again, the relatively slow speed made for some pretty easy composition, although I did find that I had to “lead” the scene just a bit in places. All I did there was to keep the panning knob within easy reach, so that once I had the composition framed up and level, I could just pan the camera just a bit as needed.

One of the funny things about being an obviously serious photographer on a cruise ship is that people always ask me to take their pictures. I always oblige, although Kathy often handles that task so I can keep making my own pictures. What was really funny was that I think every one of the ship’s photographers took our picture at some point during the day. They knew we would understand that they had a count to make and almost looked like they wanted to apologize for it. We didn’t buy any of their photos but it was interesting to see the difference in composition and framing between the different photographers. Good photos, reluctant subjects!

Tom Dills Photography Blog

Category Archives: Photography

4th of July Fireworks

The Canon 40 2.8 as a Macro Lens?

Long Overdue

July 2012 Wallpaper

Wine Country!

Victoria, BC

Ketchikan

More About That Boat

Attitude Adjustment

Glacier Bay

Photographs and stuff!