Kathy & I returned to home base this past Monday, and I’m currently halfway through the nearly 4,000 photos from our month-long adventure. I’ll be posting galleries to my Adobe Portfolio site (keep checking for updates!) and expect to have some more stories to tell here on the blog in the near future. Hang in there – I’m working on it! 😉
After recently commenting on Monte’s post, Monte asked me to show him my frog. I’ve given him a corny name, but most folks who read my blog will get it.
I found Frog at a shop in Bryson City, NC this past fall. I had previously photographed one of his cousins in Columbiana, OH. It is his cousin’s photo that I’ve been using as my avatar, but I may need to change it now that I have my own.
Frog lives on our front porch. He has a solar panel on the back of his head that will make his eyes light up at night. I haven’t turned it on yet. I’m waiting for someone to move into the house across the street. 🙂
I’ve been working lately on having a camera with me on my morning walks. It’s interesting what I see when I have a camera with me (duh!). 😉
Transmission towers aren’t exactly a glamorous subject (unless you’re into such things), but they do have some interesting lines and shapes. This one is a regular subject, mostly because it’s always there, looks different in changing light and weather, and gives me a reason to trudge to the top of the hill.
It’s also a good camera test – to check focus and sharpness!
I’ve been going back through old image folders looking for unprocessed photos that are worth spending time with. I recently came across some photos from a visit to Chincoteague, Virginia in 2010.
The ocean was particularly angry one morning, and I remember standing on the beach shooting the surf while trying to keep myself and the camera dry from the salt spray. In order to slow the shutter speed down enough to show the motion, I had stopped my lens down to – according to the metadata – f40. I didn’t remember having a lens that stopped down that much, but sho-nuff the old Canon 100-400 did!
Of course, at f40 every dust spot on the sensor is going to be visible, and on some of these photos there were dozens, perhaps a hundred or more. It’s a pretty safe guess that the reason these photos hadn’t been processed was because of all the spots. I’ve never been meticulous about cleaning my sensor, and it shows. But one of the advances in Lightroom that I am now able to take advantage of is the Spot Removal tool. The technology has improved dramatically over the last 10 years, to the point where I was able to salvage this photos. It involved a lot of clicking and a certain amount of adjusting, but a lot less futzing than I would have had to do back then!
One of the more recent additions to Lightroom is the “Transform” function, in particular the perspective correction tool. I find myself making use of this tool a lot, as it “corrects” photos where I’m forced to shoot from an angle – side to side and up to down – and making them look normal. I don’t generally use it to “cheat” but rather I like to use it when I don’t have a choice about where to stand.
I’ve been going back through some old unprocessed photos and came across a group of sunrise photos from 2010 in Belhaven, North Carolina. One of the distinguishing features of the harbor in Belhaven is a break wall that separates the harbor from the larger Pungo River. The break wall is a well-recognized landmark of this area, but the problem I always have with it is that it doesn’t run perpendicular to the places I photograph from. As a result, there is always a perspective mismatch between the horizon line and the line of the breakwall. They never looked right when I processed them, so I’ve always been hesitant to use them for anything. Until now.
Looking at this photos, I wondered if the perspective correction in Lightroom could be used to “fix” the position of the breakwall so it looked “right” in my photos. Lo and behold, it does! There is a little bit of falloff in focus in the areas that are actually father away, but it’s hardly noticeable. And yes, I could have done this a long time ago in Photoshop. But that misses my point. And of course, someone who lives there and is used to the view would likely recognize the change immediately. But for most folks, they wouldn’t notice the difference.
I’ve attached a couple of photos as examples, including one “before & after composite. I think it turns a photo that never looked quite right into one that looks pretty good for all but the pickiest few among us. And chances are they don’t read this blog! 🙂
From Wikipedia: “Tilting at windmills is an English idiom that means attacking imaginary enemies. The expression is derived from Don Quixote, and the word “tilt” in this context comes from jousting.
The phrase is sometimes used to describe either confrontations where adversaries are incorrectly perceived, or courses of action that are based on misinterpreted or misapplied heroic, romantic, or idealistic justifications. It may also connote an importune, unfounded, and vain effort against adversaries real or imagined.”
Here in the east we don’t have many, if any, opportunities to see wind turbines in the huge farms like they have out west. There are a few in eastern North Carolina and I’m sure more in other locations, but I haven’t come across them in the numbers that we encountered out west. I had seen photos of wind farms in the west, but seeing them in person made an even greater impression.
Wind turbines are not without controversy, certainly, but I find them to have a graceful beauty, spinning like a dancer in slow motion. I don’t profess to be an expert on wind turbines or any other methods of producing electricity. But as someone living within 20 miles (technically 20.5 miles) of two nuclear plants, two coal plants and a few other types, I think I would rather see a few dozen (or hundred) wind mills on my horizon than the steam plumes from the cooling towers of nuclear plants. They may not work here or make sense for an area as densely populated as Charlotte, but I see turbines as a viable alternative for producing electricity, particularly in rural areas such as Nebraska, the Dakotas and Wyoming where constant wind is a fact of life.
We were fortunate enough to come across a few sites at times when it was conducive to making photographs, and I hope I’ve done a reasonable job of presenting them.
I know this may seem like boasting, but Kathy & I had a very good year. Kathy is the recordkeeper and spreadsheet queen around here, and by her count we were away from home for 125 nights during 2019. The two questions we get asked most often by friends and neighbors are “how long are you home for?” and “where are you off to next?” We love it!
Yes, it has cost us some money, possibly more than our financial advisor thinks is prudent. But I’m the financial guy and manage the flow of funds, and with the good year the markets have had I feel confident that we’ve done the right thing. We didn’t retire to sit home and watch Jeopardy or Faux News. We retired to spend time together and see the world.
So – no apologies.
Highlights of the past year:
I admit that traveling over a third of the year might be overdoing it. I suppose the reaction (or over-reaction) to retirement is normal and to be expected. But having the time to do anything we want means we want to do everything! Frankly, the biggest challenge has been keeping our weight under control because of all the eating out. We essentially broke even for the year, which should probably be considered a win. But we’re always looking for ways to manage that, since being able to sustain that amount of travel requires being healthy, and one of the best ways to be healthy is to maintain healthy eating and exercise routines while away from home. We do great at home, but find old habits hard to break when we’re away.
So, what’s in store for 2020? We’ve got a few weeks scheduled in Florida in February, where we’re going to go “cruise ship hopping” and spend some time near the Everglades. Sometime in April we’re going to head toward the Southwest to bag a few more states and explore Route 66. We’ll be celebrating our 40th anniversary in October with a – what else? – cruise. But there are a lot of empty spaces on the calendar which we’ll be filling in as we get closer. The year is young!
I’ve included a few of my favorite photos from 2019 in this post, and as I’ve been doing lately, I have added some more galleries to my Adobe Portfolio site. This should cover most of the highlights from the year. So stay tuned! I think 2020 will turn out to be another interesting year.
I never get tired of walking around Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Kathy & I spent two days there prior to our recent cruise on Celebrity Summit. Every time we go I photograph things I have seen before, plus there is always something new to find. For this visit, we concentrated on the two forts, Castillo San Cristobal and Castillo San Felipe del Morro, both part of the San Juan National Historic Site and managed by the U.S. National Park Service. So we were able to use our newly-acquired lifetime pass for admission and gather the appropriate stamps in Kathy’s Passport book. And of course we managed to wander around town a bit.
As I have been doing, I have posted a more complete collection of my photos from Old San Juan on my Adobe Portfolio site, with just a sample of some of the more “artsy” photos here. Take a look and tell me what you think!
Long-time readers of this blog may recall a series of Aspen motion-blur photos that I shot during our first visit to Colorado in June 2015. Because it was springtime, the vertical trunks of the Aspen trees made for great subject matter when combined with the fresh spring green.
Since our most recent visit to Colorado was in the fall, I hoped to add to my Aspen Blur collection with some photos of trees with the golden yellow of fall. A lot of the trees we saw in the first few days of our visit were on the mountainsides, too far away to effectively get the results I wanted. On our final day, a drive through the Poudre Canyon with my pal Monte, we came across several excellent stands of trees.
It sometimes takes a lot of “misses” to come up with a handful of keepers. In this case I shot a relatively light 200 photos, and came up with a few that I’m really happy with. A couple have some really funky looks to them as a result of a happy accident or two.
I suppose the next step will be to get out there in the winter and make some photos of Aspen with snow. I’m not sure I’m up for that yet, but it may make it on to the to-do list, you never know! 🙂
Years ago I hung out with a bunch of guys who were pilots. Some of them owned their own planes – small homebuilt planes or private planes like a Piper Colt or Ercoupe. I actually got my own private pilot license, although I haven’t actually driven a plane in about 30 years. Photography is a very economical hobby compared to flying! But I still like planes, especially big noisy ones. 😉
One day a bunch of us were talking about going to the annual EAA Fly-In in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. For a week at the end of July, the EAA “AirVenture” as it is now called, is the World’s Greatest Aviation Celebration®. Kathy was understandably skeptical about the idea of spending a week at an airport with a bunch of airplane geeks, so she asked, “is there anything to see there besides airplanes?” One of the guys looked up and said to her in all seriousness, “well yeah, there’s parts!” 🙂
We didn’t see many airplane parts on our western road trip, but we did see lots of planes. We visited the static displays at Scott Field in Illinois and Ellsworth AFB in South Dakota. There are a few photos here, but for those who need to see more, I’ve posted a gallery of airplane photos on my Adobe Portfolio site.
