All My Blogs

What transformations did I make to the original image? The great thing about playing with architecture images is that you can apply transformations to them without making them look odd - in fact, they may actually benefit from a little stretching.  The above image is a good example.  I applied perspective correction to compensate for the way lines appear to converge over distance and distortion to convert the square building into a more attractive and page-fitting rectangle.   When applying perspective changes, I will often also distort the object vertically as the former tends to give the resulting image a squashed appearance.  The photo below is a good example of that.  The heritage building in Victoria, BC, was beautiful, but I wanted to compensate for the tilting lines that perspective caused.  Once corrected, the image had that squashed look.  I used the distortion tool to adjust for that and I found the resulting image very appealing.  ...

Somewhere along the Washington Coastline - Scanned from slide film If you held a camera before the turn of the centaury, the chances are pretty good that you shot in some form of analogue media - negative film or slide film.  I didn't switch over until the very early 2000's but have now been through some 15 DSLRs, compacts, bridge cameras, and now two mirrorless bodies.  Before then I used Nikon, Minolta, and at the beginning a Zenit 35 mm body and associated lenses.  I have taught photography courses for about 35 years now and the first 10 or so of those years were on shooting film and working in the darkroom. As a result, I have thousands of images on slide and negative film.  A goodly number of the film ones are black and white from when I had access to a darkroom and would develop and print my own photos.  I have converted some of those images to digital, but there are some 90-95% left that haven't been done.  I had some done through a service, did some...

Great basin gopher snake.  Photographed in Kelowna, BC, with my iPhone.   My wife and I were walking our dog last evening about an hour before dusk.  We were strolling casually along a gravel path at a local park and she suddenly turned and exclaimed, "That's a snake."  What we had both assumed was a stick on the ground was actually a three-foot long Gopher snake.  The odd thing was it didn't move.  She actually had to step over it when something triggered a response in her - kind of a shudder actually - when she made her proclamation. I have come across gopher snakes at least 4 times now.  Each time they have been pretty laid back about the encounter.  Twice they had a prey item they were starting to devour and the other two times they were just sunning themselves (basking).  This one was doing the same, although the sun had been hiding behind clouds.  The warmth of the day was still in the gravel substrate and it was benefiting fr...