Growing our Garden

My family has not had our own garden for a few years now. It used to be we would drive to a friends farm about 25km south of town where he allowed us a small plot at the edge of a grain field. We would plant and weed and hill the potatoes, but we never watered it, instead allowing what nature would provide as being sufficient. We always had a good crop and some years a rather huge amount of extra, although neighbours and friends or a local soup kitchen would always help us to use everything up with no waste. Well, after a few years of doing without, we decided to rent a small plot from the city in one of the community gardens to see what we might be able to grow again.

The first onions and some peas along with at least one cucumber plant are poking their heads through the soil. I made this image with my E-M5 and the 12-50mm kit lens which has an amazing quality in it’s macro mode. This photo is a testament both to the sharpness it is capable of as well as the very pleasing smooth bokeh it can provide. Bokeh, for those unfamiliar with the term is a Japanese word used to describe the out-of-focus areas of an image, in this case a few garden stakes and a nice old barn at the edge of the garden plot.

 

[Olympus E-M5, Olympus 12-50mm]

 

 

Abraham Lake, Alberta

Abraham Lake in southwestern Alberta has amazing colour as you can well see. The water level has been allowed to drop substantially in anticipation of the snowmelt to come off the mountains in the next month or so and it should be right back to full again. There seems to be plenty of snow to melt high up, even Bow Summit on Highway 93 still had maybe 2m or so of snow on the ground. My family stopped by the lake yesterday on our way home from Banff and Lake Louise. I used my Olympus E-M5 and the wonderful Olympus 12mm f/2.0 lens for both these images. Thankfully, this camera has amazing image stabilizer as the wind was screaming down the lake with nothing to stop it, which is pretty normal here, but non-the-less, it was buffeting me around and I really had to concentrate to hold steady.

 

 

My youngest son Alexander modelled for the second image with his armed outstretched in the wind. the two of us had a great time exploring the shoreline right down to the waters edge.

 

 

[Olympus E-M5, Olympus 12mm f2.0]

 

 

 

 

More from Ogden – Abstractions

One of my great pleasures is searching out abstracted images in the ordinary everyday places I happen to be in and around. This was the same day that Doug Williamson and I were out a few weeks back in the Ogden area in Calgary. Just like the last post, I can’t really say much about the images here in the way of explanation other than the balance of colours, textures and patterns appealed to me enough that I felt it necessary to examine them closer and attempt to capture an image that holds together. I hope you enjoy them, and as always I welcome your comments.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Panasonic GX1, Olympus 12mm M.Zuiko, Olympus 45mm M.Zuiko]

Ogden, Calgary, Alberta

Doug Williamson and I spent some time a few weeks back exploring the Ogden district of Calgary searching out some photo ops. We weren’t really looking for anything in particular, just things that caught our eye.. Things we could study to find balance and patterns. Things that may not mean anything to anyone else but things that somehow made sense to us at that time and in that place. It is fun to head out without any agenda and just explore with your eyes and mind to come up with an image that “works”. I can’t really say a whole lot more about these images as they were just things on that day that “worked” for me. If any strike you as something that “works” or maybe they all “fail” for you, I’d love to hear your comments!

Doug is a fabulous artist and I have had the pleasure of spending time with someone who inspires and enriches my life. I always look forward to the time I can spend with him and his very talented wife Shannon! Doug has a big exhibit of his artwork coming up in Calgary at the Wallace Gallery starting on April 26th.

[Panasonic GX1, Olympus M.Zuiko 12mm, Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm, Leica 60mm Macro Elmarit-R]

Nakusp, British Columbia

Old Court House – Red Deer

A two image stitch showing the Old Court House in downtown Red Deer at night. Another of the excursion courses that I was helping teach with Dwight Arthur, this time on night photography. An exposure of 5 seconds was necessary to capture the light. In order to get the deep blue sky you should squint your eyes and when the brightness level on the building looks about the same as that of the sky it’s time to shoot. I was a bit late on this one as the sky is a bit dark, but it almost always makes this kind of photograph look better than when the sky is black.

[Canon 5DmkII, Canon EF50mm f1.4]

Red Deer’s Old Train Bridge

I made this image while teaching an excursion course with about 8-10 students along with Dwight Arthur in Red Deer. We talk for about an hour or so about  a photographic technique or method and then head out for a few hours of fun photographing. This night we were doing a B&W course.

[Canon G10]

University of Lethbridge -1st Choice Savings Centre for Sport and Wellness

 

[Canon 5DmkII, Zeiss 21mm Distagon]

Henderson Lake Park, Lethbridge, Alberta

Mission Hill Winery, West Kelowna, B.C.

I quite enjoy visiting the Mission Hill Winery in the Okanagan. Fantastic architecture, not to mention some pretty decent wines as well. When photographing architecture, straight lines really should be kept straight for the most part. Very few lenses, save  some very expensive and highly corrected ones at that, are capable of achieving these perfectly straight lines. A fantastic tool that is available for a very reasonable price that helps tremendously is from a company called ePaperPress called PTLens. This software corrects lens pincushion/barrel distortion, vignetting, chromatic aberration, and perspective. I use it extensively for architectural photography, but also for nature images where relatively straight lines like trees, for instance, need to be corrected. It makes all the difference in the world to have no barrel distortion visible in an image, and PTLens eliminates it better than any other software I have come across. It even corrects the barrel distortion from many point and shoot cameras, rendering a very professional looking image.

[Canon G10]

 

 

Below is a quick comparison as a before and after. Left image has not yet been corrected using PTLens, nor has it been converted to a grayscale image and toned. For me it is most definitely worth the price and tiny bit of extra effort in order to achieve a far better quality image.