A few from this past Saturday’s adventure.
Wasn’t really feeling too ambitious this last outing…think it was because I was locked in to a location I’d been at before and never really walked away with the shots I was hoping for.
Luckily, birds and bugs came to the rescue.
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This photo was taken this morning, mild weather and about 21°C. The flax is in bloom, but actually one month later than usual, sowing was much too late due to the wet and cold weather. Thunderstorms and gusts of up to 90 km/h are forecast this evening, not good weather for the flax, it will be flogged!
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I have to admit I don’t know the names of any of these flowers, but a quick search suggests that the first picture is actually an echinacea.
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You’re sort of right both ways 
It started out as a visit with the option to stay longer if things worked out, and so far they have, so I’m intending to stay for the forseeable future. (as in the next 5-6 months or so… I’m not very far seeing!)
Mm. Probably. I personally find it a lot of fun to experiment with ‘abstractifying’ my images. (You what?? What I mean… for example take a black and white shot. It’s sometimes generally accepted that ‘things look better in B+W’, which I think is due to that fact that it removes a bit of reality from it. You can no longer see what colour things are so your brain has to imagine it (even subconsciously) instead, which makes the image seem more interesting.
I have a theory that by messing with colours, so that none (or less) of the colour or colour relationships are actually natural, we get a similar effect.
It removes the image a step from the ‘real world’ towards the realm of illustrations, and artworks.
Anyway… 
hence my lo-fi styles!
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Cool! Or warm, as the case may be for you right now, relatively speaking! LOL
I do, too and I’ve done that as well. But for me personally (and that’s the key thing, personally, since it’s only my personal preference) as a landscape photographer the “best” landscape images are those that make me want to “be there”. As a former graphic designer I’ve done plenty of more abstracted “design for design sake” works, but now that I’m getting old and crotchety 
I find that my own abstracted photos are sometimes less personally satisfying. And that’s because their abstraction (by nature) hides or removes what makes them, what they literally render and represent – i.e., in the case of a landscape photo, the landscape itself. Therefore my abstracted images can’t “take” me anywhere …usually. So ultimately my abstract-only images don’t have the depth to involve me like more literal landscapes.
Of course there’s a LOT of wiggle room in the middle with various levels and types of abstraction. Certainly any processing is abstraction to a degree since it alters *something*. But I personally try to shoot and process my landscape shots in a way that makes the viewer want to be there – whether literally or more idealized. At least that’s the ideal plan, but I have yet to really achieve that IMO.
I’ve seen and heard that but I can’t agree. I’ve seen plenty of very good B&W images that would probably suffer from color and in those cases, it’s true. But I’ve seen far more B&W images that I personally would rather see in color and feel the monochrome palette has “limited”. A really good B&W image is a thing of beauty, absolutely. But I think the fraction / percentage of all the B&W images I’ve seen which are really good (directly because they’re B&W) is pretty small. For example, this guy (Mitch Dobrowner) can do seriously good B&W, but would any of his shots look better / worse in color? Dunno.
Anyway, that’s all just my personal take on it so take it or leave it for what it’s worth (probably not much).
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Very nice but how did you get the background? Black screen for the shot, flash, or post-processing?
Almost completely done with RT.
Background done with color toning, black point, shadow compression and spot removal. With local adjustments raised the green of the plant a bit.
Some dark sports and the end removed with Gimp.
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I cropped in a lot, as the bottom if the frame was occupied by unsightly industrial buildings. The clouds looked a bit yellowish, except for the ones in the bottom right, so I set WB on those (in darktable’s color calibration, but then that turned everything quite blue, so I dialled back on chroma).
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A small sampling from today’s outing. I don’t often photograph in this part of downtown, so it was nice to get out and check it out on a quiet Sunday morning.
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How do you keep the train tracks so clean?
Magic eraser and elbow grease 
Our town is a significant passthrough for two of the national railways, so maintenance on any of the tracks in the city limits is always ongoing.
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Just returned from an Alaska cruise. Used my recently-acquired 20-200mm 4/.63 lens almost exclusively; found out how much I missed being able to dial between wide-angle to medium telephoto to compose. Image quality isn’t what my 24-70/4 is, but for web posting it’s okay. I do apply a teeny bit more output sharpening to small renditions, seems to mitigate the fuzz somewhat. Here’ s some of what I shot:
A lot of this:
Sitka was lush:
Most of the wildlife we saw was captive:
Of note, the raptor facility did to-the-wild rehab, the bear facility provided a home to animals that couldn’t be released.
We sailed as far as this big honking ship could get to this glacier:
The blue of glacial ice is gorgeous:
Plenty of geometrics with which to compose:
Whale season. You could book a small-boat excursion to get close, but I managed to do this from our balcony:
A lot of running water:
After the cruise, we did a few excursions around Seattle. Mt Rainier is highly recommended, the park is busy, but not as crazy as Yellowstone. And beautiful:
Yep, more water:
We went to the zoo in Tacoma; I was more taken with their gardening than the animals. A few of my shots from there monochrome-ed quite nicely:
A good family trip.
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