Ricoh GR

This is a photograph of my dog taken with my new Ricoh GR..I love this little camera!  It is small enough to put in a pocket or pocketbook; easy to use once you master the controls..has an APS-C sensor, just like the smaller DSLR cameras..the only drawback is that it is a fixed focal length of 28mm, but the wide angle is my favorite focal length so it should be ok..it is an f2.8, extremely sharp lens..I wish it came with a battery charger, but that is extra...but it would be nice to have instead of having to hook the camera to a charger..more to come later with this camera as I do some more shooting..did I say it shoots raw, too?

Winter walks

It is hard to find compositions during the beginning of winter when everything seems monotone..Ralph, my dog, and I walk every morning and I always carry my Canon G12 or if it's raining, the G9, which has been around a long time and has survived a lot of rain and snow...this was taken the other day while we were walking; looking down and using macro sometimes is the answer to images this time of year..I liked the look of these mushrooms on the deadwood...

Mentoring afternoon

These were taken in Galilee, RI with my Canon G12..the bottom one was a feeding frenzy of gulls when some fishermen dropped fish carcasses in the water..I love the one gull who is just sort of sitting there and acting as though he is not part of that chaos...it started raining pretty hard within an hour of arriving at the beach..you can see the clouds in the third image thickening and starting to roll into the harbor...there were a couple of wind surfers braving the chilly water...
I am the mentoring chairperson for our club, the Photographic Society of RI, and had a few people from the mentoring class (for people new to digital photography) with me...unfortunately, due to the rain, we only photographed about an hour...

Micky and other musings

This is me riding my horse, Micky..he has lived with me over 11 years now and is getting up in age: he's 21.
Last summer was a bad one for him: he had Lyme disease and also developed Cushings disease, which is PPID in horses..it occurs when the pituitary gland begins overproducing hormones; it can be devastating for an animal.  I treated him with Doxycycline for Lyme but also have to keep him on Pergolide to control the hormone production...I take every day as a gift to have him with me.

days two and three

Here are the images for the last day and also today...I slacked off already from the daily image project, but did take two today to try to make amends!  The top image is a fawn near my barn and the bottom is one of my cats taking a dirt roll...they were both shot with my 70-300mm L lens by Canon..this lens has been one of the best investments I've made;  it was invaluable on my trip to Argentina and Chile: it was used on every telephoto mountain image..

Image per day project!

Here is the beginning image of my Image per Day project...needless to say, this isn't the first time I have embarked on this endeavor, only to fail miserably after about two weeks or less...this time, there is a steely determination to complete the project...it will help me become a better photographer and since I shoot almost every day anyway, it will encourage me to take better images and even post the failures if there is no choice...this image was taken on a foggy morning as the trees are just changing color here in Rhode Island...
taken with my trusty G9, which I unfortunately will be retiring because of scratches on the lens and a ton of dust inside the camera..what is that all about?  How did the dust get in behind the lens?  oh well, these questions will remain unanswered as I make the transition to the G12 that I've had a couple of years but barely used...

Back from the Canadian Rockies

Just returned this week from a tour of the Canadian Rockies out of Aurum Lodge with Darwin Wiggett...this is my fifth time in the Rockies, but it never gets boring...the Canadian Rockies are always breathtaking and magnificent in any weather.  I have walked in the Andes, but the Rockies have always touched my heart; the stark beauty and power are unforgettable...the Endless Chain of mountains on the road to Jasper is a rare,
incredible sight..these are a few of the images from that tour..the top one is a rusted, burned out car detail; the second is sunrise from Preacher's point with a lot of wind and a long exposure; the next is sunrise at the North Saskatechwan river and the last is from Rampart Creek...now that I have returned home, there is a project in my mind..it is one that has proven elusive:   an image a day for a year...hope to start it tomorrow to see if I can keep it going..it won't be easy..

Beavertail and Canada

Last weekend I went out to Beavertail with a couple of friends to do some shooting..the clouds were pretty amazing:  cirrus clouds that almost looked like ocean waves.  The color never really came into the sky as the sun set but this conversion to black and white seemed to capture the feel of that day.
This weekend I am off to the Canadian Rockies for the fifth time.  It is a place that provokes a feeling of peace and belonging in me; there is just something about the Canadian Rockies in Alberta and British Columbia that is inexplicable...I have been blown away by Fitz Roy and Torres del Paine, but there is a quiet strength in the Canadian Rockies that seems to touch my soul...the mountains there are not as dramatic as the Andes but every bit as impressive...

Dressage

A friend and dressage trainer asked me to photograph at her farm recently.  It was a real challenge to go from photographing landscape to photographing horses in motion. The Canon 70-300mmL  F4-5.6 lens is not a fast lens for action, but with the new Mark III, and its ability to shoot a very high ISOs with a minimum of noise,  the lens was more than adequate.  I shot at ISO2000 most of the time with excellent results, hand held with speeds of 1/500 to 1/1000 sec..at F8, I found the background wasn't blurred out enough so I switched to 5.6 or 6.3 and found the results much better...here are a few examples of the shoot.

Canon 5D Mark III in Scotland

These images would never have looked noise free with my Mark II, a camera that I thought was amazing...after talking to a friend, who does a lot of night and twilight photography, about the wonders of the Mark III in low light photography,  I purchased one and  have never looked back...the camera is absolutely mindboggling. The three night images above are taken at ISO 800...it was twilight and I was able to get amazing clarity and brightness without long exposure at ISO 100...the one that is below of the interior of St. Giles Cathedral was taken at ISO 12800 with a Canon 24-70mm 2.8L lens at 42mm...it was hand held..and it is sharp...the interior of the cathedral was dark with lots of shadow, but this camera was able to hold the dynamic range...in the post processing in ACR, I used the Camera Raw noise reduction lightly...the noise was removed..the Mark II could have never handled this shot at ISO12,800; it would have been unusable...what I really loved in Edinburgh was the ability to walk around and shoot with a full frame DSLR, just as if it were a point and shoot...

Scotland

I have just returned from two weeks of photography on Orkney and Shetland...my recommendation to anyone headed to those two islands is that landscape photography is difficult in May..the true sunset didn't come until approximately 10:30pm and sunrise was somewhere around 3am..Most of the time was spent shooting in bright harsh light and it was hard..I am a true landscape photographer who loves the colors of morning and evening, but it just didn't work out for me.. this trip was a compromise with lighting..a lot of it was night photography;  so I did have a lot of practice in that genre..attached are some images from Orkney and Shetland..remember that these islands also have a paucity of trees..Shetland didn't have any trees to speak of, therefore, you are photographing a stark, open landscape..Edinburgh was fantastic to see and lots to photograph architecturally; but only had two days there..planning to go to Glencoe and Skye on my next visit to Scotland; will have to go later in the season in order to get the morning and evening light...

Light Painting

The other night, a few other photographer friends and I went to shoot the sunset on Jamestown..unfortunately, there wasn't a cloud in the sky and the light really sucked...so what do you do when that happens?  And it happens a lot, first of all: you can go home and come back another day..but there is also the opportunity to be creative and try something different. We went below the Newport Bridge shortly after sunset and started to light paint the rocks in foreground.  With a little experimenting with the length of time to light rocks, the images started to improve. Initially, the rocks were too bright and looked very odd, then we shortened the time we lit them with our flashlights and the images improved..then before leaving we tried to paint images in the air with our lights..the lower image is my attempt to paint a horse in air..not bad for a first attempt..but it was a lot of fun and I recommend light painting when you have a bad night with bad light.

good light

Sometimes the light can just blow you away...the other afternoon, while walking my dog in the woods, the late afternoon sun suddenly popped through the dense and turbulent looking cloud cover.  It was magical light: the boring and dull tree trunks of early spring suddenly sprang into life as the sun brought them from nothing into amazing contrast ..this is just a shot taken with my Canon G12 but the way the trees are lit against the dark, brooding sky makes it an interesting image.

Carriage works farm

These images were taken at a farm in Chepachet, RI..it has not been a good winter for me as far as getting out to photograph..it seems that I become a slug and don't want to do anything except hunker down for the winter..I am a member of the Photographic Society of RI, a very active photography group in our state; this past weekend we went out to the farm to try some photos of the animals..there was quite a variety: a pig, llamas, ponies, sheep, goats and horses..here are a few images from that day..the last one was given a Topaz filter to darken the background in order to isolate the running horse...the pony is my favorite with his long winter coat..they were all taken with my new Canon Mark III...70-300mm F4-5.6 L IS. lens..it was fun to get out now I have to continue...

Stepstone Falls

This was taken at a nearby small waterfall and brook...it was difficult to find compositions along the brook yesterday...don't know if it's because I haven't been out photographing the last week or so because of a really bad cold.  I like this image better than any other taken.  I used the blue/gold Singh Ray polarizer but dialed it down a lot as the water was looking too blue..also, did some desaturation in ACR when I processed it.

Winter in Rhode Island

These two images taken at a local brook were an experiment in shutter speed...I took the bottom image first at 1/5 second but thought the water looked a little too smooth; then the upper image was taken using a shutter speed of 1/15 second..both images were taken using a Singh-ray blue/gold polarizer on a Canon Eos 5D Mark III...the first is my favorite because of the slight detail in the water.  I love what the blue/gold polarizer can do in the winter to water...although it must be used discreetly, because it can go bad really quickly...just a slight turn is often enough..the gold effect is not a favorite of mine most of the time, but the blue really works well with ice and snow.