Today, let us swim wildly, joyously
in gratitude.
Rumi
Still and All…
Happy Canada Day!
Canadians from coast to coast to coast today are celebrating being Canadian and living in one of the greatest countries of the world. In large cities and small, in rural areas, in large and small groups, we are expressing our affection and gratitude for this unique country of ours.
Fror many years we lived in the nation’s capital, Ottawa, and spent many Canada Days surrounded by hundreds of thousands of joyful people near the Parliament Buildings. And watching the amazing fireworks in person. It was loud, it was fun and it was a bit crazy.
This Canada Day, we’re going small and simple and spending time with our neighbours and friends in our small town of Almonte just outside of Ottawa — a town we have come to appreciate deeply.
Here, it’s calm, it’s quieter and it’s just as much fun.
This morning our downtown main street was lined with vintage cars and turned into a pedestrian thoroughfare. People were in great spirits checking out the cars, eating ice cream, visiting the shops and chatting with friends.
Now I’ve never been a huge fan of cars as vehicles, but I do love old things, and especially old beautiful things with great lines that have been lovingly taken care of.
I gave myself a challenge to find a set of images I loved from among the huge collection of vehicles that graced our main street.
This afternoon features music and a feast in the park — unless it’s rained out of course (hope not) — and then fireworks. Hope I can catch those.
But for now, the cars…
It’s really the details that I love most and really say vintage to me.
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Weekly Photo Challenge: Contrasts
Because you don’t notice the light without a bit of shadow. Everything has both dark and light. You have to play with it till you get it exactly right.
Libba Bray
Here’s an interesting quote to mull over. See whether or not you agree…
“I’d rather my images be strong because they’re strong in lines, light, moments, not because people are just seduced by the colours.”
David Duchemin
Sharing with WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge
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Things I’m loving…Monday edition
Avocados, always avocados.
I added a half an avocado to a smoothie this morning, along with coconut milk, greek yogurt, raspberries, vanilla, a bit of maple syrup and some ground chia and flax seeds.
15 minute creamy avocado pasta
I am always so inspired to read the weekly post of Toad Hollow Photography in which the Toad shares a comprehensive list of photography related links that he hand selects. He is an awesome curator of tutorials, special features, great photography and interesting blogs, all intended to share the best the internet has to offer. Definitely my weekly dose of photographic awesomeness. And I’m not only mentioning this because he links to my butterfly post this week! Thank you, Toad, for your continued devotion to your fellow photographers.
For example, in this week’s collection, one of the reasons I’ve always wanted to go to Iceland, Waterfall of the Gods.
And finally some new favorite words…
Bellibone: a woman excelling both in beauty and goodness.
Snudge: to lie idle, close or snug
Coquinate: to behave as a cook.
So, my dear bellibones, I’m planning to find time this week to enjoy some coquination and snudging, and I hope you do too.
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Magnetized…
One of the many things I’ve been enjoying doing lately is making photo books. I’m up to three now — two are for gifts and one is for us. I’ve received the first one and am very pleased with the way it turned out.
But photo books can take a while to put together.
For the times when you want a quick and easy project, I like to make magnets. A few pics, a few seconds and they’re done.
I just made one for each of the grandkids, using some images taken this year. I also have one from last year on the fridge that I will add these to.
I love having reminders of those sweet little faces and great times together every time I go get a glass of water or something to munch on…
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Til the last frame of my life…
The butterfly is a flying flower,
The flower a tethered butterfly.
Ponce Denis Ecouchard Le Brun
Julia butterfly
Monarch butterfly
Rice paper butterfly
I want to fly like a Butterfly around this beautiful world, till the last frame of my life and the last click of my heart.
Biju Karakkonam, Nature and Wildlife Photographer
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Behind the images…
Some images from our recent Bahamas sailing adventure are now on sale at Getty Images. These are a few of my very favorite photographs from the trip.
Over the next few posts I thought I’d share just a little bit of the story behind each one.
New Getty Image. The Hopetown Lighthouse. Elbow Cay, Bahamas
Like many photographers, I am in love with lighthouses and I gravitate to them wherever I go.
This one, however, has a special place in my heart and my collection.
It happens to be the last of a dying breed. It’s one of the remaining two or three lighthouses in the world that is actually still lit every night. I hadn’t realized that there were so few.
Most lighthouses have now been automated. This one is still fueled with kerosene.
It’s located in Hopetown, one of the most picturesque of the little settlements scattered throughout the Abacos.
One day in April we sailed from Marsh Harbour to Elbow Cay for a visit. It was a stunning day and we had a beautiful sail. We grabbed a mooring ball in the Hopetown Harbour and spent the next few days touring this fabulous cay and its pretty little settlement. I fell hard for this lovely place and its laid back friendly foks. I can’t wait to go back again.
One of the highlights of our stay was climbing the 101 steps to the top of this lighthouse. It wasbuilt in 1862 and became operational two years later. Its light can be seen from 23 nautical miles (43 km) away.
It is maintained by a family of lighthouse keepers that goes back many generations.
It has a spring mechanism that has to be hand cranked every several hours to maintain the sequence of five white flashes every 15 seconds. The lamp burns kerosene oil with a wick and mantle. The light is then focused as it passes through the optics of a first order Fresnel lens that floats on a bed of mercury.
Looking down from the lighthouse on Hopetown Harbour
I took this picture from the top. When you look down from the lighthouse, you can see the Hopetown Harbour with its many boat visitors tied to moorings.
The strip of land behind it is the little settlement of Hopetown. Neither cars nor golf carts are allowed in the town but you can travel throughout the rest of the cay using golf carts.
Our sailboat, Windsong II, and that of our buddy Mike, the Casey Dee are circled. It was just a short dinghy ride from the boats to the settlement.The water visible behind that is the sea of Abaco and there is a gorgeous beach that lies along that shore.
While there, we had another of those “small world” experiences that make you slap your head in surprise. One day a fellow sailor going by in his dinghy happened to see that we were from Ottawa. In that neighbourly way that cruisers have, he stopped to invite us over to his boat for drinks that night. We went and had a great time exchanging stories and learning about their experience living eight months of the year in the harbour on their sailboat.
But the funniest part? Not only did they live in Ottawa during the summer, but they lived right around the corner from our old house — and in the 17 years we lived in Ottawa we had gone by their house hundreds of times while walking our dogs. They were former neighbours!
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New York Revisited…
New York contrasts
The Chrysler Building from below
Beautiful lamps in Grand Central Terminal
Oh my archives! I have so many images in them that I’ve barely looked at…especially from my past trips.
Now that my beloved Nikon is away for servicing, and I can’t be out there shooting, I thought I’d get to one of the items on my projects list — identify some images to print and frame.
Since I’m drawn to architectural images on a wall and I love neutral tones, I immediately thought of all the building images I had shot in New York and then not done anything with.
As I dig into these archives, I thought I would post a few images here. I think some of these would work well together in a wall gallery. And if not these, I do have many more!
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In the sweetness of friendship…
Textures thanks to French Kiss
In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things the heart finds its morning and is refreshed.
Khalil Gibran
June abounds with the birthdays and anniversaries of so many friends and family. So as we go through the month celebrating all of you, I’ll think about all the laughter and pleasures we’ve shared over time and look forward to more.
These beautiful irises are now planted in our front yard, the kind gift of family members with seriously green thumbs. When we moved to our new home three years ago, we left behind a garden that had taken years to develop, filled with all kinds of flowers and foliage, shrubs and trees. I do miss my irises and my peonies and my magnolia tree and my climbing vines and all the rest of the plants I carefully researched, selected and planted. I miss my quiet and soothing vine-covered meditation garden, my water feature and my granite bench.
But that was then. This is now. It’s time to start again…We began to plant and landscape last year and we added a plum tree, a ginkgo, lilacs and an espaliered apple tree. We planted blueberry and currant bushes and rhubarb. And our vegetable garden will be full of healthy brightly coloured vegetables just as it was for the past two years.
We continue to develop our outdoor space this summer. I’m yearning for more flowers…but they will come…and the irises are a great beginning.
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A time for refinement…
The feeling of an evolution is a constant for every artist who is pursuing the search for refinement and enlargement of his/her own means of expression.
Andrea Bocelli
I was very much into using textures to process my images a year or two ago. I loved the painterly look that you could achieve and the soft dreamy quality of so many textured images.
I’m still drawn to these images and I admire and enjoy the texture work on the blogs and sharing sites of so many artists and photographers I’ve met online.
But I stepped away from it myself, and this is why…
At one point I realized that I didn’t want to use heavy processing with textures as a crutch when I didn’t know what to do with a less than stellar image. So I decided what I needed to do was spend more intensive time learning and practising and honing the craft of photography — which is really what I’m in love with. I wanted to take full advantage of my equipment and make better base images — by honing key skills — exposure, composition and framing, and focus, for example. I wanted to do a better job of getting my images right in camera.
I also wanted to delve deeper into the hard work of discovering and developing my own unique approach and vision. This has challenged me to become more contemplative and intentional in my image-making, as well as more experimental and risk-taking. I feel I’ve seen an improvement in my images and while many of my experiments have not seen the light of day, they have also yielded some happy results and taught me so much. And not only have I gained ground by working on simplicity, abstracts, double exposures, long exposures, ICM, etc etc etc, I’ve also truly enjoyed every moment. The more I can master the craft, the more my images will become a means for expressing myself.
Over the next while I intend to continue to strive for the best image quality I can get from my camera, I also want to return to spending time refining my processing techniques. For example, I want to learn luminosity masking and make better use of Adobe Camera Raw for raw conversion. (ACR is basically the same as Lightroom, without all the photo organization abilities.) I just learned a few new ACR and Photoshop techniques from a video with Ben Willmore on Creative Live that have me quite excited.
And so just for fun I hauled out my textures the other day and had a play with a few recent crabapple images. I’ve learned that when I start off with a better quality image, I am generally happier with the results of adding textures. My taste is at the “less is more” stage so I went fairly light on the processing of this image to let the beauty and delicacy of the crabapple blossoms shine through.
What are you refining these days?
Sherrygaley.com 