21 Mar 2011 Adele On 21*
Author:  |  Category: Music, Videoclips  | 2 Comments

The immensely talented British singer Adele speaks about making her second album, accompanied by her video of “Rolling In The Deep”. I have both albums, the second one I bought over the weekend. The more I listen to Adele the more I like her, and I hope she keeps making music for a long time.

For one thing, she’s beautiful but she’s down-to-earth and doesn’t look like she’s starving herself. (Plus, her look is very 60′s, which is probably my favourite era, style-wise.)

And, unlike much of what charts, Adele’s material is actually her own. Apparently this second album was recorded right after a breakup, and no doubt follows the tendency of such events to inspire great art — especially music. Why rant when you can sing it out? (And win accolades and earn lots of money while you’re at it.)

Favourite tracks on ’21′:

1. Rolling In The Deep
6. He Won’t Go
8. I’ll Be Waiting
10. Lovesong
11. Someone Like You

* Eh. I only just noticed the date.

20 Mar 2011 Nice To Meet You, Buddy
Author:  |  Category: Critters + Creatures, Friends, Image Legacy  | Leave a Comment

Buddy the Dog

My friends Natalia and Jan moved into their new digs last weekend and I was their first dinner guest! Yay me! It was also the first time to meet Buddy the dog, a pooch they pooch-sit now and then but for some reason he and I have never crossed paths. It’s a good thing Buddy doesn’t have an aversion to the camera, because I sure took a lot of photos of him today. The photo above cracks me up because it looks like Buddy put on Jan’s hat and jacket.

I discovered today that Jan and Natalia’s new place is an urban landscape photography goldmine, but the best part is that it’s a fraction of the distance between their old place and mine. Plus, Natalia loves cooking. ‘Nuff said. Get ready for lots more food pictures ’cause I’m inviting myself over for dinner even more often!

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View full-screen slideshow here.

20 Mar 2011 We Miss You, Beano!
Author:  |  Category: Mobile Blogging, Xena & Beano  | 3 Comments

19 Mar 2011 Howling At The Super Moon
Author:  |  Category: Photography, The Great Outdoors  | 3 Comments

shooting the moon

OK, I wasn’t howling at the super moon… instead, I was holding my breath to keep still while I tried to shoot long exposures without a tripod in a stiff wind blowing off the lake. *shiver shiver* I wanted to shoot it when it was that haunting shade of red and low on the horizon, but at that point I was on the freeway driving the assistant home and could only glance at it while keeping on eye on traffic. It’s been 18 years since the moon was this close to earth, and by golly, do I have to wait another 18 years for it to look like that again?

shooting the moon

I had a long day that included picking up the car from the garage, wedding venue scouting in the far reaches of the GTA (eg. Kleinburg Village), and training the assistant. When all that was over around 10pm, I made my way down to the lake and took some long exposures without a tripod — first resting the camera in the arm of a tree, then on a bench. I put the camera on self-timer to give myself enough time to pull my hand away, but not knowing exactly what was in the viewfinder… which you could probably tell by the shots toward the end!

nocturnal tree march

shooting the moon

shooting the moon

long exposure on a bench

shooting the moon

shooting the moon

18 Mar 2011 Perspectives
Author:  |  Category: Image Legacy, Photography  | Leave a Comment
Union Station

Union Station

I dodged a big bullet this morning, only losing the filter on my expensive 17-55mm f/2.8 lens when it fell to the floor with a heart-stopping THUD, the camera bag strap caught by a piece of furniture. There were no scratches on the lens itself and no apparent motor damage. It was at Nikon Repair just six months ago! The damage is cosmetic — a few prominent scratches on the metal around the lens — and I have to dig up the filter receipt to claim a replacement on the insurance. (Sigh of relief that I bought replacement insurance on this filter, because this is the second one I’ve busted.)

Having dodged the aforementioned bullet, I was in no mood to invite another one while wandering around Front Street with a naked, filter-less lens. But I also wanted to confirm the focus mechanisms were still working (that was the main reason I had to repair it last year — the lens was scratched minimally but nine months after it hit the kitchen floor at The Brides’ Project it wasn’t focusing anymore). So I shot off a few photos at different focal lengths to test the lens.

As much as I love this lens, I have come to accept its distortion at the wide end (17mm, or about the equivalent of 26mm on this DX camera body). Sometimes it bugs me, but I’ve learned to position myself properly so the bits I want straight are not in the area with the worst distortion (that being the short sides of the frame). The lenses are round, so how come the photos are in rectangles?

These two photos below are actually the same photo. The top one is how the photo looks without lens correction, what my camera’s sensor views through the lens at its widest. The bottom photo has lens correction applied to make the vertical lines look vertical in the photo. As you can see, it now distorts the size of the sculpture to compensate for the horizontal “stretching” of the top half of the photo to line up with the bottom. It’s the same problem that happens with the Mercator projection of the world: the world is round and a map is flat, which forces a distortion of the relative sizes of the countries.

Union Station

without lens correction (what my camera sees)

Union Station

with lens correction (straightening the buildings)

(All this distortion is why I would probably not buy a fish-eye lens. It may be fine for the occasional photo — say, with very large groups of people — but not for regular use.) It’s interesting to think that neither of these photos are accurate to what we can see with our own eyes, which are infinitely more sophisticated than any camera manufactured today.

Brookfield Place

Brookfield Place

18 Mar 2011 This Morning
Author:  |  Category: Mobile Blogging  | 4 Comments

Discovered enroute to the mechanic’s. First glance says only filter is damaged.

17 Mar 2011 Looking For Light, Part Two
Author:  |  Category: Friends, Photography  | One Comment

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These were the original photos I was going to use for the post titled ‘Looking For Light’. Neesa and I went to her first basketball game last Friday and afterwards while we walked across the semi-underground corridor between Union Station and the subway lines I noticed this section off to the west of the doors. Why did I not notice this before? Probably because it’s either filled with people and daytime, when the same scene is rather ordinarily-looking.

And that’s the point I wanted to make with this post: in photography, the light creates the feeling for the picture, not necessarily the scene. I should take a photo of this background during the day so you can see what I’m talking about.

Photographers are rather obsessed with light, not backgrounds. If a boring background has good light, it looks interesting. If an interesting background has bad light, it looks terrible. The best light for environmental portrait sessions are about within three hours of sunrise and sunset. Everyone wants sunshine on their wedding day, but high noon weddings fill wedding photographers with dread (harsh sunlight directly over the head is unflattering for faces). Very cloudy days make photos look flat, versus lightly cloudy days which are actually great because the light is even and light-sensitive eyes aren’t squinting.

In this case, a drab concrete area at Union Station looks dramatic because of the spot lighting — and it’s the lighting that caught my eye, not the columns. The spot lighting is above Neesa’s head, which is like the unflattering high-noon light I mentioned before, but the difference is that it’s spotlighting so it looks dramatic. Here’s another example.

View a full-screen slideshow here.

16 Mar 2011 Looking For Light, Part One
Author:  |  Category: House of Fielding, The Great Outdoors  | Tags:  | 2 Comments

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To say that I’m having a bad week is a bit of an understatement.

As if saying goodbye to Beano wasn’t enough pain, my car broke down this morning before I was due at work. I was driving on King Street and the engine completely died on me. I didn’t even have enough momentum to let the car roll over to the curb. I was sitting on the streetcar tracks and my first instinct was to get out of the way! I put the car in neutral and pushed myself to the curb with one hand on the steering wheel. (One kind soul saw me pushing my car and stopped to help me, which I’d like to state for the record happened in Parkdale, a neighbourhood I like but gets a lot of bad press.) I also wanted to shake my fist at the universe, yelling “WHAT NOW?!?” — but I ran out of hands.

Best not to tempt fate, anyway. Know why? Right now I’m sleeping on the floor of my bedroom because on Friday night the skylight leaked a puddle of water right in the middle of my bed. Since my apartment is shoved together in piles because the back roof is getting fixed, the futon mattress was propped up in the hallway. At least I had something else to sleep on — it was either that or a camping cot. I also slept on the floor so Beano could sleep with me without having to jump. In the last few weeks he barely made it up to the bed.

The bedroom has a different roof from the one at the back — the back roof is currently in construction limbo. That’s right, all progress was halted this week due to a dispute between the owners and the contractors. Should I be surprised? There are more people being added to this saga daily. I’m caught in-between, sleeping on the floor and surrounded by furniture. I don’t have the time or energy to be angry about it, the house isn’t mine and I’m busy with two jobs and volunteer work.

I could go on with a litany of things that have been falling apart around me, but I won’t… instead, I decided to look for light in all this darkness. It’s there, I just had to go find it. So I walked down the street to the lake with my camera to look for light and remind myself why I live in this house, in this neighbourhood, in this city, doing what I do. I know deep down why I do, but I needed the reminder.

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15 Mar 2011 RIP Beano Caster
Author:  |  Category: Critters + Creatures, Loss, Xena & Beano  | 12 Comments

oh, were you sitting here?

It’s been a rough Monday/Tuesday and a very sad day for the House of Fielding and Caster, but we will remember Beano best for his engaging personality and cuddly ways. Who could resist that adorable little face?

In the end, Beano’s kidneys couldn’t handle this latest crisis, even with daily injections. It’s been about five weeks since he came home from the vet, and his energy never returned fully. I’m so glad the catsitter from Ottawa got to see him one last time, only a couple of days ago.

Beano will be cremated and I will split his ashes between the urn that has Hugh‘s ashes in it, and scattering some off the dock of the rowing club where Arliin was a member. Some of her ashes were scattered there on her birthday in 2009. I kept Beano alive for three years and three and a half months after she passed away, but he was with her much longer.

I have deleted my Facebook account since it was under Beano’s name. I don’t have the heart to login as Beano Caster anymore, and I didn’t use it much, anyway. If you’d like to get in touch, please send a message the old-fashioned way(s).

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*scritch scritch*

the lion sleeps tonight

bed buddies again

it's not tuna, sorry!

Bean(o) Burrito (2/3)Bean(o) Burrito (3/3)

objects in lens are closer than they appear*whimper*on the red carpet

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*rub rub*

busted!who needs a straw when you have a paw?

how I work these days (or not, as the case may be)


13 Mar 2011 Giving Aperture Another Go
Author:  |  Category: Image Legacy, Unabashed Geekiness, Videoclips  | One Comment

I was given a copy of Apple’s Aperture several years ago, but after trying it out for a while I found it even less intuitive than Adobe’s Creative Suite applications (which aren’t particularly intuitive to begin with) and uninstalled it from my computer. One of the problems is that I found it CPU-intensive, and it wasn’t managing the libraries very speedily. This was before I bought the iMac and was still relying on my now 7-year old PowerBook G4 (running Mac OS 10.4 Tiger), which was buckling under the CPU strain of running Capture NX2, Photoshop, and everything else that is part of my editing workflow. I moved my photo libraries over to Lightroom from iPhoto (a program which I use only for uploading small galleries to MobileMe as there is a 500-photo limit per gallery), and have been using Lightroom the past couple of years to manage the libraries and export photos once they’ve been edited. I didn’t bother with Aperture after I moved full-time to Lightroom.

However, I was reading in a wedding photography forum this weekend that some photographers liked the slideshow features, so I downloaded a trial version of Aperture 3 to see if those features were useful and worth buying the program if that’s all I was going to use it for. I’ve not been making many slideshows lately because I don’t like what’s available in Lightroom or iPhoto and I’ve been searching rather unsuccessfully for software that would give me more control but would integrate with my photo workflow. I’m all for templates but at least let me customize them. There is software out there made specifically for slideshows, but I hadn’t found anything that was reasonably priced or wouldn’t bloat my hard drive. Slideshows are a small part of what I do, so I don’t want to spend a lot of money or time on them.

I made a slideshow in Aperture today for a bride’s parents and so far, so good. Looks like Apple has really improved it the last few years. Because Aperture is an Apple product, it resembles iPhoto — which I’m familiar with, but it’s more advanced. I outgrew iPhoto years ago, but I am still using it in conjunction with MobileMe (Apple servers). I can stop using iPhoto altogether since Aperture also works with MobileMe. The reason why I use MobileMe for small galleries is because it has a faster interface for the end user compared to the web galleries I upload to my server, and it gives the user more control for viewing and zips all the files for download in one shot.

I have also read from users that Aperture handles colours better than Lightroom and I tested that today, too, but with no discernible difference. I’ll have to try it with a larger sample size of photos to see for myself. I’m using a 30-day trial of Aperture, but after using it today I’m pretty sold on adding it to my bundle of software at the end of the trial.

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