Because, scritches.
At the Gardens
Last week my Brother-in-Law visited us, and one of the things we did was go to the Botanical Gardens, which is always a terrific time, as well as a great place to practice photography! I organized my edited shots from that day into this Flickr album, but here are my favorites from that day:
I have a lot more photos from last weekend that I haven’t even edited yet! If you’re looking for a hobby that will eat some time, photography’s the one, folks.
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“I’ll take ‘KINDS OF RAMAS’ for $1000, Ken”
The answer: “This type of widescreen photograph can be created in Lightroom by stitching together multiple photographs from a single vantage point.”
“What is a panorama?”
Last Sunday I was at Chestnut Ridge park on a wonderfully clear day, and thus I was able to take a series of shots of the entire Buffalo-Niagara region, with visibility all the way to Niagara Falls, ON and beyond, and I was further able to experiment with creating a panorama in Lightroom. And here it is:
I know, that’s…tiny, as presented here. For the full-size enlargeable version, go here. I’m very happy with how this turned out! For one thing, I never realized that the OLV Basilica in Lackawanna can be seen clearly from up there.
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Two scenes from a morning
As much as I’m not a fan of being up before dawn all the time, I have to admit that the pre-dawn hours have a certain beauty. Two quick shots, taking during my morning commute, before the sun has risen:
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Astro
Photography, that is.
Last week I was blessed with (a) a clear night, and (b) very little moonlight. This led to a brief astrophotography session outside, where I set up my tripod right in my driveway, set my camera’s focus for “infinity”, bumped up the ISO a bit, set the shutter for various lengths, and took photos.
This resulted in a lot of clunker photos, but…not all! One thing I’m quickly learning is that the formula “take a bunch of photos during a session and maybe you’ll have a few keepers” is quite normal, even for really good photographers. I was happier with my star photos than with my moon photos; clearly I have work to do in that particular department. I still have quite a bit to learn, but for now, these are much better than my first efforts at astrophotography with this camera, last summer.
Of course, there’s a major celestial event coming up in just a couple of weeks that will test my photography skills in a unique way that I’m not likely to get another chance to practice in my lifetime. I’m starting to get excited for the eclipse!
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The trains don’t run anymore….
Photos from a short walk at the Orchard Park Railroad Depot yesterday. The Depot, you may remember, has been lovingly restored after years of neglect after the trains stopped running, and the tracks are now a rail trail.
These weren’t the only photos I took! I actually took a bunch, but of those only these were the real keepers; some others were actually practice photos I really don’t intend to do much with. I was using a new ND filter that stops a ton of light, and I used it to practice a bit of shutter-speed work as well as a couple of shots of the sun, just to get used to using it before the Total Eclipse of the Heart–er, Sun happens on April 8.
Later this week, they’re saying we may get snow. I mean, fine, winter’s not technically over yet, but today, as I write this, is St. Patrick’s Day, which is generally my personal cut-off point beyond which I am pretty sick of snow. Though this year hasn’t produced nearly enough snow for me to be sick of, so…I guess we’ll see how I feel.
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What is that cat-shaped object on the wall?
Editing with Lightroom!
While studying photography this past year, I’ve learned that the most prevalent photo-editing software out there seems to be a program called Lightroom. (I don’t want to admit how long it took me to realize that this is a pun on “dark room”, where all the photographic magic used to happen.) I figured that eventually I would need to get myself familiar with Lightroom and start using it for my photo edits; I also figured that to get the best results from this, I would need to start shooting eventually in the RAW format. I’ve been shooting in JPEG up until now, because it’s just easier for me to use when I’m still learning the ins and outs of the camera itself. I’m a big fan of segmenting the learnings, and tackling one thing at a time; right now, I’m barely starting to get kinda good with the camera by itself. Besides, I got time!
Which isn’t to say I haven’t been doing any editing at all! No, I’ve been using a nice (and free!) app called Snapseed to do editing to this point. It’s nice because it’s mobile and it’s pretty powerful, so I’ve been doing all my main photo editing on that app, on my tablet. I could use Snapseed on my phone, but I like the bigger screen of the tablet. My plan was to sign up for a Lightroom subscription soon, likely in the spring.
Well, I just learned when my Flickr Pro account renewed that it comes with a free three-month trial for Lightroom. I got this all set up last night, and now, yada yada, I’ve done my first edits! What follows are the original shot, followed by my edited version. I didn’t go too dramatic with my edits, but I deepened and intensified the colors in some spots, added some vignetting (I love a bit of vignetting), decreased the detail sharpness just a bit for a slightly more dreamy appearance, and I upped the contrast a bit. I quite like the result.
(The picture was taken from Canalside in downtown Buffalo, where I was able to look through the space between the ground-level and the I-190 underpass for a bit of framing. I also like framing.)
Some photographers I follow are able to use Lightroom to get some fascinating and quite dramatic results with their original photos. This is an aspect of photography that I am greatly anticipating learning!
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About Town
Last weekend was a good time to be out and about in Buffalo. We visited the new Buffalo AKG Art Museum, which is the renamed, updated, and expanded Albright-Knox Art Gallery. The Albright-Knox was always a favorite place of ours, and the museum got some good news back in the 2010’s at some point: a wealthy benefactor named Jeffrey Gundlach gave the museum a big pile of money, which led to the museum’s expansion. A whole new building was erected, new art was collected (the museum’s primary mission is modern art), and last year the newly re-done Buffalo AKG Art Museum was finally re-opened. (The COVID pandemic had a predictable effect on the project, that is to say, delaying it a few years.)
As one of her Christmas gifts, I bought The Wife a membership (for both of us, actually), and this past weekend we finally made it to the Buffalo AKG. And yes, it is amazing. It was always a wonderful museum, but the new addition and reorganization of the galleries makes it feel like something from a different city entirely.
The next morning–Sunday morning–I ventured down to Canalside in Buffalo, mainly choosing that destination because the weather had been warm and rainy all weekend, so my usual hiking haunts were likely to be unpleasantly muddy.
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Let the river run….
It is rapidly turning out that water is one of my favorite subjects for photography. It does so many fascinating things, and its relationship with light is particularly fascinating….
The top three are of Buffalo Creek as it flows past the Charles Burchfield Art and Nature Center. As the Creek tumbles over the rock beds there, it makes a nice bit of mild whitewater. The very first photo shows a phenomenon that whitewater boaters call a “hole”, when the water rushes over a rock in the stream and then falls back on itself, making a small water feature that looks like a pile of water flowing upstream.
The bottom two photos are of one of the many tiny streams that flow through Chestnut Ridge Park. The channel through which the stream is flowing in the first of these two photos is only about six or seven feet deep at that point, but just a few hundred feet downstream this small gully becomes a deep gorge that I assume to be at least fifty feet deep, if not more. The bottom photo is of one of the waterfalls that this stream plunges over. Note the ice crystals covering the far wall of the gorge, where the winter sun never shines….