Sometimes I like to capture things that just mean something to me, personally. Our house in Nova Scotia sits in the small "village" of Philips Harbour. This is part of the harbour, captured close to dark in June of 2016. This place holds great memories for me and always will.
Photo of the Week #73
Besides Landscape, one of my favorite genres to shoot is concert photography. I like it for many reasons. First of all, music has been a huge part of my life for a very long time and I've grown up reading the music magazines and liking the photography work in them. Also, I like it because it really couldn't be more different than shooting landscapes. Where landscape photography is laid back and peaceful, shooting music is exactly the opposite. When shooting musical subjects, you are in a very fast paced world. You are being whisked into venues quickly, you have two or maybe three songs to get your product and then you are whisked back out as quickly as you came in. You have maybe 15 minutes, maximum, to get your shots, if you miss your settings, you're beat, it's that simple. It's an atmosphere that I love. I've gone to concerts since I was 14 years old and shooting just makes it that much better. This past Friday evening, I was in Ottawa at Canadian Tire Centre to shoot the Dixie Chicks MMXVII tour. Great time, great show, and I got to hang out with some photography friends at the same time.
Above: Emily Robison and Natalie Maines, Canadian Tire Centre, April 14, 2017
Below: Martie Maguire, Canadian Tire Centre, April 14, 2017
Photo of the Week #72
Took a drive to Wolfe Island recently. The landscape there is dominated by windmills like these nowadays days. They have been quite controversial over the years, but one way or the other, they're here and we have to live with them. I decided to use them in a composition since they are there and I actually don't find them at all ugly like some do.
Photo of the Week #71
We have owned a house in the Canadian maritimes for many years, so obviously lots of my shooting takes place there. The Queensport lighthouse has been a subject of a lot of images over the years, it's just down the road from "home". This one happened while trying to use the old pillars in the beach as foreground interest. Because of the wide angle of the lens that was needed to keep everything in focus, it made the lighthouse pretty small in the frame, but I think it works.
Photo of the Week #70
I spend considerable time viewing photographs online, whether it's for pleasure, or researching for this site. One thing I am finding is that many of the images you see have noticeably over-saturated colours. With modern digital editing being as easy as adjusting some sliders, I think we have inadvertently trained our eye to desire photographs to be completely over the top and unrealistic as far as colour goes.
What is even more distressing to me is the fact that this type of processing seems to be more and more the norm these days. We see it on websites, photo sharing apps, magazines, wherever you look. Do you remember the TV show, CSI Miami? Remember all those wide, sweeping shots of Miami they used to show? All over-saturated to the max! Not at all what you see if you go there.
In my opinion, photography is the act of capturing an event or a scene and preserving it. If we are preserving a scene we witnessed, we would want to preserve it in it's pure form, or in other words, the way your eye saw it. If we are going to over-saturate it and create a falseness that was never there, we haven't done our job as photographers. So many of the photographs we see these days are manipulated and saturated far past the point of even looking real, they look almost cartoon-like.
The photograph below was made in a nice little town in Quebec along the St Lawrence River depicting sunset in the Laurention Mountains. There is already lots of nice colour there and there were no adjustments made that would artificially increase anything. I did two main adjustments, the first was to soften the sky to make the clouds look a bit less harsh. The other thing I did was to dodge up the foreground to balance the dynamic range better. The foreground was dark because of metering on the bright sunset across the river, but in person, it was more as you see it here. This is what the real event looked like and it looks much better than if I had taken liberties and messed with saturation.
