The images below were created in the thick of winter and then again this spring. The challenge in diptychs such as this is to create identical perspectives from one image to the next- in this case: close, but not perfect.
Enjoy – David
Dow's Lake Diptych
It has been a long winter in Ottawa and as is often the fashion in such conditions, Spring has been racing to its finish line – within the last few days I have witnessed the trees move from their winter dormancy to the lime green brilliance that accompanies new buds.
I like to watch the shift of seasons from the same vantage point; there is a steadfastness within a single landscape that defies the passage of time chronicling our four seasons. (FYI: in Canada there actually tend only to be two seasons: Winter and Road Construction.) So I like to photograph the same scene at different times in the year. I am particularly pleased with the image below, which is found along the Rideau Canal in Ottawa, Canada, near the Hartwell Locks.
Enjoy -
David
The Hartwell Locks: Winter and early Spring...
September 7th marked the start of a pair of photographic exhibits at Carleton University Gallery featuring the artists Justin Wonnacott and Jocelyne Alloucherie. An intriguing combination, these two collections of work curated by Sandra Dyck and Diana Nemiroff respectively.
Wonnacott’s show consists of a set of intimate images of marine animals that have formed part of his daily diet – fish, mollusks and crustaceans alike. Drawn by their vibrant beauty, Wonnacott began photographing them, starting with a moon fish that provided the exhibit’s title image: “I remember + I forget“. But his initial perceptions were to later give way to the underlying reality that the seas, and hence these creatures, were endangered. As Wonnacott so aptly puts it: “the fish are beautiful, they are in trouble and they are food.”
Wonnacott at Carleton University Gallery...
Intimate with fish: food for thought...
Jocelyne Alloucherie‘s exhibit in many respects provides a juxtaposition to that of Wonnacott. Her massive, neutral-toned images carry the viewer across vast scenes of cloud, sand, ice and air which the artist describes as “a space between the immediacy of physical experience and the memory of one or many elsewheres.” But, like Wonnacott’s own work they remind the viewer of our earth’s precarious state of affairs as greenhouse gases threaten the age-old balance between cloud and sand, ice and air.
Alloucherie at Carleton University Gallery...
Viewing vistas: Alloucherie's eye for stark majesty
Wonnacott’s exhibit run until November 7th, while Alloucherie’s work will be displayed until October 24th; two wonderful collections in one spot – what more could one ask for?
Enjoy.
David
My wife Sherry and I were cycling along the Ottawa River Parkway on the weekend and stopped to enjoy the art of John-Félice Ceprano, an artist whose rock sculptures can be found at the Remic Rapids along the Ottawa River. The work is, to my mind, mesmerizing: his stone structures precariously suspended on granite shelves appear to float over the water’s surface. The relative quiet of the the shelves provided good opportunity for photographing the sculptures’ reflections – an obsession of mine, reflections are…
The sculptures...
Eying the eyer...
Collective...
Enjoy.
David
I captured this image of foam on the water’s surface at Hog’s Back Rapids in Ottawa. My eldest sister, the epidemiologist, commented that it looked a little “disease-like”: a less-than-healthy thin-section, perhaps? Yes, perhaps, but I found it beautiful all the same.
Hog's Back flotsam and jetsam...
More of the series, “Today’s view…”, can be seen at my flickr site…
Enjoy.
David
One evening at the lake we witnessed a stunning light display from a distant electrical storm. The actual event was silent (i.e. no thunder), which added an eerie quality to it. I shot a series of stills during the storm, some of which I combined to form the stop motion video short below. I added sounds from another storm and a loon call, all recorded at a later date at the lake.
Enjoy.
David
Cool morning air collides with the surface of the lake, still warm from the previous day’s heat, to leave a blanket of mist hovering over-top.
This past week was spent at the family cottage in Northern Ontario. The lakeside property has been in the family for as long as I have seen days – that would be fifty-one years’ worth – and every year from then till now I have spent at least a portion of the summer there. We call the cottage “camp”, as do all who hail from that part of cottage country, and the Taylor camp has afforded the family immeasurable pleasure over the last half-century. But there are two pleasures that are particularly dear to me: the sound of the loons and early morning mists on glassy water surfaces, the latter being the subject of today’s post.
This first image was taken handheld from our canoe with the early morning sun behind me.
Early morning mist against the peninsula...
The second photograph shown below was also taken from the water and was also handheld. But in this case I was facing into the sun and opted for a high dynamic range version of the scene, which required that I bracket it over several stops. (In fact, this final image is an example of HDR combined with panoramic stitching.) I also found the final version most pleasing in black and white. (A somewhat larger rendering can be viewed from my flickr site, which better reveals the detail of the raft in the lower left portion of the photograph.)
More of the mist - this being a high dynamic range image...
Enjoy.
David
Anstruthers lake - vapour trails...
This image was taken as we were travelling by boat across Anstruthers Lake, located in Ontario’s Kawarthas Lakes region, to the cottage of a friend. It is in fact a high dynamic range composite produced from three separate images shot in rapid sequence and spanning four stops of exposure. The composite was produced using Photomatix Pro and subsequently imported into Lightroom for some final adjustments.
The three original exposures are shown below. On cursory view one might think that the mid-exposure image (“exposure 2″) would do just fine (and perhaps it would). However, upon more careful examination one would note that the red and green channels – producing the yellow hues of the sunset – are blown out in various spots beyond the sun itself, and that some of the cloud formations lack in tonal definition. It is these two aspects of the mid-exposure image that are cleaned up nicely in the high dynamic range version.
When merging images for high dynamic range processing, I have found it best to limit the number of original files to three or four; using more than this number can lead to softer images. Note as well that, while a tripod is best, it isn’t always necessary – I often produce acceptable HDR images from handheld shots and have found that Photomatix Pro and Photoshop both do a very good job of aligning images. (Recall that these Anstruthers Lake images were taken handheld from a slowly moving boat.)
Anstruthers lake - exposure 1
Anstruthers Lake - exposure 2
Anstruthers Lake - exposure 3
Enjoy…
David
Scene from my spouse’s decayed family cottage…
Cheers,
David
A lovely light −
Underpass: Ottawa River Parkway
Enjoy…
David
