Photographs and thoughts on photography and camera collecting
It was a gorgeous sunny day the other day: warm with blue sky and no clouds. I put Harley’s bed on our patio table and he lay there for some considerable time looking out over the garden and the still frozen lake. I too sat at the table, reading, drinking rum and coke and watching the last, tiny piece of snow melting on our patio. What an exciting life I lead.
Getting our ducks (or mostly geese) in a row.
As mentioned in the previous post March 31 was my wife’s Birthday. Since she’s fond of fish and all kinds of seafood we thought we’d try Captain Jake’s Restaurant on the Newburgh waterfront. After a nice meal: Surf and Turf for my wife and a Ribeye steak for me we took our dog for a short walk along the waterfront. Our previous dog would have chased the birds, but not Harley. He just calmly walked by them.
Geese and ducks on the river.
I wonder what they all found so interesting and why the mallard at the bottom didn’t. Obviously he’s too busy grooming.
My wife took these pictures with her iphone 5s. I provided support through post-processing.
I was walking around in the neighborhood when I came across this bird feeder in someone’s garden. A cloud of small birds surrounded it with two or three of them at any time taking turns to come and feed. Unfortunately it was some distance away and I didn’t have a long enough lens with me. I took some pictures anyway just to see what I’d get.
I liked this one the most, but because of the bird’s motion and my unsteady hands it’s rather soft and blurry. To make matters worse I had to crop fairly drastically to get it to fill the frame. So it didn’t have a lot going for it. Still I found the bird’s motion to be appealing and decided to do some more extreme post-processing than is usual for me. First I removed a second bird in the left part of the frame. It was badly blurred and quite distracting. Then to emphasize the motion I applied a zoom blur filter from Analog Effects 2. Finally I converted to black and white since the rather muted colors didn’t seem to add much.
I remember once reading something along the lines of: in a landscape either get the horizon straight or tilt it enough to show that you meant it to be tilted. I applied similar thinking to this picture. If it was going to be soft and blurry then I might as well exaggerate that. People might even think that it was deliberate. I actually quite like the result.
Taken with a Sony Nex 5N and Nikkor 85mm f2.
When I woke up this morning I could feel a lump next to me on the bed (no not my wife. She was on the other side). Assuming it was our dog, Harley I reached out to stroke him. As I did so he made a most un-Harley like noise and I realized that it wasn’t him. It was our cat Gypsy. Aha, I thought, he must be on the other side of the bed next to my wife. I looked up and he wasn’t there. To my surprise I saw him curled up right next to the cat.
This is something new. Our previous dog, Jackson was very territorial and, even though he never tried to hurt our cat he, he wouldn’t allow her into his space, which included the bed. If she did venture into his territory he would chase her off. Harley is much more tolerant and over the four months we’ve had him they’ve been getting closer and closer (becoming more friendly as well as getting physically closer).
My memory tells me that these two pictures were taken on the same day, but the metadata associated with them seems contradict this – making them two days apart. The picture above was taken from the front door of our house in Briarcliff Manor. The second one (below) was taken from a friend’s appartment in the Manhattan.
They were both taken in December 2011 with a small sensor Panasonic Lumix ZS7 so the technical image quality is not all it might be.
