Right Brain Feed

 Sarah and I recently got back from a great beach trip to Ocracoke, and a great stopover in surprising Durham. May is a great time to visit the Outer Banks, before the throngs of summer visitors. Ocracoke tends to be quiet, because it's so hard to get to (9+ hours of driving including a ferry ride).  We ate great seafood every day, hung out on a deserted beach, met some fun folks, and really chilled out. Our room had an awesome view of the little Ocracoke harbor, and we spent the week with no agenda. I spent hours just watching the world go by from the widows walk on the top of the B&B. A slower pace of travel for sure. We also stopped by Durham, which is a cool little spot, visiting a friend we hadn't seen in years. Durham has really decent food, from Peruvian charcoal grilled chicken to Shakshuka in a new African restaurant, and a full on Ina Garten inspired feast at our friends awesome house. Also highly recommended is the Sarah Duke Gardens, especially the Asian sectio...

 In learning about new camera technologies, it's easy to stumble across fervent opinions online on how glorious RAW format is for storing your photo files instead of having your camera spit out JPG files. So far I'm not buying it.... for my style of very limited editing of photos.  Manual post processing of photos feels like homework, the more photos I take, the more Photoshopping I'm supposed to do.  I'll leave Photoshop experts to that. In fact, I don't own a subscription to Photoshop.   I'm currently using ON1 Photo RAW, but not using it to do RAW editing. I'll let it do auto adjustments of contrast, highlights, and tones, I do some cropping here and there, but that's it.  Maybe there are cases where I could dramatically improve a photo with RAW editing, but they double the amount of storage (a valid concern when my photo library size is in the hundreds of GB), and it's a time investment for me.  For instance, maybe this photo could have been a lo...

 We recently had our first real snow of the year, so I spent some time playing with my new camera, it's a Sony a6600 mirrorless. It's a bit overwhelming, sooooo many options. I've been having fun taking bird feeder shots. I'll be honest, it's pretty nice to be able to capture these from inside the house, all cozy warm. 

 Guilty as charged: I tend to just start using a new camera/phone and tend to not discover new features and capabilities it has. It was really a surprise when I recently discovered software based depth blurring in my pixel4a. I discovered it when fumble fingering a photo of flowers, and now I’ve started using it here and there. Fun! It’s not always perfect, notice it missed the stem on the far left flower. But also notice I didn’t have to buy a super pricey lens to get the blur effect. Like it!

 I’ve been tinkering with Chlorophyll printing.  It’s fun, when it actually works. I start with a photo I took, and print it out in black and white on a clear sheet of acetate. I overlay that clear acetate on a leaf.  Only certain types of leaves work, this one happens to be a hasta leaf. I leave it outside on a sunny day, oriented directly facing the sun. As the sun beats down on the leaf, the places where the image shades the leaf stay green, and the places where there is no image force a change in the chlorophyll, resulting in an image on the leaf. It’s not transferring anything from the acetate to the leaf, the image is entirely a result of the chlorophyll in the leaf trying to cope with being in extended very direct sunlight for an extended time. How cool is that! Here are some more images. Lots of different tests, trials, and tribulations…. I’ll leave those perhaps for another post.

 Late afternoon lighting or the perfect exposure can make a great photo. Another way to also really improve a photo is to try and “capture the moment”, to try and tell a story with a photo.  Here are two pictures of cute fluffy chicks. One has better lighting, and the yellow chicks really stand out. The other has dark chicks huddled in a corner, but the moment that is really captured is my old canine friend that loved to stick her head in and watch the baby chicks. For me, that memory being captured really makes the photo great (to me).

 Recently one of our front burners on the stove refused to light. I could see a spark, could smell natural gas, but could not get the friggin thing to light. Bizarre.  I ended up using my phone camera (Pixel 4a has an awesome camera) along with my little LED work light panel to debug the problem. While the burner looked reasonably clean-ish, there’s a tiny tiny little pinhole in the burner that apparently controls the burner lighting. It looked like it was clean, until I was able to get the phone camera closeup.    I used the LED panel and was able to see light thru the pinhole as I carefully fished around with a toothpick, and eventually cleared it up. The design of the burner is such that it requires a ratchet of a small small size that I don’t have, and the pinhole is tucked away well hidden. Translation: it’s like they wanted to generate service calls by designing it that way. I’ve found that my phone camera becomes a useful tool when doing household projects fai...

 Every year it gets warm in early Spring, as in short sleeve T-shirt warm, the draping cherry trees bloom, followed by daffodils everywhere, then non draping cherry trees and lovely purple Japanese magnolias, and on and on and on. Every year I get sucked into thinking winter is done. Yesterday was April Fools, and Mother Nature was pranking Asheville big time. I took this pic a few days back (while wearing short sleeves), and yesterday it was windy, below freezing,...... and.... SNOWING!!?! Snow didn’t last long, just long enough to be rude.

 There should be a bird in this photo. But by the time I got my new digiscoping adapter all hooked up to my spotting scope with my phone camera,  he was loooong gone. Getting the camera all lined up is pretty fussy, and the visual quality ain’t great (but this was taken thru a screen, so I didn’t expect much).  I think I’m getting close to convincing myself that I should buy that new camera I’ve been researching to death forever.

 Yesterday I tried out my new spotting scope, and took my first stab at digiscoping. This is my first scope, digiscoping is the act of holding/mounting some sort of camera up to the scope, and taking a picture thru it. Yesterday I tried it with my cell phone. While I am loving the scope, it brings in tons of light, and is crystal clear, the photos didn’t do it justice. But it will be interesting to try different setups, and I can’t wait to use the scope to spy on loons across the lake next summer. Trying to learn about spotting scopes was an odd experience, on one hand you have the mild mannered bird geeks like myself using scopes to look at cute fluffy little birdies, and on the other hand you have macho guys all camouflaged out wanting to use scopes to go kill animals.  So this bird stalker found herself perusing spotting scope reviews a few times on websites clearly not geared towards watching cute fluffy birds. Uhhhh....Celebrate diversity?

 I wasn't sure what to file this one under... Geek? Photography? GettingOldSucks? MentalHealthIsAThing? I recently decided to get back to the pool.... I really really desperately needed to be swimming. My body and brain were screaming at me to get back in the pool. Those screams eventually overpowered the "stay home stay safe" risk avoider in me.  I found a local indoor pool that's pretty quiet, not a lot of humanoids, and has decent fresh air flow. The swim below I shared large 6 lane pool with two other swimmers.  I dug back in, happiness ensued, until predictably my ole nemesis Swimmers Shoulder showed up. Drat! I did some reading and found that rotator cuff weakness and swim mechanics can play a part in Swimmers shoulder. I've been working on some exercises for strengthening, but wanted to see how I was actually swimming. I wired up my GoPro knockoff in its waterproof case, and snuck it into the pool to film.  Note: I also filmed underwater but it isn't i...

 Continuing with the "well duh,Suzy" photography rules  , another photography truth is that photos don't come find you if you hide in your office fussing with photo editing/organizing all the time. While a lot of folks thrive on using mad editing skillz to come up with wildly teased photos, for me the joy is in the seeking and finding of photos.  I enjoy capturing the moment.  I realized recently that I was getting in too deep with trying to rework/reorganize all my photos that have piled up over 15 years ago.... I needed a break, needed to go have fun back in the real world.  So I went for a quick hike, I wasn't really focused on photography at all, but still managed to find and capture a few  nice ones on a foggy day up at Craggy Gardens. Corollary to Go Find Photos: Sometimes photos don't need the $2k body with super fast Zeiss glass shot in raw using a tripod. These were all captured with my cell phone. I wanted the photo gearicity to be on the minimal ...

 I've worked with several different photo management/editing apps over the years. I've used both Apple Photos and Google Photos for the last 10 years-ish. I never quite fell in love with either. Back in early days with my first digital camera, I used and absolutely loved the now long dead Picasa. It had just enough features without going overboard In complexity, and wasn't hell bent on locking users into their proprietary little world. I do have an ever increasing list of requirements for photo managers as I've been snapping away at pictures over the years... Can quickly do basic lighting fixes and crop photos. I don't need hours and hours of computer work every time I take pictures... I spend enuf screen time as it is. Allow me to manage and search for metadata: Keyword tags, ratings, Camera name, Lens, and hopefully GPS. Allow me to manage my photos using normal operating system directories and files. This makes it easier to use multiple tools if need be. Importin...

 First rule of photography: you gotta have your camera with you or you’ll miss the perfect shot. I’ve been neglecting this one on my daily walks, and frequently regret it. One day this Spring that I did have it... With the overcast/haze it ain’t a great pic, but I like having the memory of that early early spring day. Closely related corollaries: you can't get the shot if you forget to check how much space is on the card, and check that the friggin battery isn't about to go belly up.