Drips on a leaf...

                   Watching drips of water balanced on the edge of a leaf. Easy? No, not so easy. Drawing once again on YouTube resources for new & challenging ideas to keep me gainfully occupied during these long Covid 19 lock-down days by capturing small droplets of water teetering on the edge of a leaf, I decided that this was just the type of challenge that I needed.
The first task was to find this suitable leaf----we are not short of them in our home, especially at this early spring time of the year when it seems as if every corner and available table top has pots of seedlings awaiting milder temperatures and their transplanting into their allocated rows laid out in the vegetable garden. My initial leaf choice was a long slender amaryllis bulb leaf onto which I gently sprinkled a fine spray of tap water. It was my plan to watch the tiny streams of water collect into droplets on the edge of the leaf, building in size so as to be highly photogenic. Unfortunately, surface tension of the droplets was not what I expected & they kept overloading to the point of being excessivly weighty and rolling off the leaf. It had been my plan per the samples on YouTube to capture, three, four or five full droplets in a row, so as to maximise the creative effect. I was just unable to control in position multiple droplets at the same time, without losing several uncooperative drops over the edge. Back to Youtube for solutions! I discovered that placing water drops on the leaf edge in precise position is simple, if one employs a pipette, or in my case a turkey basting syringe with a narrow exit tube. Now I was able to magically position the droplets and even to increase/adjust the size of a specific droplet if required. Simple when you know how!
             

 On this day to learn, I also grasped that the creative impact of leaf edge water droplets is maximised with an eyecatching background. My photos were captured with a 20x30 inch sheet of white foam board as back-drop. I learned that plain white background 1) does not an interesting photo make and 2) that the lens effect of the droplets is nearly 180 degrees, so that the droplets on the leaf edge were picking up dark edges to the extreme right & left of the foam board--not attractive. An interesting photo education experience, but one from which I felt I could develop a better shot.
             Second attempt. I rounded up another leaf, but this time of a more traditional leaf shape, as opposed to the long, smooth straight leaves of the amaryllis bulb I had used in experiment #1. This time I decided to use the leaf attached to the plant and use the other leaves as background. Also I determined that the shot I was aiming for would be more abstract in concept with (hopefully) impactful use of colour. Pipette activated with a charge of clean water, I gently placed drops on the edge of the selected leaf---easy when you know how! I illuminated the entire set-up with my desktop LED light. This small battery powered  LED light is compact enought so that it can be easily moved around the set-up, effectively obtaining various illumination effects as rays shone both across the leaf surface & up through the leaf from under.
            Project completed----for now. I am sure that I will return to this idea on some future snowy house-bound day and attempt to achieve the rather more clean creation I envisaged.

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My tribute to Leonard Cohen.....

Help! I think that I am getting carried away with this selfy thing cloistered away in Covid 19 lock down. With just the two of us at home, I have a real shortage of living models. But wait---maybe I should be making eyes at the cat, as know that she loves to be so often the centre of attention.
Anyway, with time on my hands, I decided yesterday to set up camera and speedlights. Rummaging

through my box of gear & gadgets,  tucked inside, I discovered a set of commemorative Canadian postage stamps depicting the late Leonard Cohen, chanteur and raconteur, on the over-wrap and with different Cohen poses on each stamp.  An impressive guy who had a most interesting life. We had little in common, except for being of a similar certain age. I remember him as a celebrity on the circuit in Montreal, early 1970's. Anyway, with these thoughts in my mind, I  felt inspired, in my humble way, to try & to capture something of a Leonardesque feel to my photo.
                Unfortunately, I do not have a dedicated studio in my house and have to set up tripods and light stands in available quiet corners when there is no one else about, (usually when my wife is out shopping!). I find studio photography to be rather intense intellectually, with so many settings, adjustments and fine

tuning to arrive at the desired effect. Each time I attempt a studio portrait shot, I try to incorporate a technique that I have never previously tried, in an effort to expand my repertoire of techniques. Yesterday, I positioned a speedlight behind the model (me) pointing towards the camera and screened by the model from  the camera, such that just a rim of light was dramatically created around the outline of my black jacket against a black background. I was quite pleased with the effect.
I used my Nikon D610 set to manual, 35 mm Yongnuo  prime, f5 at 1/200th, ISO 100. Three Godox V850 speedlights. I employed the 10 second self-timer with my face 1 metre from the camera.
                For dramatic effect I selected a bright yellow daffodil as my prop, experimenting with the daffodil hand held, vertical, horizontal----eventually feeling a mouth held version was the 'money' shot.
Pictured at right is a painting of Leonard projected up on to the end wall of a building on Crescent Street, Montreal, (Sept. 2019).

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Multi me......

               Although intuitively I was aware of the concept, there are two very interesting words that apply to  creative photographic work. The first of the words is 'of'', as in, a photograph of an apple. A superb and eye catching photo of a red apple, but nevertheless a rather boring and probably forgettable picture of said red apple. Now let us imagine the rosy red apple is caught by the camera at the very instant that a beautiful butterfly alights. Clearly, there is a story here 'about' the instance and the photographer's luck/skill in capturing such a fleeting, never to be repeated image.Where did the butterfly come from?  Where is it going?. Did it want to eat some of the apple? etc, etc, so many  questions to be asked of this simple scenario. As a result of this simple proposition, I shall in future try harder to have a story to tell about my creative output.

            The days and weeks of this Covid lock down grind on. Luckily I am almost always very busy with a list of household tasks to be completed---would Mrs. W. want it any other way?
Yesterday I embarked on a selfie project. With a shortage of live models in my life, I often have to hire yours sincerely to pose. Now I do charge a hefty fee to pose for myself, so in view of this cost I decided to go the value route and incorporate four of me in the photo---not so difficult to achieve thanks to Photoshop Elements. My tripod was carefully set up to ensure that the camera was stable &  untouched for each of the poses with the 10 second timer switched on so that I had time to hustle myself into position for each specific pose. To make the photo a little more interesting, I decided raid the wardrobe & to wear a different outfit for each pose. As with most things Photoshop, there are always multiple ways to achieve the same end effect. I opted to stack the images on top of each other, employing the rubber eraser tool, exposing the image (in this case, our trusty model) from the layer below. This layer on layer approach was repeated with erasure to expose the lower relevant layer details. Ultimately, I had each of the four models showing through to provide the effect of appearing that the different me's were all in the room concurrently. The entire project took me several hours to complete, but in an otherwise unhurried lock down day, I had lots of fun at zero cost to the household budget.

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Out in the garden.....

                 Likely we are still at the relative early stages of the 2020 corona virus lock down. The streets are eerily quiet, almost total absence of the big jet aircraft that continually criss-cross the city (Toronto, Canada) skies and yes, the air really does seem sweeter & cleaner. My eyes closed to concentrate senses, I drank my morning cup of coffee in the garden, enjoying the first spring day where the sun tentatively radiates discernible warmth downwards. With so few other distractions

beckoning,  my spring garden work is well ahead of schedule --- my wife has laid out detailed campaign plans to accomplish her vegetable and flower successes later in the year, always assuming Mother Nature decides to partner up in this project

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                    Local parks and nearby places of interest are virtually 100%  closed and with a strong desire to continue to develop my camera skills, I am daily hunting for fresh & captivating subjects located on the property, towards which to point my lens. It is now only days away from having to cut the rapidly thickening lawn & with this in mind, I dutifully spotted the trusty lawnmower lurking in the shadows of the darkest corner of the garden shed, covered in a layer of winter dust and accumulated oily smudges.
             

Many of the photography related channel operators on YouTube, themselves also house and apartment bound, have been presenting creative suggestions & ideas on how to spot candidate household objects & possessions as a basis for creative photographic ideas. With this approach in mind, I found myself rolling around the driveway trying to find new & dramatic angles to digitally capture my lawnmower now that she is all oiled & polished up for a full summer of work. Not easy to seize arresting depictions of the mundane mower. I quickly discovered that ground level angles--as viewed by the innocent earthworm just before being shredded, offered much more dramatic views of this noisy metal monster compared to the usual and rather boring 6ft high eye vantage point of the adult male.
                      Just a word on YouTube. Fantastic tool that we, here in 2020, are all privileged to be able use & enjoy. Personally I have learned so much about photography from a considerable number of highly qualified presenters. I have learned at my own (slow & plodding) pace, incorporating new procedures and techniques into my approach as best fitted my digital progress. On the flip side, YouTube can be a monumental time waster. So much intriguing, captivating (and potentially useless) material---so little time.

READERS: To make most sense of the continuity of this blog, it is suggested that you commence reading entries with the earliest posting date.