Your Canon Photos No. 48: 31st March to 6th April 2024

Thanks, Dunlin. I think the answer to your question is obvious: there used to be abbatoirs there, at a suitable distance from where the aristocracy lived, of course.

David

David,

Looking at your tree blossom photos again, for me the second one is my favorite. That's because the background is not "busy" with other darker leaves. I did not find good examples yesterday since we did not have much sunshine (of what I'm thinking in my head). I looked through old photos too but didn't find any either. I know at times I've had the luck to have found that single flowery branch extending out against the blue sky.

Interesting! I like it less than the others because there is not much contrast with the light background... But I wanted to get close.

David

Dig,

I had occasion to make my weekly grocery run today (about 20 miles away). There were downed power lines, torn off roofs and uprooted trees within 3 miles of us.

We were pretty lucky.

Steve Thomas

Steve,

I hope you all are safe. Did you take pictures of the downed lines etc.? That would be neat to see. Often I take pictures from the car. Fortunately I can do that as a passenger, so I make every opportunity to do that.

Here's one I took in early March. I don't know if anyone finds it interesting, but stormy clouds and conditions can really look neat. Oh, yeah...I took this from a moving car. 😀

Model - Canon EOS M50m2
ExposureTime - 1/500 seconds
FNumber - 9
ISOSpeedRatings - 100
ExposureBiasValue - -0.33
FocalLength - 45 mm
Lens Model - EF-M15-45mm f/3.5-6.3 IS STM

Dig,

No.

I lived through a tornado back in 2005 that killed 22 people. A tree fell on my house. Power lines were down everywhere. No water. The National Guard with guns was called in and set up roadblocks. They had a looter spread eagled in my driveway.

I have bad memories of tornadoes.

Steve Thomas

Steve,

That's too bad about the tornadoes. I lived in Colorado for about five years and never saw one. I saw what looked like a tornado once that did not touch the ground. I heard about another tornado that was near our house. I heard from someone else that it looked like chimney smoke, that went high up the sky. It was small and only damaged someone's fence and maybe part of the roof.

When I'm in the car, I often am ready for anything. I've taken photos of car and motorcycle accidents too, but I don't think I showed them to anyone on-line. The accidents were not serious or bloody so that I think I could have showed them. But yes, if I see anything "newsworthy", I'll be out taking photos of it. Once we had a fire in small town and I documented that for a long time (over several days). One homeless person died there, who was apparently sleeping at the wrong place and the wrong time. They found the body later under the rubble. But of course, if I saw the body I would not post it on-line. Legally I could, but I have my own ethics about something like that. It's the same with my street photos of people. If I see something that I feel is embarrassing about someone (using my own judgement) I won't post that either.

What was the reason you did not take pictures of the destruction? Did you forget the camera? Or was it for personal reasons that you would rather not discuss? I'm just curious. I like to encourage people to use their cameras all the time, whether it is a cell phone or an expensive camera/lens etc.

If I had seen the National Guard, they would have had their pictures taken. 😀 I probably would have waved to them and got some cool images. I used to take pictures of protesters in Portland, Oregon as if I was a reporter, but it got to be too dangerous over the years. I think they did not like us photographers documenting any of their illegal activities. At least, that's my guess. But I stayed out of harm's way and now no longer do that. That was when I was a lot younger.

Steve,

Whereabouts are you located? I lived 16 years in Indiana, but luckily escaped the devastation in what we used to call "hurrican alley", just south of Indianapolis, which used to get hit every year. One year there was a day when I looked through the kitchen window and saw all the leaves picked up from the yard, and swirling like tea in a cup. Luckily this didnt last long... Another year, in March, we had a big snow storm and the power line between the transformer and the house was brought down, together with some boundary trees. We were without power for three days. When the men came in the middle of the night to fix the problem, I heard their amazement and language: " ~-/... me". etc! Then I spent the next severala days cutting up the trees and schlepping them away, as all the people who did that were too busy working for others! But we survived and nobody was hurt.

There are strict laws here in the EU about taking photos of people. Because of these, it is not clear whether it is legal or not to have a dashcam in Austria. I keep thinking of getting a pair and not wiring them or turning them on, just to intimidate the bad drivers that get too close! The roads are quite narrow, and are getting narrower, due to the constant addition of bike lanes (see the photos of roadworks I showed recently), so I traded my large car for one that is much smaller. But the SUVs around me keep getting larger and are much higher! One day soon, as in Paris, it will be too expensive for people to have these enormous vehicles. Many of them come from eastern Europe, including Ukraine.

Keep safe all of you!

David

The first wild bluebells are starting to flower.

Recently I took quite a radical change in how I deal with my photos.
I've (mainly) moved to storing my photos in Google Photos. Why? It was getting a bit much processing and organising all my shots every few evenings. I couldn't really justify spending so much time on it.
I'm still going to shoot RAW for the creative stuff (or the stuff I really wanna get right), but otherwise for most of the time I'm going to shoot JPG. It might sound slightly daft, but after I converted a bunch of built-up RAWs at default settings (using OM Studio) and uploaded them to G-Photos, I felt a weight lifted off my shoulders that I didn't know was there. I feel like now I can focus on the enjoyable part of making photos. It's also giving me the necessary motivation to change settings in-camera, rather than at the processing stage, which I feel is a good change.
I'll probably circle back to shooting all RAW eventually, but for now it's a liberating change.

I'm also back on Windows (for now), as linux was becoming a bit of a distraction. Too many customisation possibilities.
There's one Windows-only program I found out I was really missing - FastStone Image viewer. It's such a useful program. In Linux I need two or three different apps to replace what it does.

Anyway, I thought I'd let y'all know.

Just thought I'd drop in and say hello.

What's for lunch?

Steve Thomas

I cant understand how this change saves time. Please explain for me. I keep all mine in folders organised by date on a dedicated drive.

This is really interesting. What settings do you adjust in-camera that you previously did later?

I shoot both raw and jpg and it is rare that I find the jpg looks like what I want, though it does sometimes happen. In particular, I appreciate the fact that the actual exposure value of a raw file is more flexible: I can change the levels without running into problems with too much noise or blown highlights, as happens with jpgs.

A good example is this one:

This figure, which was originally part of the fountain in the Neuer Markt is made of lead, and the lighting in the museum is quite subdued. So I set exposure compensation to +1EV. This turned out to be a little too much, so in post processing I brought it back down to +0.61 EV, which tamed the overcooked highlights and enabled me to turn up the midtones and shadows in PhotoLab. I find I can be much more precise in the settings using this program than in the camera. I also did a little noise reduction, because ISO had to be set very high.

I also like FastStone, but I now prefer to view photos in PhotoLab, where I do almost everything. I agree that Linux is a bit of a distraction.

David

Dunlin,

The wild bluebell flowers are beautiful. That's interesting that you changed your workflow. Have you compared the photos you took as RAW and compared them to the JPEGs that are taken straight from the camera? How different are they?

Steve,

Excellent. Is that a ground hog?

Instead of converting [from RAW], then tagging/rating them, I'm going to shoot JPG more often and let Google photos deal with the DAM.

Oh, just basic stuff like white balance and whatnot.

I know and agree that RAW is superior, I just wasn't enjoying converting every photo and OOC JPGs are often just fine for me.

Some. I find that most of the time JPGs are fine for me (the main exception being when the sun in the photo).

Dunlin,

What's the old saying, "Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good".

If you get to a point where you are not enjoying yourself anymore, then what's the point?

Steve Thomas

The new weekly thread is open here. Please start using it now.

David

These are a few from last week, taken on 6 April 2024.

Welcome DanHasLeftForum. I just love the beach scenes. I was supposed to go to the beach myself in Oregon this weekend, but I had other issues that preventing me from doing that.

Each week we post a new photo posting thread. So now we are on the thread dated from April 7th to April 13th. So please join us over there. You can re-post your images on that weekly thread or just add more if you would like. Again, welcome!

I like the brown seeds as a contrast to the green colors too!

I should clarify. We start a new thread each week. It doesn't matter when the photo was taken. It does not have to be at the same time. For example, I showed some images on the April 7th to 13th thread that were a little more than two years old. Usually people seem to show "current" pictures, but there's no rules for that.

Thank you Digirame 😊

he just has never left 😂

He was gone for a few months and is not the only one with access to this username.