WINTER, LAKE NIPISSING

 

Winter has definitely arrived  here in North Bay and surrounding areas. Many parts of Ontario did not or hardly received any snow. Very unusual for this time of the season. I took this picture at the end of the popular cranberry trail in Callander. A black and white version of this landscape is also quite strong. However the colour version was my final choice In a future posting I might use the monochrome version.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

 

Christmas Eve and the right time to post a my Christmas image. I chose this image of one of my most favourite subjects, an old maple tree, which I have photographed since the early seventies. So here is my visual 

AGGREGATE PIT, NORTH BAY

 

A few years ago I visited an aggregate business  not far from my home. In the Winter of course, the only landscape is quite stark . everything blanketed in snow contrasting with the exposed, strongly textured gravel and sand. It is a great place to photograph because of the stark simplicity of the landscape. White and black interspersed with beautiful textures and patterns. 

WINTER LANDSCAPE, BLACK AND WHITE

 

It is the busy time before Christmas.Last week I designed and mailed our Christmas card which took up some time, but all the cards have been sent. So on Saturday my friend Gerry invited our friend John and me to go on a little photo safari. The weather forecast predicted a nice sunny day but of course it was quite overcast. Not a great problem because I overcast skies in the Winter. It makes for nice moody Winter shots with strong graphic images. We had a great day visiting some of our favourite spots. I decided to concentrate on black and white pictures. So here one example of that trip.  I hope you like it.

WINTER LANDSCAPE, COLOUR

 So here is the promised colour interpretation. Rob gave the black and white image 10 out of 10, so I am interested which picture he prefers. I used the word interpretation because I used a variety of filters and adjustments to create the Winter mood I was looking for. The enormous changes in the various photo adjustment programs gives me the same freedom as painters have to create the image to your own artistic interpretation.

WINTER LANDSCAPE, POWASSAN, ONTARIO

 

Again a. picture I took a few years ago in the Powassan area. It was a difficult decision which image to choose, so I decided to publish both interpretations. Today I start with the monochrome image, tomorrow the colour interpretation. Each image reflects the Winter season and both show a different aspect of the cold season. I feel that this image reflects a strong graphic meaning of the Winter season. But lets look at the colour picture and maybe this will decide my view of which picture is the one with the most impact.

DRAMATIC SKY, LAKE NIPISSING

 

Last Friday afternoon I made a visit at one of my local beaches here in North Bay. It was a pretty somber grey Fall day. But I was lucky because just when I arrived the sky started to open up at the horizon. Of course that was all the change I saw but it made for a pretty simple but dramatic picture, which, after I turned this simple landscape into a black and white image, became quite a visually impressive image.

FIRST SIGNS OF WINTER

 

This photograph was quite a challenge for me. The original is an old and I mean old, Agfa  slide. This type of film has a pretty limited life span. The colour was faded and showed discolouring on the edges. So, after scanning, I decided to turn the image into a monochrome picture and I am quite happy with the result. I took this picture early on a cold November morning and I like dark moody quality. Then I made some rather subtle changes with a LUT filter, which you can create yourself, to enhance the overal tone of the final image.

OLD BOOTS

 

About time to post another image. Again I have been rummaging through my files and liked this picture of old boots at one of my favourite places to visit the Powassan Treasure Mill. Its a fun place to take pictures.

The boots were black with the centre pair brown. So I turned the original colour image into a monochrome picture and then simply masked out the brown boots. It just added a contrast to this richly textured image.

 

COMPOSITION WITH COW PORTRAIT

 One of the places I visit, is a famous local house which is decorated  with all kind of found and collected junk. But lately it does not look that interesting any more. Everything looks neglected and deteriorated. Still, I did take a few pictures and liked this painting of a cow surrounded by some typical Canadian objects like old snowshoes, skates and hockey sticks. Again I prefer the monochromatic interpretation.

FOUR BRICKS

 

Composition with four bricks. The original was in colour but, after some study, I decided to turn the image into a monochromatic picture. Then I brought back the colour in the bricks to make them prominent in the composition and I liked the result. It definitely made the image visually stronger.

REEDS AND REFLEXIONS

 Another black and white image, which I took a few years ago when taking pictures around Munster, Ontario. It is a simple subject of reeds and its reflexion in water. I like the contrast between the detailed textured reed contrasted by the strong black and white reflexions, which look like a Japanese ink drawing.

LAKE NIPISSING, CLOUDS AND WAVE

 

Visited my favourite beach today. It was simply a glorious fall day. But instead of creating a colour interpretation of the landscape, I decided to render the scene into black and white. The reason, simple I liked the similarity between the clouds and the wave at the bottom. Black and white made the two elements more dominant in this composition.

FALL REFLECTIONS

A beautiful Fall day yesterday. We went for a walk along some trails, where we took pictures along a small creek. My first interest in running water are reflections and textures. I know what I can expect but of course the results are quite new and can be spectacular. The final image looks closer to an abstract painting rather than a straight photograph. Working with the various images on the computer is exciting because you manipulating the original file you can  see the image turn into final result you had in mind in the first place.

AUTUMN LEAVES

 

Just listening to Nat King Cole singing Autumn Leaves. I still love his interpretation of this popular song.

SoI am posting my visual interpretation. I like the painterly effect of this Fall image.

FALL LANDSCAPE

 

On the weekend I took a walk around the maple bush on the old Thorn’s farm property on our street. The house is gone but the old maple trees in the back of the property are still there for the time being. It’s a pity but I expect that soon we will see this nice area transform into some form of new development. So just in time to take some nice romantic Fall landscapes.  

WALK WAY, NORTH BAY, ONTARIO

 It has been a very long time since I posted a picture to my blog. Other projects have taken priority but I will certainly return to posting images again. This picture was taken last week on one of our walks through  the downtown neighbourhoods we like to explore. These areas are always an inspiration because there are always new ways of seeing the very familiar cityscapes. This picture was made while walking down one of the various walkways between streets. We enjoy those walkways reminding us of the paintings by a relative unknown painter Albert Frank who loved to walk along the various little lanes in Toronto, which he photographed and made into very delightful paintings.

RAIN

Rain today and yes I had to take a few pictures of hostas again. The two different patterns of the  drops and the lines from the leafs created a marvellous image.

SUMMER TEXTURES

Summer started yesterday, so to celebrate the new season I took some pictures in our garden. The garden is almost pure textures which we enjoy. The garden is predominantly coloured in a wide variety of greens, ranging from light yellow green to a deep forest green. However I decided to render my composition in black and white and yes I think this works quite well. It reminds me of the very powerful images of plants and gardens by the San Francisco photographer Imogen Cunningham.

DIPTYCH

Since the beginning of the pandemic I did not post any image on my blog. Actually I don’t have a good excuse for neglecting my blog. Not that I abandoned photography, far from it. this time was actually a good time to start looking at my past files and thinking about the direction my photography is taking me. Maybe it is my age but I found a renewed interest in my. black and white work. Also as I have mentioned earlier, I am very interested in what I would call my abstract photographs. Here is an example of my latest almost painterly experiments in my photography.

ROOTS

Time for another post. My choice  is a picture of some visually interesting tree roots. I am reading a book on Chinese art, a topic which has interested me for quite a long time. It is the ink drawings with just some light touches of colour, which I enjoy and recreate in this photograph. In this time  of isolation I like using my iPad to work on my pictures. There are some very good apps which allow you to explore different visual effects.

SPONTANEOUS ENVIRONMENTAL ART

Walking along the shore we came across this stacked rock “sculpture”, which I titled “spontaneous environmental sculpture”. I liked the simple elemental aspect. Not just the shape but alsothe colur and texture made a nice added surprise to our  walk.

EARLY SIGNS OF SPRING

Yesterday we went on a short little walk and photo shoot along the shores of lake Nipissing. It is still very early in the Spring season yet here in Northern Ontario. An overcast day which resulted in muted tones ranging from grey to yellow and browns. Actually closer to late Fall tones than the exuberance of the Spring colours of predominantly light green and yellow. It was a nice walk which resulted in a few nice images when I returned home. We are very fortunate living in a part of the country which allows us the freedom in these difficult and restrictive times to still go and enjoy the spiritual healing of simply walking and enjoying nature.

RED DOOR, HAILEYBURY, ONTARIO

Another picture from my file. when I saw this door, I was quite curious about the construction of the entrance to the building. It showed a very generous application of cement not just the entrance but also around the window. Looking at the file It reminded me of some nineteenth century gothic scene. Remembering old wet plate photos from that era I first made a black and white image, which I combined with the original colour file. Then I applied a variety of filters to end up with an early hand coloured final image. My workflow is quite simple, starting in Lightroom then switching to Photoshop to make my preliminary adjustments and finally using the various filters and settings in OnOne.   

CITY SCAPE, MONTREAL, PQ

We are going through some strange times and are housebound of course like nearly everyone else. This is a good time to go through all my books and discovering the work of photographers, which over time I simply lost. One of the photographers I rediscovered is the Italian photographer Gianni Pezzani. Looking at his beautiful hand coloured black and white images. Remembering my own time working in the darkroom. Much of the digital photography is technically superb of course but most of it looks the same and I long for the time when photography was more innovative than what we see today. Of course there are some very creative photographers who have created great work using the computer so I should not generalize of course. 

EARTH DAY 2020

Today is the day we celebrate our earth, the planet we call home. While we are  battling a pandemic , we have to remember another and a much greater problem is the deterioration of our home. This day should also be a time that we have to seriously start working on cleaning up home and it is our only home, which we will lose if we don’t seriously tackle the problems of cleaning up and preserve the air we breathe,  the land we are destroying and the oceans and rivers we keep polluting.  Maybe while we are trying to get this coronavirus pandemic under control we will start realizing that we have to change our unbridled consumerism into a more sustainable way of living. 

TAG GRAFFITI, MONTREAL

Being cooped up inside your house or apartment is of course no great fun. you are restricted in your movement and you simply can't grab your camera and wander around looking for new images. But look at it from a positive angle. this is a great time exploring your files and finding some great  forgotten images.

So this picture is from a trip we made in the very early Spring a few years ago to Montreal.
Tagging is the simplest style of graffiti but this reminded me of a quote by Michael Ondaatje from his book In the Skin of a Lion.

"Everyone has to scratch on walls somewhere or they go crazy”

Now back to my files looking for more forgotten pictures.

HAPPY EASTER

I like to wish all of you a Happy Easter. Yes I know times are very trying and frustrated but Easter offers us a message of hope and a reminder that better times will definitely return.

OLD CHURCH, CACHE BAY, ONTARIO

It has been quite awhile since my last posting. Actually I seriously have neglected posting to my blog. Maybe it was the Winter weather or other projects I am working on. I have not been on any serious photo excursions this Winter, but last Friday Gerry and I made a nice trip starting in Cache Bay and ending in Port Loring. The reason we went to Cache Bay was simply to see the state of the old Anglican church, which we had photographed earlier. The church is slowly deteriorating and we suspect that it is beyond restoration and will disappear in the next few years.  It will be a pity to see a bit of local history disappear. 

OLD SAWMILL, CACHE BAY

Time to post another picture. Lately I have been going through some of my old negatives and I came across some pictures I took many decades ago. These are the remains of the old sawmill in Cache Bay. It reminded me of a book I read in my late teens by the British explorer Percy Fawcett  and  his quest in finding the lost city Z, as he named it, in Mato Grosso in Brazil. Nobody knows if he ever found it because he disappeared in 1925. The fictional character Indiana Jones was loosely baseed on Percy Fawcett.