My husband and I were visiting Canada some 3 years ago. We stayed there for a month, and although I was working on a scientific project, I was not working on the weekends and afternoons. Having a car, it was a great chance to get to know the region, and we took a whole advantage of it. We visited Vancouver, and took a ferry to Vancouver Island. On one of the weekends, we drove thew Sea to Sky Highway up to Whistler, where they just started to work on the Olympic Village. On the way back, we saw this beautiful waterfall from the road. It was impressive. It looked to me like it is starting at the top of the mountain. We stopped and took some photographs from close-by, but I still think it looked better from the distance.

Today’s image comes from the same session Tomasz mentioned several days ago. We were finishing off our evening in the studio, when I thought- how about paring a yellow gerbera with a yellow lemon? He was not very convinced at first, and when I set it up and took several images, I was not so sure myself. But it somehow transformed on the screen into quite an interesting still life.

It was a beautiful day, I was off work, I was running errands and just had my iPhone with me. I took a number of images of those berries, all around town, and was so disappointed when I uploaded them on my computer. Side note- I never put an iPhone image on blog before I see it on a big screen. What happened, and what I have not seen on the small screen on the iPhone was how dark the berries came out- there was too much contrast between overcast sky and them. So I took my big camera and retraced my steps, to take the images I wanted!

Today we’ve decided to shoot some flowers. Iza bought two nice gerberas so we tried to arrange them into something eye catching. After several tries of face shots I came up with an idea of simulating nice spring morning with the flower pointing itself out straight up into the sun, trying to catch as much of the heat as it possibly can. Quick rearrangement of flashes, blue gel on one of them and here is the result:

Now if only the real sun was so kind and show up again…

You are probably quite familiar with the newest major credit card commercials where they use various objects to resemble a smile? The commercial itself isn’t particularly appealing to me, but the concept of impersonating various items around us stuck with me. So imagine my joy when I saw this red-green face smiling at me while we were out few days ago . I just had to take picture of it. And let Iza play a little bit.

This image was perfect for one thing I wanted to try recently, which is one-image HDR. It was taken from several feet on the very foggy day, so it was seriously lacked contrast. I moved a bunch of sliders in Lightroom before coming up with this idea, and I like the final result.

In a recent post I’ve mentioned mixed feelings about Nikon’s own service center where we have our D300 repaired. The feelings are mixed enough that next time I will think twice before choosing Nikon’s service center over the certified repair facility (which, remember, still can repair your hardware under warranty). Here are some pros and cons:

Pros:

- the hardware will undergo extensive check covering every functionality, not only the case reported (that’s the mysterious TO GWO on work order – to good working order). Our body got some parts replaced (unrelated to auto focus mechanism), the autofocus properly adjusted, they cleaned it, checked metering and ttl system, the whole 9 yards.

- if the hardware needs to be replaced, you’ll get the newest piece down the line (e.g. in our case it would be D300s. ‘unfortunately’ our was repairable’)

- in border line cases, the Nikon is going to propose you paid upgrade

Cons:

- there are only two service centers in the US. So shipping takes several days for us living in the middle of nowhere, Iowa.

- also it takes forever to get the equipment fixed. Our body was lying 4 days there before it even get registered in their system, and then another 5 before it even got to repair shop.

- there is virtually nobody to talk to to get some status update or information – the call center is on the other side of the US in New Jersey, there is no email or phone listed anywhere to talk to anybody directly at the center handling your body. All you are left with is a status on the website saying ‘in shop’ and a trust that Nikon will buck up the service center with it’s name so if something happens they can make it up to you.

So would I do it again? If it’s body under warranty – definitely yes. If it’s a lens, or flash, or body out of warranty – I will probably get much faster and cheaper service at APS in Chicago

We decided again to participate in Digital Photography School Weekend challenge. We are rather guilty of cherry-picking the subjects, although putting together both of our creativity and some time on weekends, we managed almost anything. This time, Good Morning challenge took us to photograph our Saturday breakfast. We ended up eating it cold, in lunch time!

When I saw yet another contest on Darwin Wiggett blog, this time calling for a Canadian landscape, I instantly thought about our old images from the trip to Vancouver almost 3 years ago. We took the images with our Konica Minolta Dimage Z2 we had back then. Although the quality of images varies significantly, both by composition and graininess due to not great performance in high ISO (like 200 ), I am sure I will be able to pick up something for the contest. Meantime, one of the images just looked like HDR almost by itself, but I decided to improve it even more. We took it one evening on the walk around Granville Island, disappointed that the market was already closed, but willing to explore the neighborhood nevertheless.

I was wondering already for a while about how many people are reading the blog, and how many people are subscribing to RRS feed (meaning even if they don’t regularly read, at least it lends in their Inboxes, which for me is still better then opening the web page from time to time). I am not alone there, as Brian Auer was recently pondering on full vs truncated feed in context of getting people to the page. Yes, it takes a lot of time and energy to build and improve the web page, and although I am going to continue working on it, I would prefer to have people subscribe, and this is also how I am treating my favorite blogs. They are in my RRS feeder, and unless they post a movie, I will go for years without ever going to the web page again (after initial visit to get RRS address that is ). And just to throw a thought on Brian’s dilemma, the blogs with truncated posts in RRS feed are quickly deleted from my reader, and unless the person tweets about every post, they are quickly forgotten.
In any case, I would be interested in how you, my reader, are reading this blog, so here is the simple poll for you.

We took s short walk in the park, just looking for something, anything. There were some red-branched bushes, with drops of water from settling fog. They were so photogenic and hard to photograph at the same time, due to movement from the wind. But from one of the keepers, I made a simple fine art matte. What I enjoy about the image is the drop, the color of the branch, and all the colors of the blurred by the fast lens background of remaining part of the bush.