It’s been a month since the last SMP blog entry so an update is long over due. It seems we’ve been just too busy to process any files and keep the website & blog refreshed with everything else that’s been going on at our place. The CF cards have been piling up by my computer so there will be lots of fresh material coming soon.
Our daughter Lindsay married Cameron Bechtold on July 24th in Geneva, New York, so we now have a wonderful son-in-law. They will be living in Lynchburg, Virginia for the next two or three years while they finish their degrees and then start grad school at Liberty University. Although I wasn’t the wedding photographer (too busy being father of the bride) I was able to take a few portraits of Lindsay before the wedding which I’ll post as soon as they are processed. For the portraits I used the new Canon EF 100 mm f/2.8 L IS macro. It’s an excellent lens and fun to use although I must admit I still have a huge soft spot for the 85mm f/1.2 L lens that it replaced in my lens kit. The versatilty of the macro is much better than the 85/1.2 and it’s equally as sharp even though a lot less expensive.
We are now looking forward to our son Jeffrey and his fiance Ellesse’s wedding in Toronto on October 1st….only eight weeks away! It’s been a busy season for weddings in the Martin family but it’s been fantastic as we have gained an incredible daughter in law and son in law.
Jeff & Ellesse were engaged in March in Florida and I was pleased to be able to take the engagement photographs. They were all taken at Disney World at the Grand Floridian Hotel. Most of the images were taken with the 24-105 f/4 L IS and the 70-200 f/2.8 L IS lenses.
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More images of Jeff & Ellesse can be seen in their gallery
This entire blog entry was done from the cottage on an iPad2 tethered to an iPhone4 for internet access. It worked very well except I couldn’t resize the images to better fit the blog layout. That will have to wait until I get home.
Although the spring warbler migration is ramping up nicely, this first blog entry for May will contain no bird images. Instead it is designed to get you into your local theater to view the movie “Soul Surfer” which tells the incredible story of professional surfer Bethany Hamilton, who lost her left arm in an attack by a fourteen foot Tiger Shark on October 31, 2003, while surfing off the coast of Kauai, Hawaii. Bethany Hamilton was only thirteen years old when she lost her arm yet miraculously she was back in the water one month later and competed again in January 2004. In 2005 Bethany won her first national title and then realized her childhood dream by turning professional in 2007.
My wife and I saw Soul Surfer a few weeks ago and enjoyed it immensely. The movie chronicles Bethany’s life and that of her close-knit family, whose lives revolve around surfing and a strong faith in the Lord; a faith that sustained Bethany through the loss of her arm and was her strength to continue on surfing despite the humanly impossible odds. This movie is a must see movie.
In October 2006 while vacationing in California, Deb & I were at the ISA-XXI World Surfing Games being held at Huntington Beach. Many countries from around the world were represented at these games, including the American Team of which Bethany Hamilton was a member representing her home state of Hawaii. It was an amazing experience for us as we were able to photograph the competitors and actually ended up alongside the Hawaiian team, who explained in detail how to spot developing waves and gauge which ones would potentially result in the perfect wave to ride with the short boards they were using at the games.
The following are some images of the Soul Surfer, Bethany Hamilton. I trust they encourage you to go see the movie (and plan a trip to Huntington Beach :)). The surfing images are fairly large crops as they were taken with a 70-200/2.8 IS lens mounted on my first DSLR, the Canon 20D (which you will get a glimpse of in the last image).
Contemplation
Panoramic crop
Riding the wave.
Part of the Hawaiian team.
Heading out for another session.
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The Hawaiian Team with the Huntington Beach Pier in the back ground.
The Viera Wetlands are a series of water retention ponds that are part of the town of Viera’s waste management system. Viera is located on Florida’s Space Coast approximately 15 miles south of Cocoa Beach. The Wetlands provide the perfect environment for both resident and migratory birds with the variety of species present truly amazing. It’s common to photograph twenty to thirty species on a good day. Besides birds you can also count on seeing alligators and the odd snake as well. For a more complete description of the Viera Wetlands please follow this link.
Viera is also a great place to meet other birders and photographers who are always happy to point you towards a new bird or tell you about a rare migrant they’ve seen or photographed.
Besides the tremendous variety of birds present at Viera it is also a place where the birds seem quite used to the presence of people and will allow surprisingly close access, especially if you are patient. In terms of gear I’ve used everything from a 24-105, 70-200/2.8, 400/5.6 and 500/4 with a 1.4xTC for 700mm; so when heading to Viera bring everything you’ve got because you will probably be able to use it all!
The following images are some favourites taken at the Viera Wetlands over the past few years (all taken during the month of March when we vacation in Florida each year).
Crested Caracara
Osprey with fish
Limpkin
Cattle Egret
Least Bittern
Northern Harrier
Blue Wing Teal
Ring Necked Duck (which is a new species for me, taken last month)
and the female
And finally here is one of those alligators I told you about. This is the first ‘gator I’d photographed and it was about eight feet long. As I was lying on the grass about fifteen feet away to take this full frame shot, it donned on me that it probably wasn’t a wise thing I was doing. Fortunately he wasn’t hungry.
Make sure the next time you are in Florida you include a trip to the Viera Wetlands. You will be glad you did.
This past Saturday, my wife, son and about fifty other friends mostly from Calvary Baptist Church spent the day at the Oshawa Curling Club enjoying the great game of curling. It was a rather relaxed bonspiel with each team playing four games throughout the day with lots of time to eat and socialize between games. If you have never curled before you really should give it a try. It’s a wonderful game that’s lots of fun and couples can play together as it’s not a particularly physical game, although you can work up a sweat sweeping!
Curling, like golf, is a game with Scottish origin dating back to medieval times with the first written mention of the sport in 1541 and the first paintings depicting curling trace back to 1565 Scotland. The first curling club was founded in 1716 in Scotland and it is still active today! The Royal Montreal Curling Club is the oldest in Canada and has been operating since 1807. The Oshawa Curling Club was founded in 1882.
Curling is a rather “simple” game which involves sliding a 44 pound granite stone along about 150 feet of ice and having that rock stop as close as possible to the button which is essentially the bulls-eye of a target 12 feet in diameter. After each of the four members of the two teams playing have thrown two stones each in alternating order, the team with the rock closest to the button gets a point for each stone that is closer to the button than any of the other team’s stones.
Curling Stones have changed greatly over the years from flat river stones to the high-tech $650.00, forty four pound hunks of granite they are today. The Canadian Curling Stone Company is a world-wide leader in curling stone manufacturing with most of the stones used in world-class bonspiels coming from the Canadian company.
The brooms used for sweeping the rocks down the ice, to help control the distance & curl of the rock, have also changed a lot over the years, from the old corn brooms of the past to the synthetic brushless brooms used today. In fact the “brooms” used today are actually brushes, but you will never hear hem referred to as anything but brooms.
Although curling predated the invention of indoor curling rinks, virtually 100% of curling matches now take place inside a curling rink where the ice conditions are perfect. Here is an inside view of the Oshawa Curling Club which has been in operation since 1882 and has hosted several national & international bonspiels over its many years of operation.
As this is a photography blog please take time to notice the difference between the two quite similar images above. The first is from a higher angle of view using a small aperture to create more depth of field (keeping everything in focus) and making the curling rink the object of the image. The second image has a much lower angle of view and larger aperture to create a very shallow depth of field. Although the composition of the two is similar the object of the second clearly becomes the curling stones. Whenever you are out shooting, remember to shoot the same scene from different angles of view and at differing apertures. Differing angles of view and apertures can make similarly composed images look completely different from each other.
To end this post, here are a few shots of curlers pushing off the hack and delivering the stone down the sheet of ice presumably to stop on the button. These images were all taken with a Canon 1D MkIII and 70-200 f/2.8 IS lens. I believe the following images were all taken at f/2.8 to create a shallow depth of field, blurring the distracting back ground elements that are often found when in an indoor setting. The problem with shooting at f/2.8 is that the depth of field is so shallow it is hard to get all of the person in perfect focus. This problem is minimized by using the AI Servo focusing mode which tracks the object in the viewfinder and continuously adjusts the focus to keep the object sharp.
Virtually everyone these days seems to have an iPhone in their pocket, or perhaps some lesser smartphone like a Black Berry or Android. Actually this statement isn’t too far from the truth as I read this week that it is predicted that there will be 30,000,000 cell phones activated in Canada by 2013 and that the market penetration of smartphones will increase to 50% by that time (from 32% in 2010). So it seems that soon everyone in Canada will have a cell phone and half of them will be smartphones.
The versatility of smartphones is amazing and they can even be used effectively in nature photography. The camera phones are sporting processors with 5-7 megapixels which rival those of professional DSLR bodies of only a decade ago (I know…. that’s like comparing apples & oranges however the point is image quality is great in today’s smartphones).
So next time you are out for a trail walk, take your iPhone and have fun with it. Talking pictures is far more enjoyable than catching up on your email. Take some bird seed and it wont be long before the chickadees will find you. Put you camera on your wrist, some seeds in your hand and practice your timing to take the picture. The camera phones can focus to very short distances so just snap away.
The technique resulted in this image, taken at Halls Road in Ajax.
Don’t forget to have your camera phone ready when you see the big animals as well, however when you take ‘full frame’ shots of a Moose with your iPhone you are probably too close to the moose. This image was taken on the Mizzy Lake Trail in Algonquin Park.
Taking videos with smartphones is also a lot of fun and certainly helps capture the memories of the day. Here is a friend of mine providing the most expensive perch I’ve ever seen used for taking pictures of Chickadees with an iPhone 🙂
Yesterday morning provided the opportunity to photograph three new bird species; the Pileated Woodpecker, Common Redpoll and Evening Grosbeak. If all goes well they will be posted on the website in the next couple of days. If you want to read new blog posts as soon as they are posted please click the Orange RSS feed button on the top right side of this post. You can then have my blog sent to your Google Homepage, Google Reader or any number of other subscription readers that you prefer.
About two weeks ago I was privileged to do a photo shoot for Carriage Trade Cleaning Centres and thought I would share a few of the images from that shoot. Carriage Trade is in the process of revamping their website and the purpose of the shoot was to generate images that would show best in a panoramic crop and be used as header and banner images on the new website. Although the images needed to illustrate the many facets of the cleaning centres it was also important to include the Carriage Trade branding as much as possible.
There are two Carriage Trade Cleaning Centres. The original facility opened on Simcoe Street North in Oshawa, Ontario in April 1982 and the second opened more recently in Courtice Ontario. Carriage Trade is a multi-generation family owned business that provides superior garment cleaning with value added services that are second to none, including 24 hour clothes drop off, drive through, complimentary minor garment repair and even a freshly ground cup of coffee brewed to your specification! They are also unique in that Carriage Trade Cleaning Centres are ‘wet’ cleaners using only water and natural detergents and cleaning agents that are 100% organic, mostly derived from citrus products. There are no chemicals used in the cleaning process so Carriage Trade is solvent free and entirely green in its operation. For years the typical ‘dry’ cleaners have used dangerous chemicals like PERC (tetrachloroethylene) to clean clothes, which is toxic to the environment and ironically doesn’t clean clothes as efficiently as the natural solvent free system used by Carriage Trade Cleaning Centres.
Carriage Trade Cleaning Centres are nationally and internationally recognized having received numerous community, industry and government awards. They also enjoy the distinction of being the first solvent free cleaning centre in North America.
I hope you enjoy this small sampling of images from Carriage Trade Cleaning Centres and if ever you are in need of any commercial photography please don’t hesitate to contact us as we would be glad to help.
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For all your cleaning needs in Oshawa or Clarington Ontario, Carriage Trade Cleaning Centres are simply the best.
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