MorseBlog

I went out before my father to the lake house to open the place up. He had some chores for me and would follow shortly.  The whole area is different from two months ago when I left in the heat of early September and smoke from local fires. The first snows of winter had fallen a couple of days before and only now was the temperature edging up a degree or two above freezing.  The highway was clear of ice and snow but with white a rime of salt. The road out to the lake was still snowpacked in the shadows under the trees. The lake is also at its lowest level. After the summer recreational season the lake level is lowered about ten feet. Along this shore it extends a rocky beach ten to 20 yards out to the waters edge. The bay is merely its forlorn bottom. Fisherman’s island can now be walked to from the road.  Out on the water are hundreds of Western Grebes paddling around what must be shallows for feeding. The sky is overcast with low hanging thick cloud though small breaks a...

Introduction I flew back to the UK last month. I had taken a few nice photos (digital) in Idaho (see prior posts) and at the time I sought out a local shop to get larger prints made of some of them. I contacted an outfit in Spokane and after a little effort on their website got some photos uploaded to be printed as 8x10s for test prints. A week or so later they arrived in the post and I immediately thought yeech!. They all had this strange green tint. Now these were C-prints and I have never really had trouble with C-prints as it is a pretty mature technology. I hemmed and hawed about contacting them as some of this is quite subjective.  Finally, I decided to call and was put in touch with the owner who said she would check. She called later in the day and agreed they had a process problem. She said it would take a few days to sort out. I went away on a week-long camping trip and completely forgot she was supposed to send new prints. It took another ...

Introduction One image I took this last summer that I really like I ended up calling ' Together '. It was taken on a calm misty morning after a night of heavy rain. I was up at dawn and had the lake more or less to myself with the exception of one fisherman. The day was still and gray with a soft fog in the distance. I found these two Western Grebes swimming in the lightly rippled calm. I was out with my Fuji GFX 50s ii with a 55-110mm f4 zoom lens. A nice portrait composition came to mind with the grebes in the lower right corner and distant island in the upper left corner. This gave a nice tension as the island helps anchor the scene to give a reference to the incoherent surface of the water. There is faint hint of the water's edge at the horizon and a show of the mountains at the edge of vision. The ripples and subtle shades of blue give lots for the eye to contemplate.  I was walking the road that hugs the shore which places the perspective quite low on the water. I wan...