Everclear

I screwed up and left this post in draft mode for the past week. 

Mike and I went to the Everclear concert at The Ruby Amphitheater at Hazel Ruby McQuain Park.  The opening band was The Sages.  I had never hear of them before, but the played well to a full crowd.  Everclear, a popular band from the 90s,  played to an SRO audience.   I guess people like them a lot more than Leftover Salmon, which I saw last week.  

I only had a passing familiarity with Everclear's music.  I was in the minority there.   People were singing along to a lot of their songs.

Well, this time I brought my camera and a Canon RF 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM lens.   

Here's a good shot of The Sages:

As you can see, it paid to sit higher up and back.  We could actually see the band over the heads of all of the people standing in front of the stage.

Here are a couple of shots of Everclear:

A Visit to the Morgantown Botanical Garden

 As the the title implies, I toured the Morgantown Botanical Garden yesterday afternoon.  I saw this as an opportunity to try out my recent purchase of an AK Diffuser, which provides even lighting for macro photographs.  These are purportedly custom made for specific camera and flash combinations.

Using this diffuser, I took a variety of mushroom pictures in the woods.  Unpracticed as I am with using my ancient Canon Speedlite flash, I still had to resort to cranking the ISO level on my camera, alternating between 1000 and 2000 ISO. I've downloaded the manual for the Speedlite 580 EX, so now I can research how to increase the amount of light being emitted. 

Here's a cute little Yellow American Blusher (Amanita flavorubens): 

 

This is a tiny little Winter Russula (Russula cremoricolor) nestled deeply among the leaf litter:

As you can see, the AK diffuser provided an even lighting for what would normally be a dark, shadowy picture.

Finally, I was able to catch the Great Rhododendron (Charlie Brown), which was blooming in the forest:

If I had any sense at all, I should check out the Deckers Creek trail or the cliff at Coopers Rock State Forest for some more picturesque wide-angle shots.

The Macro has Landed

 Earlier, I had explained how I needed the old Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM lens to get the Canon 77D back in the game.   The lens has arrived and it seems to be working fine.

Today's Macro Monday theme on Flickr was "sports," bearing in mind that the representation of sport had to fall with a three-inch diameter.  My choice for that macro was to shoot the hub and spokes of my bicycle.  To try out the new/old lens, I set up a 20-shot stack.  From that, I picked alternating shots and stacked them that way.   This save a lot of processing time, especially since my laptop storage is teetering on "full."  Not owning any specialized photo stacking software, I performed that job in PhotoShop.  I left some blurry areas amongst where some of the spokes crossed over.  I laboriously went in and used the clone stamp and heal tool to fill in the blurred spaces.

Here's the final product:

The stacking really helped to bring out the depth of this picture.  You would have to know what to look for to even suspect that this picture had been edited.  In my defense, I wasn't putting in something that wasn't there, I was restoring some tiny blurry areas that PhotoShop had created when it processed that stack.

Repurchasing an Old Lens

 Don't get me wrong.  I'm very happy with my latest camera, a Canon R6 Mark II.  But I'm still hanging on to my 77D, an APS-C Canon from 2017.  But in the process of moving to the mirrorless world, I had sold off some of my older lenses, one of which was the Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM.  I now regret parting with that lens.  I miss having a macro lens on the 77D and I can foresee times when I would use that camera to supplement my macro photography.

Alas, the EF-S 60mm is no long in production.  Canon stopped producing it and decided to emphasize their newer R-series lenses for mirrorless cameras.  The lenses are still available on the used market, however.  Prices are said to range between $275 and $410.  I searched eBay and found that most lenes were close to $300 and well beyond.

I broke down and bought a lens from ProPhoto Supply for $250, including shipping.  It's on its way now.

Crazy Tuesday

 Another Flickr group that I participate in is called "Crazy Tuesday."  It is a moderated theme-based group, where the subject matter changes from week to week according to a chosen theme.   This week's theme for instance is "stamps."  

Yesterday, I worked on a sheet of Ukrainian wildflower stamps from the year 2000.  Here's what I finally came up with:

I was pretty happy with this, but then I thought that it seemed silly to have just a picture of stamps.  I could have easily just done it with a scanner.  It needed a little something else.   Today, I worked on reshooting these stamps to include some flower in the margin.  Just something to emphasize that the stamps weren't merely scanned.

At first, I used my go-to lens:  a Canon RF100mm F2.8 L MACRO IS USM lens mounted on a tripod.  Even with Adobe Lightroom, however, my image was a little skewed.  I reshot once more, this time using a Canon RF24mm F1.8 MACRO IS STM lens.  The wide angle gave me a lot of extra room around the subject, so that any distortion was away from the center of my subject.

I was careful to place the flowers in such a way that any shadow they cast would be towards the lower-right.  My natural light source was coming from the top.  Exposure was .3 seconds at f/8 and 200 ISO.  This was actually created from three bracketed shots and processed as an HDR -- High Dynamic Range -- which captures a much wider range of light and shadow.

Somehow, I suspect that I may encounter some resistance from the group moderator, as she had said this:

Your photo must unambigoulsy show the THEME OBJECT which FILLS THE FRAME (without a big negative space) and the THEME must be RECOGNIZABLE (without having to say in the description “it is this or that”. As our group’s name is CRAZY TUESDAY – some craziness is very welcome but WITHIN the implemented group rules/requirements. Sometimes that is more or less possible – depending on the theme.

I've run afoul of group rules before that has resulted in my picture being removed.  I'm going to state my case in the photo description, arguing that I didn't want to post something that looks like a scanned image.  We shall see.

About this stamp sheet

The "Flowers of Ukraine" (also known as Plant World Flowers) stamps, issued in October 2000, are a beloved series of 10 miniature stamps designed by artist Kateryna Shtanko. This iconic wildflower souvenir sheet placed 3rd in the seventh World Cup of the stamp held by Timropresse.

There Was Music

 Last night we attended the first show of the Ruby Summer Concert Series at the waterfront park.  These are free concerts every Friday night during the summer at Ruby Amphitheater.

The warmup act for the show was a band called The Cooley Gang. I ripped this blurb from their web site:

(Their music) spans many classic genres including: bluegrass, old time, rock & roll, gypsy jazz, folk, jam band, and cowboy songs.

They were a tight band and surprisingly good.  Here's a shot of them:

I had to post this picture of a dog that I saw at the concert.

It apparently had sensitive hearing or just disliked loud noise.  These ear protectors just be specially made for pooches because there are big paw print logos on either side.   There were moment when I wished that I had something like that.  We were sitting in the fourth row from the stage, and my Apple watch had warned me several times about high decibel levels.

The featured band was called the Leftover Salmon.  They are a classified as a jam band and their music was somewhat reminiscent of the Greatful Dead.  They were good!  I'll have to look into some of their music on YouTube.  If you want to learn more about them, click on the Leftover Salmon link at the top of this paragraph.  It will direct you to their Wikipedia entry.

Here's a shot I took as we were leaving.

 

Next time we go to one of these concert, We're going to sit much further back,  so that we will get an unobstructed view of the band, whereas from the fourth row we had to contend with people dancing and standing in front of the stage.

Looking close on Friday!

 One of the Flickr groups that I belong to is called "Looking close... on Friday!"  It's a venue for close-up or macro photographs, where each week calls for a different theme.  This week's theme was "bracelet on white background."

I usually spend way to much time trying to come up with an idea for a submission.  I took a few shots of various bracelets that wife had in her jewelry collection.  I finally decided on this:

This pair of gold bracelets has an interesting history, especially so now that Iran is back in the news.  These were brought back from Iran in 1979 by my wife's brother, who had been employed there as a helicopter technician prior to the fall of the Shah of Iran.