chasing the focus

Long days with a lot of light – and short nights with almost non-existent darkness. And even that short darkness isn’t pitch black but dusky. Finland at its best. Beautiful.

I’ve been sort of hibernating and so has my camera. But today was a warm, beautiful sunny Saturday. For once the glorious weather came in the weekend! So I took my camera and went out. I didn’t go outside our own gate and still managed to find many delightful things! (Click an image to go into the original gallery)

Yes, the winter has been hard. Long, cold and hard. And it shows in the things that come out when the snow finally melts.

But the bikes have been deported from the greenhouse where they spend the winter. Hubby has started making room for potatoes and other growing stuff.

It’s finally warm enough for the pooches to be outside without their wooly sweaters. They love the sun and the warmth :)

And they shed……..

There’s still a lot of snow left so I had to do some shovelling to get where I wanted to…

…but it was worth the effort because I found these

and these

and these!

Gotta love it, don’t you think? :)

The winter continues…  It has warmed up a bit but the snow blanket keeps getting thicker as we speak. I took this photo a couple of weeks back – it’s been too cold to go out there with my camera, so I’m digging into my archives.

I took this one about week ago when everything still was very white. Now the wind has brushed some of the frost off the trees. However, my problem was that most of the walkway was lit with orange streetlights (yuck…) and at the end of the path there suddenly was a very cold blue light. So straight out of the camera this picture looked pretty awful – all orange, with a bright blue spot in the middle! However, after a colour correction act and some tweaking with saturation in PSE, this is what I ended up with… Reminds me of the scenery in the Narnia movie The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe!

Today I’m giving you just a documentary-type of photo about how this winter has been so far. Lots and lots of snow and whiteness. So much so that even photographers are getting fed up with all that white – especially since it comes with fog that flattens all the light and removes all the shadows so that it’s difficult to even focus. So, this photo too, is pretty heavily post-processed to bring out at least some detail out of the never-ending whiteness!

This road is actually where I used to live. About 200 m further and there’s what used to be my mother-in-law’s house and next to it the one my husband built for us. Yes, I know, we lived in the sticks… but it’s beautiful there. Especially if you don’t have to live there… And see the cables? They really are hanging so low I could almost jump to them! No wonder we constantly had power breaks, with either snow or wind raging out there.

This is a photo-op I missed yesterday morning because I was in a hurry and didn’t stop to take the photo. Yeah, right. It woudn’t have made any difference, I was half an hour late already! Anyway, today afternoon I got another chance – but the light was far from what it was yesterday. Of course, it takes a lot to beat a good morning light and for this pic it came from a perfect direction yesterday: From behind the trees, through the fog. Today there really was no light at all and it came from another direction because it was late afternoon. However, I think the picture turned out pretty good anyway. Just that again I can’t make up my mind which version is better! The first one is more authentic (although pretty heavily post-processed) but there’s just something in the second one, too…

Yesterday I missed at least two potentially great photos. The first one was on my way to work – I was late already so I didn’t stop… The row of maple trees down the road was covered with frost, the light came beautifully from behind them, through thick mist so that there was no distraction behind the maples as usually there is.

The second one was this pic. I was coming home from the camera club board meeting. The mist floated on the main street so that it covered a lot of the distractions and was like a soft blanket under the Christmas lights. I was busy going home and the traffic was pretty heavy – so I thought I’d come back later when hopefully the traffic would be a bit lighter. Only, two-three hours later when I went there was pretty much no mist left. So learn this: No matter how busy/tired/lazy/what ever you are, if you see a photo-op – then STOP and take the picture!

I think this is more or less (probably less) decent but in no way brilliant – not even good. I just couldn’t get the focus right, again. Also I couldn’t get a shot with no cars in it (probably should go there at 4 am instead of 10 pm) and the neon lights are just plain ugly. And someone, please teach me how to get decent photos of lights? So that they don’t become blown-out blobs in the middle of pitch-dark blackness… However, this photo is pretty much unedited: I only cropped it, added the copyright text and did a slight sharpening/contrast boost with unsharp mask.

I took this last night. Almost froze my fingers and nose and everything while shooting! I’m not happy about how the streetlights turned out here but didn’t know what to do with them. The lights also brought both orange and blue colours into the scene, hence the b&w conversion.

Sorry about the break between posts – I was visiting my brother with my girls. Here’s one shot from the trip: A winter wonderland called Finland. Star models here are my younger daughter and my sister-in-law’s islandic horse.

Welcome to my brand new photoblog. In pursue to boost my photographic motivation I decided to give up struggling with the limitations of a free wordpress blog and start something totally new, with a new attitude. That includes posting even if not every day, at least more regularly – please remind me if I’ll get lazy!

The blog name is “chasing the focus”. Why? Simply because IMHO that’s what photography is all about. First chasing the perfect subject, then the perfect composition, lighting – and of course in perfect focus, because blurred photos seldom are fun to watch. However, focus can vary a lot depending on the person. Someone likes family snapshots, others prefer dream-like landscapes, breath-taking action shots or wild animals deep in the woods. The possibilities are unlimited. I’m still trying to find “my own voice” in photography – hence the chase, too.

I think it’s very appropriate to start this brand new blog with a couple of photos from the first hour of the brand new year – taken with my brand new 7D. A click on the picture takes you into the gallery where you can find a bigger version of the image in question.