Category Archives: Photography

First Boat Dives

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This morning, we did our first boat dives. We left the dock shortly after 8 with all twenty of us and our guides Remy and Connor. The first dive was at a site called “Rockpile”; I don’t remember the name of the second site.

Rockpile is on the other side of Kleine Bonaire, a small deserted island off the western coast of the main island. The site sloped down from about 20 feet into the depths; I mostly stayed shallow. I’ve had a regulator free-flow that’s been costing me bottom time so I didn’t want to go too deep.

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First Day of Diving

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Today was our first actual day of diving. After breakfast, we headed down to the dive shop to pick up our weights, and get in the water. The resort requires guests to do their first dive on the house reef, in order to allow people a chance to get their weighting (and hence their buoyancy) correct before heading out other dive sites.

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Making of a Christmas Card, 2015

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I was really of two minds as to whether I wanted to make a card this year. For some reason, perhaps the weather, perhaps the compressed calendar this year, I really wasn’t feeling it. Still, I spent some time going through my photo library to see if I could come up with some ideas, and quickly zeroed in on a series of pictures I took out in Colorado five years ago after a snowstorm. I wanted a picture with evergreen trees that were Christmas tree shaped, and decided I would transform it to a night scene, and ‘decorate’ the trees with lights. I decided to go with this picture, taken in the Arapaho State Forest, as we traveled from Breckinridge to Canon City: Continue reading →

The Performance and the Score

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This afternoon, I was thinking about something my sister said a couple of years back in connection with last night’s post. She’d been remarking on something my brother Tom had said. It was something to the effect that yes, my pictures were good, but of course, I adjusted them all after the fact. There was the implication that it was sort of cheating.

Poppycock. As Ansel Adams once said, “The negative is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print the performance.”  It’s what you do with the negative that counts, and the same goes for the relationship between the camera’s RAW file and the final result. What you shoot in the camera is the starting point. It needn’t be the end point.

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Foggy Morning Paddle

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The one good thing about the rapidly shortening days in September and October is that it you can be up for the sunrise without having to wake up at some ungodly hour, like you do in the summer. With that in mind, this morning I took the kayak out for an early morning trip. I was hoping for either a sunrise or early morning fog; I got fog.

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Paddling to Pomham

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When I was working in Providence, I often rode the East Bay Bike Path after work. It was close by, relatively flat (except for one killer hill) and scenic. One of my favorite pieces of scenery is the the Pomham Rocks Lighthouse, which sits on an outcropping of rock quite visible from the path. I’ve been wanting to see it up close for a long time, and now that I have my own kayak, I can. Saturday, I finally made the trip.

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