Daily Photo 20190115 Seine fishing nets and buoys

A visit to the dentist is made more palatable when it's a) not raining and b) when there's fishing gear laying about nearby.

And that's what happened this afternoon. We had about 15 minutes, which gave me time to shoot a few bits of boats and a pile of this very fine, aqua-colored fish netting.

My daily photo: done! And now to watch a Golden State Warriors basketball game. Life is good!

All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you for your understanding and kindness.

Different state, same theme . . .

Now back from a few days in Seattle, celebrating our 25th wedding anniversary, and what a wonderful time we had.

First stop was at the Fisherman's Terminal to check out the boats.

Major adrenaline rush.

I've never seen such a huge facility with extremely serious fishing boats. All shapes, sizes, types. Some beautifully kept up, others beautifully grungy.

Skies were overcast, very few people around, and the colors glowed and gleamed.

I'm overwhelmed at the moment with photos to process, but these are a few that initially caught my eye.

We walked more than four miles and still didn't see everything.

Nets, floats, bumpers, buoys -- did I not get enough of this while living in Oregon? Apparently no.

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh.

What I saw / What I made

The reason I like photographing fishing nets so much is that I enjoy making order out of chaos. Big overviews don't do it for me, but simply wandering around and looking for details is exciting and, frankly, it's what I'm good at. So being surrounded by color and texture, lines and forms, it's like being at Disneyland.

In the first photo you see an overview of a pile of nets. My "job" is to simplify the view, find something within the whole to frame and present.

What I liked about the big pile of nets was that area in the yellow rectangle (first photo). I liked the slightly diagonal line of one rope holding the bundle of nets together. And I liked how the edge of the netting sort of swoops down there in the bottom right corner. Two big diagonal lines going two directions that enclose the repeating pattern of all the ropes, which also are moving diagonally, just in a softer curve.

I probably could have stood there and made four more photos, but like a kid, I wanted to see MORE, so off I went.

How to see is the hardest thing to teach, so I just thought you'd like to see what I saw and what I did with it. 

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

iPhone photos of the day . . .

Since I don't have much time left here on the Oregon coast, and since I haven't taken photos in like forever, I spent an hour at my favorite fishing net location and used my iPhone for a few of the shots. I also used my Canon 50D, and it will be interesting for me to compare the phone images to the DSLR shots. That's not going to happen today, however.

But . . . The first photo here was taken using the Hipstamatic app and the second one was taken just using the cellphone default camera. I like the wider-angle of Hipstamatic as well as how dark the pavement went versus the iPhone 6+ regular camera photo.

When I looked closely, the quality of both the unprocessed photos is not good. I looked at the specs of each one.

Hipstamatic: 268k in size, 640 x 640 px, 8.9" x 8.9" 72ppi

Regular cellphone camera, square format: 3.28MB in size, 2448 x 2448 px, 34" x 34" 72ppi

Hipstamatic capture was just 268k! That's NOTHING. The regular cellphone capture was 3.28MB, which is still really small, but significantly larger than Hipstamatic.

Neither image looks really good at 100%. For me, with the ultra-limited knowledge I have right now, this makes the iPhone 6+ a very expensive toy camera. I can't use these photos for anything but showing them here in a small size. To use in photomontages, to create art for sale, no way will this work for me.

I do like the ability to shoot from different angles, however. I was walking around using a 70-200mm L lens on a Canon 50D and could not move in really close to my subject. But for the two photos of rust, all I had to do was lean over the big piece of metal and shoot straight down. That was pretty cool. (Both of these photos were processed when I got home in Photoshop.)

What's my point? I don't know . . . It just felt good to be out shooting. It was fun playing with the cellphone camera. And I'm looking forward to seeing what the "real" camera gives me. I'm disappointed in the quality of the cellphone, though, and just need to read and learn and practice with it so that I don't feel so apologetic about my resulting photos. It's a blow to both my pride and my ego, don't you know!

And now back to packing . . .

©Carol Leigh
All text, photographs, and other media are ©Copyright Carol Leigh (or others when indicated) and are not in the public domain and may not be used on websites, blogs, or in other media without advance permission from Carol Leigh. Thank you!

Nautical explorations

Judy, Chris and I did a lot of exploring in Newport yesterday . . . walked, walked, walked, just looking to see what we could find. Here you see the fishing vessel Thunder heading into port, a lot of fishing nets, floats, crab detail on a gate, and a sprig of ivy valiantly making its way through a crack in a fence. A good day with good people.©Carol Leigh

Colorful days

Despite a bit of rain and overcast skies, I've found good color the past couple of days. I like the complementary blue and orange colors of the fishnet floats and the way the yellow and turquoise colors of the nets emphasize their sensuous folds. (And when's the last time you saw the words "sensuous" and "fishing nets" used together?)

A pink opium poppy in the back yard mist this morning caught my eye, the way the petal acts as a little umbrella, keeping the pollen dry.

And then in Florence this afternoon we slammed on the brakes when we saw a bunch of antique cars in a restaurant parking lot. The fortuitous combination of a brilliant blue sky reflected in the chrome as well as the reflections from a nearby red car really punched up the orange colors on this old Chevy truck. (A car show's scheduled for this Sunday — woo hoo, more color potential!)

All photos were taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II camera; the first one with a Canon 24-85mm lens, the poppy with a Canon 100mm macro lens, and the Chevy with a Canon 70-200mm L lens. I've got issues with the 24-85mm lens: it's not as sharp as I'd like and I'm hoping it's something as simple as an iffy polarizing filter. Testing is in order.

©Carol Leigh, wishing you equally colorful days this week

Monochrome Monday

 We've got a photo workshop going on right now and it's fun to see "my" neighborhood through others' eyes. I took them to shoot the fishing nets and found I was particularly attracted to these two very monochromatic scenes. Lots of texture, lots of flowing lines, and classic Rule of Thirds. ©Carol Leigh