From there to here, from here to there, Funny things are everywhere
Yeesh, ya gotta move fast if you want to catch the seasons around here. I took this photo of the baby maple leaves unfurling just last week, and it’s already ridiculously out of season. Summer has crashed so abruptly on the heels of spring that it’s hard to believe this was just a few days ago!
Not that I’m complaining, mind you. Not one little bit!
Because squirrel!!
Also, a little interval of B&W in all the supersaturated nature colours lately.
Photo tip: when taking a picture of any critter, biped or otherwise, try to make sure there’s a little light showing in the eye. Eyes with light have sparkle and life; eyes without light appear dead. Also, if you get nothing else in focus, make sure you have clean focus on the eye. One of the first things the human eye seeks out in a photo is other eyes.
We live on an island, so you don’t have to go far to find water. No wonder I have moisture issues in my basement! But even on the island, there are little patches of water, like this small, nearly hidden pond a block from my house. If you walk past at dusk, you can hear the most delightful sound of frogs singing, but I was even more delighted to walk by yesterday and find this unexpected red canoe resting quietly on its bank.
It was totally worth the three dozen mosquito bites I acquired while taking a few variations of this photo! If only you could hear the frog music in the background. 🙂 For all the challenges we’ve had with this house and living in a very small town, it’s having this sort of lovely scene just around the corner waiting to be discovered on an evening walk that makes it all worthwhile.
I seem to spend a lot of my time these days crawling around on my belly with my camera, chasing tulips and dandelions and dewdrops.
I desaturated the green in this quite a bit to emphasize the shapes more than the colour, and to make the yellow of the dandelion head pop a bit more. (The circles are de-focused dewdrops backlit by the rising sun.) And I soaked my pants to the knees taking it!
Two weeks ago, I lamented that despite my best efforts, I had utterly failed to lose a pound and in fact, was losing the battle against the 10 lbs I gained in the last year. I whined that I did not want to count calories, that I was doing my best, that I did not know what else to do.
What a difference an app makes.
On the advice of a friend on Twitter, the very day I posted my last lament I downloaded the free My Fitness Pal app for my iPhone. Oh my goodness, how much do I love this app? I swear I am not shilling for them, but I am seriously impressed by this app. For one thing, it synchs automatically with my Fitbit, so while I log all my food and exercise for the day, it tells me how many calories I have burned based on my daily steps. Very motivating! You don’t need the app, as you can actually do most of the activities via the My Fitness Pal website, but I do like the convenience of having the app in my pocket.
And the whole counting of calories and measuring of portions is made much easier by the app, too. It has three functions I simply adore. First, you can scan the UPC code of whatever you are eating and chances are, it’s already in the database. Just enter your serving size and you are done. I haven’t stumped it yet – from Feta cheese to boxed pasta to dates rolled in coconut, every food I have scanned has been in there. The second is the amazing ability to analyze recipes from websites by simply entering the URL. It scans the page and pulls out all the ingredients and proportions. How cool is that? Sometimes you have to help it interpret a few items, but I find it runs about 80% accurate. Very, very cool! Third, you can chunk foods together as regular meals. We have fajitas at least once a week, so I keyed everything in once, saved it as a meal, and it’s just one click to add it every time we eat it. Same for my daily breakfast of cold cereal and 450 oz of coffee.
In addition to all that, it analyzes everything you eat for the day not just for calories, but for nutritional components as well. Apparently I am not as much of a carb junkie as I thought: I am regularly under on my ideal proportion of 50% of my daily calories coming from carbs and instead I regularly go over on fats. I’m thinking that’s my love of nuts, seeds, avocados and coconuts. And no wonder I haven’t had a cold in 18 months – I usually consume about double the daily recommended amount of vitamin C, but even with the vast quantities of very milky coffee I consume every day, I’m still falling short on the recommended amount of calcium.
(I am, ahem, also very glad that the one thing the app doesn’t measure is daily caffeine intake. A girl needs a vice or two, after all.)
Neat, eh? And the very best part is that I lost THREE POUNDS in the last two weeks! Well, actually I lost two, gained one, lost two, but hey, at least it’s progress! 😉
So I am a little more obsessive about the counting and measuring than I would ordinarily be comfortable with, but I have to admit that it is helping me make smarter choices. I figured out, for example, that I can have a small handful of baby carrots with a tablespoon of chip dip and that makes a surprisingly satisfying evening snack at about 80 calories – which I can ‘earn’ with about 20 minutes of walking. And I while I am reluctant to snack on high calorie foods like chips because I have to account for them, I can also choose occasional treats in moderation. Hellllooooo Starbucks macchiato!
What’s kind of funny is that I get so annoyed when I forget to put my fitbit in my pocket for the day, or can’t quite find the perfect representation of what I’ve eaten in the food database, that it’s easy to forget that it’s not what I capture in the app that’s driving my health and weight-loss but the other way around. The app might not see the sweaty hour I put in yesterday turning over a new veggie garden plot in the yard, but based on my muscle soreness this morning, my arse certainly did!
So yay for progress! According to yesterday’s update on the app, if every day were like yesterday I would be within two pounds of my weight goal in five weeks, which is conveniently when we are going to PEI. And while I may just “forget” to enter my daily calories when we’re on vacation, I’m pretty sure I can keep up at least the daily accounting without too much effort going forward.
Yay for progress!
When I was a little girl, my grandmother had a huge rock garden in her back yard. It was one of the most lovely gardens I remember ever seeing, and it was huge. She used to have grape hyacinths like these, so every garden I’ve had always has grape hyacinths.
I added a quick layer of texture in Photoshop to give these a painterly look and tweaked the contrast. It would make a pretty greeting card, don’t you think? I’m overdue to make myself up a box, too!
Four years ago, I had the great honour of photographing this big guy when he was just four weeks old, and he came to visit for porch portraits when he was a toddler. I’m predisposed to love him already, but seriously, is this not the CUTEST EXPRESSION EVER?!?
He is going to make an amazing big brother!! You can see he comes by his cuteness naturally – look at this gorgeous family. And they’re even sweeter than they are lovely.
Lots more treasures to share with this fun photo shoot today with a new baby sister and Nanny and Grandad visiting from out of town. Stand by – the cuteness is nearly unbearable!
I had a lot of fun with this image in Lightroom and Photoshop. Not every photo needs serious post-processing, but sometimes it’s fun to push the boundaries a bit and see what happens. I’ve also had fun teaching myself both how to see problem areas I might not have recognized before AND the digital ‘chops’ to know how to correct them.
When I looked at the detail in the tulips, I saw that the green colour channel was clipped, which means that the colour that is opposite to green on the colour wheel – magenta – was “blown out” and the reds were pretty darn close to blowing out too. In other words, the colour was so intense in the tulip heads that all detail was lost. I tweaked the saturation on just the flower heads a bit, but there is still some detail lost. If I were more patient, I could probably fix it in Photoshop, but it was close enough for me.
Another problem is that despite exposure and saturation tweaks, the tulips were out of gamut. This is one of the real challenges of digital photography and photo processing – the range of colours that your eye can perceive is far greater than what digital equipment like your camera sensor and computer monitor can replicate is far greater than what a printer can render. My camera and computer are set to sRGB colour space, which has a much wider range than CMYK, the colour space that most printers use. I played with it a bit and recovered some of it, but I don’t think this would make a great print without a lot more work – those reds and magentas are just too intense and would likely print as flat blobs of colour.
Finally, the sky was kind of cloudy and grey and it too was on the border of being blown out, so I painted some of that blue back into the sky. There was only a hint of blue in the sky to my eye, but I burned it a bit and added a bit of tint to make the clouds pop. I think the drama in the sky balances out the really intense colour in the foreground, and sort of surrounds the Peace Tower. Then I popped the contrast even more, because I love contrasty photos, especially with lots of mid-tone contrast.
So now the image tells a complete story, from the brilliant tulips in the foreground to the actual subject of the photo, the Peace Tower, in the middle ground, and that turbulent sky in the background.
TMI? Do you like the geeky stuff, or should I just go back to posting the pretty pictures? Be careful what you wish for, I could really go on and on and ON about this stuff! 😉 If you’re curious, feel free to ask questions. We can all learn together!
Edited to add: Good question from Lynn – here’s the unedited version for the sake of comparison. Note the tilted horizon – I cannot for the life of me take a straight picture. I think my eyes are crooked!
The tulips are awake! Found this shot with my iPhone on the way back to my office after a meeting – the Chateau Laurier screened through some purty red tulips.
Twenty-four hours ago, there were no dandelions. Suddenly, they are EVERYWHERE!
I have never understood why people try so hard to eradicate them. They’re harmless, and lovely. See?
Are you a friend or a foe of the pervasive dandelion?