Our Little Italy

We spent the evening wandering Corydon Avenue. This is Winnipeg's "Little Italy" complete with patio restaurants, gelato and live music. The atmosphere is celebratory; summer plays on every corner.

Rural Storage

Wind's Sigh

To catch the spirit of the prairies one must include wheat and wind.

Finding a new perspective when shooting can make a big difference in the outcome. Getting low to the ground and shooting the subject of the wheat upward gives a sense of shelter and security.

Shelter and security are both strong characteristics found in homesteading on the prairies; we see the wind but are not fearful.

Home

Silently she slips below the glassy surface. She is home.

The use of negative space can be powerful in an image. It can inform and create mystery, both. Here, the expanse of water and relative void of colour add to the silence heard in the whale's descent home. We understand that her home is greater in size than we see and we're also left wondering what home is like for her.

Clouds

Sunflower

Nothing urges me to be present in these summer days like the first signs that fall is on its way. Geese seem to be more prevalent, already gathering before they bid summer goodbye. Leaves are just starting to change colour, though only a few. And then there are the sunflowers; they symbolize the changing of the seasons for me, from summer to autumn.

I used my 60 mm prime lens to capture this bee on the sunflower. I shot at a speed of 1/200 with an f stop of f/2.8, keeping my ISO at 100.

The sunflower is so very familiar that we need only to see part of it to know what it is. Composing the shot to keep the focus at the point of the bee's presence is effective.

Autumn's Canvas

Winnipeg's skies and fields are painted by Autumn.

I shot at f/5 and 1/640 with a focal length of 190. Once in Lightroom I used a preset but then increased contrast in the buildings and changed the hue of the golds from there.

Presets can be a great starting point. When I use them I'll continue to play and tweak until the image looks as it does in my mind.

Moonlit Pass

This shot was taken near Oakville, Manitoba. It was a beautiful late autumn day. Many leaves had already found their way to the ground. The grasses were dry and the fields were mostly stubble.

Though pleased with the initial colours and tones in the daytime capture, changing this up in Lightroom also changed the entire mood of the image. Adding a moonlit preset brought a mystery to this scene that wasn't there initially.

Stories are woven. Imaginations soar. We play and explore.

Aflame

The tree and leftover crop seem to be on fire on this autumn evening. The heavy bank of clouds lifted enough for the sun to paint the field with gold before it set for the night.

Keeping my ISO at 100, as I normally try to do if at all possible, I shot at a speed of 1/1250 and an f stop of f/2.8. The reason for the speed was I was in a moving vehicle at time of capture. Had that not been the case, I would have tried for a greater depth of field with an f stop of around f/11 or thereabouts. Having said that, the point of focus was the tree and it didn't really matter if the rest of the image was not as clear.

Urban Shooting

Just an ordinary day on an ordinary street yet still so interesting to me. I am finding that although I love to take pictures of anything and everything, I am leaning more towards the urban shoot as being my favourite kind of shoot.

Composing the shot to capture the character of the scene, or what I interpret to be its character, is what I try to do. Bringing the image into Lightroom to bump up the contrast and intensify some of the colours enhances the old brick work and architecture we see here, further showing the scene's character.

Using f/6.3 and a shutter speed of 1/400 seemed adequate to capture enough detail for this composition.