HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

Last post until next year 🙂 Here’s wishing you and your families a safe and prosperous new year, and all the very best for 2012.Thanks to all for your continued support and for your comments. They are most appreciated.

Thanks also to those who have purchased my first e-book A Photographer’s Guide to the Ontario Landscape. I hope you will find to be a worthy resource for taking your landscape imagery up a notch and as you travel throughout the province of Ontario.

Cheers!

 

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A Pleasant Surprise

Blue Jay

Winter has finally arrived here with the last couple of nights going down to -20 degrees Celsius and we have about 6-8 inches of snow on the ground. This morning I took advantage of some spare time and settled into my photo blind out in the backyard with a thermos of coffee, lots of battery power, and a several compact flash cards. The Blue Jays were particularly active today. Here are three of my favorites of the day.

Now for the surprise…beside my feeding station that I have set up with an assortment of perches (that I change frequently) for photographing songbirds, I have a two foot section of a tree trunk set-up with suet cakes on the backside of the trunk (so they are not visible in the photos) to attract woodpeckers. The woodpeckers that I am able photograph with this set=up are Downy and Hairy Woodpeckers, however, this morning I glanced over at the trunk to see if there was any activity on it and was shocked to see a beautiful Red-bellied Woodpecker enjoying the suet cakes. I am going out tomorrow for more images and hope that this woodpecker is still hanging around and remains cooperative. Below I have posted two images captured this morning. I like them both, although I do think the head angle on the last photo is a little better, but the first image does show off the beautiful red cap behind the woodpecker’s head. Let me know which is your favorite and why?

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Ontario Landscape Guide

 

I am pleased to announce the official release of my first eBook  A Photographer’s Guide to the Ontario Landscape, with foreward by Mike Grandmaison,the first-ever comprehensive guide to photographing the province’s landscapes.There are many outstanding photo destinations throughout Ontario’s vast and varied landscape and I have compiled many of them, from the Abitibi Canyon to Point Pelee, the Ottawa Valley to the Algoma Highlands and beyond, within this easy-to-read, easy-to-follow guide, complete with driving directions to each of them. When I began photographing the Ontario landscape I wish there was a resource such as this available to me. I have spent countless hours searching the internet, studying road maps, and meandering down backroads in hopes of finding inspiring landscapes to photograph. As a result, I chose to write this guide to simplify the process for others.

While this is ebook is about Ontario landscape locations, I have also scattered dozens of tips throughout that will help you create stunning landscapes of your own, wherever you live.

This ebook, has been published by  Birds As Art Books and is available exclusively through the Birds As Art on-line store. Click here to read the official release of this eBook in the Birds As Art Bulletin #393 and here to purchsae your copy of A Photographer’s Guide to the Ontario Landscape.

I would also like to thank those who help with the review and editing process of this guide. Their constant encouragement and inspiration was instrumental in me writing this ebook. I greatly appreciate all their hard work. With special thanks to Arthur Morris, Denise Ippolito, Gregg McLachlan, Mike Grandmaison and Mike Hannisian.

 

 

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Season’s Greetings

 

Wishing you and your families all the best at this time of year and for the year ahead!

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First Day In The Blind

Black-capped Chickadee

I have been swamped over the last couple of weeks putting the finishing touches on my eBook that will be released and available for download in the coming days. With the final edit completed, I finally had some spare time to get out into my blind that has been set-up for winter songbird photography. As usual, the Black-capped Chickadees were very energetic providing a good couple of hours of entertainment. Here are three of my favorites from the day.

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Balls Falls

Balls Falls, Twenty Mile Creek, Ontario

Sorry for the lack of posts to the blog lately folks. I have been very busy lately with various projects, not too mention by bad back acting up on me. With the workload nearing an easing up time period and my back pain subsiding somewhat, I have been going through many of my image files that I have been unable to attend to until now. Above you will be Balls Falls on the Twenty Mile Creek along Ontario’s Niagara Escarpment, an UNESCO World Biosphere. Often I have visited this waterfall and there has been virtually no waterfall due to low levels of rainfall. This past spring was rather wet and it made for some excellent waterfall photography, especially along the Niagara Escarpment. This is one of my favorites from my visit to Balls Falls. And below you will see that I just could not resist the temptation to run the image through Topaz Labs ‘BW Effects’ plugin for Photoshop. I have saved a selection of settings in BW Effects for my ‘waterfall preset’ and will share those settings in an upcoming post soon. Hope you like today’s images.

Balls Falls with BW Effects applied

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