When Something Has To Give

I’m writing this post to let all my readers know that I will be taking a break from my blog. There’s a lot brewing in my life, and maintaining this blog to the standard that I like is not possible right now. One of the reasons is this:

You’re strong, so hand over some money.

I have a free Flickr account. They are migrating to a paid model. I am allowed to keep 1,000 photos free there as of January 2019.  On the date of their announcement to focus on paid accounts I had about 33,000. Honestly, I was never super impressed with Flickr. But it was free, and sometimes when things are free, you don’t worry too much about their imperfections. So, I am attempting to get my files back from Flickr and it’s a mess. Not to mention a major time suck as I am trying to make my retreat from Flickr an organized one. Given that I could reasonably expect to live another 30 years, I would have to hand over $1,500 minimum to keep my files on Flickr. Given the number of error messages I have gotten over the last few days as I attempt to handle my files, there is no way I would even consider it.

Another has to do with my camera. Sadly my 50D is coming to end of its useful life. I’ve had it for about a decade, and I’ve been really happy with it. I narrowed down my new body to the Fuji XT-3 or the Canon 80D. I’ve decided to stick with a Canon.  I’d like to thank all the bloggers who shot with Fuji who I’ve peppered with questions over the last few months, your input and advice was really helpful. I’m also getting started with Luminar, a new to me editing software. They will be rolling out a cataloging system in December and by March I am hoping to decide if I want to continue with my Lightroom/Photoshop subscription, or just move forward with Luminar. I’ll be needing a bit of time to work these things out.

The last is a bit of a catch-all reason. My life is just a bit full right now and both requires and deserves my attention over this blog. I do love this blog though, so I am hoping to be back in this space in mid-January. I’ll hope to see you here then. I’ll still be on Instagram during this blog break, so feel free to visit me there.

All the best and many thanks to everyone who reads this blog.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Festive

Since festive is the theme this week at Where’s my backpack? I decided to give the whole bokeh thing a try.  Here is one of my photographs that I took last night:

ISO 1000 50mm 0ev f/1.8 1/80

For those of you who are not familiar with the term bokeh, in this photo it is the dots of light that the tree lights and tinsel have become in this image.  In order to get this photo, I first read this article that is on the Digital Photography School website.  If you ever have a basic question about photography, I think the DPS website is a good place to start.  What I liked about the bokeh article is that it includes specific examples of bokeh with each of those photos linked to the flickr image.  Flickr (the link there is specifically for bokeh) is a good place to look at images because the camera settings are often included in information, which gives you an idea of where to start when making your images.

For my photo above, I used a tripod.  By setting my f-stop to 1.8 it was easy to have just the bird in focus, thus creating the bokeh effect with the lights an tinsel.  This was a fun image to make, and I will be working on some more while we have our tree up.

Cheers!

Travel Theme: Mystical

When I saw that mystical was the theme this week at Where’s my backpack?, I knew what I was going to be blogging about right away.  I have borrowed an infrared filter for the week, so here is a photo I took in the morning at about 8 am:

ISO 500 50mm 0ev f/10 87sec.

I put two others on flickr, so you can pop over and check them out if you like.

Cheers!