Sawyer's Bay

It's 8AM and I'm standing on the dock of the bay as the last minute assembled crew of Straight Jacket arrives with gear, food and coffee.  The sun is already high in the sky, the breeze is light and an overall sense of  happiness is in the air.

It's a couple of hours motoring from the marina to our destination of Sawyer's Bay.  It's the little secluded inlet behind the head of the sleeping giant.  There's already a few boats moored off and we link up with them to expand the raft.   It's a race day and this is the starting area.  As more boats arrive and join up - the conversations grow to a dull roar.  Sailors are walking across all the decks to meet up with others.  We have our own little waterworld here.

Eventually the time comes for the skippers meeting outlining the course set for the race.  We dismantle the barge one by one and start the race before the race.   Everything by now is rigged up and we're ready to embark on a 7 hour sailboat race that parallels the 'Giant' then best course back to the city across the bay.

It was a beauty of a day for sailing.  I packed my Nikon and snapped some pics throughout the journey.

Summer Nights By The Sea

Blue hour may now be my favorite time of colour.  Blue hour takes place after the sun has set or before the sun rises.  I was sailing last night and our club had a little party afterwards. The skies were brilliant and I couldn't help myself.  I ran to get my Nikon and started snapping away.  I had no tripod so I resorted to railings, docks and garbage cans to set the camera on to get these nice placid lake shots.
 

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Keep It Simple

 

I've been struggling with my photography as of late. I watched way to many Youtube photography channels on the matter and have been swimming in the technical aspects of the art and it became daunting.  I was shooting everything in 'raw' and spending way too much time editing my pictures in post like everyone i was studying on the internet.  I couldn't see the forest from the trees.  I wasn't happy with my photos as I was doing too much to them in post and feeling fraudulent.  

After a great discussion with a fellow photographer about this he gave me some sage advise. Go back to JPG.  It'll make your life easier.  What I got out of our discussion was this - Raw gives you way more information to work with yes - but that can be debilitating.  The images once in your post picture production software of choice will always look 'flat' as there is a ton of extra digital information that you have to work with.  My take on this now is that I shouldn't have to rely on all this extra information to fix my photos if I take them well enough to begin with.

I flipped back to JPG and haven't looked back.  When I take the memory card out of the camera and put it into Cyberlink PhotoDirector the picture looks more or less like I saw in the view finder.  A bit richer - not so 'flat'.  I am literally now touching up my photos in a minute or two as opposed to ten or twenty in RAW.  The results are far more pleasing - at least to me and really - that's who I am doing this for.  Me.

I was loosing the joy and getting stuck on the technical.  I was going down the trap of wanting to buy better gear to make my photos better.  I am what I am - an amateur hobbyist photographer.  Being honest with myself has been liberating and I am back to taking snaps because I'm inspired instead of trying to proove I can do it.

These two photos are the first of my flip back to JPG.  I am very pleased.

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