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Photography: Articles & Ramblings

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Snowdrifts

2013, March 22 - 20:28 — Matthew

The calendar may say it's Naw-Ruz (and therefore spring), but here in Kingston we're not quite free of the snow.

What's left on the lawns now isn't too pretty, but there were a few nice snow days earlier in the winter. Drifting snow plus the wind off the lake can result in some intriguing natural sculptures- and a near complete loss of any sense of scale.

Canoeing on a dead-calm lake at sunrise

2013, March 9 - 10:07 — Matthew

Canoes are simply amazing little boats. They have no systems, no motors, no sails, none of the usual trappings of maritime life. The boat is really nothing more than a hull, a thwart or two, and a place to sit.

And yet this simple boat is a veritable magic carpet, taking you to an unfathomable number of secret, hidden places where no other vessel can travel.

Construction site foibles

2013, January 25 - 23:55 — Matthew

This is not the correct way to use a dumpster.

'Nuff said.

Sunset over the lake

2013, January 1 - 14:07 — Matthew

Happy New Year, folks.

Cute puppies for New Year's

2012, December 31 - 12:03 — Matthew

It has been a busy, crazy, roller-coaster week. So here's a cute puppy to end it with.

Canoe at sunrise

2012, December 20 - 08:12 — Matthew

If you own (or borrow) one of these amazing little boats, this will surely be a welcome sight for the first day of winter.

DNG: The solution to proprietary RAW files

2012, December 18 - 08:18 — Matthew

Almost every new camera seems to bring a new, proprietary file format that nothing else can work with at first. It's quite likely that, 25 years from now, software capable of reading today's proprietary formats will be difficult or impossible to find- in which case your gigabytes of old photos would be unreadable. Is there a solution to this problem?

TL;DR: When shooting RAW, convert the camera raw files to DNG format, and save the DNGs instead of the original raw files.

Freezing a campfire

2012, December 15 - 00:28 — Matthew

Fire can be really fascinating stuff. Trying to freeze it in an image is tricky- it is not in the nature of fire to stay still

Kiteboarders being crazy

2012, November 17 - 23:29 — Matthew

Halfway through November, with the thermometer hovering near zero at night, it's far too easy to dream of summer.

Nothing says summer quite like watersports, so let's take a quick break from November to look back at this summer's kiteboarding action.

Canada's New Copyright Law

2012, November 11 - 10:15 — Matthew

Bill C-11, the end result of half a decade of copyright reform talks, was passed in June and is now in effect.

What does this mean for you, as a Canadian and as an artist?