I thought I'd try out a new plugin for my website. I wanted to make life easier to stay on top of my social media posts and downloaded a plugin designed to push my blog post to all of my accounts. So that being said, if you see something thats not working quite right then this is probably why. lol Please let me know if it's not working on your end. For this post I will add photos from the most recent Photo walk that I did with the St Thomas Photographic Guild. We went to Whittaker lake on Sunday Morning September 11 2016. It was a nice morning but a little on the cool side. I left my hoody on for a good hour before taking it off. My favourite part of the shoot was when the sun crested over the tree line. It gave an amazing yellow glow over the lake and through the beautiful landscape surrounding it. Here are a few of my favourite photos from the morning walk.

This first Photo was a Panorama technique I used with my SLR. I took 5 photos moving from top to bottom and stitched them together using the software in Lightroom cc. I physically couldn't get any farther back from the tree so I had to use a wide angle. I believe I had it at 28mm with my 28-70 f2.8 Nikon lens. I have to admit, the results make me smile a little. ;)

This next image was a blind curiosity shot. If that makes any sense. I could not actually see over the cat tails here. I could see the light beaming through the top of the cat tails and imagined that it would likely make a great photo. So I put to use the tilt screen that Nikon put on the D750 and tilted it down so I could raise my camera high enough to get a photo over the cat tails. I put the camera on self timer for 10 secs, raised the camera with my tripod folded like a monopod and took a couple test shots to get my exposure. Once I had it sorted out I was able to get this shot.

Below is an image that I almost passed by. I spotted this little over grown walk way and I almost kept walking, but my curiosity took over. Am I ever glad it did, there's a reason they say to go with your gut instinct. This shot turned out to be stunning.

Next photo here, is another one where I decided to try out a technique that I hadn't used before. I learned about a this technique during the summer and wanted to give it a shot. It's called "Focus Stacking". So typically, when taking a shot like this one, you would focus somewhere in the front, middle or back of the scene to get the look you want. But there is a problem with that in a landscape shot, the opposite area of the photo will be a little less sharp due to the focal plane. If I focused on the lilies in the foreground then the trees in the distance were blurred and vice versa. So what you do is take a couple photos. You'll want to ensure you are using a tripod for this too. Take a shot with focus on the foreground, another of the middle ground and then the back ground. Now you have three images with every part of the photo in perfect focus. :) Now upload the photos to photoshop (or whatever program you are using that will do layers) and create the three layers. The easiest way I found is to erase the blurred area from the photo on the top to reveal the focussed photo below. Voila! Now, I'm sure for the professional re-touchers out there, they are probably cringing at my explanation and work flow. I will continue to see if there are better ways to do this, but for now, looking at the photo below, I have to say it worked quite well.

These last two photos are ones I took on my way back to the truck. I had to hurry back for an appointment and really liked the composition in front of me. So I set up in a hurry to capture what I saw.

Well I hope you enjoyed this post. Please like, post or leave a comment on any of the social media platforms you see this in. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this new plugin works well for me. Cheers!

Whittaker Lake