Do you recognize this?  I thought I noticed that one of our window screens had something unusual on it so I grabbed the TG-4 and took a picture through the window glass.  I often use that camera for studying things up close as well as making visual notes for myself.  Upon closer examination of this image, you can see that the screen is falling apart and that it is made of tiny strands of fiberglass with some type of coating.

Just another use for an Olympus TG-4 camera.

These are just a few scenes that caught my eye while out walking yesterday.  The first was early in the morning and the second was in the afternoon while I was passing an area where they are repairing the paving in the Town Hall loading area.

Don’t forget to click on one of the images to view them in slideshow mode.

I took a walk prior to 7am this morning to see what I could do with scenes around Homewood in the early morning fog.  I also processed them differently in color.  Most of my viewers who live here appreciate color better than B&W so I thought that I would see how they liked these.

It has been raining lightly off and on and I couldn’t think of anything to photograph until I looked out the window and saw rain drops on the new leaves of a plant.  I grabbed the TG-4 and went out and made a quick grab of a picture.  I then pulled it up on my computer and started playing with cropping and the various adjustments until I arrived at this image.

You might be wondering why I am telling you how I made this image.  It is because I am still looking for ideas for future photography.  One thing that has interested me off and on over the years is seeing what can be done with lesser cameras.  While I have four cameras with the Fujifilm X-T2 being the best for low light indoor work, the Olympus Pen-F being the best for using smaller long focal length lenses (due to weight and size), and the Ricoh GR II having the best IQ for low light in a pocketable package, the Olympus TG-4 is my smallest, most roughed zoom camera, that is also my least expensive.

Another reason is that I have been slowly moving towards using smaller and lighter cameras and I am always trying to learn how to best use them.  For example, if I had to resort to mostly using the TG-4, I could always use it in the manner I used to make the above image.

I was going to publish these images in color, but the color didn’t really add anything to them so I decided to show them in monochrome.  I took the first two pictures with the Olympus Pen-F and the 45mm lens just to try crop-zooming and then upsizing and processing them to show the variations in the flower pedals.  The second two pictures were made with the Olympus TG-4 in macro mode.  I was interested in seeing how the images compared.

Flower season is coming to an end so I’m not sure how many more I will be making like these this year.  I do want to capture some of the dried flowers, stalks, etc. in the wet area later in the fall and I might be able to use the TG-4 to make them if I can get close enough.

One change I want to try is to see if I can make more B&W images.  I like light and shadows and images with a lot of black in them so I am going to concentrate on seeing if I can make more of them that I like.  I also like simplistic images and it is easier to make them in high contrast B&W.

My problem, if I try to make more B&W images, is learning to see in B&W.  Making the images isn’t as simple as converting to B&W and increasing the contrast.  That doesn’t create pleasing examples of this mode of photography.  To make this style of image requires learning how to see differently and then seeking out the images that work.

One thing I am doing to speed up the learning process is going back over the pictures I have made this year and reprocessing them in B&W to help me learn what kinds of images might work as well as those which don’t work.  That is the beauty of LR.  I can rework all of my pictures over and over as I try different processing.

After I process some of my older images, my future photography and posting in this blog will be contingent on me getting out and getting some new pictures.  Since that could easily slow down my posting, I might use any extra time to catch up with a backlog of pictures that I want to print and possibly publish a book or two.

As some of my neighbors have noted, I have been taking exercise walks around Homewood without a camera lately.  When I walk with a camera I have often made images like these.  Some are worthwhile for displaying, all have been taken as I try different ideas for taking and processing images.  The problem is that I have been doing it for over five years while I walked the same few paths and streets within Homewood and I have about exhausted the opportunities.

As I mentioned in the last post, I am trying to do something different with my photography.  One change is to try to become more deliberate with my photography; therefore, I am not always carrying a camera.  I have been shifting to sometimes only taking a good camera out and making pictures when I have a definite photographic goal in mind.  I’ll still sometimes take a small pocket camera, and I always have my cell phone in my pocket when walking, and even occasionally I will take one of my better cameras when walking just in case I see something.

Next, I hope to make some processing changes and eventually find some different things to photograph.