It is a rainy Thursday morning here in Chatham.  I have been here since Monday.  My friends and I have enjoyed excellent weather until the heavy rain hit this morning. I started working on the photos for this posting about two hours ago and since then, the sun is making an effort to appear.  However, scattered thunderstorms are on tap for the rest of the day.  I am sharing a few photos from this most recent visit to the Cape.  I have been coming here on an annual basis since 2002 or so, staying in the same rented home near Cockle Cove Beach in Chatham.  The village of Chatham has an idyllic quality that captivates this annual visitor.  It sits on the elbow of Cape Cod with beaches on the Atlantic and also Nantucket Sound.  The shops are quaint, the pubs are crowded, the fresh seafood is excellent, and it is not easy to find a parking place after a certain hour in the morning.  The first photos below were taken this morning just outside the doors of our rental home.  They demonstrate the look of a rainy, dreary day.  There is a bit of irony in that as I write this, the sun is shining intermittently  through the clouds.  At any rate this posting will move from the dreary start of today to some photos taken on the days just preceding this one.  I used Black and White to accentuate the dreariness and the green  plant to display the rain drops at rest.  I am using the gallery format below, so be sure to click on the photo for the full image.

My annual visits have produced numerous photos of the flora and fauna on this enchanting peninsula, but I continue to shoot one more flower and find one more rabbit or bird that I can capture.  I am not sure these repetitive efforts result in a better product, but I continue to try.  At the very least, the current photos are a fresh look at familiar objects of interest.  Below is a portfolio of recent photos that present a current view of the Chatham area.  I take the photos when I walk or ride the bike.  The camera rests in my hand or dangles from my neck as I continue to look for newer versions of the old.  

There may be more to come during my final two days.

I have this empty corner of my living room that is crying for a 20 by 30 framed poster collage to complement the one hanging on the wall near the adjacent corner of the room.  Yesterday, I made an attempt, experimental at best, to create this wall hanging using the theme of flower photos that I took on a recent trip to the Biltmore Estate located near Asheville, NC.  My goal was to use the various tools in Lightroom to modify each of the flower photos for use in the collage.  Secondly, I wanted to use the layers application in Pixelmator to create a design that gave a feeling for the beautiful outside gardens in spring with the more fragile flowers nurtured inside the Atrium that borders the Gardens.  Most of this work is purely experimental.  I purposely decreased the opaqueness of the black oval background to allow a hint of the large garden shot to show through, hopefully without interfering with selected photos from the outside gardens and the inside atrium.  If nothing else, I find the colors interesting and the design works for me.  I will have more of an opinion once I hang it on the wall.  It may come across as more of marketing visual than a photographic collage, but it was fun trying.

As I experiment more and more with this Website, I am discovering what a thrill it is for me at my age to have the opportunity to mess around with this technologically supported creative activity.  It is certainly pleasing to me and I hope it has some value for those of you who choose to look at it from time to time.  At the very least, it is a hobby that gives me personal satisfaction.  It may serve as a sort of journal of this phase of my life that may have some meaning for my kids and grandchildren.  I keep adding to the various pages on the site, but I am beginning to have the most fun with the "Photos of Interest" section.  As I learn more and more about the power of Adobe's Lightroom, I am amazed what Lightroom enables me to to do in transforming a decent or not so decent photo taken with my trusty Canon Powershot SX50 HS or occasionally with my Olympus D300 or even my iPhone.  



The  camera course I took at  the Silvermine Art School in the early part of this calendar year taught me a great deal about how to plan for the original shot.  I find myself using the manual settings more often, including the ISO settings, Exposure Compensation scale, and overriding the automatic white balance, although this last function, I do rarely.  Often, reality dictates that I have only a few seconds to take a shot or it is gone forever.  Birds flying, wild animals in the backyard, people doing acrobatic exercises on the beach, my grandson hitting a Wiffle ball thrown by his Father provide just a momentary set of opportunities. 

I suppose it is possible to take the time to pose some of these shots, but I love capturing the spontainaity of a candid photo with little semblance of posing.  At any rate, those rapid fire shots often leave much to be desired with the initial photo.  Shooting in RAW and importing the photos into iPhoto for editing in Lightroom and occasionally some final touches in Pixemator comprise a process that is working well for me.  I will continue to develop this site.  The time will come when I will need to start removing some content to keep the navigation of the site more manageable,  but I am not quite ready to do that yet.