Charles T. Low Photography

Late Autumn in Eastern Ontario: our one big (beautiful) dump of snow has melted, the wonderful Fall colour-change has long ended, and I call this the Brown Season ... not the most photogenic. Nonetheless, I head out, and my social media posts often say knowing that nothing would happen, and then ... the Universe occasionally smiles upon me (and occasionally does not!).

The image above numbers among several recently in which a heavily overcast dawn, a half-hour or so prior to sunrise, surprised me with a vivid (almost ostentatious?) glow above the treetops. And then I subjected that image, my most dramatic example of late, to a distortion (among other more normal editing manipulations), to emphasize what had started as a narrower band of fiery colour.

Note the smaller red accents extending up into the clouds.

Or, a serendipitous abstract might flash across my camera's LCD view-screen. I saw this, below, and then spent a minute working it, until I had it as I wanted it.

(Back-story: I had been in the car, waiting for something about to happen outside, in the rain, and so got everything as organized as I could while still under cover. This happened. The outdoors thing didn't work out.)

On my personal three-point rating system of intrigue, meaning and beauty, I just like the look of it (so: beauty).

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I might think that I have photographed enough ships (over 1,000 images). But, I live on the St. Lawrence River portion of the Great Lakes Seaway, and these behemoths simply never fail to leave me awestruck. I call myself an occasional ship-photographer, not a ship-watcher per se, although I contribute (in some heady company) to three ship-watching Facebook groups:

1. Ship Junkies - Lakes, Locks & Rivers (LL&R),
2. the St. Lawrence Seaway Ship Watchers and
3. The Prescott Anchor.

Happily, I seem to continue to find new ways to photograph them. I have been known to say that new for new's sake alone doesn't do it for me, but that I very much enjoy expanding my artistic horizons. I still expect art to result (although by whose definition?).

So, one day recently, I noted on Marine Traffic that a tugboat was heading downstream, so that seemed like a nice change from my usual diet of mammoth freighters, but ... darkness encroached, and under heavy cloud I knew that it would not likely work out.

Still, I went to the waterfront to check it out, and hand-holding my camera (rather than using a tripod, as I more usually would), so having to bump the ISO up into stratospheric territory (so this image could not have even occurred in ancient times, with film-photography), I found this light, and immediately liked it.

(Some techo-geeky pixel-peeping photographers might object to the high ISO. While I agree with their concern, I submit that it matters not one whit for this image. I reviewed that topic a bit in my previous blog.)

Perhaps more towards the intriguing end of my three-point framework, two full-size freighters met, and all three vessels fell into one frame. (And I still like the light.)

The image below occurred a few days later under almost identical dusk-lighting conditions. I used a tripod that time, still requiring pushing my camera's ISO capabilities, in next-to-no remaining light. The image — the light, and those reflections — frankly startled me.

From that location (Maitland, ON), I roared on a bit further upstream to catch it again, as it passed by Brockville, but by that time I had insufficient light to render a useable image.

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I made the image below mid-afternoon, on a dark and windy day. I would not have expected a rainbow to appear. (A close inspection will reveal a hint of a double-rainbow.)

I made overview images of the rainbow as well, but this closer-in view pleases me more.

And of course I return to dawn-photography. I could not have thought of anything simpler than the image below: a clear sky, the river, and a glowing band of orange beginning to appear from the Sun, still far from rising.

Essentially, I lined up my camera, and released the shutter. (It did matter than I first showed up.)

And I like it. I know of no rule mandating complexity or difficulty.

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Elevating the Fall

It wasn't so hard, in late Autumn, finding things to photograph after all

I can't show all of my work in these blogs, so feel free to follow me on various social media. I keep the list here (now including Mastodon, but I suggest Instagram for the most images).

Thank you all so much for reading! Kindly comment.

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You may wish to look through my larger portfolio. Almost everything is for sale. I favour large wall art, and also deal in books and other small items: prints, notecards, and postcards.

Charles T. Low
Photographer
Blog #88
2022-12-11

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