k6ka's blog about anything!

One fine June morning I rolled out of bed early to do some bird photography. Me and my dad had recently bought a long lens together—a 55-300mm beauty—so I was able to do wildlife photography with greater ease. This young American robin hopped by while I was on the footpath and came very close to me. It didn't seem afraid of me at all, and graciously allowed me to photograph it. I did get a number of photos before someone else came down the footpath and it flew away.

Oh look, I let this blog sit stagnant for a long while. Hmm. That can't be good. I definitely have a lot of catching up to do to get up to speed. During this time I've continued to be active on Flickr and Instagram , but especially on DeviantArt , and over the summer I've improved a lot with my photography. I purchased a new long lense and have been using my DSLR more and more, and although I didn't have nearly as much time as I would've liked to use it during the summer, I've been out taking much better photographs than the year before. I'm quite happy with the progress I've made this year and would like to continue with this amazing hobby in 2020. I don't know where to begin, so I'll probably start where I last left off: a photograph of a tulip in my backyard. This was one of the first times I actually shot in RAW, and while I still largely used JPEG during the year, RAW files are definitely a much better investment if the goal is to get g...

Flickr  and  DeviantArt Flickr  and  DeviantArt I recently recovered from a pretty deep photography slump. Also, having four assignments all crammed into the same week in lieu of exams wasn't exactly helpful either. Feels great to be out and about with a camera again.

I wouldn't ever tell you if I ever got lost. I'm sometimes too proud of my geography skills to admit when I don't know where I'm going. 99% of the time I have the right sense of direction and find myself at the other end, sometimes even ahead of schedule. But this  time, you could probably say that I was a little bit lost, but not "lost" lost. My archaeology class was meeting up at Fort York that afternoon. Getting to the location via public transit was a breeze and I knew the route even though I had never actually taken it before. As soon as I stepped off the streetcar, though, that was when the head scratching began. The place clearly changed a lot since the last time I had been there, and on those times I had come in a car or a bus with my parents or my (elementary) school. On top of that, a howling gale was whipping at me so hard that I was being blown to the side and could barely keep my head up to see where I was going. There was a long, brown buil...

I've been using the Vibrance HDR app for a few weeks now, and though it is fairly simplistic in its offerings, it does the job quite well, actually, and I highly commend the app developer for making such a reliable app that gets the job done  in under 10 MB! The app is built to work well with OpenCamera's Exposure Bracketing option, although I've successfully been able to get it to process images taken by my DSLR as well. It can support up to 7 different exposures to create a working HDR image; however, this depends on your phone's specs. My phone unfortunately doesn't have a lot of RAM (only 2 GBs) so I was limited to the minimum of just three. Still, it accomplishes what it sets out to do: be a true HDR app that merges exposures (rather than the "fake HDR" method of applying whacky filters) with not too many extras. There are some basic post-processing sliders you can use to adjust the image, but it doesn't beat further editing in a proper image ed...

View on  Flickr  and  DeviantArt . Sometimes, great scenes for photography happen out of the blue and at seeming random. Most of the time, I let these scenes pass, and although I sometimes feel like kicking myself for failing to even take out my camera to capture a great scene, I usually forgive myself within a few minutes and acknowledge the fact that I can't capture every single moment in life. And that's okay! This photo was taken just outside the Bishop Avenue entrance to Finch subway station, right by the GO/YRT bus terminal, on January 11. I had just come out of the subway when I spotted the scene, and liked it so much that I immediately took my phone out to capture it. I took three exposure bracketed shots that didn't have the TTC bus in the background, then took an HDR one that my phone processed on the spot, which had a bit of motion blur that I didn't mind. I'm not too good with photo editing, but I think I touched it up pretty well for this one. Wha...

For Android users interested in using their smartphones for photography, I highly recommend getting the  OpenCamera  app. It really is one of the better camera apps out there that's for people serious about photography and contains quite a lot of handy features, although its functionality may be limited depending on the device you have and how stingy the manufacturer was at limiting third-party camera apps. One of the neatest features I recently discovered on the app is an Automatic Exposure Bracketing mode. OpenCamera has an HDR mode too that does the same thing but processes the images for you on the spot. For a long time, this was fine for me, since I wasn't really good at image editing, but now that I have PhotoDirector 5 and its amazing Bracket HDR feature (that's pretty darn simple to use!) I appreciated having this feature right on my phone when my Nikon D60 lacked it. The Exposure Bracketing option in the OpenCamera app. For those who aren't so familiar w...