Summer has finally arrived here in Cowland. We’re seeing consistently dry, hot weather now and you can see that people out and about are in much happier spirits. Summer is only about a month late.

I’ve been busy trying to stay out of trouble.

So far I’ve succeeded.

Our annual summer party rainfest (it has rained every year except for one that we’ve had the party) went off successfully again — no injuries, one broken fence gate, some assaulted frogs, and 2 overfed dogs.

I’ve been schooled and am schooling.

The latest person to school me was Rudy. I was refreshingly pleased to be given a few insights into his political thought processes. He argued some political points with me on facebook recently, but did so with intelligence and practicality. He’s someone that has made his own political decisions through reason and research rather than as a crowd-following Lemming.

I’m schooling myself in photography, as many of you know. It’s my newest hobby and I’m working my way through a stack of books, from visual composition, to using Adobe Lightroom. Playing with off-camera flash is the coolest thing I’ve come across in a very long time. It’s actually what’s keeping me away from this blog the most. Fragileheart has patiently volunteered her time to a couple of photosessions for me to work on my lighting.

Here’s an example of what off-camera flash can do for you. Take for example a painting that was created with heavy brush strokes or a palate knife. The surface of a painting like this is as important as the image itself. The strokes convey texture, emotion, and movement to the underlying image.

Straight-on, or flat, lighting produces this:

Lighting from the side produces this:

The trade-off (isn’t life full of these) is that the more texture you show, the less saturated your colours become. The trick is finding the right lighting ratio and angles to strike a good balance between colour saturation and texture and thereby do some justice to a piece that will still be best viewed live.