Canadian Sunrise (Palette Knife Filter)

Granted, there's a point in post-processing at which a photograph stops looking like a photograph, or when it starts looking like something other than a photograph. Is it still photography when your photo starts looking like a painting, or a cartoon? I guess my thought is that, if an artist manages to produce something that he finds visually pleasing, it's ok if it doesn't look exactly like it did when he snapped the shutter on his camera.

Riddle about a Fallen Log in Canada

Do you remember the old joke (is it really a joke? maybe more of a riddle?) about the fallen log? "If a tree falls in the middle of the forest, and there's no one there to hear it, will it still make a sound?"

The tree in this picture reminds me of that riddle. It's not quite 'in the middle of the forest', but it is on an island way out in the middle of Lake of the Woods, Canada.

As I walked around the island, this tree really caught my interest. So, what do you do when you have your camera and you see something interesting? You...

Night Fishing (for Pictures) in Canada

This past summer, the family and I went up to an island in Lake of the Woods -- Spruce Island, to do a little fishing. The trip was very instructive for me on several levels, especially as my camera was still new (to me) and I was continuing to learn all sorts of things about my camera (stumbling into all sorts of new (to me) things that I could do with my new camera, etc.).

While everyone else was sleeping, I would get up early (or go out late) to take pictures. (My theory was that I would try to take enough pictures, so that when they were all ready to go out fishing, I could put the camera away and actually be of some help to them with the fishing.) Shooting under these low light conditions, the camera would automatically use a longer shutter speed to take in more light in order to actually achieve a picture (which, was something new to me).

The following picture was taken at 5:30 a.m. (sunrise was around 7 a.m.) First, you see the RAW file converted to a JPEG without edits:

(9/19/13, Sony NEX-7)

And here it is, rendered with a little help from the editing programs: