Thorn Cycles Forum
Community => Non-Thorn Related => Topic started by: RonS on January 01, 2025, 11:52:50 PM
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Let's get the ball rolling early this year!
I got out for a quick 32 km today to get rid of last night's cobwebs :) (One drink and in bed at 10. I'm such a party animal.)
The temperature was 4° so I put my new toe covers on and gave them a try. They passed the test.
Happy new year and happy riding!
Ron
PS I wasn't riding Nozomi today so I had to "artfully crop" my non Thorn bike from the photo :)
PPS The second pic is a photo from the iPhone. It just happens to look like one of Andre's watercolours. No idea what I did for it to come out that way.
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Jeez, Ron, seems like "Rides of 2025" is Just a Canajan Thing. Who knew??
I know you've been riding a lot, out there in LotusLand, 'cos My People at Komoot keep me posted on your doings.
En ce qui concerne moi-même et Freddie, well, it's been a matter of a wretched late wet'n'cold spring. Last winter ('23-'24) we had just 50% of our average snowfall, only about 110 cms; this year, we had 250 cms-plus, about 12-15% more than our average. And, some of that came in the second week of April, fer gawd''s sake, 20 cms of the stuff. In Toronto, where I was for ten days in early April, people were joking about "spring" being just a malicious rumour spread by your favourite villain goes here. Gotta get/make your humour wherever you can, these days.
But, hope springs eternal, etc., etc., and today, nearly two months after the date of my first ride in 2024, I managed a very welcome 15 kms along the bikepath system through the Experimental Farm. A few short'n'steepish hills to get my heart rate up -- more, at least, than 30 minutes' skating will do, if, like me, one's still a wee bit careful about cracks in the ice, sudden stops or backward spins to avoid careless youngsters, undsoweiter.
Freddie was smooth and unfussed about everything as you'd expect, and I was whistling back-and-forth with the Northern Cardinals. These lovely birds, bless'em, are everywhere now, recent arrivals nudged waaay northwards in the last decade by climate change.
Photos to come from the next ride -- forecast is for sunshine and 20º on Monday! :)
This time last year, I was all the way up to Pink Lake in the Gatineau, but a mountain-biking acquaintance told me that the trails are still chock-a-block with snow. So, All That will probably have to wait 'til early/mid-May. You can check in from Foggie Olde to see what's what on this, Our Very Own Thread.
Do give my best to the West Country, and say hi to Sarah and all at Thorn Cycles if you're in Bridgwater.
Cheers, mate. ;)
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The second pic is a photo from the iPhone. It just happens to look like one of Andre's watercolours. No idea what I did for it to come out that way.
My watercolors look like that because, until recently, that was what I saw and therefore painted, to be taken in the context of me not being overly set on getting exact colours, and being perfectly happy to simplify scenes that are a bit too chaotic even for "nature". In the last couple of months I had the cataracts replaced with clear lenses in both eyes, and my wife says she's looking forward to seeing what I paint after I get my new eyeglasses in a couple of weeks.
The likelihood, if this is indeed an iPhone effect on your photograph, is that HDR was accidentally switched off. HDR is a facility that shoots three photos every time you press the button once, and averages out the image from all three, thus removing the effect of an electronic "long lens" magnifying the slightest tremble. HDR is a superb convenience and I generally recommend that people keep it switched on.
The fastest way, if you want the effect and don't get it, is to run the raw image from the camera through a Mac app called Graphic Converter, and using only two of it's many impressive facilities, the filter Unsharp Mask, which you use two or three times at low settings (start at 6 pixels and work your way down until you get the right effect), followed by one of the colour filters called Auto Levels which you need to use only once. That's the easy way. It is more difficult in Photoshop.
For a painter, the effect can be achieved with special brushes, called foliage brushes, which have the hairs arranged flat with irregular gaps rather than with an even edge, combined with thickish paint and the artistic technique of dry-brushing. See the winter drees of the trees in the middle of your photo. They'd be a pain to produce with the traditional rigger's brush. Or see the moss dripping in the centre of the painting below. The top half is of the orchard behind the house which was let go about 90 years ago and the bottom half of bristle grass shooting seed, seen beside the river, which runs through town and beside all my normal rides, one day when I had to wait out the rush hour on the main road before continuing my ride. I painted the bottom half first but its background was just a view I'd painted too many times before, so I left it blank. A bit later I was tracking my fox's path from the living room patio around the old stable wall and through the orchard to the gulley with the intention of negotiating with Mrs Fox for a female cub to train up as an inside pet, when it struck me that all these broken trees made just the sort of interesting pattern I wanted as a background.
The sky in your photo is an easy hit for even new painters: float some water on the page where you want the paint to flow, wet only the tip of the brush with thinned watercolor or ink, and put the tip into the wet area, then tilt the paper to flow and graduate the colour much more progressively than you can possibly achieve by trying proactively to paint the gradation. It's so obvious that nobody ever says it, but the watercolorist's best friend is...water.
All that said, Ron, I like your photographs just as they are. If you have interesting subjects from weird and wonderful places -- and, let's face it, Canada is weird and wonderful to about 99 percent of all the people on earth, and so is Japan, and the north coast of Scotland and Hebridean Isles -- you don't need tricky post-processing, you just need to select your viewpoint intelligently and click away.