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TheRagens Newsletter
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 | Amazon.com. Starting with books but adding links to just about anything now. |
| Powell's Books. Just a book store but well done with lots of hard-to-find used books for that special holiday gift. |
| Shutterfly. This is where we print our holiday cards. They offer a nice service with lots of options. |
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Wine Enthusiast
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| New Photographs |
| Bookmarks - Booklists |
| Wine Tasting |
| Web Sites Worth Visiting |
I'm still working on some of my photos from the summer. Here is the next set of photos that I've published on the site. The eagle photo is probably one of the more challenging pictures I've completed -- it was taken just a few minutes after first light before there was much natural light. While the exposure was long, the head of the eagle was remarkably stationary while the wings were "painting the sky" as the eagle landed on the rock.
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October and November are great for climbing and outdoor books. Three different awards are given out across almost fifteen different categories and we've updated our web pages for each of the awards. I haven't read most of the books as there are so many that make the winner or finalist lists but there is always something interesting in the winners.
| Boardman Tasker Memorial Prize for mountain literature. |
| National Outdoor Book Awards in such categories as Adventure Guidebooks, Literature, Design and Art, and Outdoor Classics. |
| Banff Mountain Book Festival Awards in categories such as Mountain Literature, Adventure Travel, and Mountain Image. |
| Featured Book
Noble Rot: A Bordeaux Wine Revolution Bordeaux has long epitomized fine wine. After the 1855 classification was put into place, the French reverence for tradition settled in. Fortunately, over the last 2-3 decades, some revolutionary "garagistes" (winemakers who work on smaller lots) have begun using new growing and wine-making techniques to to make extraordinary wines. There is considerable controversy in this modernist approach and this book makes the most of it. In fact, this book was temporarily pulled from bookstores due to a challenge by the old owners of Chateau d'Yquem. Wine lovers will come away from this lively account with a sense of how globalization and economics have created ferment and growth in ancient Bordeaux. |
Our first "harvest" season has come and gone for Sunbreak Cellars, our backyard vineyard. As I've noted in our vineyard journal, we didn't intend to get a crop this year. Our goal was to strengthen the vines and their root systems. And I think we accomplished that.
I have noted, though, that we did leave several bunches of grapes on some of the vines just to see how they matured through the year. Excitingly enough, they did quite well! I tasted them several times and they were getting progressively sweeter. Sweet enough that something (birds or raccoons) went through the vines one mid-September night and chowed down on the few clusters that were left. No disappointment as I was anticipating that to happen but I now know that I need to put netting over all the grapes by the first week in September or risk losing all of them next year!
| Nature Photography Directories - Nature Photography Top 100 - Photography Sites.com |
One thing that I've always wanted to try is infrared photography. It's somewhat more practical with film as all you need is a good IR filter and some IR film. However, it's more challenging with digital as most digital cameras have a IR cut filter that limits the infrared that gets to the imaging chip. If you have the right kind of camera, there are a few guides that you can follow to surgically modify your digital camera. It's a one-way journey and you'll void the warranty but you can get decent infrared right in the camera.
| Canon G Series Conversion |
| Converting Nikon 950 or 990 cameras |
| IR Digital Conversion as featured in Digital Photo Pro |
A slightly more practical way to do this at minimal cost is to use a Photoshop action from Fred Miranda. This is essentially a script that tweaks the images to make them look as though they are infrared.
| Fred Miranda Digital Darkroom with Photoshop Plug-Ins and Photoshop Actions |
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