The photo of the day today comes from a local lake, but the title caption isn’t exactly accurate. It was a nice quiet few minutes on the lake until this public lake patrol told us we could only take our kayak (our Dagger Axis) out on the water if we were going to fish from the kayak. I told him I didn’t want to fish today and he then told me we would have to leave because they only allowed people who want to fish. The crowds you can see were overwhelming, but we also won’t be going back to this lake any time soon either.
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Last night we went out to Chewacla State Park for a very quick trial run to test out the Dagger Axis 10.5 Kayak. This boat is much smaller than our previous kayaks but is very stable, easy to maneuver, and tracks quite well. We got to Chewacla too late to give it a real good testing but it was nice to get out on the water for a short time and to see the sunset together. It was a beautiful “fall” sunset, full of mosquitoes and 95*F weather, but as you can see from the photos it was well worth the trouble.
There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of review information about the Dagger Axis around the blogosphere but from a first impression it certainly gives a lot of bang for the buck and is one of the only kayaks that can seem to adequately cover both white water and recreational or touring flat water. From past experience you really can’t get a good feel for how a kayak handles until you have sat in one all day and paddled for hours (or miles), much like riding a street bike for the better part of 40-50 miles at a time. Hopefully the weather will cool off soon and we can do a little paddling during the day without having heat stroke. For now, here are a few pics from the launch (I’m the one with no hair), and one from the lake.
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My wife and I in days past were quite active paddlers. We spent about 5 or so years kayaking all around the country in between conventions (our work), and because we were always traveling we were able to kayak in some really neat places. Just to name a few, we went out to the caves in Lake Superior near the Apostle Islands, the slot canyons at Lake Powell in Arizona, coastal surf in the North Carolina Outer Banks, rivers and lakes from Ohio to New York, and out to the great Columbia river in Oregon. Only problem, for me, was I never did like my particular kayak (the Dagger Cortez 16.5), for various reasons, but I never could get comfortable on a long paddle.
Since then we have tried to find different outdoor activities that we could both enjoy together, but never really found anything we both equally liked (other than sailing, which we might do again some day), so we decided to go back to kayaking, but with shorter, lighter, smaller, less expensive, kayaks we can just throw in the back of the truck and take to the nearest body of water (like Chewacla which is only a few miles away). Anyway, below are some of our previous paddling trips, wish we had time to go back to some of these great places.
These below were all shot with film so they are a little grainy, HDR high res images are in order soon.
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I have a hate hate relationship with scanners. I have had scanners of all types and none have been anything worth keeping and not throwing out the window
at any nearby target. I started long ago with an HP slide scanner, actually one of the better performing scanners specifically designed to scan slides. Since I shot almost all Fuji Velvia 50 or a Kodak 100 positive film back then, the slide scanner was something I was really excited about. It cost a fortune, worked ok, for a while, game mediocre results, and I ended up scanning only a hand full of slides.
Fast forward about 10 years and 5 scanners. My current scanner, the Epson Perfection V500 Photo scanner, is supposed to be a great one for scanning all kinds of film, 35mm negatives, positives, 120, just about the only thing it can’t do is wet scans. But, results, up to this point (I have had this scanner almost a year now) have been dismal, until yesterday when a friend and fellow photographer (Jak) told me to try a few different settings and software. I do this every so often, try again and get lousy results but this time I started messing with the color profiles and other areas and it didn’t turn out so bad.
This was a scan of an original Velvia 50 transparency taken back in May 2002 of Deb kayaking on Lake Erie in Ohio exploring the coves. Contrast is a little bit high but this is how it came out of my scanner, far better than any I have tried before. The shot below shows the sharpness at 100%, not bad for a scan on a scanner I thought didn’t work.
Like most things, it takes practice to get it right. This scan was straight out of the scanner, no post processing corrections (hense the artifact above Deb’s head). A polorizer would have also helped here but as I remember, I was in my kayak trying to hand hold a very expensive camera while trying not to tip over like a turtle thus ending my photography as I knew it at the time. I will try to get some other dated scans done and post them periodically.
