Mark K

My nephew started about 2 years ago- not for the $$. He has freakish mechanical and electronics skills and converted a sewing machine into a rod wrapper. It's pretty wicked. He builds them with Winn Grips and clear wraps. They look pretty cool . He built a pretty beefy baitcaster with a Bushido blank to use for froggin' . It had a really nice Lews reel on it that had some foo-foo bearings in it- the combination feels fantastic. The beauty is you can build the rod exactly the way you want. Long term you could probably charge $100 labor for 8 hours work- give or take if you could find the right customer. Trouble is there are really nice super cheap rods today that fish really great. I bought both my boys Gander Mountain rods on sale for $19.99 with a GM reel for $24.99. The cork on one started to peel. It's not even solid cork, just a veneer going over some kind of hard foam! The guides don't have any ceramic. These things are reasonably light, we caught tons of nice bass with them in Sylvania and blugills and crappies and carp. If they were going to break, they would have broke by now. I have about a dozen, easy- St Croix, Loomis and falcon rods. The kids leave these things in my car and I fish with them when I am on lunch all time. Seriously, my favorite rod is an old Loomis SJR721 (like a $250 rod) and if one of these combos is rigged and ready, I would grab it first. Point being, that's what you are up against.

No, but those bobbers were called “Adjust-a-Bubble” and were made byRainbow Plastics. If that is what you are after.

I fished it in the Kank today. Got skunked. I was hoping the plastic might lift the jig out of the rocks a bit, I got stuck a lot.

As far as I can tell, they would be 100% legal in Sylvania too. Their jigs are beautiful. Nice sharp high quality hook. The plastic is super soft and stretchy, but I think they are really hard to rig straight. So much so, that I would rig' em at home. Me thinks if one were to super glue to the jig one would have a bomb-proof jig. According to the manufacturer they don't play well with Plano type boxes.

Yeah. The tail stand up completely because the plastic is buoyant. I have become really skeptical about lures especially soft plastic. Nothing is ever really new, it's just re-molded into a different angler attracting shape. This think has different action than anything I have seen. Check it out.

So, I bought some 1/10 ounce jigs and one of the finesse baits- Like a 4" Senko with a shreded tail , I would not attribute catching a bass in cold water to this lure, bur I will say it fishes really nice. and stays out of trouble. Pain in the ass to rig. I would do a few at home. First Fish 2018 by Mark Kasick, on Flickr

Cool, Rob, nice post. I haven't tie one yet, but i did start using Barr's Meat Whistle (from Cabelas) which Ron recommended. It's a darn good fly. I liked his practical selections for casting. Don't recall that he was a fan of flies that resemble cat toys. Maybe I am wrong about that. Really, I am still kind of stunned that he is gone. I only met him twice, I think, in person. But I did read most of what he wrote.

Man, that is terrible news.

I love Sylvania. Here is a video I took of an ideal august morning at the boat launch on clark Lake. An eagle made a fairly low pass overhead. So I got my phone out but it was gone so we are stuck with a bunch of loons.

+1 on Sylvania.

Recent post on TU site. https://tu.org/blog-posts/epa-suspends-clean-water-rule-—-implications-for-clean-water

Take a look here: Links to recent TU blog.

yep.

Always wanted to visit snake road during the migration.

Well, that makes sense. why is the LM called salmoids?

Jeez, that's awful.

Correction that was from "Save the Boundary Waters" organization. But here is an article: Game over. again. How many more years of this? http://www.startribune.com/feds-ok-mining-on-edge-of-bwca/465989843/

From the Sierra Club: This afternoon, the Trump Administration moved to give a Chilean company an absolute right to mine on the edge of the Boundary Waters against science, law and the will of the people.

Just to comment also. I love post processing. I look at going out shooting pictures as gathering pixels. From what I have seen, the processor in the camera rarely capture scenes the way the human sees it, at least not my eye. I felt the same way about shooting film and I essentially lost interest in photography once I lost access to a darkroom. I heard people call post processing "cheating" I think that is absurd. A camera processes a raw data in body the same way you would on a computer. In fact you can change the way it does it in the shooting menue by using "standard" "vivid" "landscape" portrait" or even "Black and White". Its just some engineers' algorythm applying some extra schmooz to the jpeg. Exactly what you can do in post.

Manny the monitor I have at work is dark. They look better on my home monitor and they look good on my phone. I think the shadows are too deep in the canyon shots for my taste. That's hard to get right in camera. I would spot sharpen certain areas too. #3 I like the leaves in the foreground. I think that is effective and makes shots interesting. Especially if you use a wide angle where you can move up close and because the depth of field is much deeper, so stuff in the background will still be in focus. Personally I find this part pretty challenging.When I was looking at your shots on my work monitor it almost looked like were done in the evening. So take that low light comment with a grain of salt. So here is a tutorial by a really great wildlife and landscape photographer, I follow his stuff on you tube and it's really improved my stuff. Personally I think he is one of best around and a good teacher. I bough some of his e-books. Steve Perry (not the singer from Journey) of Backcountry Gallery. Regarding his comments on low light, just make sure you have enough light to pull shadows out of detail without too much noise. One thing that polarizers do really well is cut the glare off vegetation- which there is a lot of. It makes for deep saturated shots and I like that. Too his comments if you are shooting harsh lighting it's going to be hard not to blow highlights- like skies. I highly recommend his videos. Though he works mostly in Photoshop, not LR. https://backcountrygallery.com/waterfall-photography-in-eight-easy-steps/ LR is different than Photoshop. It started out as an organizing program with basic editing features for RAW files. A lot of photographers just did all their editing there and so Adobe refined it over the years to this really powerful editing tool. I used to shoot RAW +jPEG then I stopped with the jpeg because I got so fast at processing in LR it was not worth it. Once you start editing in RAW, and try to go back to jpeg you will see just how much data is missing. The other great thing about LR is it's totally non destructive to that original RAW file. You can always go back to the original. A guy on You Tube named Anthony Morganti to me has the best tutorials on LR. Before you jump on the LR bandwagon, there is another program I got a trial version of called "Luminar", it was like a version of lightroom minus the organizational tools, which to be honest, I don't use as I should. I downloaded a trial version but really never worked with it enough, but what I saw I really liked. and it's non destructive. They havea PC version now if that;'s the way you roll.

I shoot RAW always and yes, I think you should too. If your Sony has the same 16mp sensor my Nikon D7000 does, you will unlock it's potential of capturing dynamic range. rarely will your camera capture what the human eye sees in terms of color and dynamic range. Shooting RAW and really working on post processing will improve you photos. I edit in Lightroom Classic/Photoshop $9.99 a month thing. A bargain in my opinion. I have never walked away from Mathieson or Starved Rock with a composition I was happy with. You would think it would be a piece of cake. Part of it is I only have an 18mm as my widest lens. On a crop sensor camera that's a 35mm perspective of 27mm and that's not really that wide for shooting canyons. But still it's hard to shoot anything there that doesn't look static and boring. So, what I learned about this type of photography is that you want the sharp portions of the image to be UBER sharp. That's what makes these type of moving water shots pop, when that sharpness stands out against the soft water. That's hard to achieve in low lighting because the contrast is so low and that is part of what gives you sharpness.. This will sound counter intuitive, but you don't want to shoot these in low light conditions. To make matters worse, if you stop all the way down to your tiniest aperture, diffraction will rear it's ugly head and kill sharpness. yes, you can spot sharpen, improve saturation, contrast etc in post. But better if you capture as much as possible in the image. So that would be why ND filters are important. polarizers only chop off 2 stops. Lastly in long exposures any kind of wind is going to make vegetation look soft. The way around that it to not shoot in wind. Or you can shoot one exposure with a slow shutterspeed one with a fast, stack them in photoshop then using masks erase the portion with the undesired movement to reveal the image with the fast- (therefore sharp) shutterspeed. I have not tried this yet, but this really looks promising. So you shoot a number of exposures at normal shutter speeds, then stack and blend them in photo shop. I did not watch this tutorial, but I think this is the general gist. There maybe better tutorials.

Did you shoot these in RAW and what editing program are you using.

yes. He was a regular at all the conservation stuff we did.

Looks good to me

Let me know if you have trouble.