Today is a special day. Not only is it New Year's Eve, it is also the 1 year anniversary of the day I bought my DSLR. One year and ~13700 shutter clicks later, I hope I'm a better photographer. If nothing else, it has been fun.

It snowed all day today... not really a blizzard, just fat flakes falling relentlessly. I had to wrap the camera in my toque to avoid getting it wet between shots. We walked to the Experimental Farm, where I took quite a few photos this fall. Different seasons bring different subject matter. In the fall, about 90% of my Experimental Farm photos were taken with the 50mm lens, and the other 10% split between the macro and the Lensbaby. Today I put the 50mm on the camera and brought the new 70-200mm zoom in case there were any birds to be photographed. As it turns out, I spent much of the day wishing for the wide angle and the macro. There was too much distracting background material in the fall to take wide angle shots... now the trees have lost their leaves and the corn fields have been replaced by a clean blanket of white snow. Everything is much more open. The trees are encrusted in ice and snow - perfect fodder for the macro lens. Nonetheless, the best lens is the one that you have with you and know how to use... and the 50 is a versatile little gem. Here is one of the icy trees I managed to photograph. I might return later on this week with a different selection of lenses, weather and life permitting.

Another day off, another photo journey. This time, we set out for Fitzroy, Ontario. We somehow managed to leave home even later than yesterday. We got lost on the way to Fitzroy, and got the car stuck soon after arriving at the Provincial Park. By the time we got the car unstuck, we had pretty much missed the sunset. There was a long trek down to the water, where we stood around and froze for a while before deciding there was really nothing interesting to photograph.

Cold and dejected, we started to trudge back to the car. The path was illuminated by the almost-full moon in a clear sky. My fingers felt like they were about to fall off, but I couldn't resist stopping for some long-exposure shots. This one was taken with my new lens.

This is an apt photo to be posting today, as there will be a blue moon tomorrow. Apparently, a blue moon occurs on New Year's Eve only every 19 years.

I finally have a few days off from work and was desperate to take a photo journey. I have seen quite a few patients from Cornwall, Ontario, and was curious about the place. Since it's situated right on the St. Lawrence River, I figured there would be something interesting to photograph there. Unfortunately, in typical Graem and Andrea style, we did not leave the house until after 1pm. Then, we had a bunch of drawn-out and mundane errands to run before hitting the road. The days are getting longer now, but not by that much. We raced toward Cornwall as the sun raced toward he horizon. We realized that we were destined to lose the race, so made a detour to Morrisburg. I tried looking up Morrisburg, Ontario on Google Maps, but alas it does not exist there. I was redirected to South Dundas, which is somewhat north of Morrisburg, and not on the St. Lawrence.

The temperature today was -20 degrees Celsius. It is probably the coldest day we have had so far this winter. For someone who grew up on the prairies, -20 is really not that cold. It sure seemed cold, though, with the wind coming right off of the water. It was not a good photography day for me. I was hoping to try out the new lens (a 70-200mm f2.8 zoom). I had it set on manual focus from the last time I had used it, and forgot to switch it back to auto. Most of my shots with it were blurry... which actually didn't matter since I couldn't compose a decent shot to save my life today. Partly it can be blamed on the cold, but partly my concentration was just all over the place.

Luckily the wide-angle rescued the day (yet again). As sunset turned into night, I brought out the tripod and took some long exposures. A couple were actually decent. One is posted here, and one is on Red Bubble.

It is supposed to be warmer for the rest of the week. I'm posting this at 5am and I haven't been to bed yet... but I hope to haul my carcass out early tomorrow and find somewhere interesting to go.

Today I'm about to break two of the rules I've established so far for this blog: Number 1: No posting photos taken by other people. This just seems like cheating to me. I've been tempted to post photos taken by Graem before (kind of a guest-blogger thing, just like some webcomics occasionally have guest artists). I've always managed to avoid the temptation. I was going to post one of his frog photos, but found them underexposed when I went to convert them to JPEG. I was going to post a macro shot he took of the spindles on our back door... but I just never got around to it. That one still might turn up one day. Rule Number 2 (the hardest for me not to break): Thou shalt not blog like a kitten parent. Let's face it... I am a kitten parent. And a proud one at that.

Moosh has always loved Christmas. Maybe it's something about the catnip toys, the special treats in his food dish, or all of the boxes, bows and wrapping paper he gets to investigate. This year we had very little of that, but it didn't seem to matter. The excitement of Christmas was enough to make Moosh (a cat who sleeps 90% of the rest of the year) tear around the house meowing, fuzzy tail raised sky-high. This is Moosh's tenth Christmas, and it seems like every year we have a "Christmas Moosh" photo... one that manages to capture all of his exuberance and life. This year Graem got that photo (those are my legs in the background). Without further ado, I give you Christmas Moosh 2009. Here's to many more.

Here's yet another icicle photo... At first I thought the roof in the background was distracting, but the more I look at it, the more I think it actually adds something to the picture. The icicles are getting more interesting every day. It has been melting the past few days, and today there is freezing rain. I took some interesting shots a couple of days ago which are still sitting on the camera. Hopefully a few turned out!

Here's another icicle photo. I was pretty enthralled by the detail on the tip of this 'ice talon' (probably best viewed big). This is one of the few photos of it that didn't come out blurry. I hope my icicle photos don't get tiresome. Truth be told, I only have a couple more to post. My work schedule won't let me take any new photos until Dec. 28 at the earliest. I've taken another look at my snowboard binding macros and deemed the rest unpostable. Maybe I'm just in a picky mood. Assuming I don't change my mind, I'll post my remaining icicle photos in the coming days, and maybe a Red Bubble reject if I find one I deem worthy. Other than that, there might be a brief hiatus until I have a chance to take more photos.

I hope that some of you people out there in Internet Land have a few days off from work/school and manage to enjoy the holidays!

Time stands still for no one. But at this time of year, it certainly seems to. This is another of my icicle macro photos. I thought it quite suitable for posting on the longest night of the year.

Today I took the macro lens out to photograph icicles. I got a few interesting shots. I was in a mood for simplifying things, and I was striving to make my shots as clean and uncluttered as possible. I intended to convert everything to monochrome, but when I finally sat down with the images, I decided I like my icicles better as nature made them - with a subtle tint of cold blue.

This photo was an exception. The icicle was bright white, the background baby blue, and for some reason the base of the icicle had a pinkish hue... The whole thing looked like a decoration one might find on a cake at a baby shower. Despite that, I really liked the photo. It's not the typical cliched icicle photo. I therefore decided to rescue it with monochrome conversion.

I'm not even sure if this can be called an 'icicle', as it was not hanging down, but rather jutting up from the railing on my porch. Are icicles analogous to stalactites and stalagmites? Is there a special term for ones that jut upwards?

Graem bought a new snowboard, with boots and bindings to go with it. I thought the bindings would make a good subject for indoor macro photography and learning to use my off-camera flash. I like the shiny metal and the fact that there are so many intricate parts. The colors are also a bonus - shiny red and silver are quite appropriate at this time of year. I was using a piece of green felt as background, which gives a Christmas feel to some of the photos. Unfortunately none of the ones I deemed postable include the felt. 2009 has been a terrible year all around, and this is the closest I'll come to feeling festive, I'm afraid.

This photo shoot was a real learning experience for me. I thought I'd have a bunch of great shots... but in the beginning my lighting was all wrong. In the later pictures, I had the lighting under better control, but you can see every bit of dust and cat hair on the bindings... not to mention my own fingerprints. I had taken great pains to clean them off, but nothing can hide from the macro lens! If I get a chance to try again before Graem goes snowboarding, I'll have to implement special sterile technique. I'll have to wipe the bindings off with a lint-free cloth, and blow the dust off with the air-puffer I use to clean my lenses. I'll have to steal some gloves from work to make sure I don't leave fingerprints!

This was probably the best photo I took in terms of lighting. I have some others where the lighting isn't as good, but the composition is maybe more interesting. Look for them to appear soon either here or on Red Bubble.

My ability to post photos over the summer was largely limited by the slowness of my laptop. I needed the laptop to study for my exams, and posting a single photo might cause it to spool helplessly for more than an hour. Now my laptop's performance is marginally better... but I'm the one who is spooling. I can't seem to summon the physical or mental energy to take new photos or edit the ones I already have on my computer. By the time I get up, it seems as though the light is already fading. It's a "balmy" -12 degrees out, and I feel like I'm going to die of hypothermia every time I open the door.

Today was my last real day off from work until December 29th. I was hoping to try out the new lens, but there was nothing really to take pictures of in my yard. The cats didn't want to be outside, and the thought of going for a walk did not appeal to me. Besides... it was about 3pm and already starting to get dark. I thought of swapping over to the macro lens to photograph icicles and got stuck spooling in the process. Hence, a Red Bubble Reject today.

This photo was taken almost exactly a year ago. My camera was brand new, and I couldn't wait to try it, despite the fact that it was -37 out and already dark! The only post-processing of this photo was to convert it to monochrome... though the color version doesn't look much different (sadly no red roof on the house). I've always been impressed by the 'retro' look of this photo... It looks like a picture you would find in a social studies textbook about the pioneers. I was clueless about my camera then, and probably wouldn't be able to replicate that mood/style now even if I tried!

Here is another photo from my experiments with the orchid and off-camera flash. I title this one "Maybe"... as in "Maybe it is good enough for posting. Maybe it isn't". The flash comes with a steep learning curve. I am still quite clueless, but I can honestly say I've improved by an order of magnitude since this shot was taken. This is the last of the older photos I have stored up for posting, though I'm hoping to take the new lens out for a spin this weekend. I've also been doing some more indoor work with the flash, the macro lens, and some very interesting subject matter... but I haven't had a chance to go through the photos and pick out the good ones. Hopefully I'll have something ready to post this weekend.

This is another photo taken in Hawkesbury, Ontario. It is similar to the one I have already posted, however in this case the sky was more dramatic. The clouds prevented the sun from being overpowering, so no HDR was required.

This photo was taken at a park near Dow's Lake in Ottawa in the first week of December. If you peer into the far right hand corner of the photo, you can see that the grass was not only visible, but still green! Unfortunately that has changed now... Everything is covered by a couple feet of snow which will probably stick around until at least April. At least we were lucky enough to stave it off for this long.

This was my best shot of that day (and really the only shot worth posting). I'm not happy with the exposure. For some reason my RAW shots always look properly exposed, but when I convert them to JPG, they are underexposed... and I can't fix it without blowing out the sky. I guess I'll have to get more adept at HDR technique.

Speaking of exposure, when my computer was out of commission, I used Graem's computer, and noticed that a lot of my photos look very oversaturated on his monitor (especially reds). I wonder if my monitor needs to be calibrated. I hope I'm not making a fool of myself by posting garishly oversaturated photos all over the internet. If anyone else finds my reds blown out and the photos oversaturated, please leave a comment!

In other news, I bought a new lens today! By the time I got home it was too dark to do much experimenting, but I hope to give it a thorough workout soon. I also have more indoor macro work planned with off-camera lighting. So maybe the dearth of new material won't last as long as I had originally anticipated.

My computer has been in Windows mode the past few days so that I could scan in some things from work. I can't view my photos in Windows, hence no posts. It's just as well. I haven't had the time, or frankly the inclination to take new photos.

Believe it or not, this ladybug photo was taken in mid November. I don't think I've ever seen a ladybug in November before. She was kind of a deep rust color rather than the usual bright red, and blended in nicely with the woodchips in my yard. I got a few shots of her taking off and flying, but none were in sharp enough focus to consider posting. There's one that came very close... I may post it later on if I get desperate for material. I always see crisp shots of insects in flight and wonder how on earth the photographer has managed to pull it off... A million monkeys banging away at a million typewriters, I guess.

Graem has done some fiddling with my computer in the past few days, and I now have access to the 1TB drive where all of my photos from before June 2009 are stored! This means I'll be revamping my Red Bubble profile in the next little while. It's something I've been waiting to do. I'll be removing a few photos (the ones I don't like, the ones I'm sick of, and the ones that no longer represent my best work). This will mean removing a few of my most popular photos from the site. I'll be adding some of my favorite photos from this blog to my Red Bubble profile, just to get them more exposure and see how they fare there. Some of my favorite photos have been buried in the archives of this blog where nobody ever sees them.

I've been looking at a lot of other photoblogs and other people's photography sites, and in my more ambitious moments, I envision a radical redesign for Sun Goes Boom. In reality, it probably won't happen... I have no computer skills and frankly no desire to learn. Blogger provides a conveniently easy (if not ideal) template.

Posts here might be sparse for the next while... I have only a couple of "oldies" stored up, and won't be taking many new shots until work starts being kinder and I get my head screwed on right again.

I've had this photo sitting on my hard drive for a while waiting to be posted. I have photographed these berries before, earlier this fall. Now they are all wrinkled... I personally consider this photo too blurry and poorly composed for posting, but Graem thought it was 'abstract'. He suggested I post it on Red Bubble and title it 'Raisin'. I haven't had time to take many new photos and I only have a couple of older ones saved up... so today I will post the Raisin.

This is another of my experimental photos using off-camera flash indoors. I love orchids, but haven't had much luck keeping them. A while ago I learned all about orchids and how to care for them. Unfortunately I have never really been able to provide them with the right conditions in terms of light, temperature and humidity. I haven't really had enough time to devote to it either. If I had my way, I would have a huge garden/greenhouse/pond and all of the necessary infrastructure to care for it properly. I wouldn't have to waste 98% of my life working at a job I don't enjoy while living in an environment that can only be described as spirit-crushing. But I don't have my way. So I will have to do my best for this little orchid that was given to me as a present. And the off-camera flash will be my substitute for sunlight.

I haven't been able to figure out how to reply to comments directly on Blogger... though I'm sure there is a way. Someone asked me whether I have had any luck with human portraits. I haven't had much time to work on it... I have taken many portraits of my husband, all of which are too awful to post here. There is virtually no natural light in my house, and the walls are all beige. If I attempt to bounce my flash off of the walls to diffuse it, the resulting photos are an ugly yellow-brown that isn't so noticible with flower petals, but it does wreak havoc with skin tones. Adjusting my white balance doesn't seem to help. I'm pretty sure the technical aspects of portrait photography will fall into place as I practice more with the flash and maybe get a reflecting umbrella or two.

The human aspects of portrait photography are a bit more difficult to handle. I feel bad telling my subjects how to pose. To be honest, I have always hated having portraits taken... The photographer always wants me to twist my head one way and my knees the other, while sitting at an unnatural angle. As a photographer, I can now understand the rationale for doing that... but it still seems contrived. My mom and I had portraits taken when I was 6. I look at those photos and I don't see myself at all. My hair is naturally straight, but my mom spent 3 hours burning my head with the curling iron in order to make it look curly. I was wearing a dress - something I never would have done at that age - and I remember how awful it was to go outside in stockings in December. Graduation photos were the same... An unnatural pose wearing unnatural clothing in front of a wall of fake books. Why not use real books? Come to think of it, why use books at all? I don't remember studying for anything in high school or even really doing much homework. High school is an important time in one's life, but really not for academics. Why can't photographers try to bring out some of the more important things in grad portraits? The growing up/transition from childhood to adulthood sort of ideas? Why not? Because it would take effort... and the kids couldn't be shuffled through en-masse like components on an assembly line.

I'm at an age where my peers are all reproducing, and consequently showing me the 'amazing' baby or family portraits they have had taken. While these photos are technically good, they seem for the most part artificial to me... everybody dressed up in their best clothes... kids dressed up in sailor suits playing with fake wooden boats... Baby sitting on a fake park bench with fake trees in the background looking shell-shocked and horrified. For me, portraits should create memories... The best photos of kids are of them playing in the backyard, grass stains, scraped knees and all. Why does everyone seem to want memories of things that never actually existed?

I did manage to get a few good portrait-style shots at my mom's wedding a year ago... but the best people photos I have taken are by and large candids.

I've been looking at portraits taken by some of the 'old masters' - Cartier-Bresson, Steichen, and a few others... and this is really something to aspire to. But I'm kind of stuck on the notion that most people in modern society have a vastly different idea than I do of what a 'portrait' ought to be.

This Red Bubble reject is actually one of my favorite photos. Spring was very late coming to Saskatoon this year, and I thought my tulips would never bloom. When they finally popped open, it was sudden and violent.

I actually had this photo made into a print. It looks much better to me on paper than on screen.

This will be my last post before I head off to Saskatoon for 10 days. It's also the last photo I have saved up from my fall forays to the botanical garden. These flowers were beautiful, even in decay.

Here is a picture of Moosh with the sun shining on his nose and his whiskers heading out to infinity. I love taking extreme close-ups of the cats, but it's hard. It's uncommon for them to stay still for the fraction of a second it takes to click the shutter.

I took a bunch of photos very similar to this one right after a hard rain this summer. I was excited to view them, but every last one turned out blurry. Fast-forward a few months and I've managed to do a better job... if only because I made sure to take double the number of exposures this time!

A double post today! Partly it's to mitigate the fact that I'll be in Saskatoon for 10 days and won't be bringing my camera. I haven't decided whether to bring the portable hard drive or not... Probably not as I'm already drowning in worries about all of the things I need to take and will probably forget, and the fact that I am only one person and can only carry so much luggage. Partly I'm taking advantage of the fact that Blogger's upload mechanism seems faster than usual tonight, and partly I'm just bored and depressed and posting a pretty picture on the internet makes time stand still for a moment.

This shot was taken in my backyard a few days ago... Maybe even this weekend - I've lost track. I was experimenting with very shallow depth of field, and my ratio of misses to hits was quite high. Even the shots that were in focus often had blurry thick stems right in front of the subject that I somehow missed through the viewfinder.

I was going to post this to Red Bubble. Graem thought the Red Bubble crowd wouldn't care for it. I guess we'll never know, as the random number generator told me to post it here. He suggested that if I did post it to Red Bubble, its title should be "Ganglion".

If I find a subject that I really like to photograph, I'll usually take a few shots. Often none of them turn out, and sometimes I get one good one. Sometimes it happens that I get two or more shots of the same subject that I consider 'good' or 'postable'. If I have a few good shots of the same subject, it can be incredibly hard to decide which one gets posted... especially since this means the other shot(s), even if they are equally good, tend to get lost and buried on my hard drive where I can't always find them back later on.

A solution I've employed a few times is to post one of the shots to my blog, and one to Red Bubble. Even if the shots are both 'good', there's usually one that I secretly prefer. These shots are both recent Red Bubble Rejects. I wasn't going to post them here, as I already have a picture of the cornfield, and a picture of the caterpillar on the red and white tulip. Be that as it may, I truly think these ones are better.

This is one of the pictures that resulted from my first experiment with off-camera flash. The room was completely dark except for the flash. It was even too dark for me to tell if my focus was correct. I had no idea that little flash unit could give off so much light. Here it is at 1/64 of maximum power, and I'm using a diffuser to soften the light. The background has a bluish tint that I don't really care for, and it only gets worse when I try to adjust the white balance. Nonetheless, I'm impressed with the flash and I'll have to experiment with it more.

For those who haven't guessed by now, my favorite things to photograph are flowers and insects. I also like to take pictures of dilapidated buildings, rusty machines and beautiful landscapes... but those are not as plentiful in my life.

In winter, everything is grey and dull. Yes, the snow is beautiful... but it's hard to spend too much time outside taking photos when exposed skin freezes in less than 10 seconds. There is a decided lack of sunlight in winter, and no flowers or insects to be seen for 6 months of the year.

In order to combat winter depression, I thought of setting up a little indoor studio to take still life shots over the winter... and maybe to learn to take portraits. I bought a single off-camera flash and I'm considering a more elaborate light set up. The flash has a very steep learning curve... I took a few photos that are interesting, but I'm not sure they're any good. I have one I will probably post another day. I'll have to experiment with the flash quite a bit more before I can truly say I'm in control of it.

I also got some candles and thought it would be interesting to take candlelit flower portraits. These are two of the best ones... Unfortunately my session was cut short because I brought the candles too close to the petals and literally fried my subjects! It's a good thing I was using cut flowers. The flowers were bright pink in real life. I didn't custom adjust my white balance and tried to do it afterward on the computer. I decided I preferred the orangey glow of the candlelight to the 'corrected' white balance.

We went for a walk around Ottawa last weekend and took the camera along. We walked through Little Italy where all of the roads are being rebuilt. The scene was littered by dirt, gravel, pylons, rubble and little yellow backhoe machines which sat still, abandoned for the weekend. As the sun set, people scurried around the debris, heading off for dinner at one of the many restaurants (still open), or an evening at the pub. Everything was very surreal; it's too bad none of my Little Italy photos turned out.

We walked through another neighborhood... I'm not sure where it was. I can and do get lost within 2 blocks of my house. I'm always a bit leery of walking around with thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment in a neighborhood full of pawn shops, moneylenders, and XXX video stores... but it was interesting and everything turned out ok.

This photo was taken as we were walking on an overpass, overlooking the city at sunset. The view of the city was amazing, but marred by an ugly, tall white building. I looked behind me and saw this. In real life, the sun was shining on the rail on the right of the picture, making it look like a trail of fire. I liked the fact that the road was empty, and that the white lines on the road (from the left) balanced the lines of the rail on the right.

Urban photography is hard. There are so many things to take pictures of, it's hard to isolate a subject without too much background distraction. You have to get used to being out in public with a big camera and big lens. You have to overcome fears of invading people's privacy or of being thought insane... Overall it's a challenge... but I hope to try it some more.

A long time ago, Graem warned me that I must not blog like a kitten parent... And I do admit being irritated and bored by people who tirelessly post photos and blog about their (human) children as though the rest of the world is supposed to care. Despite all of that, I sure am feeling like a proud kitten parent these days. We have had some nice fall weather, and I have discovered that I like taking portraits and action shots of the cats almost as much as I like flower and insect macros!

Here is Synder... This is a rare photo that shows off how his coat is actually reddish when the sun shines on it. Synder, as usual, cares nothing about posing. He is giving the camera his look of studied nonchalance.

I will (probably) post a non-feline photo tomorrow.

Here is Jackie, cute as ever and doing much better. We're giving him subcutaneous fluids every day and he is on antibiotics for a kidney infection. He has been put on a low-protein renal diet with a potassium supplement as well as an appetite stimulant (though I can't blame him for not wanting to eat that foul-smelling goop).

Despite all of that, he's slowly getting his energy and personality back and gaining a bit of weight. We've had a few warm days, and Jackie has remembered how much he likes to pose for the camera! To honour the special occasion, I'm mass-posting the latest cute Jackie photo to this blog, Red Bubble and my Facbook profile. I'm hoping for many more cute Jackie photos to come.

Here's another photo taken at Gatineau Park. I waited for a long time to photograph this waterfall as there were quite a few people around, many with cameras. Most of my photos didn't turn out, but I like the way the light was shining on the water in this one.

This photo was taken last weekend in Hawkesbury, Ontario. Hawkesbury is about halfway between Montreal and Ottawa. We stopped there on the way home from Montreal to take some photos and eat dinner. Everyone at the restaurant spoke French. It felt weird for me to be in Canada but unable to understand what anyone was saying. I actually felt more at ease in Costa Rica and the Philippines. At least there, it was blatantly obvious that I was a tourist and nobody made the automatic assumption that I would understand them.

The dramatic sky and relative lack of garish man-made objects afforded me the rare opportunity to use my wide-angle lens. This is actually my first attempt at HDR photography... or rather Graem's first attempt to teach me to create an HDR image from one of my photos. I have to admit that I was exhausted, bored and dozing off. I like taking photos much more than I like post-processing them. I was captivated by the first few HDR photos I saw. They were scenes shot in a countryside village in the UK complete with cobblestone roads and houses with thatched roofs. I couldn't believe that these images came from a camera... they looked more like the medieval houses rendered in a computer game I played in junior high... or maybe illustrations from a storybook. Frequenting a few online photo-sharing sites, I started to become frankly bored with HDR. The element of photography I like most is capturing things I find interesting or beautiful and sharing them with other people. The world is not a storybook or video game, and HDR photos always seem a bit fake and insincere to me... In an effort to improve on reality, we end up with a poor and cheap imitation.

In the midst of all the HDR photos, I have seen a few very tastefully done landscapes and macros with subtle HDR technique. I hope to experiment more with HDR, and these are the ones I want to emulate. Basically, I just want to bring out the details in the shadow areas of my landscape shots without blowing out the sky.

Here are some colorful rosehips, taken at the botanical garden a few weeks ago before the skies opened on me.

I've been experimenting a bit lately and have a few different pictures ready to post, but the random number generator tells me I must be patient and post this 'older' photo first.

This is one of my favorite flower macros, and maybe one of my favorite photos I have taken so far. It was taken at the botanical garden just recently. For some reason, the flower reminds me of a pineapple.

This is a Red Bubble reject taken in early 2009. Believe it or not, the temperature was about -35 degrees Celsuis the evening this shot was taken. The sky was just spectacular.

The other photo I posted from that day is very popular on Red Bubble. It was my most viewed and commented photo for a long time. This particular shot never received much Red Bubble love. In fact, it was rejected from several Red Bubble groups as being 'technically inadequate'.

Whenever we visit my in-laws and I have my portable hard drive with me, they insist on seeing all of my photos. The problem with that is that I take a lot of photos... the majority uninteresting, even to me. When I visit a new place, I have no interest in photographing people or the usual iconic landmarks that other tourists photograph. At the same time, it's common for me to take 100 or more shots of the same flower trying to get everything right, or to photograph the same landscape from a million different vantage points using different camera settings. It must be incredibly painful for anyone to view all of my photos if I haven't sorted through them first to pick out the best ones. To be honest, it is even kind of painful for me.

My in-laws sat patiently through my collection of winter 2009 landscapes (>5000 photos in all), too polite to flee the scene. This photo of the silos is the only one my father-in-law commented on. He liked the composition. That simple compliment meant more to me than any amount of gratuitous Red Bubble feedback.

Last weekend we went to Gatineau Park. I had been wanting to visit Gatineau Park ever since we moved to Ottawa, especially in the fall, as I had heard the leaves were spectacular.

To be honest, the trip was a bit of a disappointment. It was late by the time we got there and the light was already fading. Even at dusk, Gatineau Park is a busy place... I read on the internet that the park has 2500 visitors/day. I find it hard to take photos in a crowded place... Not only am I struggling to keep random people out of the frame, I find myself feeling a bit nervous and self-conscious. As a result, I have only 2 postable photos to show for the trip to Gatineau Park.

This is one of them - perhaps the best. I have been trying all summer to take a good leaf abstract photo - one that shows the shape and texture of the leaves, as well as the juxtaposition of the shadows of adjacent leaves and the dark jagged lines of the branches. It's a very specific photo I have been trying to take, and (though not perfect), this is probably my best attempt so far.

The experimental farm is surrounded by barbed wire. When I took this photo, I liked the green and gold colors in the background with the barbed wire crisp in the foreground. The photo reminds me of a flag... albeit the flag of a country with an oppressive government!

This is foxglove, the plant from which digitalis (a common cardiac medication) is derived. I have always loved the spotted flowers on this plant. This photo was taken at the public botanical gardens, though I did attempt to grow foxglove in my garden back in Saskatoon. It claimed to grow in shade, and since my yard was predominantly shade, I decided to get a bunch. Unfortunately, just because something can grow in shade doesn't necessarily mean it will thrive there. The plants survived and even bloomed, but in the absence of sunlight, the flowers were an anemic yellow/green color instead of the usual vibrant pink. The spots were pale yellow and barely visible.

I'm away at a conference now and can't post anything new... But I suppose I could post a Red Bubble reject. This is one of the photos taken in Jan 2009 when my camera was brand new. We went out into the -40 degree weather and waist-deep snow to photograph old farmhouses. I remember the day this was taken quite clearly. The sun was bright, the sky a brilliant blue, and the little bits of grass sticking up were like yellow strings of gold against the snow. I liked these photos better in monochrome, though. The color versions seemed too busy.

All of these early farmhouse photos were slightly underexposed... I think because my camera was metering from the snow, and I knew nothing about post-processing then. Even the monochrome conversion was done in-camera. The vignetting occurred because I was using a cheap lens. In my opinion it adds to the vintage feeling of the shot. If I was trying to recreate this shot intentionally now, I probably wouldn't even be able to.

I'll probably do a complete overhaul of my Red Bubble profile soon. My three most viewed photos have 200 more views than their nearest competitors. To be honest, the most viewed photos are not my best photos, and if I am getting sick of looking at them, I'm sure others are too. I want to put up some better shots that have been buried on this blog, as well as some fresh new shots. All of that will have to wait for my laptop to start speaking to the hard-drive where my photos are stored, though. In other words, expect the overhaul some time in the next 10 years.

I ordinarily don't like photos taken from directly above a flower. Photos like this will always look 'nice', simply because flowers are beautiful, amazing things... But there isn't much interesting or creative about pointing your camera directly down at a flower and clicking the shutter. I've noticed some photographers whose portfolios consist only of head-on flower shots... Booooring. Sometimes I do succumb to the temptation to take these shots, though... and sometimes they do turn out alright, especially if I'm able to get in very close, with the light shining through the petals.

When I walked through the Experimental Farm on my way to the botanical garden, I saw a couple of ears of corn poking out just waiting to be harvested. To be honest, I was strongly tempted to steal an ear of corn. I have no idea why... in fact, I had corn on the cob sitting in my fridge at home waiting to be eaten. The sun was shining on the corn making it glow temptingly, and I debated for a long time before deciding not to take a cob. A guy in a Government of Canada jeep had, after all, driven up just as I had decided to go take photos in the middle of the corn field on my previous trip... Who knows... maybe stealing government corn is a federal offense. Being an "experimental" farm, who knows what they are doing to the corn? Besides... my camera bag is jam-packed with gear. There is no room for corn cobs! I decided to capture the corn with my camera rather than stealing it. On the way home, I didn't have to worry about temptation. The birds had beaten me to the corn cobs, which were lying on the ground, half-eaten.

Here are some mushrooms, discovered as I was wandering around the Exprimental Farm a few weeks ago. It rained nearly every day this summer, and we've had quite a bit of rain so far this fall. The result: mushrooms popping up everywhere!

Here's another photo of the purple flowers that just started blooming in October, and are still flourishing despite the fact we've had frost a couple of nights now. Their petals shine when the sun strikes them, especially after a rain. This photo was taken the last time Jackie came outside to photograph flowers with me before going into the hospital. I knew he was a sick cat that day. He came out, curled up in my lap and wouldn't move - so small and so fragile.

I photographed these berries in my yard about a month ago. I had been meaning to photograph them for a while, and I still think I should take a better picture of them. The problem is that they grow between my house and my neighbor's where the light is always bad. I always catch the sun shining on the berries at inopportune moments, like when I'm rushing off to work.

Graem advised me that this photo is not in sharp enough focus to post. I scrutinized it closely, zooming in and out... To be honest, it seems to be in sharp focus to me. Maybe I'm just blind. The monochrome version of this photo is very interesting. It is posted on Red Bubble. The color version reminds me of the chemistry sets we had in first year university for building molecules. The berries are carbon atoms, and the branches are bonds.

This photo was taken a couple of weekends ago when I visited the Experimental Farm. It's a Red Bubble reject... 2 weeks on Red Bubble and it couldn't generate half the views of my second least-popular photo. It doesn't surprise me... It doesn't look like much in a thumbnail... and the photo itself probably isn't that technically great.

The only person to comment on the photo was perhaps the only person to 'get' it. They commented that it really looks more like a winter tree than a fall tree. That's exactly what I thought when I saw the tree in real life. It was a warm day when I took the photo... The temperature was above 20 degrees Celsius, and it was really more like summer... but the dark sky looks like it could be threatening snow, and the bare branch tips warn of colder, bleaker times to come... For me this tree epitomized fall... a season whose only significance is the transition between summer and winter. But as a photo... it's probably not much.

You have probably noticed that I haven't been writing as much about my photos lately. Part of the reason is that work is trying to kill me these days. I'm no stranger to that, though. The real reason is that my cat Jackie is in the hospital, very sick with renal failure. He's getting better, but the long term prognosis isn't good. The vet says 4-6 months. Every molecule in my body hopes for Jackie to do much better than that... to beat all the odds and recover completely... but it is what it is.

I hate myself quite a bit right now. I've known for a long time that something wasn't right with Jackie, but I didn't do anything about it. I was completely self-centred and obsessed with frivolous things like taking pictures and my exams while my little guy suffered alone.

I've always had an interest in photography, but it only became a serious obsession for me about a year and a half ago. It happened accidentally. I got a new point-and-shoot camera for my birthday. We were vacationing on Vancouver Island and Graem was angry with me one morning. He went off and did his own thing, and I was locked out of the place we were staying with not much to do. I had my little camera in my pocket and I went down to the beach... I took a couple of snapshots of the beach and the ocean... the usual kind of beach snapshot with the crooked horizon smack in the middle of the picture. Mostly I was just angry and bored. As I wandered down the beach taking photos, I started to see beauty everywhere around me... It was a sunny day and the clouds were reflected in the smooth wet sand. The light gleamed off the smooth, wet, black surfaces of rocks and bright yellow flowers poked out between the crevasses, surviving where no flower really should. The shallow tide pools were filled with uncountable treasures, and on the beach, crows swooped down to claim dropped potato chips... kids splashed in the shallows in their bathing suits, adults walked dogs along the beach. There were beautiful and amazing things everywhere around me,and I captured them all with my little camera. By the time Graem came down to find me on the beach that afternoon, I had been transformed into a photographer.

Since Jackie has been sick, I have completely lost interest in photography. Beauty brings with it a wistful sort of hurt. The beauty is gone for me now, and only the hurt is left. I hate a world that could do something like this to such an innocent, generous soul. Fall does nothing but remind me of inevitable decay. When I see the fall leaves, all I can think is that Jackie might never accompany me outside to photograph flowers again. I might never see his coat lightened by the summer sun.

I have a lot of photos stored up from the past few weeks. With work the way it is, I wouldn't have time to take new photos right now anyway... I post photos here and on Red Bubble in the same way I try to carry on with the other routines in life... I eat, drink, sleep and go to work with varying degrees of success. Whether I take any more new photos once these ones run out is something that remains to be seen.

I took this picture while I was photographing the yellow flowers I posted yesterday. I looked up and saw that the sun was illuminating the trees overhead... and the brightly colored leaves contrasted with the dark and ominous sky. It looks like there's a staircase made of leaves in the sky.

Here's another shot from one of my many recent visits to the botanical garden. It's a celebration of the color yellow!

I'll let today's photo do the talking for itself.

Viewing the archives of this blog, I just realized I have already posted as much in October as I did in all of September. It's nice to be done with exams! The light and weather were fairly good today, but a sick cat prevented me from taking any new photos (or doing much of anything else, really). My work schedule is such that there probably won't be any new shutter clicks for the next 2 weeks, but I think I have enough photos stored up to sustain the blog through the drought.

Here's my favorite photo from yesterday. It's amazing what a bit of light can do. This scene looked fairly drab through the viewfinder until the sun came out from behind the clouds. Then... instant magic! I clicked away, hoping I could manage not to screw up the focus and/or the exposure. One or two of my shots turned out alright.

This is a fresh photo taken today. The light hit these flower petals at just the right angle to make them sparkle. They reminded me of sugar flowers like one might find on a birthday cake.

The first time I discovered sugar decorations was at age 4. We went to visit people I didn't know very well on Christmas day. The only other kids there were older than me, and a little bit strange. I spent most of the day scrunched up in a corner reading my Alice in Wonderland book, feeling nervous and out of place. On a brief foray into the basement, I discovered something amazing - a skating rink with ice made of blue jello, complete with sugar penguin skaters. Blue jello... who even knew that such a thing existed? And the penguins just glistened as the dim basement potlights illuminated the sugar crystals. All night I looked forward to eating this magical creation. I had spent the whole day wanting to go home, and now I was suddenly afraid that we would have to leave early, before I could taste the blue jello.

The time to eat it came soon enough, and I made two important discoveries: #1. Blue jello is disgusting. #2. Eating a sugar penguin is somewhat like eating sand (I was an authority on such matters at age 4). The pain of disappointment was enough to make me burst into tears right there, in my little folding chair at a little folding table in a strange person's kitchen. All of the adults present rushed over to find out what was wrong, but I couldn't quite articulate it in words. That sort of thing still happens from time to time.

Yet another picture of the botanical gardens. I was photographing roses, when I noticed how the sun was shining right in front of the rose bed, illuminating these flowers very nicely.