This is Synder. I have three cats, all of whom have different attitudes toward photography. Jackie will do anything to get his nose in front of the camera. When he sees me taking pictures of flowers, he'll run in front of the camera, and sometimes even trample the flowers. He's always looking especially cute or doing some kind of stunt for the camera.

Moosh (Jackie's brother) strikes a regal pose when he sees the camera lens pointed at him. He's like a spoiled supermodel or a member of the royal family out on parade.

Synder is the most difficult cat to photograph. First of all, his coat is shiny black with a reddish sheen. It's hard to capture the shininess and true color of his coat. The camera always wants to overexpose him, so the settings need to be adjusted for each photo. Then there's the fact that Synder doesn't care to have his picture taken. He doesn't sit still... and even when he does, his head and ears are swivelling all around. Synder is the self-appointed tough-cat - protector of the territory that is our yard, especially the hotly-contested honeysuckle bush. He doesn't have time for being cute or acting like a primadonna.

This is probably the best picture of Synder I've taken so far. I converted it to monochrome because there was a distracting bright orange object in the background. I wish I could have left his eyes green... I'll have to figure out selective coloring later on.

I may post a picture or two tomorrow (or later today - I notice the sun is fully up in the sky even though I haven't been to bed yet). If not, it will likely be a few days as we'll be driving to Ontario and will need to get the internet set up in the new place.

As luck would have it, my hard drive issues are sorted out just as it's time for me to move across the country. Most of my photos have been transferred over to the 1TB drive (where I'm not entirely sure I have access to them). At least this frees up lots of room on the 250GB drive for more photos.

I finally managed to get up close to a butterfly! All of my previous butterfly shots were taken from quite a distance, most with the point-and-shoot. I'm happy with this one, but a bit annoyed that I cut off most of the wings and the antenna tips. I always see insect macro photos and wonder how the photographer manages to get the whole insect in the frame, the eye (at least) in focus, and some sort of pleasing composition with distracting dirt and foliage out of the way... all in the fraction of a second before the insect flies away. I guess they probably do what I do -- take several shots and maybe one turns out.

Hopefully I'll see more butterflies this summer.

Every time I've seen heliconia before, they have looked something like this. In Costa Rica, I saw a type of heliconia that was soft and fuzzy! The first time I noticed it was right after it rained. There were water droplets clinging to the fuzz. It should have made for good pictures, but the light was very bad that day. The next morning, I got some better photos of the fuzzy (but dry) heliconia illuminated by bright sunlight.

I took some photos today, and I hope they turned out. I had good subject matter, at least... I hope to post them when my hard-drive issues are sorted out, whenever that may be!

These mosses and lichens were growing on a tree right on the beach near where we stayed in Costa Rica. I didn't actually notice the lichens until our second-last day there. I have other lichen photos that are more colorful, but I like this one because you can also see the texture in the wood.

I'm still lacking hard drive space to upload my new photos. I went back through my archives and pulled out a couple from Costa Rica.

This beetle stayed with us in our beach house for a couple of days. I took over 100 photos of him, but unfortunately none turned out. This is probably one of the better ones. The beetle hated light and would immediately scuttle toward the nearest dark corner. It's hard to take a 1/20 second exposure of a moving creature, so I opened up the aperture to shorten the exposure time. The consequence of this was shallow depth of field... meaning I never really got all of the beetle in focus at once.

The beetle had so many interesting parts to focus on - the hooks on his legs, his anter-like antennae, and his fuzzy underside just for starters. I was eager to search the net when I got home to try to find out exactly what kind of beetle this was. The result was kind of anticlimactic: "Dung Beetle".

This picture didn't last long on Red Bubble. I'm not sure why. Graem played with the colors on this one, and he tends to increase the color saturation more than I would. In the Red Bubble thumbnail, the water in this picture looked very green. Maybe that prevented people from viewing it. Maybe Red Bubble just gets flooded with Canada goose pictures in the spring, and people get sick of them. I don't know.

I really enjoyed photographing the geese. They are all such characters, and I was able to get quite close to them, despite not having a very long lens. There's also the added bonus that when the geese arrive, you know it is officially spring!

This photo was titled "Second Date" on Red Bubble. I have always liked the symmetry of this photo -- the geese are nearly mirror images of each other. They are together, though looking in opposite directions. Maybe they're worried that their relationship is starting to stifle their individuality. Maybe they're just geese, doing what geese do.

Every spring, these caterpillars take over my yard and eat all of the leaves. They are literally everywhere. You can't go outside without getting caterpillars on your clothing and in your hair. Despite being ubiquitous, they're quite hard to photograph. They move quickly and are so small that you have to get in very close to get a meaningful picture. The closer you get, the shallower the depth of field, and the less tolerance for motion. I took a few photos of this one, expecting to have a few good ones. I didn't really get any good photos, and only a handful that were in focus.

In years past, I've gotten upset about the caterpillars eating my plants. Since I'm moving this year, I'm fairly apathetic. It's not that I don't care about the plants anymore -- I'll actually miss them more than anything else in Saskatoon! I've just developed a fatalistic sort of attitude. They're not my plants anymore, and I have no control over their destiny. Whoever buys this place might choose to tear up the whole yard and turn it into a parking lot or swimming pool... I sincerely hope they wouldn't, but they might. It's a depressing way of looking at things, but it helps me to better tolerate the caterpillars.

I have about a week free between finishing work here and moving to Ontario. I hope to take a lot of photos in that time. Before I can post them, I'll need to find a place to store them! In a little more than a year of serious photography, I've filled up a 250G drive with photos. I bought a 1TB drive, but it is not on cordial terms with Digikam (my photo management program). I'm going to try to keep posting things, but if I can't for a while, that's the reason.

I've experimented with black and white on most of my recent photos, but always end up preferring the color. This is a possible exception. There could very well be a B&W version of this photo appearing soon, either on Red Bubble or here.

Another Red Bubble reject taken in winter 2009. Everyone takes pictures of abandoned farm houses from the front. Often they form part of a larger prairie landscape shot. I crept behind this house, and for some reason found the "backyard" view of the house and its dilapidated shed quite compelling. I took a few pictures while standing in waist-high snow.

I adjusted the luminosity curve a bit before posting the picture here. The version that was on Red Bubble was a bit underexposed. It was hard to bring out the detail in the walls and window of the shed without blowing out the highlights in the lightest part of the sky. Back then, I knew even less about photography and my camera settings than I do now!

The only person to comment on this photo on Red Bubble said, "It looks very cold in your part of the world". I checked out his/her profile and found it filled with sandy beaches, and flora and fauna I have only seen in pictures. I don't think (s)he can even begin to imagine how cold it gets in my part of the world.

I'm not sure what these flowers are, but Google image search tells me they are probably alliums. I didn't think they were going to bloom this year, as I came home from vacation on June 5 last year and had missed their blooms altogether. They didn't even look like they were planning to produce buds on June 5 this year, but they're making up for lost time now.

This picture reminds me of a crumbling castle wall holding back a hoarde of angry peasants whilst the bourgeoise cower inside, aware that the end is nigh.

I have converted my greenhouse into an outdoor office so I can study for my exams and write up this stupid manuscript I am working on without missing the summer altogether. It works well for reading blocks of text, but today I discovered just how horrible it is for viewing and editing my photos. With the reflection from the screen, I couldn't tell what was or wasn't in focus, let alone discern any subtleties of color or light. I'm wearing quite a busy t-shirt with MC Escher patterns on it, and about halfway through viewing my photos, I realized that much of the detail I was seeing actually came from my own reflection! I brought a towel out and draped it over the laptop monitor and my head to eliminate the reflection. It worked well, but was kind of smothering. I actually had to stop editing photos because I felt like I was going to choke to death.

Leopard's bane flowers usually have smooth tips, kind of like a daisy. For some reason, this one has serrated edges, kind of like little fingers.

Today was probably the first warm day we have had this spring. We went out for dinner, and decided to walk since it was so nice outside. The walk was fairly long, so I brought the camera and my neglected 50mm lens.

When I took this photo, the rock in the foreground was literally shimmering in the sun. I'm not sure if this comes out all that well in the photo. I feel bad about cutting off the left side of the rock and lilac bush but if I had framed the photo any differently, there would have been ugly traffic signs and metal railings in the picture. I actually didn't take many photos today, and certainly not many good ones. I have the weekend off from work, and the warm weather is supposed to continue... hopefully I'll have a chance to take more.

Here is another photo from Wakaw. The wide angle is an amazing lens, but it comes with a steep learning curve. Lately I've been trying to focus more on the composition of my photos. Since starting with the wide angle, I find myself back to square one. I have lots of (crooked) horizons smack in the middle of the photo, isolated subjects in the centre with distracting backgrounds, etc.

Right before sunset, the sun illuminated these hills, making the dry yellow bushes look like fires while the valley stayed in shadow. I like the contrast of shadows and light in this photo, and the appearance of the bushes. I couldn't salvage its composition no matter what kind of cropping I tried.

I have a billion things that I should be doing, but I couldn't let this evening slip by without taking the new lens for a spin. This wide angle lens is supposed to be the landscape photographer's weapon of choice. It sure doesn't disappoint! We went to a farm near Wakaw, SK. I was hoping for a spectacular sunset, but the sky foiled my plans by being, frankly, about as boring as it's possible for a sky to be. It didn't matter... There were more than enough things to photograph - marshes, hills, green pastures, and dandelion fields. If I had felt like swapping over to the macro, I would have had wildflowers, frogs and a couple of strange insects. There were also birds galore. I'll have to return before I move to Ontario - someday when I have more time, my rubber boots and some mosquito repellant!

Today I decided to try viewing life from a different angle... an extremely wide angle.

This Red Bubble reject was taken on March 3, 2009. We had gone out into the country so I could take some photos of Graem riding his snowboard in the drifts. On the way home, we discovered this man-made waterfall and a stream that went with it. The sight made me so incredibly happy it is hard to describe in words. In the middle of a bleak, drawn-out winter, this was the first non-frozen water I had seen in a long time. To top it off, the stream bank was composed of sand! The whole world could be collapsing around me, but if I had water and sand to look at, touch and smell every day, my existence would be a blissful one.

We followed the stream to a lake where ducks were swimming around, taking off and landing. The ducks were much too skittish and far away to photograph. There was an ice shelf at about waist height beside the stream bank. I knelt in the muck, peered under the shelf, and was rewarded with the most amazing sight ever. Ice stalactites hung down from the shelf and were illuminated by the late afternoon sun reflecting off the water. The whole thing looked like a palace made of gold. I took several photos, careful not to bash my (then new) macro lens on the ice shelf or get it wet. I couldn't wait to get home and see the photos, but they unfortunately turned out as a white mess of lens flare and blur. Some of the most beautiful things in nature can't be adequately captured with a camera... at least not without patience, skill and luck - at least one of which I am lacking on most days.

On the way back to the car, I took some photos of the waterfall while standing ankle-deep in the stream. I wanted to take a lot more pictures of the ice-tongues flowing down and the rusted bit of wire on top of the waterfall. It was then that I discovered my winter boots were not as waterproof as I wanted them to be. The photo journey was curtailed, with plans to return in the spring. Unfortunately, I have no idea where this was.

When I got my new camera, one of the things I looked forward to most was taking macro photos of insects. I had to wait a while to try, since I bought the camera in the dead of winter. I got a few moth and spider shots in Costa Rica. I took more than 100 pictures of the same large beetle over the course of 2 days, and went out at night to photograph giant grasshoppers with long antennae. I also photographed a few different spiders. Unfortunately, I was disappointed when I reviewed the photos later. Some lacked critical sharpness -- including ALL of the beetle photos. The night grasshopper photos just looked bizarre thanks to harsh lighting from my head lamp. I might post some of these photos later when I am feeling less critical (or lacking blog material). In all cases, I didn't seem to be able to get as close to the tiny creatures as other macro photographers seem to get.

Now that I have my teleconverter, I should have no problem getting close! My problem has been, frankly, lack of bugs. It has been a cold, dreary spring, with temperatures more like March than May or June. Last summer, armed with only a little point-and-shoot, I seemed to be virtually tripping over ladybugs, spiders, bees and caterpillars. This year... nada. I took a few bee shots at the Mendel Conservatory, and the results were miserably blurry (there's no such thing as autofocus with the teleconverter).

Today, the sun came out for literally 15 minutes, and I got a chance to practice with this little fly in a now-open leopard's bane (view big for best effect). Hopefully this will be the first of many insect photos this summer!

I usually don't do much post-processing with my photos. For me, the joy in photography is in taking the pictures, not in fussing over them on the computer for hours on end. I sometimes adjust saturation and contrast or experiment with monochrome tones and filters, but that's about the extent of it. Over-processed photos with gimmicky effects always look...well...bad to me.

Today was a rare exception when I decided to play around. In case you haven't guessed by now, my macro lens is my favorite. I have used it enough that I can pretty much point it at something and get the right focus and depth-of-field right away. I'm still getting used to the teleconverter. Sometimes I point the macro lens at something with the teleconverter attached and sway around drunkenly for a bit while I get my orientation back. Today I pointed at an orange poppy and discovered I was quite a bit closer than I had intended to be. As I slowly rocked backward on my heels, the flower petal rising up over the centre of the flower resembled a cresting ocean wave. The orange color made it look like a wave illuminated by a bright orange sun, low on the horizon before sunset. I took the photo, knowing it would end up looking nothing like it had in my imagination. When I uploaded the photos to the computer, I told Graem what I had imagined, and we played around a bit to try to make the petal look like a wave. The result looks absolutely nothing like what I had envisioned. I'm not sure if I like the altered photo, but I decided to post both it and the original anyway.

I have a gadget enabled that lets me see what people type into search engines when they discover my blog. Sometimes it's entertaining... Someone discovered my blog while seeking instructions for building a wooden deck over a pond. I'm afraid I wasn't able to help him/her too much with that. Someone discovered my blog while doing a Google-search for "macro poppies". My blog appeared on page 33 of the search. This poor soul must have really been looking for a certain kind of image to scroll through at least 32 pages of Google detritus!

I decided to dedicate my photo time today to taking macro poppy pictures. Unfortunately, it wasn't a good day for photographing poppies (or really much of anything else). It was COLD, with snow threatened yet again in the forecast. The sky was a flat grey color with no sunshine to illuminate the flowers or accentuate texture. To top it all off, I was becoming annoyed with my teleconverter. It caused every small speck of dirt on a flower petal to be magnified into an unsightly blemish. Luckily I found some freshly emerging poppies that hadn't had a chance to become dirty yet!

Here are some photos from our visit to Bents (a ghost town) earlier this spring. It was my first visit to an actual ghost town, and I hope it won't be the last. Bents is completely deserted. All that remains is a grain elevator, some rusted farm machinery, a general store/post office, a community hall, a scattering of old houses and sheds, a swing set, and other assorted debris left behind by Bents' inhabitants (including these boots and these teacups).

Although I enjoyed my visit to Bents, the whole experience left me with a peculiar hollow sadness. As I traipsed around the general store, camera in hand, trying not to fall through the rotting floorboards, I imagined the store as the centre of a bustling community. I imagined the inhabitants of Bents as the hardy early 20th century pioneers I learned about in elementary school. This was the real wild west!

Despite my imagination's best efforts, bashed-in TV sets and semi-modern appliances hinted at a more recent date for Bents' abandonment. Creeping through one of the old houses, I discovered a door frame where someone had tracked the growth of two children with pencil marks. The last two markings: Tyler April 1988 and Kim April 1988. The height of one of the wall markings, a hockey trophy atop the TV, and the peeling Smurf wallpaper in one of the bedrooms betrayed an irrefutable fact: Tyler, wherever he is now, is the same age as me.

I'm not sure why this revelation bothered me so much. A family abandoning their prairie town in the late 1980s is nowhere near as romantic as the saga of the pioneers, right? Will amateur photographers 20 years from now find poignancy in the wreckage of today's cookie-cutter suburbia littered with iPhones, Poang chairs and plasma screen TVs?

I spend a lot of time living for tomorrow. Life sucks now, but tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow I'll be able to do the things I want to do. The old adage tells us that tomorrow never comes. I find it to be quite the opposite. Tomorrow comes, followed by another tomorrow, followed in rapid succession by a few hundred more tomorrows. Eventually, all that's left is debris - most of it not very interesting.

I wanted to post pictures of something non-floral today. There wasn't time after work to go on a journey of any length, and sorting through my Costa Rica photos just makes me sad and nostalgic for my vacation. The best I could come up with was this bright red backlit leaf. Sometimes a photo can't do justice to the way something looks in real life. This is usually the case with well-illuminated foliage.

I really like the color orange.

Tofino, British Columbia is my favorite place on the planet. Tropical beaches have a secure place in my heart (they're warm and you can swim without a 6mm full-body wetsuit!), but there's something about Vancouver Island that I love. I think I just like the feel of the place.

This Red Bubble reject was taken in May 2008, around midnight on Chesterman Beach. I took macro photos of the driftwood with my little point-and-shoot, while Graem illuminated it with a flashlight. I like the texture of the wood, and the fact that some of the photos look like miniature moonscapes.

This is another Red Bubble reject. Morning and evening have the best light for photography. I have lots of photos taken in the evening or at sunset, but not many in the morning. I am simply not a morning person. Even in Costa Rica, when I knew there were all sorts of amazing creatures to be seen and seascape sunrises to capture, I could not drag myself out of bed. In fact, the only time I am awake at sunrise is if I haven't gone to bed yet.

This was exactly the case the day this photo was taken - August 4, 2008. I went down to the river to take some photos before turning in for the 'night'. This photo was taken with a point-and-shoot, all automatic settings sometime between 4 and 5am. Summers are short in this neck of the woods. There was already a chill in the early morning air, and I was wearing a warm coat and a toque. This photo may not have the best composition or focus, but I love the character of the morning light and the way it illuminates these symmetrical bunches of little white flowers.