One day last week, I was forced to be up early, but didn't have to work. I ate breakfast outside and took advantage of some amazing morning light. I took quite a few good photos, and I'll post some in the coming days. Many are of the same group of flowers... so I hope you don't get too bored.

These flowers don't have much color to begin with - just a small dab of yellow in the centre and the purple stamen. I kept some in color and converted others to black-and-white. I find that black-and-white is better for accenting textures and the contrast between shadows and light. I also don't seem to mind blown highlights as much in black-and-white photos.

A couple of days ago, I was trying to photograph a large spider who lives in my laundry room sink. I eventually gave up, concluding that I would have to try again with a better light setup and less help from my feline assistants. Before I went upstairs, I tried taking some self-portraits in an old mirror in our basement. The mirror is cracked, and its surface is marked with amazing fern-like patterns. The self-portraits didn't turn out looking like much. I decided to try taking macro shots of the surface of the mirror. I wasn't expecting to see much besides the reflection of the lens.

I'm actually pretty happy with the way the mirror macros turned out. This one makes me think I'm lying on my back in a field looking up at the branches of winter trees. The background even looks like a winter sky - pale and bleak.

Nights have been warm, and I have most of the windows in the house open. It's not uncommon for me to have winged visitors flocking to my desk lamp when I study at night. This one stuck around to indulge me in a photo shoot before being let back outside. This was an interesting insect to photograph. Much as I hate to praise Ikea, I got a very nice desk there. It's made of polished metal and has a modern, clean look. I don't have to worry about spilling my coffee on it, and the cats can leap up without their claws destroying it. It also provides a nice backdrop for photographing bugs.

This bug was well-complemented by the reflective desk surface. The photos really don't do him justice. His wings were intricately beautiful, and each segment of his thorax a different color - pewter, amber and copper. I took a few photos that were much better than these two... the problem being that I tend to eat at my desk. My best photos of this insect were marred by uncroppable pizza crumbs, about the size of his head.

These flowers are growing in a couple of yards that I pass every day on my way to work. The petals are bright pink. I love the colors, especially after a rain, and I have been dying to photograph them for a while. As I passed one day last week, I noticed that one flower had broken off and was lying on the sidewalk. I brought it home and put it in a glass of water, hoping to rejuvenate it. Unfortunately, I think the flower had been on the sidewalk for a while before I got to it. Its petals are ragged and dirty... and not in a way that's aesthetically pleasing.

I still managed to take some photos of the flower's centre. It reminds me of the bristles on the surgical scrub brushes I use at work... or a plastic toy hedgehog I had as a toddler.

Summer is short, and the leaves are already starting to fall... The Canada geese whose arrival I anticipate each spring have started to mobilize for their fall journey south. The whole thing makes me sad... Summer is the only Canadian season I enjoy. With sadness comes beauty, and I have noticed how amazing maple leaves are when they change color and fall from the trees. I don't have any maple trees in my yard... but they heavily populate my route to and from work. Next thing you know, I'll be crawling around on the ground picking up leaves to put in my purse!

Blog posts here will probably be (even more) sporadic for the next while. My work schedule for the next 2 weeks does not look compatible with life, let alone photography. Then there is the exam... Once the exam is over with, pass or fail, I intend to spend a lot of time taking photos. Summer will be over, but I'm sure I'll find some interesting places and things to take pictures of, as well as some interesting new camera toys. And maybe one day it will be summer again.

This is another photo with an unorthodox crop. The problem with photographing things in my front yard is that there is too much clutter - brick walls, the neighbors' recycling bin, driveways with shiny cars in them, etc. I like this photo because the flower looks like it's suspended in mid air between the two stems.

I was going to post this photo on Red Bubble, but my new photos aren't getting any views there lately. I thought that maybe people were out enjoying the nice weather instead of viewing photos on the computer... but my old photos are still getting several views/day... so I don't know what it is. I decided to post these basking flowers on my blog instead. Nobody views these photos either, but for some reason I enjoy posting them and writing about them.

I had to do a rather unorthodox custom crop on this photo. I think its final dimensions worked out to be something like 9X8. There was a very distracting green leaf on the right-hand side, but any of the standard crops destroyed the composition.

The temperature has been up in the mid 30s all week, and it has been nice to get out a bit with the camera.

I was sitting on the stoop eating popsicles on Saturday when it occurred to me that I should phtograph the side of my neighbors' house with the lensbaby. I'm not sure what kind of effect I was trying to achieve. I liked the shadows of the leaves dancing on the brick wall. The lensbaby gives one area of extremely sharp focus where you can actually see the pores in the brick. As you move out toward the corners, the perfect uniformity of the brick wall is stretched and distorted.

I wanted to try again with this picture to see if I could do better, but it has proven surprisingly difficult. There is a window of only about 10 minutes where the light is right for this kind of shot. Yesterday the neighbors were having a party. Tonight it was raining. I took some shots of the side of my own house that I haven't uploaded yet. I still think this one is interesting.

I was reading a photography forum recently where a woman posted a (fairly decent) picture of a bird in flight and asked for criticism. The bird was at the edge of the frame, with an expansive and empty blue sky behind and below it. The people who responded suggested that she should have framed her shot differently to have the sky in front of the bird so it would appear to be flying into the frame. It became a discussion on "effective use of negative space". I was thinking about that post while photographing these flowers. What I noticed most when I peered at this flower through the viewfinder was not its vibrant petals or intricate centre. It wasn't even the jagged shadows on the petals. What I noticed were the green empty spaces between the petals.

It isn't really the same concept they were discussing in the forum, but I still find it amusing that I was thinking about negative space.

I've noticed that my photos are starting to look "point-and-shooty"... or maybe "formulaic" would be a better word. I've been keeping my aperture set on f16 quite consistently for macro shots. I think it's a subconscious reaction to not having much time for photography. I want to guarantee myself a few "keepers", despite not taking many shots and not putting much effort into composition. I suppose it has worked to a certain extent. I've had a higher ratio of photos that were basically in focus, but nothing I could call beautiful or spectacular.

Today I forced myself to open up the aperture as wide as it would go. I'm fairly pleased with the results. I definitely took some photos I found interesting to look at. I did have a couple of shots that could have been amazing spoiled by blur... but I plan to retake them later or tomorrow when the light is different and I need a break from the books.

This summer has been cool and rainy. Earlier this week, the mercury finally managed to hit 30 degrees Celsius! Being a heat-lover, I couldn't resist taking the camera out for a little while. It was almost as though the bees and butterflies felt the same. They were out in full force in the front yard. Unlike the lazy days of early summer where a bee might spend a few minutes investigating a single flower, these bees were just giving 'er - frantically flying back and forth like gluttons at an all-you-can-eat buffet. They were moving so fast they were hard to photograph... I took nearly 50 photos, and these were the only ones that were (close enough to being) in focus.

This is a photo I took in June 2008 with my point and shoot camera at the Mendel Art Gallery conservatory. It's another of my early photos that I had blown up into a print.

My favorite thing about this flower (which probably couldn't be seen in the thumbnail on Red Bubble) is the single speck of yellow in the centre of the flower amidst all of the purple. I also like the white stripes on the petals... Most of my flower macros taken with the point and shoot were blurry... this flower almost seems too sharp to be real.

I bought 3 brown-eyed susans this year, and each one turned out looking a bit different. One has a double row of petals, and one looks like a normal brown-eyed susan, but its flowers are gigantic compared to the ones I am used to seeing. I looked them up on the internet and saw that there are several different varieties. When I bought my plants, I didn't even notice that the neighbors had brown-eyed susans growing in their half of the yard. When they were away on vacation, I discovered yet another variety. These ones have burgundy streaks on their petals.

Living in a duplex takes some getting used to. I have a bigger yard and a nicer garden than I thought I would, but now I have to share it. The neighbours went away for the August long weekend, and I took the opportunity to photograph some of the flowers on "their" side of the yard.

These are cone flower buds. I'm waiting for an opportunity to photograph the open blooms, because they're actually quite interesting. The ones in my yard are yellow, but there are some amazing purple ones with orange centres that I pass every day on my way to work. I would love to take the camera and photograph them... especially right after an early evening thunderstorm when the petals are still wet and the sun has come out, leaving dark ominous clouds in the background. I have the shot all planned out, as you can tell... but it probably won't happen. It would seem fairly odd for me to be crawling around a stranger's yard with my camera!

My photography has been kind of limited lately - mostly because I won't have time to go anywhere interesting until after my exams in September. I have all kinds of interesting things around me, but I feel self-conscious taking photos in the yard with the neighbours around. They're fairly nice people, but I've noticed the world is dichotomously split: one half thinks it's cool to crawl around photographing flowers and insects with a humongous camera and lens... the other half thinks it's utter lunacy. No matter their feelings on the matter, people seem compelled to stop and make comments, or sometimes just gawk. Today I was pulling weeds in the garden and photographing wasps. As soon as I heard the neighbours drive up, the cats and I packed up and retreated inside. We really are a reclusive bunch.

Today I uploaded this brown-eyed susan picture to remind myself that we actually have had some sun this summer! Today was another rainy day, but nice and warm. Tonight there has been the most amazing thunderstorm... The sky is a weird yellow/purple color, the rain coming down in sheets and there is a tornado warning in effect! I'm too busy to take the camera out, and even if I wasn't, I'd be worried about getting it wet. Hopefully I'll get some good lightning shots before the summer is over.

These photos didn't last long on Red Bubble. I posted them a little more than two weeks ago. I left them up on the front page for an extra week, and they still couldn't muster as many views as the point-and-shoot photos I took last summer and didn't enter into any Red Bubble groups. The other two photos I posted around the same time had no problem getting views... so I guess the Red Bubble crowd just didn't like this quirky little flower.

These pictures are both the same flower. They were taken only a couple of days apart... I was amazed by how different the flower looked once it had lost its petals. I almost overlooked the flower the first time because it was shaded by a bunch of dense green foliage... Hence the greenish cast to its petals that the Red Bubble folk may have pooh-pooh'ed. I liked the detail in the centre of the flower and its "hairy" stem.

I'm actually a bit offended that nobody liked the second photo. Usually when I convert something into monochrome, it's to get rid of something bright and distracting in the background, or to make something look older or more simple. In this case, I just imagined it as a black-and-white photo right from the start. I like the fact that the stem in the foreground is blurred while the flower in the background is in sharp focus.

Maybe these photos really do suck. Maybe they're just too avant garde for the folks on Red Bubble.