I didn't have time for a long photo journey today, but I did go to the Experimental Farm. The farm is very close to my house, and every time I pass it, it seems odd to see fields of crops growing right in the middle of the city. As soon as I moved here, I made a mental note to myself to photograph the corn one day. I was hoping for a dark, ominous sky in the background, and today I got exactly that!

I wandered around a bit and took lots of photos of the fall scenery. The light was very good despite the thick clouds. I'll be posting more photos in the coming days. The farm is surrounded by barbed wire fence. I found a break in the fence and thought it might be nice to wander into the midst of the corn and take some photos from there... perhaps even take some photos looking up at the sky while laying on my back in the corn field. Unfortunately someone who drove up in a Government of Canada truck just then thought otherwise.

It's good that I didn't have time to venture too far, because the skies tore open suddenly and down came the rain. I actually took my jacket off and wrapped the camera in it to keep it dry while I ran home.

Back in February, I was thinking to myself that it's not a real photo journey if you don't arrive home shivering and soaked. I guess that makes today's trip a bonafide photo journey, even though it was brief.

I have a couple of days off from work, and I planned to go out and photograph the fall trees today. Once the leaves start changing color, it isn't long before they've all fallen, so I thought I should seize the opportunity. The days are getting shorter, and knowing my tendency to sleep in, I had my camera bag all packed and ready to go with a fresh battery and memory card so I could take advantage of the limited daylight. Mother Nature had other plans for me, though. The rain started falling last night, and came down all day today in sheets. It only let up for about 10 minutes just as it was starting to get dark and I ventured outside to take two crappy snapshots from my porch.

If I want to post a picture of fall leaves, I'll have to post one from last weekend. It isn't the best picture... The light was fading and I had a hard time bringing out the color of the leaves without completely blowing out the sky.

I really hope I get a chance to photograph the maples with their bright red leaves in good light. Unfortunately it's forecast to rain again tomorrow, and all through the weekend as well.

In keeping with the theme of simplicity, this is a photo of a tree reflected in gently rippled water. The color version had a brownish hue. At Graem's suggestion, I converted it to black-and-white. In its current incarnation, this photo reminds me of a Rorschach ink blot.

I posted the color version of this photo on Red Bubble, where it has been fairly well-received so far. It's another photo taken in Val-des-Bois at sunset. A boat had just passed by leaving ripples in the smooth water surface. I couldn't decide whether I liked the color or the monochrome version more, so I decided to post one there and one here. In truth, I think the monochrome one may be better.

My favorite thing about this photo is its simplicity. The trees and ripples on the water are in silhouette - their presence merely suggested by black shapes.

Lately I've been trying to reduce things down to their simplest terms - not only with photography, but with life in general. I used to like only very detailed drawings and paintings - ones where you could distinctly see every leaf and blade of grass, the more detail the better. I viewed stylized art as being rather "lazy". I'm coming to realize that simplicity can be technically quite difficult and often takes more thought than creating a detailed piece. I recently saw a drawing of a tree composed of only 3 lines. This drawing was, to me, more representative of a tree than a more detailed drawing, or even a photo of an actual tree could have been. I had to laugh a little bit at the paradox of that notion. I guess that's what I'm trying to achieve with my photos.

Here is another photo taken on my adventures last weekend. We went to the Stony Swamp Conservation Area just outside of Ottawa. My mood at the time was bleak, as I was certain I had failed my exams and would be wasting another year preparing to retake them. I was especially drawn to the sad desolation of these skeleton trees.

I crept around a bit trying to get a few different perspectives on the trees, but my mobility was limited by the fact that I was ankle-deep in a bog (hence the name Stony Swamp, I guess). When I got home, I tried everything in my power to crop out the leaves in the left side of the photo. No matter what I tried, I wasn't able to crop them without cutting off the branches of the tree on the left, or seriously unbalancing the photo.

I actually found it a bit humorous... Into the bleakest of bad situations, there creeps a little optimism.

Last weekend, we went on a photo journey to Val-des-Bois, Quebec. Up until last year, my only visit to Quebec had been a layover in the Montreal airport when I was en-route to somewhere else. Last year when I visited Ottawa, I ventured across the bridge to Gatineau. I got lost looking for the Museum of Civilization and became quite hungry wandering aimlessly around downtown Gatineau. I was afraid to stop for food anywhere because I don't speak French.

Val-des-Bois was beautiful... This scene absolutely blew my mind. Shimmering sand and rocks, fall colors, calm water and a bridge! The photo doesn't really do it justice. The light was failing by the time we got there and my landscape photography skill leaves much to be desired... but this is still one of my favorite photos.

I have already posted this photo to Red Bubble, but I'm posting it here too... just for the sake of having something to post.

The whole time I was studying for my exams, I told myself that if I passed, I could start taking photos again. Photography was like the special toy (or often ironicallly candy) that I got for enduring a trip to the dentist as a kid. I should have known that right at the time I could start taking pictures again, my computer would get messed up. We switched our operating system around just as my 24/7 tech support (ie. my husband) left for a month. The photo management system I have been using does not like the new OS very much. I spent my whole day off today trying to find different photo management software. I may have finally found a solution, but certainly not an ideal one. Editing and posting my photos was hard enough on an antique, memory deficient laptop with buggy software. It's going to be a lot more difficult from now on, if it's even possible at all. I took over 400 photos last weekend and had a bunch picked out for further editing and posting. Now, in the best case scenario, I get to do all of that over again.

But enough whining, I guess. Back to the photo at hand. What could be more quintessentially Canadian than a maple leaf? I'm sad that fall is here, but the trees sure are amazing. These maple leaves were even more spectacular a couple of weeks ago when they were bright red and yellow around the edges with patches and veins of green in the centre. Now, the leaves that have changed color tend to be pure yellow, orange or red with no residual green. I hope to take many more photos of the fall trees in the next few days. Whether I'm able to extract them from my camera and get them into postable form is another matter entirely.

Here is a closeup of one of the white flowers I photographed on the morning with "magical light". Sadly, it's probably the last photo I will post on my blog before the exams. I have a couple more that were ready for posting, but they're older photos (from before I left SK), and looking at them now, I really don't like them all that much.

A week from today, my stupid exams will be over. I don't work next weekend, and I intend to take the camera somewhere interesting and take a lot of photos. If I pass, it will be a great celebration. If I fail, it will be much-needed therapy. Either way, I hope to have something interesting to post.

Speaking of interesting posts, Moosh has some concerns with the picture I posted of him yawning. He worries about ending up as a LOLcat - a legitimate concern, I guess. LOLcat stardom would be the ultimate humiliation for a cat as dignified as Moosh.

This picture was taken with my cell phone camera. I haven't really scrutinized it closely. It's low resolution, and might be blurry. It's really just a fun picture. The 'best' camera is always the one you have with you when a good photo opportunity presents itself. If I had been fumbling with the Nikon, I would have missed this moment altogether!

This flower looks like an origami flower to me. I was never any good at origami... My paper swans and cranes end up looking like genetic mutants. I tried to fold a beetle once... The result looked very much like a beetle - one that had been squashed under someone's shoe!

Whenever I'm studying for an exam, my general knowledge is always broadened much more than my knowledge of the topic I am trying to study. I feel compelled to sit at my desk, tethered to the computer... so I find myself procrastinating by looking up all kinds of random things.

While studying for my internal medicine exams a couple of years ago, I played a lot of online chess. I can't do that now... I use Linux, which means my computer is basically incompatible with everything, unless I want to get a PhD in jargonese to figure out what people on Linux forums are actually trying to say. My laptop is also antiquated now... Most chess programs send it into an infinite, overheated spool. But I did waste a bit of time looking up chess programs for Linux the other day... I found myself reading two rather complicated articles on game theory... interesting, but over my head. Of course this meant I had to look up and read a few simpler articles. I ended up reading about the history of rock-scissors-paper.

I met someone from Lybia last week, and it occurred to me that I know nothing about Lybia. This prompted a visit to Wikipedia, and from there a lengthy jaunt around the 'net.

While procrastinating on Red Bubble, I discovered someone who does origami on a very tiny scale... I was quite impressed by these sub-centimeter ducks. After seeing this, I decided to google-search 'micro origami', hoping to find more of the same. Instead, I found things like this. You can imagine how that took me off on an entirely new tangent.

I've been feeling too stressed out and guilty to go out and take photos... but with the amount of time I spend procrastinating on the internet, some photography would be healthier and easier on the eyes!

I have been trying for a while to get a good photo of these little white flowers. For some reason, the pictures I take always end up blurry. The other day I was doggedly persistent, and took about 30 photos of these flowers, despite the fact that they were in shade and the flowers beside them were basking in glorious sunlight.

I had envisioned a dreamy photo of the whole plant with shallow depth of field; one or two flowers in the foreground sharply focused, and the others gently blurred in a soft background. None of those shots really turned out. The white foreground blended into the white background, and it reminded me of the pattern on a plastic tablecloth my grandma had when I was three.

I like this sharp picture of only two flowers better than the dreamy ones of the whole flower mass. I ended up cranking the contrast... maybe a bit too much. For some reason, this photo evokes happy childhood memories- Christmas Eve, the first day of summer vacation, photographing lizards in Costa Rica... I guess that last one is not a childhood memory, but somehow it feels the same.

This is a color photo of the flower in the last post. I actually meant to post the color photo first, but clicked on the wrong thumbnail.