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.