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 now the trees have lost their leaves and the corn fields have been replaced by a clean blanket of white snow.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.