This shot was taken in Reykjavik at the harbour on one of our first 2 nights in Iceland. Believe it or not, it was taken near midnight. Nights are short in Iceland in late May. The building under construction is a concert hall/convention centre. I wish that the conferences I attend would be held in interesting places like Reykjavik!

I decided to post an Iceland photo today, just to switch things up a bit. This photo was taken on the first day we left Reykjavik to drive around the island. We had all sorts of lofty plans for how far we would make it, and where we would spend the night. We ended up hiking in these hills less than 30 minutes outside of Reykjavik, and that took most of the day! It was stressful at the time, as I was worried about seeing everything in Iceland in our 2 short weeks. In retrospect, these unintended side journeys yielded some of the best photos and some of the best memories.

Waterfalls are everywhere in Iceland... We saw so many that it was impossible to keep track. This is only the second waterfall we saw on our journey (the first being at Thingvillir). I have a few photos of this waterfall, most of which didn't turn out. I didn't hit my waterfall photography stride until much later on in the trip. Most of the shots are taken with the 50mm lens and a neutral density filter, as I'm trying to capture the motion of the water. This one was taken with the wide angle lens, and it's the unique perspective that makes it an interesting shot.

This is my favorite photo from our fall visit to Parliament. The clouds, the trees and the spires of the church all came together to make the scene interesting - not to mention some good light. This was another good use of the telephoto lens. I haven't had nearly as much opportunity to use it as I would like.

This shot was taken in my backyard in early August. I don't see anything particularly special about it, but for some reason I liked it then, and I still consider it postworthy - if only because it reminds me of summer. I hope I have the chance to take some photos this weekend. I'll be heading to Saskatoon for a while, and I don't know if I'll bring the camera. It's tempting, since I'll have a few days free to roam around the old stomping grounds. On the other hand, I probably already have too many things that need to be taken as carry-on, and the weather forecast on the prairies doesn't seem conducive to photo walks. Maybe living out east has just turned me into a cold weather wimp.

When I was just starting out with photography about 2.5 years ago, I read a magazine article where the author spent a whole summer photographing nothing but the brown-eyed susans in his yard. It seemed like a waste of a summer to me, but he did come up with some of the most interesting flower photos I have seen. More recently I have been reading posts on The Online Photographer blog where readers are challenged to spend a whole year using only one camera and one lens. These exercises are designed to enhance one's creative vision... When restricted to a single subject, one quickly becomes bored with all of the usual clichéd shots and starts to see the subject in new ways; a 'flower' becomes a hodge-podge compilation of parts that are interesting in their own right. Ditto with being restricted to one focal length.

I haven't undertaken anything that extreme, but this summer I did spend a couple of days photographing nothing but my geraniums. I got lots of boring shots, lots of shots spoiled by blur and bad light... and a few keepers. This is one.

I honestly don't recall where this photo was taken. I know that it was taken in early September. We left town on a photo journey, but as usual ran into problems with there being nowhere to turn off of the highway. Also, every square inch of waterfront property seems to have someone's house or cottage plopped on it. I miss the desolate prairies sometimes!

Although I have no idea where this photo was taken geographically, I know that there was a bridge to the left of the frame. Directly across from me there were little kids playing in the water with homemade boats. I was a bit angry with myself - so many interesting things to take pictures of, but I was obsessed with getting a good shot of this tree. I tried a few different lenses before settling on the wide angle. I'm not sure if it was a coincidence, but the tree shot was the only one of the whole lot to turn out.

I still can't figure out how to reply directly to comments on Blogger, but someone asked me if I am thinking of making my own site to display my photos. The short answer to that is 'yes'. I spent most of yesterday looking at other photographers' sites and figuring out what I like and don't like. I guess that's a bit of a start. I've also gone way back and read this blog from beginning to end and realized that I do have a bit of attachment to it. I figure I will probably make a site to view the photos larger and uncluttered with text. I will leave a link to my blog, or maybe have a 'find out more about this photo' link which leads to more of a blog-like post, plus or minus camera settings. I'm not sure how many people will look at my site, but it will be an interesting diversion for those (too plentiful) days when the weather is too bad for photography.

This photo was taken in mid October when we went to visit the Parliament buildings. I thought I would visit Parliament as soon as I moved to Ottawa, but it actually took me 1.5 years to get there! It's impossible to find parking there, and the grounds are always crowded - hard to take pictures without a thousand people in the frame, especially since the architecture lends itself so nicely to wide-angle photography.

I did manage to get a few good shots on this visit to Parliament, especially once the sun decided to come out. This shot was actually taken while standing on Parliament Hill and looking across the river. For this shot, I used my telephoto lens at 70mm focal length. I have another shot taken almost from the same vantage point with the wide angle. I think this one is much better. The telephoto is an amazing lens, but I haven't been able to find many occasions to use it. This is one instance where it really shone.

Today I'm posting one of my favorite spring photos and one of my favorite fall photos... kind of a juxtaposition of 2 opposite seasons, I guess.

The tulip photo was taken at the botanical gardens in early May. The colors seem impossibly bright now, in the midst of winter gloom.

The leaf photo was taken in my backyard just a couple of weekends ago, before the weather turned nasty. Fall shadows have a magical quality sometimes. I tried all last fall to get photos of the fall leaves with shadows from adjacent leaves and branches superimposed. Every effort was a failure. This year things came together - I think mostly because I lucked into the very best kind of light. I have lots of good leaf and shadow pictures... it would be nice to post the whole lot of them somewhere as a collection.

My mom recently moved to Sackville, New Brunswick, and I went to visit her there for the first time in mid October. The fall colours probably would have been more brilliant had I gone 2 weeks earlier, but there was still some bright foliage left for me to see. It rained most of the weekend I was there, but I did get some very good light. I like this particular shot because it was taken right after a heavy rain, and the leaves have that saturated, wet look. The desolation of the highway is also nice... Small town NB is very different from Ontario. This photo is a little underexposed, though, and the light is not stellar. It was still one of the 'keepers' from the trip, and one of my mom's favorites.

I often read about landscape photographers who don't even bother taking pictures if the light is not 'exactly' right. I always considered them to be kind of 'photography snobs'... There is a finite amount of time in life for photography... for most of us, not nearly enough! Why pass up an opportunity to take pictures just because the weather/light is not cooperating? Recently I've come to see their point of view, though... the New Brunswick trip is a case in point. I was half-heartedly clicking away at some trees beside the highway with the sky completely overcast and the sun obliterated. My subject matter was beautiful, but I knew that even if my shots were perfectly composed, I would end up with mediocre photos at best. Bad light makes for flat pictures, with little latitude for adjusting the contrast and colour saturation in post-processing. As I was standing there snapping, the sun came out, setting the foliage on fire and bringing out the colours in the ominous grey/blue clouds. I only fired off two pictures before my mom got worried about the time and we had to go home... but the difference between those two pictures and my 'cloudy' pictures is really night and day. I'll probably be posting those shots soon. Does this mean I'm becoming a photo snob?

This is a photo taken in spring 2010 right before we left for Iceland. Ottawa has a tulip festival every spring. A friend was visiting at the time, and so was my brother-in-law. The three of us decided to check out the tulip festival. The timing of the festival is supposed to coincide with the tulips being in full glory... but everything was early this year - we had flowers in our yard the second week of March! By the time the festival rolled around, most of the tulips had seen better days. That's ok... I have lots of photos of tulips in full bloom, but some of the most interesting shots come from flowers that are starting to decay.

This is my first post in a long time. Let's see if I remember how this works. This is a portrait of Tuk taken a couple of weeks ago. Tuk has matured into the most amazing cold weather cat. He's big and burly with a dense coat that would be the envy of any arctic explorer. As the weather gets colder, the other cats stay in and sleep more. Not Tuk. We think he's part Norwegian Forest Cat.

I have actually taken quite a few good cat portraits recently... some I might post later. I stayed up all night yesterday going through my photos from summer/fall 2010 and I have more than 60 ready for posting. I haven't had much time for photography lately, but I'm encouraged by the fact that some of my fall photos are the best I have ever taken. I will be posting them eventually... the only question is where.

Part of the reason I haven't posted is that I've become a bit disenchanted with my current options for displaying photos online. I made a Picasa album for my Iceland photos because I have lots of family and friends who wanted to view the photos without being bothered to sift through a blog. I realized a few things in doing this. First of all- storage on Picasa is limited. I had to severely scale down my Iceland photos in order to post them. Second, all of the photos I post on this blog are linked to a Picasa album... and therefore the same space limit applies. There is a finite number of photos I can post on this blog before running out of space. I calculated that ~2 years of daily posts would do it, assuming no other vacation albums were made. The Picasa album for my blog is also 'public' -- open for anyone to view. I didn't really want random people viewing the photos outside the context of the blog, so I tried to make the album private. That immediately made all of the photos on my blog unviewable... So the whole Picasa thing is messed up.

The blog is not the ideal vehicle for photography, either. The photos are small... enlarging them to fit the screen is sometimes problematic. They get lost in the text. There is no way to view a group of photos in isolation, view a slideshow, or view thumbnails.

Red Bubble is also problematic. I have good computer setup at home, but whenever I view the site at work, it takes an eon to load and sometimes freezes. The site layout looks horrible on the small screens at work. I imagine that this is probably how most people are viewing the site. The newest version of Red Bubble also removes control from the user over how photos are displayed... and again - no way to view a certain collection of photos or a slideshow. In some ways it's more like a self-congratulatory social networking site than a place to display art... and that can be grating.

There are other sites online that will display photos for a fee... Both Picasa and Flickr offer more storage space if you pay. My take on this is that if I am going to be paying for a site, I want to have complete control over it, with a site tailored to my specifications. None of the current photo-hosting sites I have seen can offer this.

I have been thinking that I still want to maintain a blog, but more for writing than for photos. The blog posts may occasionally contain photos, or focus on photography, but it won't necessarily be a photoblog. I think photoblogs are ideal for beginning photographers and people who are trying to encourage themselves to carry the camera more often or just to be more observant of the world around them. This worked for me at the beginning, but in some ways I think I've moved beyond that.

Graem asked me what I hope to 'achieve' with my photography. The short answer is that I don't know. I'm not very achievement-oriented (ie. I tend to waste a lot of time). Do I want to sell my photos? Not necessarily. It is always nice to sell a piece, but unless I become some kind of personal photographer for the stars, my photography earnings will never eclipse my day job - a sad fact I have come to terms with. When I started this blog, my intention was to share the beautiful and interesting things I discover with other people who might appreciate them... and I think this is still my goal.

The thing about dedicated photo sites with full-screen photos, slideshows, and limited text is that they tend to belong to 'pro' photographers or very talented amateurs. One of the things holding me back is that I'm not sure my photography is strong enough to stand on its own. I spent a long time last night going through my best photos from the past 3 years and asking myself that question... "Can this photo stand on its own and tell its own story?" The short answer: Some of them can... and I hope that in the future that percentage will be higher.

As I mentioned, I have more than 60 photos in the queue to be posted, so I'll try to keep posting here and on Red Bubble for now. In the next few months, I hope to come up with a completely different way of exhibiting my photos. Maybe it will be better.

A second post today, just to make up for my recent negligence. The Iceland photos seem kind of stale, and it seems lazy on my part to be posting them. Nonetheless, there were some amazing things there that I haven't yet shared on this blog.

This is a photo from Jokulsarlon (Glacier Lagoon). Pieces of a larger glacier (known as 'calves') break off and float in the lake. The colors are amazing (I expect they would be even better in good light). One thing that you don't get in a photo is sound. The creaking and groaning of the ice was amazing... and frankly a little bit creepy when the tourists went away and everything else was silent.

Jokulsarlon is a major tourist attraction, and boats even run out onto the lagoon at regular intervals. We stayed away from the tourist lookout. In fact, we found another glacier lagoon nearby which was very similar to Jokulsarlon but less popular with tourists. This photo might have actually been taken there, although it's impossible for me to remember now.

I haven't been keeping my promise to post more often. There are a few reasons for that, I guess. The Iceland trip really spoiled me for good photo subjects. For 2 weeks, I was surrounded with some of the most interesting photo fodder in the world. Since I've been back, everything else seems mundane. Whenever I go out into the yard with the camera, I find myself staring right into the neighbors' faces and beating a quick retreat back inside. Even when work gives me a chance to venture further afield, there don't seem to be many photo opportunities around here... There are lots of lakes and such showing on the map, but when you actually attempt to visit them, there isn't any access and everything is private property -- all built up with people's cottages. There have been a few frustrating photo journeys this summer where we drove for several hours only to return with a couple of half-hearted snapshots.

We bought a canoe, and this weekend we went camping at a nearby lake where we actually did find access (although we risked life, limb and new truck to get there). I thought I would get a lot of good photos, but I didn't find anything there very inspiring. I only saw water and trees without enough contrast to separate them, and a fairly boring sky. Graem took quite a few photos (which we haven't looked at yet), so maybe it's just me.

I have been reading this book by Ansel Adams, as well as his other books: The Camera, The Print and The Negative. In the first book, he mentions that when he visited Hawaii, he was not in the least bit inspired to take any photos, despite the fact that the scenery was beautiful. Ditto with the first time he visited New Mexico, although he would go on to take many of his most recognized photos there. Not that I can compare myself to Ansel Adams, but it's good to know that even famous photographers lack inspiration at times. Actually, I have been amazed to learn that Ansel had many of the same concerns with photography as I do: blown out skies, underexposed foreground, amazing subjects that simply cannot be framed effectively. 80 years later and with digital-everything, photography hasn't changed very much at its core. I'd strongly recommend this series of Adams' books to anyone with an interest in photography.

Here's a photo taken at the botanical gardens in the spring, before the Iceland trip when my enthusiasm was fresh. I may wander over there in the next couple of days to try and get some of that enthusiasm back... Yes, it's kind of boring to always visit the same place, but the flowers are always changing and I'm guaranteed to get a few good shots.

This is one of my favorite photos from Iceland. The central hill looks like it's jutting into the sky like a crown. Like so many of my Iceland photos, I have no idea where it was taken. I imagine it was somewhere on the Snaefellsness Peninsula, as it is preceded by photos of the glacier and followed by photos of a beautiful beach called Dritvik. Google Maps does not know where Dritvik is, but I seem to recall it being somewhere on the Snaefellsness Peninsula as the glacier can be seen in the background of some of my shots.

These photos were taken at the Krafla geothermal area in northern Iceland. We stayed at Myvatn for a couple of days. Vatn means lake... so to refer to "Lake Myvatn" is really a redundancy, as is the term "Snaefellsjokull glacier"... as jokull means glacier. Myvatn actually translates to "Midge Lake", which proved to be fairly accurate, as there were little black flies everywhere. The flies didn't bite, but many perfectly good photos were ruined by swarms of them in the foreground.

There was so much to do at Myvatn that we worried about packing it all into 2 days. We ended up visiting the Krafla geothermal area at night. The sun never set in northern Iceland while we were there, so photography was actually possible between midnight and 2am... and that's when these photos were taken!

I think it was a mixed blessing to go at that time. There were no other tourists at a place that would have ordinarily been quite busy. This is a huge bonus. The desolation and time of day made everything far more surreal. There were a few downsides, though... Just because light was present doesn't mean the light was good. My camera can take acceptable shots at ISO 6400, but the best shots will always be the ones taken in good light. These could have been spectacular photos, but as it is they are kind of flat and grainy. By the end of the trip I was so exhausted and cold that I was knowingly sloppy with my photography. I didn't bother to swap out my wide angle lens for faraway subjects, and I fired off snapshots without thinking much about the camera settings.

There is a geothermal power plant at Krafla which looks kind of like a space station. At the power station is a vent which releases pressure and steam from deep underground into the sky. This steam can be seen in both of these photos as a giant plume rising into the sky. Sound can't be reproduced in a photo, but this vent made quite a roar. It was almost deafening. We couldn't hear each other talking, and at one point I wished for earplugs. The roar was loudest right near the vent, but could be heard throughout the whole geothermal area. It added to the surreal quality of the experience... Imagine picking your way through a deserted alien landscape at 2am with the howl of the steam vent reverberating in your mind.

We visited the Viti crater (seen here), and then explored some nearby lava fields with yet more natural geothermal vents. We had to wade our way through a field of mud and soupy melting snow before reaching the lava fields. Once there, there was a nice boardwalk for tourists to walk on, with dire warnings not to step in the boiling mud. Graem thought it odd that there would be a boardwalk in Iceland given the relative lack of wood. Maybe they ran out of wood, given that the nice safe boardwalk ended abruptly right around the time there were gaping chasms in the lava to be traversed. All of my photos from this leg of the journey were rather flat and underexposed.

The second photo is of the power plant and was taken on the way back to the hotel in Myvatn. By that time (about 2am), the sky was starting to get noticeably lighter! The lagoon in the foreground was bright, bright blue in real life.

This photo was taken at Hofn in southeastern Iceland. We were in Iceland from May 24-June 6. May is considered the "shoulder season" - there are a few tourists, but not too many. We didn't pre-book any of our hotels, and didn't have problems finding a place to stay. It was common for the highway to be empty in both directions as far as the eye could see. Come June 1st, the high season begins. We happened to see the ferry come in from Denmark on June 1st, and caravan after caravan came spilling out onto the road with license plates as diverse as UK, Romania, Germany and Spain. This also meant a huge increase in hotel prices. When the Hotel Hofn wanted to charge us 30% more than we had been paying elsewhere, we thought it was just a part of the seasonal increase. The room was ok, but nothing special.

We went out in the evening to look at the ocean. The water was perfectly still, and the sky (at times) was almost the same color as the water. I fooled around trying to take some long exposures by resting the camera on a park bench as I was too lazy to walk back to the hotel and get the tripod. None of them turned out. The best shot ended up being this rather simple composition with a normal-length exposure and interesting clouds.

The Hotel Hofn advertised breakfast from 7am-10am. By my way of thinking, this should mean that a person could show up in the dining room at 10am and eat. By Graem's way of thinking, it means that everyone should be finished eating and ready to clear the dining room by 10am. In either case, we went for breakfast at 9:40 (plenty of time to grab a piece of toast from the buffet and a cup of coffee), only to find that the dining room was locked and breakfast had been put away. I was fuming about the scathing review I was going to write for the Hotel Hofn online, and Graem was insisting that it was actually our fault for being 'late'. When we checked out, they apologized for putting the breakfast away early and deducted 6500 kronur from our bill, making the hotel only slightly more expensive than what we were used to paying (for hotels that included breakfast). I made a mental note to increase the hotel's rating from 1 star to 2 in my review.

I intend to review all of our Iceland hotels, though haven't gotten around to it yet... the pain of being home from Iceland is still too strong for me to think about the trip objectively in the past tense. All of my reviews will be glowingly positive or neutral, except for the Hotel Hofn. If I return to Hofn, I'll probably stay in one of the two guesthouses there rather than the hotel. I know nothing about the guesthouses, but I figure it would be worth the gamble.

I've been really bad at posting here lately. Hopefully I can change that. This is one of my favorite Iceland photos... though I spent most of the trip trying to capture it. Farms and houses in rural Iceland are distributed seemingly at random. The explanation I read for this was that when the Vikings settled Iceland, there were no natives there, and therefore no need to guard against enemies. People simply settled wherever they wanted to - usually in the most beautiful places and places that afforded some natural protection from the elements.

I wanted to capture a particular sort of bucolic scene with sheep grazing in the foreground, red-roofed white farmhouses, and something quintessentially Icelandic in the background. It was more difficult to take this picture than I imagined it would be. Many of my attempts are marred by power lines, fences and boring or blown-out skies. Most of these shots were taken from the car window as we were driving by. The sheep and houses were sometimes so far away they looked like specks. Motion blur was also a problem.

This is my best Icelandic farm scene photo. I have my sheep and my farmhouses. The mountain in the background is unmistakably Icelandic, and I have some beautiful ominous clouds! I didn't touch the colors in post-processing. Much of southern Iceland is green in the spring, and when the sun shines, this green is very, very bright.

These photos were taken in Reykjavik on our first day in Iceland. There is a lake called Tjornin in the middle of Reykjavik where people gather to feed the birds. Consequently, the lake is filled with ducks and gulls. When I took these photos, I was basically just playing around with my relatively new telephoto lens. It was early afternoon and we still had a bit of time to kill before checking into our hotel at 2pm. We had flown all night, wandered around Reykjavik all morning like vagabonds, and I was fairly exhausted by the time we reached Tjornin.

This was the ideal place for taking bird photos - the people were occupied with throwing bread to the birds, and the birds were occupied with eating this bread... I could basically just snap away, unobserved. Later in the trip, we visited a conservation area that was supposed to have 13 species of duck. I was excited, but I saw only 1 or 2 species... from a VERY great distance. I took a few photos, but none worth posting (or really even looking at twice). Little did I know that my best duck photos had already been taken in Reykjavik.

I love the colors in the photo of the buildings around the lake. I didn't touch the colors in post-processing. What you see here is what I saw through the viewfinder (with the exception that the horizon is straight). This was one of my first times using a polarizing filter, and I like the effect on the colors and the sky.

One of my colleagues was mocking my duck photos... He said that he can't believe someone would go to Iceland to photograph mallards, and that the duck photos probably cause me to lose most of the audience for my web album early on. Be that as it may, this photo of a duck splashing is the most viewed photo in my Iceland web album thus far... Somebody must find it at least worth clicking on.

The Iceland photos are finally posted! Sorting them and getting them ready has required nearly 2 weeks of nonstop work... hence no regular posts here. I still plan to post some of the better ones here in the coming days. In the meantime, here is a link to the Picassa web album.

The photo posted today is of Gulfoss. There are many waterfalls in Iceland. Some are heavily visited tourist attractions, and some are just found in the hills or at the side of the road. Gulfoss is one of the better known tourist attractions in Iceland. I honestly thought none of my photos there would turn out. It was hard to compose a shot without getting a bunch of people in the frame. It was a windy day, and I was pretty much soaked with the spray from the waterfall. I thought I would have water drops all over the camera lens. Nonetheless, I was blessed with a rainbow and amazing light. The lens stayed dry long enough to fire off (literally) a couple of good shots.

I worked on the Iceland photos this weekend pretty much to the exclusion of everything else. I have about 90 ready for posting (of an estimated 400-500). I have pretty much decided to put them in a web album. I'll send out a link after I have all of the photos in the album. Quite a few people have been asking about the Iceland photos who would just want to view them all at once, without being bothered by text or scrolling through a blog. Also... 500 photos represents about a year's worth of blog-fodder. Much as I loved Iceland, I'm sure I'll want to post photos of something else this year! What I will be doing is posting the best photos to the blog, as well as those that have interesting stories behind them.

Here's the first.

This is a photo of Snaefellsjokull glacier (jokull means glacier in Icelandic). It was taken on the fourth day of our vacation. At this point in the trip, I was very stressed out about our slow progress. I had been reading about Iceland on the internet and in our travel handbook. I had seen a few 2-week itineraries created by other people which basically involved touring the Golden Circle (Thingvillir, Geysir and Gulfoss) on the first afternoon, then taking in the Snaefellsjokull glacier/peninsula on the second day. Well... We received our rental jeep very late on the second day, then got cranky, hungry and lost wandering around Thingvillir... never mind Geysir and Gulfoss! On the second day, we got sidetracked hiking up a mountain barely 30 minutes outside of Reykjavik... we never even saw the Snaefellsjokull glacier, let alone the whole peninsula! I had identified things that I wanted to see throughout the island, and already we were so far behind in our itinerary. It was at this point we decided we were going to have to skip the Westfjords!

Iceland is pretty much taken over by tourists during the high season. If you're researching a trip there, you'll read about all of these things that you must see (Blue Lagoon, Golden Circle, etc). To be honest, my favorite parts of the trip (as a photographer and as a curious traveller) were those that fell off the beaten path a bit... those that we stumbled on accidentally. Yes... the highly publicized and well-toured waterfalls are amazing... but some of the waterfalls we found beside remote gravel roads were equally spectacular... and I could play around with my camera as much as I wanted to without worrying about other tourists. Yes... the geysir is worth seeing... but photographing the geysir surrounded by 50 tourists and a rope fence reminded me of photographing a lion in a zoo cage - not very exciting and frankly kind of sad.

Iceland has some beautiful paved highways. They have secondary highways which are well-maintained gravel roads, as well as rougher roads into the interior, designated "F-roads". The F-roads only open in mid-summer, once all of the melting is finished. In order to travel on F-roads, a 4X4 is required. We tried to rent one and were given a Toyota RAV 4 - as one of my coworkers put it, the soccer mom's 4X4. We took a little dirt and gravel road to Snaefellsjokull. At the road's origin from the highway, there was a sign saying, "Impassable". Being used to wimpy Canadian road signage, we scoffed at this and proceeded to take the impassable road. We hadn't yet learned that Icelanders don't mess around with road signs. If they say a bend in the road should be taken at 30km/h, that is probably a good suggestion. If they say a road is impassable, you might, for example, find yourself driving right up to a glacier - sheer snow and ice with no traversable path. This is what happened to us.

Looking through my photos, I must have been having some sort of brain malfunction when I chose my camera settings to photograph the glacier. Nonetheless, the light was good enough that day to make up for my ineptness. The Snaefellsjokull photos are among the best I've taken so far. Look forward to seeing more when I get the web album up.

Drumroll, please! The first of the Iceland pictures is here! Actually, you might find it rather anticlimactic. This is a photo taken from our first day in Reykjavik. We landed at Keflavik International Airport at 6:25am, which was 2:25am Ontario time. We took the Flybus into Reykjavik. We couldn't check into our hotel until 2pm, but thought we might at least drop the luggage off. The Flybus took us to a central bus station where a helpful employee told us that the public transit would take us to within a block of our hotel. The bus schedule told us to expect a bus every half hour, except for Sundays and holidays. We started to suspect that it might be a holiday when no buses came after nearly an hour of waiting. Google later confirmed this suspicion - May 24 is indeed an Icelandic public holiday. Armed with a map, we endeavoured to walk to the hotel. This photo was taken whilst we wandered the streets of Reykjavik in the early morning hours. It was sunny and a balmy 20 degrees. My sleep-deprived grogginess and annoyance at having to walk so far while carrying luggage was wiped away by avid curiosity about the city. We pretty much had the streets to ourselves at that hour on a holiday!

I took this photo because I loved the bright colors and the way the street signs lined up with the houses. The green car makes things perfect. I thought this would be an easy photo to post first since it required very little post-processing. It actually took me quite a while to get my horizon straight. I don't have Graem here to be my horizon police, and I'm not good at judging these things for myself. In this shot, a crooked horizon would be especially bothersome given all of the right angles and straight lines!

Reykjavik is a very interesting city. I found myself comparing it to Halifax, Vancouver and San Francisco, but it really is an entity of its own. It is definitely a 'big city', despite the fact that the permanent population is only about 120,000. There are lots of trendy and expensive restaurants and shops. At the same time, I never felt a sense of big city caginess or isolation. I was comfortable (and perhaps foolish) enough to leave my camera equipment in plain view unattended in our rental jeep.

I loved the Icelandic street signs. I wish I had taken more photos of them. The signs were always colorful, and for the most part very precise. One sign, for example, warned us that there was a 10% grade in the road coming up over the next 0.2 to 0.8km! Precision was mixed with total ambiguity. You can see 2 signs in this picture of a blue circle crossed out with a red line... What could that mean? We spent our whole vacation guessing what "No Blue" might mean. Graem even had a dream about it. It wasn't until we pulled into the airport on the last day that I figured out it must mean "No Parking". There were a couple of other colorful but ambiguous signs whose meanings still elude us.

I'm not really sure what to do with the Iceland photos. I'm going through them and still haven't seen them all. I'm tagging the best ones to go back to and consider for posting. I'm running into the problem of deciding which photos to post and where. So far, I have only identified about 20 really great photos. The problem is that they tend to be from the same day and/or the same location. If I only post the cream of the crop, I'll leave the misguided impression that Iceland = 2 waterfalls and 1 glacier. I certainly don't want to do that. The second tier of photos ranges from 'nice but not stellar' to 'mediocre, might have been taken with an iPhone'. Sometimes the light is terrible, I'm not on the ball as a photographer, or I can't get a clear shot at something without fences, powerlines or billions of other tourists in the way. I still want photos to help me remember these things. People who haven't been to Iceland might still find these photos interesting even if they aren't spectacular.

Red Bubble is for "art" photos - that is a no brainer. I'll post my technically best shots there, as well as some abstract ones. I'll cross-post the very best photos to this blog. The tier 2 photos are problematic in that there are so many of them. I think I'll have upwards of 500 photos to post when all is said and done. A good number will be posted on this blog, I think... but I may set up a Picassa album or Flickr account or somesuch for the rest.

A few of my coworkers have been bothering me to make a travel blog. These are the same people who told me I was crazy to want to go to Iceland in the first place. I don't know about that.. Making a blog is a lot of work. It would give me a venue to talk about things that aren't necessarily documented in my photos - Icelandic people and culture, the food, our hotels, the time that we stumbled on an '80s glam rock party while looking for a place to eat lunch...

I'll ruminate on it a bit, and I'd appreciate any suggestions. Right now I'm too tired to think.

I photographed these lilacs at the botanical garden shortly before leaving for Iceland. I have always associated the lilacs blooming with my birthday, because that's exactly when they would bloom when I was a kid growing up in Calgary. In reality, I haven't seen the lilacs bloom on my birthday in more than a decade now. In Edmonton and Saskatoon, they bloom later. In Ottawa this year, they were pretty much done blooming by the time my birthday rolled around. There were lilacs in full bloom when I visited the botanical garden, but I preferred these buds... to me they looked like little fists just ready to burst open and convert their potential energy into scent.

I just got back from a fabulous photography trip to Iceland, so you probably wonder why I'm posting a photo of some (very Canadian) lilacs. The answer is quite simple... I'm finding my Iceland photos overwhelming.

I took more than 3000 photos in Iceland. Tonight I sat down to look at them for the first time. It took forever for my photo management program to load them, and I would say I have probably viewed ~75% of them now... but nothing more than a cursory flip.

I'm in the sort of mood today where I hate all of my photos and I'm quite disappointed in how they turned out. I have a lot of dust on my sensor that will have to be edited out of most pictures. Iceland is a dusty place, and I wasn't as careful as I should have been with swapping lenses. Many of my wide-angle shots are marred by lens flare. I was a lazy photographer too... I left filters on when I should have removed them, left the tripod in the car when I should have used it, and I didn't start bracketing my shots routinely until fairly late in the trip... so blown-out skies, underexposed rocks and blurry waterfalls are common. All of my Reykjavik pictures are lousy, save for some remarkably sharp duck and seagull photos that I might have taken anywhere, and a photo of a residential street I took merely because I loved the symmetry between the houses and the street signs.

Part of this was due to laziness and my general apathy towards life these days (as well as relative inexperience as a landscape photographer). Part was due to the hectic nature of the trip, and the mobs of other tourists. In order to do this right, I needed much more time to wait for the right light conditions, concentrate on my composition, exposure, etc. We spent the whole 2 weeks frantically rushing around the island, and still didn't begin to scratch the surface of all there is to see. I needed to be more like Ansel Adams hiking around Yosemite surrounded by beautiful vistas with only 8 plates to expose. Only 8 plates... better choose your exposures wisely. I think that's what I need to work on in my photography now... take some trips and concentrate on quality over quantity. It's tempting to click the shutter a thousand times when I have so little time for photography, but I think that the only way for me to improve from here is to slow down a bit.

If all of this sounds depressing, it isn't necessarily. I'm often in a mood to hate all of my photos. I look at them later and feel differently. I go through similar phases where I think they are all amazing, and post a bunch. I come back a bit later and wonder what the hell I was thinking, embarrassed to have posted such shite. Chances are that I'll be more optimistic when I view these photos later on.

I have 3 days off this weekend with nothing much to do, so look forward to the first Iceland photos starting to trickle through. Graem uses every lame excuse he can think of to leave here and stay away as long as possible. Lo and behold, he has thought of another one already! I'm exactly where I was before the Iceland trip: lonely and slogging through my non-life, willing it to be over one day at a time.

I had previously eluded to my analogy between drycleaning and vacations. Drycleaning was magical to me when I was a kid... an item of clothing too fancy or too dirty to be cleaned by any conventional means was sent away and presto! It came back clean without even getting wet! Later I began to notice that the stains were never actually removed from the clothing... they weren't even really diminished. You might think that we used a lousy drycleaner, but I have noticed the same thing with every drycleaner I have patronized since. I developed a theory that drycleaners don't actually do anything to the clothes besides press them, repackage them, and give you the expectation that they are cleaner. Clothes that have sat in the closet for 2 years are rediscovered. You can go out for dinner somewhere fancy, look professional for a job interview, and just generally tackle life with a new perspective and renewed sense of confidence! And to think... it's all a nifty placebo effect!

Vacations are the same, if a bit more expensive than drycleaning. Going on vacation doesn't change your life in any way... it's still as lousy or as wonderful, as boring or as stressful as it ever was when you get back. Vacations take you out of the loop for a bit, though... and while you're gone, life is repackaged like a pair of wool dress pants so that you can see things from a bit of an outsider's perspective when you return.

We tried a new drycleaner shortly before we went to Iceland. They affixed yellow tags to the clothing, drawing attention to the stains: "ink stain on front pocket", "sleeves", "hair stain on collar" (what is a hair stain?). The stains were (of course) all still there when we got the clothing back... but this time, we had nice bright yellow tags to point out stains that we hadn't even noticed before! I can't help but feel that I'm being cruelly mocked by my own analogy.

Here's another tulip shot from the botanical gardens. Not much to say today... just getting through the few remaining days until vacation. Who knew time could move so slowly?

I took a quite a few shots of these little blue flowers. Most of them were marred by the two Bs: blurriness and boringness. Here I was lucky enough to get one flower in crisp focus against a foliage background that was somewhat complementary.

I call this photo "Feeling Blue". It's an aptly named photo to be posting today. I find myself slogging through all of the mundaneness and garbage that remains to be done before the trip to Iceland... and I know that when I return, all of the mundaneness and garbage will still be here waiting for me. Ho hum. I developed a theory a while ago that drycleaners don't actually do anything with clothes besides press them and wrap them in a sheath of flimsy, rustling, child-suffocating cellophane. When you pick your clothes up, they aren't any cleaner, but you feel better about them somehow... Vacations are probably similar in a lot of ways.

I took many photos of these yellow flowers last weekend. Partly it was because these were the first flowers I saw upon arriving at the botanical gardens... and hence the first flowers I have photographed in spring 2010. Partly it was because I liked the way the sun was shining through the petals... but I'm afraid I mostly took these shots out of stubbornness, pure and plain... the wind was whipping the flowers around, and I was determined to get a non-blurry shot. I ended up with a couple of keepers.

This is one of my favorite photos taken at the botanical gardens last weekend. I had beautiful light while I was photographing these daffodils, and I thought I would have some interesting shots. Strangely, most of them turned out looking very 'blah'. Some were blurry (likely due to wind), and some just looked very flat, despite the good light. This is one of the only daffodil shots to turn out. It looks as though the flower in the front is posing for a portrait!

This is my first post in a long time. Jackie died on March 8, and I pretty much lost interest in everything, including photography and living. I also got a new computer and had to switch my photos over to the new hard drive. I have to say I'm enjoying the new system. Editing my photos is amazingly fast. I had been using a laptop with a small screen that was starting to burn out and gave everything a pink hue. I now have 2 gigantic flatscreen monitors (soon to be 3). It's great to see my photos so big, in such detail... and the color is amazing. On the downside, the bigger better screens allow me to see the flaws better. My sensor needs a good cleaning... and some of the photos that had been my favorites are embarrassingly blurry. Graem has pointed out some crooked horizons, but I'm still not able to see them as crooked. That's always been one of my biggest challenges as a photographer - getting my horizons straight.

I'm trying to get my life back in order, and I hoped to spend the last 2 weekends taking pictures. It didn't happen... Work is conspiring to wreck what remains of my life, and then last Saturday I got my compact flash card stuck in the card reader, and spent the day journeying across the city to buy a new one. I lost about 400 photos from the past 3 months, including photos from the final days of Jackie's life. This weekend has been a write-off... cold and rainy. In fact, the weather forecast tells me it's snowing now, though I don't dare to look out the window.

I did make it to the botanical gardens last Sunday, though. I got some decent tulip shots, despite the wind. I don't even think the tulips were blooming yet in Saskatoon last year at this time. Here in Ottawa, there were crocuses and daffodils blooming as early as March 18. Prairie homesickness be damned, I say! I'll try to be better about updating regularly. I don't have much time to take new photos, but I have a bunch saved from the botanical garden. May 23-June 6 we'll be vacationing in Iceland... and that should bring an entirely new breed of photography!

This shot was taken near the Rideau River. It's yet another photo that illustrates my recent love affair with the wide-angle lens. If you asked me last spring what my favorite lens was, it would be hands-down the macro. Now it would be my precious 14-24mm zoom. Each lens has a particular situation and subject matter where it shines (even the Lensbaby). I can't wait to track down some birds and wildlife to give my telephoto a real workout!

This is another photo from Hog's Back. Lately I've been letting the random number generator decide what I post. Today is an exception. For some reason, I wasn't happy with anything it chose, even after 5 or 6 clicks. I decided to just go ahead and post this shot. For some reason, I was infatuated with the purple shimmer of the water behind these trees and took about a million shots trying to get it right. This one was taken with my 50mm lens. I have another one taken with my telephoto, which I thought better at the time. I can't remember why I deemed that one 'unpostable'.

The random number generator doesn't have much to choose from these days... No new shots in a while. I have a few ideas for indoor photo sessions with my flash and/or candlelight. I feel like I'm in limbo right now; waiting for Jackie to get better (or not), waiting for spring to come... It feels like both are just around the corner and that I should just hunker down, hold my breath and wait. Not the best approach, I know.

When Graem and I visited the Rideau River, we walked right across the frozen water at one point. That sort of thing always makes me nervous, even if there are tire tracks on the ice indicating that someone drove a vehicle that was (presumably) much heavier than me across safely... Maybe they just weakened the structural integrity of the ice!

We made it across safely and alive, and I even took time to gingerly crouch and examine this swirled bit of ice. When we lived in Edmonton, there was a glass shop nearby where we would always stop to admire (and occasionally buy) expensive glass bowls and sculptures that we couldn't really afford. This ice reminds me of one of those sculptures.

This is another ice-and-water abstract taken at the Rideau River. I like the contrast between the still ice and the moving water. The chunks of ice had been formed into interesting shapes by the splashing water.

An inhumane work schedule and a sick cat have eaten up my time, and even most of my interest in taking new photos this week. We can always hope for better in the days to come.

This macro shot was taken near the Rideau River. As with my last ice/snow abstract, I found that monochrome conversion helped to accentuate the texture of the ice. Ice and snow make nice macro subjects, but I can't wait for spring to have something a wee bit greener in front of my lens.

Here's another shot taken at Hog's Back Park near sunset. It would have been a rather mundane shot, if not for the shaft of sunlight shining through the trees and reflected on the snow. I adjusted the levels a bit to try to accentuate the light on the snow.

Here is one of many ice abstracts taken at Hog's Back Park. I think (hope?) that my composition is improving for landscape shots and for things like flowers that I photograph all the time. Where I've noticed my composition lacking lately is in this type of abstract shot. I always get excited about things that look cool through the macro lens (lichens, rocks, icicles), and I happily snap away expecting masterpieces. When I review my photos later, I'm always disappointed. Yes, the subjects are interesting, but the photos are a visual cacophony with no real focal point. These ice abstracts are decent shots, but I know of some photographers who could have made them far more interesting. In this particular shot, the monochrome conversion really helped bring out the texture in the snow, even though it was essentially a black and white photo to begin with.

This is one of many shots I took by the Rideau river last weekend. Most of my photos from that trip are macros of water, rocks and ice. This is one of my favorites. I'm in love with my wide-angle lens these days. I'm also rereading a book about Ansel Adams which has me infatuated with epic landscapes and sweeping skies. I wish I had more opportunity for landscape photography myself. What I like best about this photo, however, is that it has a distinct "spring on the prairies" feel, rather than a "winter in Ontario" feel.

I have taken a few photos over the last couple of weeks, but didn't have time to look through them and edit them until today. This is turning into a monthly photo blog, rather than a daily one!

These photos were taken at Hog's Back Park in Ottawa. The park features a small waterfall and some rocky cliffs which are turned into dramatic ice-scapes at this time of year. I thought that "Hog's Back" was an odd name for a park. I guess the name refers to the big rocks jutting out of the Earth. To quote a sign found at the park:

These rocks, sandstones and limestones were formed at the bottom of a shallow sea which covered this region in Ordovician time some 400 million years ago. Note the ripple marks formed by the ancient waves. Later the region was uplifted and the strata here were folded and broken. A major break or fault can be seen here at low water just below the East end of the bridge. The present course of the river over these rocks was established at a still much later date.

That explains the geological features of the Hog's Back. Whoever was responsible for the man-made features did not have photographers in mind. The whole park is surrounded by an ugly black fence. I spent a lot of time trying to keep the fence out of my shots. Most of my wide-angle photos of the waterfall were marred either by the fence itself, or the shadow of the fence creeping into the frame. As a result, the best shots were taken with longer lenses, and I have quite a few closeup abstracts.

With the first photo here, I thought it would be cool to photograph the snow mounds (complete with shadows), crisp in the foreground with the waterfall blurred out in the background. It didn't turn out exactly as I wanted it to, but I still like it.

The little bush in the second shot looks like its branches are dripping with icing. It looks like something that belongs in the front yard of a gingerbread house. If only there were jujubes...

Here is another shot taken on the Calabogie trip. It's not immediately apparent (to me at least) what this is a picture of. It's actually dark water with ice chunks moving rather quickly under a bridge. I was using a longer lens, so the shot loses its wider context. When I was viewing my photos, I got a bit confused and thought this was actually a closeup of a faceted rock... and I couldn't remember taking any photos of rock. It could also be that I'm just losing my mind.

This is the last photo I have saved up to post for a while. Hopefully I'll find some time and some subject matter for evening photography... Otherwise nothing new until the weekend.

This photo was taken on a recent trip to Calabogie, Ontario... although I suppose it could have been taken anywhere. Unfortunately none of my wide-angle landscapes turned out. These little rusty bumps on a rail on the side of a bridge reminded me of warts. At first I tried taking macro shots of the 'warts', but they didn't turn out looking like much. On the way back I decided to focus on the chain link fence and let the bumps blur into the background. These ones turned out much better.

This is one of my wide-angle tree shots from the Experimental Farm. The shape of the tree reminded me of the palm trees in Costa Rica. I was lying on my back taking photos of them (albeit not with a wide-angle) and they had the same long and lazy shape. Maybe I'm just sick of winter and everything I see is starting to remind me of the tropics.

A combination of cold weather and illness is keeping me tethered to home, despite having a rare 4.5 days off from work. I don't have many new photos to upload, although I took a bit of a trip earlier on in the week. The photos are not uploaded yet, but maybe some of the wide-angle ones turned out alright *crosses fingers*.

It has been my recent habit to post the best pictures from this blog on Red Bubble. Today I decided to do the opposite. This is one of my favorite photos, but it hasn't received many views on RB. I think the thumbnail is just too small to bring out the detail. This photo was taken on my recent journey to Fitzroy, Ontario when I had a few days off over the New Year. We had freezing rain all through Christmas, and the tree branches were covered with a coating of ice which made them look like they were made of glass. In this shot, the moonlight makes the frozen branches glisten. This was actually an accidental shot... My fingers were frozen and I was trying to adjust my settings when I accidentally tripped the shutter. I had been meaning to take a longer exposure as well as close off the eyepiece to prevent any light from entering through it. In the end, this 'mistake' turned out looking better than any of my planned shots. When I lengthened the exposure, the branches were so blown out with moonlight that the subtle gleam wasn't visible.

There is more freezing rain in the forecast for tomorrow, and I have Tuesday off from work... Maybe I'll get some more icy tree shots.

Here is another of my winter tree photos... This one taken with the wide angle. I was about as miserable and depressed as it's possible for a person to be when I went on my photo journey last week. As soon as I put on the wide angle, it was like snapping a light switch: instant happiness. I guess all of those sayings about viewing the world thorough a different lens or though rose-colored glasses have some basis in truth. Believe it or not, this was actually a short, squat tree in real life. The wide-angle stretches it out and distorts it like one of those funhouse mirrors.

This is another of my favorite photos from last weekend. I like the composition with the trees and the buildings, and the stark white of the undisturbed snow. A wide angle lens makes even the most mundane things look interesting.

This is probably the most interesting photo I took on my trip to the Experimental Farm last weekend. The wide angle lens gives things a different perspective... I was actually standing mere steps from the yellow house, although through a 14mm lens, it looks far away. This photo also contains something that has been rare since I moved to Ontario - an interesting sky! I really miss the vibrant prairie skies. My brother-in-law recently visited and made the comment that the sky always looks the same in Ottawa. He's right. It's always bright white, or a uniform grey... very drab and dull for a photographer. Last weekend I was rewarded (however briefly) with some amazing color and light.

This weekend I took a walk to the Experimental Farm. I wanted to go somewhere further afield... but the days are still too short to allow for that. It's true that there is always fodder for the one lens you leave behind. On my last trip to photograph winter trees, I missed the wide angle. I brought it this time and left my telephoto at home. Wouldn't you know it... The trees and fields were swarming with crows. Through my 50mm lens, they just looked like black specks... black specks that cackled and cawed, mocking me.

In spring, summer and fall, trees are all about the leaves. In winter, I like the shapes formed by the bare branches against the sky. A wide angle lens brings a whole new perspective to these shapes.

Here is the only "postable" photo I took with the 50mm lens before swapping over to the wide angle. To be honest, I think it's the least exciting. I'll post the wide angle shots in the coming days, since it will be a few eons before I have another day off.

Today's photo has an amusing story behind it. I was out taking photos of the cats in the yard yesterday when my eyes were drawn to this little windswept bush in the corner. It was begging me to take its photo. The fact that the wind was actively blowing it just accentuated its 'windswept' character and made it an even more appealing photo subject. The problem was the background... The siding on the neighbors' garage is...well... frankly quite ugly. I was hoping that converting it to monochrome would make it more interesting. Maybe the lines on the side of the garage could represent blowing wind in some abstract, artsy-fartsy sort of way.

I like taking photos, but I really don't care for fiddling with them on the computer... I have no idea how my post-processing software works, aside from the most basic operations. I was wondering if maybe I could summon the motivation to try blurring out the background on the computer, when Graem peered over my shoulder and said (as though he had read my mind), "Nothing you can do with that one. It's always gonna look like siding". And there you have it.