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.