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.