This is one of my favorite flower macros. My bleeding hearts grow in a shady area of the yard, but they get some late afternoon sun. Today the sun was low in the sky and shining through the fence at an angle such that some of the bleeding hearts were illuminated and others in shadow.

This isn't really the traditional bleeding heart picture that you usually see. The flower reminds me of an arrow or a spear poking through the foliage on the right.

The shallow depth of field in this photo makes it look like the poppy is absolutely still while the world around it spins out of control. Or at least that's what I think.

When I took this photo, I was concerned that the midday sunlight was too harsh, and that there would be too much reflection on the petals. I really like the colors of this tulip, though, and the way the petals curl backwards. I'm still not really sure how much I like this photo. I change my mind every time I look at it.

This is a leopard's bane. The leopard's bane has been one of my favorite flowers for a few years now. I discovered it when I was a kid, and I went shopping for perennials with my mom and my grandma. I was allowed to go pick out a couple of plants of my own. I chose a leopard's bane. Its bright yellow flowers stood in stark contrast to my mom's flowerbed, which was a uniform pink and purple. My grandma was aghast that I could choose such an "ugly" plant. The leopard's bane thrived, and eventually even my grandma asked if she could have some to put in her garden. I have several plants now, and each one can produce 40 or more flowers at a time! This bud is just about ready to burst.

Sometimes I see something and I become obsessed with photographing it. I'll go to great lengths to take a picture, and if for some reason I can't, I feel annoyed and depressed about it for days! I usually end up liking those pictures, even if they don't look like much to other people. This is one of those pictures. I'm not sure what appealed to me about this scene... maybe it was the bright red of the wheel juxtaposed against the weathered wood. This was taken when we visited a ghost town called Bents, SK earlier this spring. It wasn't that hard to get the photo... I just had to climb over a small pile of rusty junk to frame it properly.

Since it wasn't a good day for flower photos, I decided to practice my cat portraits. This is Jackie (aptly named after Jackie Chan). I have three cats, but Jackie is the only one who actually likes having his picture taken. Whenever Jackie sees the camera, he rushes to put his face in front of the lens. When he sees me trying to take a picture of one of the other cats (or anything else), he rushes to get between the subject and the lens. Jackie has a real knack being cute.

Today was not a great day for flower photography. I didn't get outside until late, and the light was fairly bad. It was windy enough to make macro photos difficult. I don't think I've had such a high percentage of blurry photos since last summer, when I was pushing my point-and-shoot to its limits. Nonetheless, I couldn't resist posting this pink tulip.

Spring always comes late to the prairies, but this year it seems later than ever. We even had snow last week! I've been watching my friends from around the country and elsewhere in the world post flower pictures for a couple of months now! All of my flower photos this year had been taken at the conservatory in the Mendel Art Gallery.

My tulips have been on the verge of blooming for a few days now. I worked all day on Saturday and was afraid I would miss it. Yesterday was cold and rainy - a good day for any sane tulip to stay closed. Today it finally happened! I spent the afternoon taking tulip macros in my own backyard!

I've been meaning to take the lensbaby to the train bridge and try to capture a train. I think the combination of lensbaby + moving train would result in some very interesting pictures. In reality, it would probably result in focusing difficulties and a big mess of blur.

We decided to try it out tonight at sunset. We went to the train bridge and waited... Unfortunately the train schedule is unpredictable... or maybe unknowable is a better word. There wasn't a train. We stuck around for a while and took lensbaby pictures, most of which didn't turn out. Here's one of the more interesting ones, converted to black and white.

More fun with the macro lens and teleconverter! I like it when sunlight strikes a flower petal at just the right angle and makes the petal sparkle. This is a rare thing to capture in a photo (at least for me). I think this is the best "sparkling flower petal" macro I have taken so far. I'm hoping for more this summer!

Another Red Bubble reject. I love the lonely appearance of this abandoned farmhouse. I remember walking around this house and its surroundings wondering what it must have been like to live there in the winter in the days before modern heating and insulation. The photo is a bit underexposed and there's a bit of vignetting from the lens, but I think these features add to the overall desolate feeling of the photo.

I belong to an online art and photography community called Red Bubble. I joined this winter, and it has been a great place to see some interesting photos and share some of my work with others. I keep the photos in my Red Bubble gallery sorted by number of views. When I add new photos, I give them a few days at the top of the page to be seen before sorting them. I figure that this way, the "cream" will rise to the top. This is probably an oversimplification. I'm using the number of views as a surrogate marker for how much people like the photo. In reality, there are other variables at play. Some photos just look more compelling as thumbnails. A more interesting thumbnail might generate a click, even if the photo itself is mediocre. The converse is also true. I think the hummingbird photo I posted on Red Bubble is among the best I've taken. The bird can't be distinguished from the green background in the thumbnail, and I think that's why it has been relegated to second-page obscurity. Some photos fit nicely into all sorts of groups and challenges and develop a greater presence on the site. Others aren't so easily pigeonholed, and rely solely on random visits to my profile for their views.

I have decided to keep my Red Bubble profile pared down to only 60 photos (or 3 pages) and eliminate the ones with the fewest number of views. I decided this after looking through a few profiles of people who have thousands of photos in their galleries. It's rare for me to go beyond the first page when I view someone's profile, let alone scroll through 200+ pages. I want my profile to maintain some sort of meaning.

One of the reasons I started this blog is that Red Bubble on its own is not the ideal forum for displaying my photography. For one thing, it's a site geared toward selling art, and this creates certain biases. The photos most appropriate and appreciated on Red Bubble are polished works, designed to sell and appeal to the masses. I want a forum to display some photos that maybe aren't technically brilliant, but are personal favorites of mine. some of these photos have interesting stories behind them. Others just highlight quirky tidbits and personal fascinations of mine (old machinery, wood macros, flower petals, etc).

The first photos I pruned from my Red Bubble gallery were taken when I was just starting out. Some of these old pictures are gems, but there's a steep learning cure in photography, and I take a very different photo now than I did a year ago. A lot of these older pictures no longer represent my "best" work, and I have let them fade unceremoniously into the ether. It was inevitable, though, that some of my favorites would fall off the Red Bubble site. I've decided to give those a permanent place on this blog. Without further ado, I present you with the first Red Bubble Reject: Rusty.

I got my new camera on December 30, 2008. Despite the fact that the temperature was between -15 degrees and -40 degrees Celsius most days, I was desperate to try it out. Every time I had a weekend off, Graem and I would bundle up and jump in the car with the camera and tripod. We investigated a lot of abandoned farms and houses. After a few hours of photography, I was exhausted from tramping through fields of snow up to my waist. My pants and long underwear were soaked right through, and I felt ready to drop dead from fatigue and hypothermia. Nonetheless, these are among my best winter memories. This is a picture of an old rusty piece of farm machinery taken in February 2009.

I got a new teleconverter for my birthday! Of course I had to go try it out. My macro lens can take close-up photos with 1:1 magnification... so an ant, for example, will appear actual size in a photo. The teleconverter attaches to the macro lens and provides an additional 1.7X magnification.

I used to be scared to photograph lilies. They're beautiful flowers, but also very complex. Lilies are huge, and their various parts extend outward in so many different planes... It's hard to get the whole flower (or even part of it) in focus. It didn't help that I started out with a little point-and-shoot camera that had trouble focusing at close range and struggled in low light. I'm sure I have close to 1000 lily pictures on my computer from last year, and maybe 20 of them aren't blurry.

The teleconverter seems to allow me to take the kind of lily macros I've envisioned in my brain all along. I'm sure I'll have a lot of fun with it this summer. I can't wait to see how it does with dragonflies and butterfly wings!

There is a weir on the South Saskatchewan River in Saskatoon. Every spring, pelicans congregate there and dive for fish in the turbulent water at the bottom of the weir. They seem to be having fun splashing in the spray and riding the surf. It really seems like an idyllic existence.

There were lots of people observing the pelicans and taking photos from the observation deck above. I don't have a long telephoto lens yet (another item on the wishlist). In the photos I took from the observation deck, the pelicans just looked like white specks. I crept closer into a "forbidden" area to get a better view. After about 20 minutes, I was surrounded by other people with cameras and tripods. It kind of spoiled the magic... The pelicans and I packed it in for the day shortly after.

This was taken at the same slough as my sunset photo. There was a still pond where you could see the reflection of the trees and the sky.

I really like this photo, but I have no idea why. This happens to me often.

I am always taking macro photos of wood. Perhaps it's a pathological thing. A piece of wood doesn't look like much from a distance, but up close there are so many different colors and textures to be seen. I have taken photos of driftwood, tree bark, and even little bits of scrap wood left over from building our deck. I'm not really sure if other people enjoy my wood photos, or if they just think I'm insane.

My in-laws had a small fire on their property. When we visited this weekend, everything smelled like burning grass. Smaller trees had been reduced to charcoal. The coating of ash gave the wood in this photo an almost silver sheen. The color and texture reminded me of a lizard's skin. In fact, the piece of wood itself is even shaped kind of like a lizard.

I have lived in cities my whole life, and I am very naive about farming. A coworker recently mocked me because I didn't know what a combine was. I knew it was some kind of farming implement, but I certainly couldn't sketch one or point one out in a picture. Despite my ignorance, I am fascinated by farm machinery. I especially like older rusty tools. There's something about abandoned things that I find moving: once-useful tools rusting in the overgrown weeds, once-inhabited buildings now deserted, once-loved toys now forgotten... These subtle reminders of impermanence are my favorite subjects for photography.

On the way back from Camrose, we stopped at a slough to take sunset photos. The light was perfect. As the sun sank, the grass started to glow a golden yellow. It was worth getting my shoes soaked and freezing the rest of the way home.

The title of this blog is actually taken from an Eden Ahbez song. I didn't really understand what was meant by "When the sun goes BOOM" until we visited the Philippines and later Costa Rica. In the tropics, sunrises and sunsets are very sudden, dramatic events. I suppose prairie sunsets can also be that way sometimes.

This weekend I visited my in-laws near Camrose, AB. Of course, I took some pictures. I love the effect of a wide angle lens on landscapes, skyscapes and architecture. An ultra wide angle lens is on my wish list, and I'll probably treat myself to one soon. This treehouse belongs to my sister-in-law. I envy her secluded treetop perch.

I was sitting on the ground trying to photograph lizards, when I heard a sound like a small motor right above my head. I looked up, expecting to see some kind of model helicopter (I don't know why I was expecting to see a model helicopter in middle-of-nowhere, Costa Rica). Instead, I saw this hummingbird! He was moving pretty fast, but I was lucky enough to get a few good shots.

This moth was a very cooperative model. Not only did it allow me to get very close to it with my macro lens, it chose an interesting, colorful flower for its lunch.

What could be more disheartening than snow in May? I grew up in Calgary and I'm quite used to erratic weather. My birthday is at the end of May, and I remember two years when school was cancelled due to blizzard on that day. I also remember wearing shorts to school in February during the 1988 Winter Olympics. I've lived in Saskatoon for 6 years now, and I've been under the illusion that things were different. Once warm weather comes to Saskatoon it stays, right? Wrong. It snowed overnight, and much of the day today. I got the stepladder out and took some photos of the snow in our willow tree.

Graem brought a willow cutting home from his grandma's place back when we lived in Edmonton. We planted it in a pot and moved it with us to Saskatoon. It grew tall and gangly in the pot. When we bought our house, we decided to plant the willow in the front yard. The first couple of years it looked scrawny... I doubted its ability to withstand the elements. The willow has flourished the last year or so, and this is the first time it 'bloomed'. We'll probably take a cutting from the willow tree with us when we move this summer. It will still break my heart to leave the tree behind.

The most important part of photography (at least from what I have observed so far) is being in the right place at the right time with a camera. Sometimes you get lucky (best viewed big).

This is a female golden orb spider. As you may see in subsequent photos, the males are much smaller.

This photo was taken at the conservatory in the Mendel Art Gallery. The conservatory is a good place to take flower photos in the dead of winter. The light is invariably bad, but they always have interesting plants.

Every spring, the Canada geese return to Saskatoon for nesting. They are quite brazen and not afraid of humans. It's possible to get good closeup photos, even without a long lens. This guy was taking a leisurely stroll down the beach, pondering life.

We visited a ghost town called Bents, SK. It is about 90km southwest of Saskatoon. The abandoned buildings were interesting, but most of my pictures of them were disappointing. Some were cliched, others just not what I was expecting them to be. Maybe I'll post some later when my mood is different. Here is some ubiquitous prairie grass... the macro lens and wide aperture gave an interesting effect.

I take more pictures of flowers than anything else, but I rarely post them anywhere. I figure that a flower photo has to be spectacular to merit posting, since everyone and their dog takes pictures of flowers. I'm not sure if this flower photo is spectacular, but it's one of the better ones I took today.

The selective blur effect in this photo is created by a Lensbaby Composer. I used to think the Lensbaby was a poor man's tilt-shift lens... now I realize it's more just a toy. It takes some interesting photos, nonetheless.

I used the Lensbaby to make it appear that the old rusty tractor was racing across the field.

I have a strange fascination for machinery of any kind, although I rarely understand what the machines are supposed to do.

The place where we stayed in Costa Rica was peppered with little holes in the ground. The holes were inhabited by crabs, although you wouldn't have known it during the day. The stealthy crustaceans came out at night, and we managed to take one by surprise walking back to the cabin from the beach. Graem illuminated him with a flashlight while I took pictures. He seemed to be doing some sort of comical dance on stage under a spotlight as he scuttled back to his hole.

I took sunset photos every night in Costa Rica. This is one of the few where I managed not to screw up the exposure for the water or the sky.