This is one of my favorite flower macros, and maybe one of my favorite photos I have taken so far. It was taken at the botanical garden just recently. For some reason, the flower reminds me of a pineapple.

This is a Red Bubble reject taken in early 2009. Believe it or not, the temperature was about -35 degrees Celsuis the evening this shot was taken. The sky was just spectacular.

The other photo I posted from that day is very popular on Red Bubble. It was my most viewed and commented photo for a long time. This particular shot never received much Red Bubble love. In fact, it was rejected from several Red Bubble groups as being 'technically inadequate'.

Whenever we visit my in-laws and I have my portable hard drive with me, they insist on seeing all of my photos. The problem with that is that I take a lot of photos... the majority uninteresting, even to me. When I visit a new place, I have no interest in photographing people or the usual iconic landmarks that other tourists photograph. At the same time, it's common for me to take 100 or more shots of the same flower trying to get everything right, or to photograph the same landscape from a million different vantage points using different camera settings. It must be incredibly painful for anyone to view all of my photos if I haven't sorted through them first to pick out the best ones. To be honest, it is even kind of painful for me.

My in-laws sat patiently through my collection of winter 2009 landscapes (>5000 photos in all), too polite to flee the scene. This photo of the silos is the only one my father-in-law commented on. He liked the composition. That simple compliment meant more to me than any amount of gratuitous Red Bubble feedback.

Last weekend we went to Gatineau Park. I had been wanting to visit Gatineau Park ever since we moved to Ottawa, especially in the fall, as I had heard the leaves were spectacular.

To be honest, the trip was a bit of a disappointment. It was late by the time we got there and the light was already fading. Even at dusk, Gatineau Park is a busy place... I read on the internet that the park has 2500 visitors/day. I find it hard to take photos in a crowded place... Not only am I struggling to keep random people out of the frame, I find myself feeling a bit nervous and self-conscious. As a result, I have only 2 postable photos to show for the trip to Gatineau Park.

This is one of them - perhaps the best. I have been trying all summer to take a good leaf abstract photo - one that shows the shape and texture of the leaves, as well as the juxtaposition of the shadows of adjacent leaves and the dark jagged lines of the branches. It's a very specific photo I have been trying to take, and (though not perfect), this is probably my best attempt so far.

The experimental farm is surrounded by barbed wire. When I took this photo, I liked the green and gold colors in the background with the barbed wire crisp in the foreground. The photo reminds me of a flag... albeit the flag of a country with an oppressive government!

This is foxglove, the plant from which digitalis (a common cardiac medication) is derived. I have always loved the spotted flowers on this plant. This photo was taken at the public botanical gardens, though I did attempt to grow foxglove in my garden back in Saskatoon. It claimed to grow in shade, and since my yard was predominantly shade, I decided to get a bunch. Unfortunately, just because something can grow in shade doesn't necessarily mean it will thrive there. The plants survived and even bloomed, but in the absence of sunlight, the flowers were an anemic yellow/green color instead of the usual vibrant pink. The spots were pale yellow and barely visible.

I'm away at a conference now and can't post anything new... But I suppose I could post a Red Bubble reject. This is one of the photos taken in Jan 2009 when my camera was brand new. We went out into the -40 degree weather and waist-deep snow to photograph old farmhouses. I remember the day this was taken quite clearly. The sun was bright, the sky a brilliant blue, and the little bits of grass sticking up were like yellow strings of gold against the snow. I liked these photos better in monochrome, though. The color versions seemed too busy.

All of these early farmhouse photos were slightly underexposed... I think because my camera was metering from the snow, and I knew nothing about post-processing then. Even the monochrome conversion was done in-camera. The vignetting occurred because I was using a cheap lens. In my opinion it adds to the vintage feeling of the shot. If I was trying to recreate this shot intentionally now, I probably wouldn't even be able to.

I'll probably do a complete overhaul of my Red Bubble profile soon. My three most viewed photos have 200 more views than their nearest competitors. To be honest, the most viewed photos are not my best photos, and if I am getting sick of looking at them, I'm sure others are too. I want to put up some better shots that have been buried on this blog, as well as some fresh new shots. All of that will have to wait for my laptop to start speaking to the hard-drive where my photos are stored, though. In other words, expect the overhaul some time in the next 10 years.

I ordinarily don't like photos taken from directly above a flower. Photos like this will always look 'nice', simply because flowers are beautiful, amazing things... But there isn't much interesting or creative about pointing your camera directly down at a flower and clicking the shutter. I've noticed some photographers whose portfolios consist only of head-on flower shots... Booooring. Sometimes I do succumb to the temptation to take these shots, though... and sometimes they do turn out alright, especially if I'm able to get in very close, with the light shining through the petals.

When I walked through the Experimental Farm on my way to the botanical garden, I saw a couple of ears of corn poking out just waiting to be harvested. To be honest, I was strongly tempted to steal an ear of corn. I have no idea why... in fact, I had corn on the cob sitting in my fridge at home waiting to be eaten. The sun was shining on the corn making it glow temptingly, and I debated for a long time before deciding not to take a cob. A guy in a Government of Canada jeep had, after all, driven up just as I had decided to go take photos in the middle of the corn field on my previous trip... Who knows... maybe stealing government corn is a federal offense. Being an "experimental" farm, who knows what they are doing to the corn? Besides... my camera bag is jam-packed with gear. There is no room for corn cobs! I decided to capture the corn with my camera rather than stealing it. On the way home, I didn't have to worry about temptation. The birds had beaten me to the corn cobs, which were lying on the ground, half-eaten.

Here are some mushrooms, discovered as I was wandering around the Exprimental Farm a few weeks ago. It rained nearly every day this summer, and we've had quite a bit of rain so far this fall. The result: mushrooms popping up everywhere!

Here's another photo of the purple flowers that just started blooming in October, and are still flourishing despite the fact we've had frost a couple of nights now. Their petals shine when the sun strikes them, especially after a rain. This photo was taken the last time Jackie came outside to photograph flowers with me before going into the hospital. I knew he was a sick cat that day. He came out, curled up in my lap and wouldn't move - so small and so fragile.

I photographed these berries in my yard about a month ago. I had been meaning to photograph them for a while, and I still think I should take a better picture of them. The problem is that they grow between my house and my neighbor's where the light is always bad. I always catch the sun shining on the berries at inopportune moments, like when I'm rushing off to work.

Graem advised me that this photo is not in sharp enough focus to post. I scrutinized it closely, zooming in and out... To be honest, it seems to be in sharp focus to me. Maybe I'm just blind. The monochrome version of this photo is very interesting. It is posted on Red Bubble. The color version reminds me of the chemistry sets we had in first year university for building molecules. The berries are carbon atoms, and the branches are bonds.

This photo was taken a couple of weekends ago when I visited the Experimental Farm. It's a Red Bubble reject... 2 weeks on Red Bubble and it couldn't generate half the views of my second least-popular photo. It doesn't surprise me... It doesn't look like much in a thumbnail... and the photo itself probably isn't that technically great.

The only person to comment on the photo was perhaps the only person to 'get' it. They commented that it really looks more like a winter tree than a fall tree. That's exactly what I thought when I saw the tree in real life. It was a warm day when I took the photo... The temperature was above 20 degrees Celsius, and it was really more like summer... but the dark sky looks like it could be threatening snow, and the bare branch tips warn of colder, bleaker times to come... For me this tree epitomized fall... a season whose only significance is the transition between summer and winter. But as a photo... it's probably not much.

You have probably noticed that I haven't been writing as much about my photos lately. Part of the reason is that work is trying to kill me these days. I'm no stranger to that, though. The real reason is that my cat Jackie is in the hospital, very sick with renal failure. He's getting better, but the long term prognosis isn't good. The vet says 4-6 months. Every molecule in my body hopes for Jackie to do much better than that... to beat all the odds and recover completely... but it is what it is.

I hate myself quite a bit right now. I've known for a long time that something wasn't right with Jackie, but I didn't do anything about it. I was completely self-centred and obsessed with frivolous things like taking pictures and my exams while my little guy suffered alone.

I've always had an interest in photography, but it only became a serious obsession for me about a year and a half ago. It happened accidentally. I got a new point-and-shoot camera for my birthday. We were vacationing on Vancouver Island and Graem was angry with me one morning. He went off and did his own thing, and I was locked out of the place we were staying with not much to do. I had my little camera in my pocket and I went down to the beach... I took a couple of snapshots of the beach and the ocean... the usual kind of beach snapshot with the crooked horizon smack in the middle of the picture. Mostly I was just angry and bored. As I wandered down the beach taking photos, I started to see beauty everywhere around me... It was a sunny day and the clouds were reflected in the smooth wet sand. The light gleamed off the smooth, wet, black surfaces of rocks and bright yellow flowers poked out between the crevasses, surviving where no flower really should. The shallow tide pools were filled with uncountable treasures, and on the beach, crows swooped down to claim dropped potato chips... kids splashed in the shallows in their bathing suits, adults walked dogs along the beach. There were beautiful and amazing things everywhere around me,and I captured them all with my little camera. By the time Graem came down to find me on the beach that afternoon, I had been transformed into a photographer.

Since Jackie has been sick, I have completely lost interest in photography. Beauty brings with it a wistful sort of hurt. The beauty is gone for me now, and only the hurt is left. I hate a world that could do something like this to such an innocent, generous soul. Fall does nothing but remind me of inevitable decay. When I see the fall leaves, all I can think is that Jackie might never accompany me outside to photograph flowers again. I might never see his coat lightened by the summer sun.

I have a lot of photos stored up from the past few weeks. With work the way it is, I wouldn't have time to take new photos right now anyway... I post photos here and on Red Bubble in the same way I try to carry on with the other routines in life... I eat, drink, sleep and go to work with varying degrees of success. Whether I take any more new photos once these ones run out is something that remains to be seen.

I took this picture while I was photographing the yellow flowers I posted yesterday. I looked up and saw that the sun was illuminating the trees overhead... and the brightly colored leaves contrasted with the dark and ominous sky. It looks like there's a staircase made of leaves in the sky.

Here's another shot from one of my many recent visits to the botanical garden. It's a celebration of the color yellow!

I'll let today's photo do the talking for itself.

Viewing the archives of this blog, I just realized I have already posted as much in October as I did in all of September. It's nice to be done with exams! The light and weather were fairly good today, but a sick cat prevented me from taking any new photos (or doing much of anything else, really). My work schedule is such that there probably won't be any new shutter clicks for the next 2 weeks, but I think I have enough photos stored up to sustain the blog through the drought.

Here's my favorite photo from yesterday. It's amazing what a bit of light can do. This scene looked fairly drab through the viewfinder until the sun came out from behind the clouds. Then... instant magic! I clicked away, hoping I could manage not to screw up the focus and/or the exposure. One or two of my shots turned out alright.

This is a fresh photo taken today. The light hit these flower petals at just the right angle to make them sparkle. They reminded me of sugar flowers like one might find on a birthday cake.

The first time I discovered sugar decorations was at age 4. We went to visit people I didn't know very well on Christmas day. The only other kids there were older than me, and a little bit strange. I spent most of the day scrunched up in a corner reading my Alice in Wonderland book, feeling nervous and out of place. On a brief foray into the basement, I discovered something amazing - a skating rink with ice made of blue jello, complete with sugar penguin skaters. Blue jello... who even knew that such a thing existed? And the penguins just glistened as the dim basement potlights illuminated the sugar crystals. All night I looked forward to eating this magical creation. I had spent the whole day wanting to go home, and now I was suddenly afraid that we would have to leave early, before I could taste the blue jello.

The time to eat it came soon enough, and I made two important discoveries: #1. Blue jello is disgusting. #2. Eating a sugar penguin is somewhat like eating sand (I was an authority on such matters at age 4). The pain of disappointment was enough to make me burst into tears right there, in my little folding chair at a little folding table in a strange person's kitchen. All of the adults present rushed over to find out what was wrong, but I couldn't quite articulate it in words. That sort of thing still happens from time to time.

Yet another picture of the botanical gardens. I was photographing roses, when I noticed how the sun was shining right in front of the rose bed, illuminating these flowers very nicely.

These purple flowers are really just starting to flourish, despite the fact that it's October. I took a few good photos of them in the evening when the sun came out for a few seconds between cloudbursts.

I'm off for the Thanksgiving long weekend and would like to spend as much time as possible outside taking photos. Unfortunately, rain is forecast for the entire long weekend.

When I took this photo (in my yard last weekend) I remember thinking it was somehow visually dissonant, and that the flower looked very defiant. In spite of all that, I still liked the picture. I haven't looked at it again since making it ready for posting. It will be interesting to see if my impression has changed.

I was off from work today, but stuck at home waiting for some furniture to be delivered. I spent the morning staring wistfully out the window thinking that the light was perfect for taking photos. Sure enough, as soon as the furniture arrived the skies opened and down came the rain. I've always liked rain, but to be honest, I have liked it a lot less since I've become interested in photography. Here's another picture from Saturday at the botanical garden... which is the last sunny day I can remember.

I have the Thanksgiving long weekend off. I'm hoping the sun decides to make a rare appearance and that I can go somewhere interesting but not too crowded with my camera.

I took quite a few photos of these stunning red leaves. I liked the way the soft leaves were caressing each other. This isn't the best one for composition, but it had better color and sharper focus than the picture I liked most (which was a view of the two left-hand leaves head on).

This is a recent personal favorite of mine. Fall might be here, but those destructive little beetles continue to eat anything and everything in my yard.

The random number generator again helped me decide what to post today. I couldn't take any new shots thanks to yet another downpour.

This pink flower was photographed at the botanical garden yesterday. The only thing really special about it is its pinkness. When I first saw this group of flowers in real life, my first thought was, "These are impossibly pink". I was planning to save this shot for Red Bubble, but who am I to argue with the random number generator?

I've noticed that my camera does weird things with bright colors. Bright reds, oranges and pinks tend to look kind of burnt out sometimes, especially if its sunny. I was kind of annoyed about it yesterday after taking >20 photos of fluorescent orange flowers that didn't turn out. An expensive camera like mine shouldn't do that! In this case, it was likely at least partially my fault. I'm expecting to get a light setup soon for still-life and portrait photography. I figure this will keep me from sinking too deeply into depression over the winter when it's too cold/dark to go outside. In preparation for learning to deal with multiple light sources, I'm learning to use my camera in full manual mode. All of the photos I took at the garden yesterday were done with no automatic settings whatsoever.

Photography has a steep learning curve... but unlike some of the other steep learning curves I have encountered in life, I'm thoroughly enjoying this one so far.

I have lots of time free for photography now that my exams are over (if still not as much time as I would like). Once getting over the initial hurdles of using new photo management software, things are running far more efficiently on my antique laptop. These factors combined have allowed me to get ahead of the game for once. I actually have lots of photos ready and waiting to be posted here and on Red Bubble. Today I used a random number generator to help me decide which photos to post.

Today I went to the same botanical garden that Graem and I visited our first week in Ottawa. This time I was properly armed with the macro lens and my Lensbaby. As I walked home, I experimented taking Lensbaby pictures of the fall trees. As always with the Lensbaby, most didn't turn out. It is tough to know exactly where the area of sharp focus is, especially when shooting something far away. Sometimes things look good in the viewfinder and the camera's LCD, only to be a blurry mess when I view them on the big screen at home. When a Lensbaby shot works, though, the results can be magic.

The light is not terrific in this photo, but I'm happy with the way it turned out. I actually took several shots trying to get the framing right. I was crouching at the side of the road, trying to time my shots between the passing cars. I must have looked like a lunatic!

When I went to work this morning, the sun was just coming up and there was a beautiful mist enveloping the fall trees. It seemed warmer outside than in my house, but I noticed that I could see my breath for the first time this fall. If would have been a good time for photography.

I took this purple flower picture a couple of days ago. The flowers are kind of like me - stubbornly refusing to acknowledge the end of summer.

This may look like a picture of wires from a broken fence, but they are actually little vines. The color version looks rather nondescript. I photographed these vines when we stopped at a lake en route to Val-des-Bois. We were taking photos of a little frog when I actually got a bored and stopped for a bit to amuse myself with the vines.

We assumed the frog would be skittish and took several pictures from far away. Slowly, we crept closer and closer. We thought that we might get an action shot by stirring the water near the frog with a stick. To our immense surprise, the frog lunged toward the stick and tried to bite it. The whole time we thought we had been creeping up on the frog, the frog had also been 'hunting' us - patiently waiting for us to get close enough for him to take a chomp. We spent some more time (unsuccessfully) trying to get a photo of the frog with his mouth open lunging at the stick.

Graem got the best frog photos of the day. The one time I crept onto the rocks, I fell backwards onto my butt. I don't mind getting wet shoes or wet pants for the sake of a good photo, but I wouldn't want to fall forward and smash/submerge thousands of dollars worth of camera and lens. Therefore, Graem got all of the closeup shots... some of them pretty good.

I haven't posted any frog photos... mine aren't any good, and I don't like to post photos other people have taken. I might someday make an exception for this frog. He was, after all, pretty cute.