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.

I posted the color version of this photo on Red Bubble, where it has been fairly well-received so far. It's another photo taken in Val-des-Bois at sunset. A boat had just passed by leaving ripples in the smooth water surface. I couldn't decide whether I liked the color or the monochrome version more, so I decided to post one there and one here. In truth, I think the monochrome one may be better.

My favorite thing about this photo is its simplicity. The trees and ripples on the water are in silhouette - their presence merely suggested by black shapes.

Lately I've been trying to reduce things down to their simplest terms - not only with photography, but with life in general. I used to like only very detailed drawings and paintings - ones where you could distinctly see every leaf and blade of grass, the more detail the better. I viewed stylized art as being rather "lazy". I'm coming to realize that simplicity can be technically quite difficult and often takes more thought than creating a detailed piece. I recently saw a drawing of a tree composed of only 3 lines. This drawing was, to me, more representative of a tree than a more detailed drawing, or even a photo of an actual tree could have been. I had to laugh a little bit at the paradox of that notion. I guess that's what I'm trying to achieve with my photos.

This flower looks like an origami flower to me. I was never any good at origami... My paper swans and cranes end up looking like genetic mutants. I tried to fold a beetle once... The result looked very much like a beetle - one that had been squashed under someone's shoe!

Whenever I'm studying for an exam, my general knowledge is always broadened much more than my knowledge of the topic I am trying to study. I feel compelled to sit at my desk, tethered to the computer... so I find myself procrastinating by looking up all kinds of random things.

While studying for my internal medicine exams a couple of years ago, I played a lot of online chess. I can't do that now... I use Linux, which means my computer is basically incompatible with everything, unless I want to get a PhD in jargonese to figure out what people on Linux forums are actually trying to say. My laptop is also antiquated now... Most chess programs send it into an infinite, overheated spool. But I did waste a bit of time looking up chess programs for Linux the other day... I found myself reading two rather complicated articles on game theory... interesting, but over my head. Of course this meant I had to look up and read a few simpler articles. I ended up reading about the history of rock-scissors-paper.

I met someone from Lybia last week, and it occurred to me that I know nothing about Lybia. This prompted a visit to Wikipedia, and from there a lengthy jaunt around the 'net.

While procrastinating on Red Bubble, I discovered someone who does origami on a very tiny scale... I was quite impressed by these sub-centimeter ducks. After seeing this, I decided to google-search 'micro origami', hoping to find more of the same. Instead, I found things like this. You can imagine how that took me off on an entirely new tangent.

I've been feeling too stressed out and guilty to go out and take photos... but with the amount of time I spend procrastinating on the internet, some photography would be healthier and easier on the eyes!

Another Red Bubble reject taken in winter 2009. Everyone takes pictures of abandoned farm houses from the front. Often they form part of a larger prairie landscape shot. I crept behind this house, and for some reason found the "backyard" view of the house and its dilapidated shed quite compelling. I took a few pictures while standing in waist-high snow.

I adjusted the luminosity curve a bit before posting the picture here. The version that was on Red Bubble was a bit underexposed. It was hard to bring out the detail in the walls and window of the shed without blowing out the highlights in the lightest part of the sky. Back then, I knew even less about photography and my camera settings than I do now!

The only person to comment on this photo on Red Bubble said, "It looks very cold in your part of the world". I checked out his/her profile and found it filled with sandy beaches, and flora and fauna I have only seen in pictures. I don't think (s)he can even begin to imagine how cold it gets in my part of the world.

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.