My ability to post photos over the summer was largely limited by the slowness of my laptop. I needed the laptop to study for my exams, and posting a single photo might cause it to spool helplessly for more than an hour. Now my laptop's performance is marginally better... but I'm the one who is spooling. I can't seem to summon the physical or mental energy to take new photos or edit the ones I already have on my computer. By the time I get up, it seems as though the light is already fading. It's a "balmy" -12 degrees out, and I feel like I'm going to die of hypothermia every time I open the door.

Today was my last real day off from work until December 29th. I was hoping to try out the new lens, but there was nothing really to take pictures of in my yard. The cats didn't want to be outside, and the thought of going for a walk did not appeal to me. Besides... it was about 3pm and already starting to get dark. I thought of swapping over to the macro lens to photograph icicles and got stuck spooling in the process. Hence, a Red Bubble Reject today.

This photo was taken almost exactly a year ago. My camera was brand new, and I couldn't wait to try it, despite the fact that it was -37 out and already dark! The only post-processing of this photo was to convert it to monochrome... though the color version doesn't look much different (sadly no red roof on the house). I've always been impressed by the 'retro' look of this photo... It looks like a picture you would find in a social studies textbook about the pioneers. I was clueless about my camera then, and probably wouldn't be able to replicate that mood/style now even if I tried!

This Red Bubble reject is actually one of my favorite photos. Spring was very late coming to Saskatoon this year, and I thought my tulips would never bloom. When they finally popped open, it was sudden and violent.

I actually had this photo made into a print. It looks much better to me on paper than on screen.

If I find a subject that I really like to photograph, I'll usually take a few shots. Often none of them turn out, and sometimes I get one good one. Sometimes it happens that I get two or more shots of the same subject that I consider 'good' or 'postable'. If I have a few good shots of the same subject, it can be incredibly hard to decide which one gets posted... especially since this means the other shot(s), even if they are equally good, tend to get lost and buried on my hard drive where I can't always find them back later on.

A solution I've employed a few times is to post one of the shots to my blog, and one to Red Bubble. Even if the shots are both 'good', there's usually one that I secretly prefer. These shots are both recent Red Bubble Rejects. I wasn't going to post them here, as I already have a picture of the cornfield, and a picture of the caterpillar on the red and white tulip. Be that as it may, I truly think these ones are better.

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'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.

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.

This is a photo I took in June 2008 with my point and shoot camera at the Mendel Art Gallery conservatory. It's another of my early photos that I had blown up into a print.

My favorite thing about this flower (which probably couldn't be seen in the thumbnail on Red Bubble) is the single speck of yellow in the centre of the flower amidst all of the purple. I also like the white stripes on the petals... Most of my flower macros taken with the point and shoot were blurry... this flower almost seems too sharp to be real.

These photos didn't last long on Red Bubble. I posted them a little more than two weeks ago. I left them up on the front page for an extra week, and they still couldn't muster as many views as the point-and-shoot photos I took last summer and didn't enter into any Red Bubble groups. The other two photos I posted around the same time had no problem getting views... so I guess the Red Bubble crowd just didn't like this quirky little flower.

These pictures are both the same flower. They were taken only a couple of days apart... I was amazed by how different the flower looked once it had lost its petals. I almost overlooked the flower the first time because it was shaded by a bunch of dense green foliage... Hence the greenish cast to its petals that the Red Bubble folk may have pooh-pooh'ed. I liked the detail in the centre of the flower and its "hairy" stem.

I'm actually a bit offended that nobody liked the second photo. Usually when I convert something into monochrome, it's to get rid of something bright and distracting in the background, or to make something look older or more simple. In this case, I just imagined it as a black-and-white photo right from the start. I like the fact that the stem in the foreground is blurred while the flower in the background is in sharp focus.

Maybe these photos really do suck. Maybe they're just too avant garde for the folks on Red Bubble.

This photo was taken in June 2008 with my point-and-shoot. I remember the day very clearly. Graem had decided that we needed to measure the perimeter of our house. I don't remember what project this was for, but it was something that had to be done immediately and couldn't wait. I was standing there for an interminable amount of time holding the end of the tape measure. It was about 8pm, and light was rapidly fading from the sky. The whole time, I was looking at our caraganas and thinking that I must photograph them. It also seemed like something that had to be done immediately.

As soon as the measuring was done, I grabbed the camera. I wasn't hoping for too much given the lighting conditions. I know the photo isn't perfect - I must have been using the "super macro with LED" function on my camera as there is reflection from the flower petals and the leaves have an unnatural green glow. Nonetheless, I was quite pleased with the results. In fact, I ended up having a print made of this photo to hang on my wall. I had never really taken notice of caragana flowers before.

I debated long and hard about removing this photo from Red Bubble. It had the least views of any of my photos currently on the site, but it is the first Red Bubble reject that had been favorited by someone. I know that some people are quite liberal with their photo 'favoriting', but it still seemed kind of mean to remove someone's 'favorite' photo. I ended up removing the photo... After all, as I become a better photographer, and as I become more well-known on the site, a higher proportion of my photos will probably be 'favorited'. If I leave them all on Red Bubble forever, I risk ending up with one of those 200-page profiles I am trying to avoid.

This photo was teetering on the brink of Red Bubble elimination even before I left Saskatoon. I decided that I would try to take a better photo of the caraganas with my DSLR and macro lens to replace it. Unfortunately, by the time I got around to it the caraganas had finished blooming.

Spring and summer are far too transient. Right now, I am especially goaded by the fact that it is summer and I'm in an exciting new city, but I'm always either stuck at work or at my desk studying for exams. There isn't nearly enough time for photography or enjoying life in general.

This is the latest Red Bubble Reject. It was taken in winter 2009, on the first real photo journey I took with my new camera. We went out into the country and photographed some abandoned old farmhouses.

To be honest, I wasn't expecting much when I took this shot. I certainly didn't plan the shot or have any sort of composition in mind. I had never peered through the window of an abandoned house before, and it seemed kind of taboo. The inside of the house was also very dark. One of my main reasons for choosing a Nikon D700 was its reputation as the best DSLR on the market for low-light photography. I always seemed to be crouching in the ditch photographing wildflowers at dusk with my point-and-shoot and a close to 0% success rate. I was eager to try out the low light performance of my new camera, but I didn't actually think I'd come out with a useable photo. I was pleasantly surprised! I like the look of the peeling wallpaper and paint, and the snow (with little mouse footprints) on the ground. Despite the lack of planning for this shot, it placed quite high in an online photo competition I entered (32nd place from more than 400 entries).

I find it both comforting and unnerving to look at a photo like this. It's a reminder that all of the things we treasure right now, all of the things our lives revolve around, all of the things that cause anguish and stress... they all end up like this, someday.

This photo is another Red Bubble reject taken at about 5am on August 4, 2008 when I went for a walk with the camera before going to bed. I like the still water and the reflection of the clouds and blue sky. I like the quality of the light, and the fact that the train bridge can just barely be seen in the background. Morning light is kind of a novelty for me, since I am such a night person. If I'm seeing morning light, I'm usually racing to work, late, with my nose buried in my coffee and my brain preoccupied with other things. It's rare to have a morning off and be awake to enjoy it.

A couple of weeks ago, I took the wide angle lens down to the river and tried to capture a similar shot. The colors were maybe a bit better, but none of the photos really captured the same mood. I have thousands of dollars worth of photography equipment that I didn't have a year ago, but sometimes just getting the right moment is the most important thing.

This picture didn't last long on Red Bubble. I'm not sure why. Graem played with the colors on this one, and he tends to increase the color saturation more than I would. In the Red Bubble thumbnail, the water in this picture looked very green. Maybe that prevented people from viewing it. Maybe Red Bubble just gets flooded with Canada goose pictures in the spring, and people get sick of them. I don't know.

I really enjoyed photographing the geese. They are all such characters, and I was able to get quite close to them, despite not having a very long lens. There's also the added bonus that when the geese arrive, you know it is officially spring!

This photo was titled "Second Date" on Red Bubble. I have always liked the symmetry of this photo -- the geese are nearly mirror images of each other. They are together, though looking in opposite directions. Maybe they're worried that their relationship is starting to stifle their individuality. Maybe they're just geese, doing what geese do.

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.

This Red Bubble reject was taken on March 3, 2009. We had gone out into the country so I could take some photos of Graem riding his snowboard in the drifts. On the way home, we discovered this man-made waterfall and a stream that went with it. The sight made me so incredibly happy it is hard to describe in words. In the middle of a bleak, drawn-out winter, this was the first non-frozen water I had seen in a long time. To top it off, the stream bank was composed of sand! The whole world could be collapsing around me, but if I had water and sand to look at, touch and smell every day, my existence would be a blissful one.

We followed the stream to a lake where ducks were swimming around, taking off and landing. The ducks were much too skittish and far away to photograph. There was an ice shelf at about waist height beside the stream bank. I knelt in the muck, peered under the shelf, and was rewarded with the most amazing sight ever. Ice stalactites hung down from the shelf and were illuminated by the late afternoon sun reflecting off the water. The whole thing looked like a palace made of gold. I took several photos, careful not to bash my (then new) macro lens on the ice shelf or get it wet. I couldn't wait to get home and see the photos, but they unfortunately turned out as a white mess of lens flare and blur. Some of the most beautiful things in nature can't be adequately captured with a camera... at least not without patience, skill and luck - at least one of which I am lacking on most days.

On the way back to the car, I took some photos of the waterfall while standing ankle-deep in the stream. I wanted to take a lot more pictures of the ice-tongues flowing down and the rusted bit of wire on top of the waterfall. It was then that I discovered my winter boots were not as waterproof as I wanted them to be. The photo journey was curtailed, with plans to return in the spring. Unfortunately, I have no idea where this was.

Tofino, British Columbia is my favorite place on the planet. Tropical beaches have a secure place in my heart (they're warm and you can swim without a 6mm full-body wetsuit!), but there's something about Vancouver Island that I love. I think I just like the feel of the place.

This Red Bubble reject was taken in May 2008, around midnight on Chesterman Beach. I took macro photos of the driftwood with my little point-and-shoot, while Graem illuminated it with a flashlight. I like the texture of the wood, and the fact that some of the photos look like miniature moonscapes.

This is another Red Bubble reject. Morning and evening have the best light for photography. I have lots of photos taken in the evening or at sunset, but not many in the morning. I am simply not a morning person. Even in Costa Rica, when I knew there were all sorts of amazing creatures to be seen and seascape sunrises to capture, I could not drag myself out of bed. In fact, the only time I am awake at sunrise is if I haven't gone to bed yet.

This was exactly the case the day this photo was taken - August 4, 2008. I went down to the river to take some photos before turning in for the 'night'. This photo was taken with a point-and-shoot, all automatic settings sometime between 4 and 5am. Summers are short in this neck of the woods. There was already a chill in the early morning air, and I was wearing a warm coat and a toque. This photo may not have the best composition or focus, but I love the character of the morning light and the way it illuminates these symmetrical bunches of little white flowers.

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.