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 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.

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.

Here are some photos from our visit to Bents (a ghost town) earlier this spring. It was my first visit to an actual ghost town, and I hope it won't be the last. Bents is completely deserted. All that remains is a grain elevator, some rusted farm machinery, a general store/post office, a community hall, a scattering of old houses and sheds, a swing set, and other assorted debris left behind by Bents' inhabitants (including these boots and these teacups).

Although I enjoyed my visit to Bents, the whole experience left me with a peculiar hollow sadness. As I traipsed around the general store, camera in hand, trying not to fall through the rotting floorboards, I imagined the store as the centre of a bustling community. I imagined the inhabitants of Bents as the hardy early 20th century pioneers I learned about in elementary school. This was the real wild west!

Despite my imagination's best efforts, bashed-in TV sets and semi-modern appliances hinted at a more recent date for Bents' abandonment. Creeping through one of the old houses, I discovered a door frame where someone had tracked the growth of two children with pencil marks. The last two markings: Tyler April 1988 and Kim April 1988. The height of one of the wall markings, a hockey trophy atop the TV, and the peeling Smurf wallpaper in one of the bedrooms betrayed an irrefutable fact: Tyler, wherever he is now, is the same age as me.

I'm not sure why this revelation bothered me so much. A family abandoning their prairie town in the late 1980s is nowhere near as romantic as the saga of the pioneers, right? Will amateur photographers 20 years from now find poignancy in the wreckage of today's cookie-cutter suburbia littered with iPhones, Poang chairs and plasma screen TVs?

I spend a lot of time living for tomorrow. Life sucks now, but tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow I'll be able to do the things I want to do. The old adage tells us that tomorrow never comes. I find it to be quite the opposite. Tomorrow comes, followed by another tomorrow, followed in rapid succession by a few hundred more tomorrows. Eventually, all that's left is debris - most of it not very interesting.

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.