I took a quite a few shots of these little blue flowers. Most of them were marred by the two Bs: blurriness and boringness. Here I was lucky enough to get one flower in crisp focus against a foliage background that was somewhat complementary.

I call this photo "Feeling Blue". It's an aptly named photo to be posting today. I find myself slogging through all of the mundaneness and garbage that remains to be done before the trip to Iceland... and I know that when I return, all of the mundaneness and garbage will still be here waiting for me. Ho hum. I developed a theory a while ago that drycleaners don't actually do anything with clothes besides press them and wrap them in a sheath of flimsy, rustling, child-suffocating cellophane. When you pick your clothes up, they aren't any cleaner, but you feel better about them somehow... Vacations are probably similar in a lot of ways.

This is one of many shots I took by the Rideau river last weekend. Most of my photos from that trip are macros of water, rocks and ice. This is one of my favorites. I'm in love with my wide-angle lens these days. I'm also rereading a book about Ansel Adams which has me infatuated with epic landscapes and sweeping skies. I wish I had more opportunity for landscape photography myself. What I like best about this photo, however, is that it has a distinct "spring on the prairies" feel, rather than a "winter in Ontario" feel.

Another day off, another photo journey. This time, we set out for Fitzroy, Ontario. We somehow managed to leave home even later than yesterday. We got lost on the way to Fitzroy, and got the car stuck soon after arriving at the Provincial Park. By the time we got the car unstuck, we had pretty much missed the sunset. There was a long trek down to the water, where we stood around and froze for a while before deciding there was really nothing interesting to photograph.

Cold and dejected, we started to trudge back to the car. The path was illuminated by the almost-full moon in a clear sky. My fingers felt like they were about to fall off, but I couldn't resist stopping for some long-exposure shots. This one was taken with my new lens.

This is an apt photo to be posting today, as there will be a blue moon tomorrow. Apparently, a blue moon occurs on New Year's Eve only every 19 years.

Time stands still for no one. But at this time of year, it certainly seems to. This is another of my icicle macro photos. I thought it quite suitable for posting on the longest night of the year.

I usually don't do much post-processing with my photos. For me, the joy in photography is in taking the pictures, not in fussing over them on the computer for hours on end. I sometimes adjust saturation and contrast or experiment with monochrome tones and filters, but that's about the extent of it. Over-processed photos with gimmicky effects always look...well...bad to me.

Today was a rare exception when I decided to play around. In case you haven't guessed by now, my macro lens is my favorite. I have used it enough that I can pretty much point it at something and get the right focus and depth-of-field right away. I'm still getting used to the teleconverter. Sometimes I point the macro lens at something with the teleconverter attached and sway around drunkenly for a bit while I get my orientation back. Today I pointed at an orange poppy and discovered I was quite a bit closer than I had intended to be. As I slowly rocked backward on my heels, the flower petal rising up over the centre of the flower resembled a cresting ocean wave. The orange color made it look like a wave illuminated by a bright orange sun, low on the horizon before sunset. I took the photo, knowing it would end up looking nothing like it had in my imagination. When I uploaded the photos to the computer, I told Graem what I had imagined, and we played around a bit to try to make the petal look like a wave. The result looks absolutely nothing like what I had envisioned. I'm not sure if I like the altered photo, but I decided to post both it and the original anyway.