Forgotten

Forgotten, a photo by Pantheroux on Flickr.

This is currently the most viewed photo in my Flickr photostream. Taken in spring 2009 in Bents, SK with a Holga Toy Camera. The Holga is the perfect camera for photographing a ghost town. This is another test post... still learning how to post from Flickr to my blog.

This is my favorite photo from our fall visit to Parliament. The clouds, the trees and the spires of the church all came together to make the scene interesting - not to mention some good light. This was another good use of the telephoto lens. I haven't had nearly as much opportunity to use it as I would like.

This photo was taken in mid October when we went to visit the Parliament buildings. I thought I would visit Parliament as soon as I moved to Ottawa, but it actually took me 1.5 years to get there! It's impossible to find parking there, and the grounds are always crowded - hard to take pictures without a thousand people in the frame, especially since the architecture lends itself so nicely to wide-angle photography.

I did manage to get a few good shots on this visit to Parliament, especially once the sun decided to come out. This shot was actually taken while standing on Parliament Hill and looking across the river. For this shot, I used my telephoto lens at 70mm focal length. I have another shot taken almost from the same vantage point with the wide angle. I think this one is much better. The telephoto is an amazing lens, but I haven't been able to find many occasions to use it. This is one instance where it really shone.

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.

I have already posted this photo to Red Bubble, but I'm posting it here too... just for the sake of having something to post.

The whole time I was studying for my exams, I told myself that if I passed, I could start taking photos again. Photography was like the special toy (or often ironicallly candy) that I got for enduring a trip to the dentist as a kid. I should have known that right at the time I could start taking pictures again, my computer would get messed up. We switched our operating system around just as my 24/7 tech support (ie. my husband) left for a month. The photo management system I have been using does not like the new OS very much. I spent my whole day off today trying to find different photo management software. I may have finally found a solution, but certainly not an ideal one. Editing and posting my photos was hard enough on an antique, memory deficient laptop with buggy software. It's going to be a lot more difficult from now on, if it's even possible at all. I took over 400 photos last weekend and had a bunch picked out for further editing and posting. Now, in the best case scenario, I get to do all of that over again.

But enough whining, I guess. Back to the photo at hand. What could be more quintessentially Canadian than a maple leaf? I'm sad that fall is here, but the trees sure are amazing. These maple leaves were even more spectacular a couple of weeks ago when they were bright red and yellow around the edges with patches and veins of green in the centre. Now, the leaves that have changed color tend to be pure yellow, orange or red with no residual green. I hope to take many more photos of the fall trees in the next few days. Whether I'm able to extract them from my camera and get them into postable form is another matter entirely.

I usually try to only post my best photos. This is an exception. I know that this photo is not technically very good, yet it was one of those pictures I felt absolutely compelled to take. It was taken as we were walking home from the river. I like the bifurcation of the path and the group of maple trees in the middle. I also like the Canadian flag on the building. The clouds were quite dark and ominous in real life, and this added to the mood.

This photo suffers from the same problem as many of my landscape photos and ocean sunsets - highlights in the sky are blown out, and the foreground is too dark. This was quite noticeable in the original. I fixed it a bit in post-processing, but the result was (unfortunately) a fairly flat photo. I hope to someday get a polarizing filter and maybe a neutral density gradient filter to prevent this problem.