Today I'm posting one of my favorite spring photos and one of my favorite fall photos... kind of a juxtaposition of 2 opposite seasons, I guess.

The tulip photo was taken at the botanical gardens in early May. The colors seem impossibly bright now, in the midst of winter gloom.

The leaf photo was taken in my backyard just a couple of weekends ago, before the weather turned nasty. Fall shadows have a magical quality sometimes. I tried all last fall to get photos of the fall leaves with shadows from adjacent leaves and branches superimposed. Every effort was a failure. This year things came together - I think mostly because I lucked into the very best kind of light. I have lots of good leaf and shadow pictures... it would be nice to post the whole lot of them somewhere as a collection.

My mom recently moved to Sackville, New Brunswick, and I went to visit her there for the first time in mid October. The fall colours probably would have been more brilliant had I gone 2 weeks earlier, but there was still some bright foliage left for me to see. It rained most of the weekend I was there, but I did get some very good light. I like this particular shot because it was taken right after a heavy rain, and the leaves have that saturated, wet look. The desolation of the highway is also nice... Small town NB is very different from Ontario. This photo is a little underexposed, though, and the light is not stellar. It was still one of the 'keepers' from the trip, and one of my mom's favorites.

I often read about landscape photographers who don't even bother taking pictures if the light is not 'exactly' right. I always considered them to be kind of 'photography snobs'... There is a finite amount of time in life for photography... for most of us, not nearly enough! Why pass up an opportunity to take pictures just because the weather/light is not cooperating? Recently I've come to see their point of view, though... the New Brunswick trip is a case in point. I was half-heartedly clicking away at some trees beside the highway with the sky completely overcast and the sun obliterated. My subject matter was beautiful, but I knew that even if my shots were perfectly composed, I would end up with mediocre photos at best. Bad light makes for flat pictures, with little latitude for adjusting the contrast and colour saturation in post-processing. As I was standing there snapping, the sun came out, setting the foliage on fire and bringing out the colours in the ominous grey/blue clouds. I only fired off two pictures before my mom got worried about the time and we had to go home... but the difference between those two pictures and my 'cloudy' pictures is really night and day. I'll probably be posting those shots soon. Does this mean I'm becoming a photo snob?

I haven't been keeping my promise to post more often. There are a few reasons for that, I guess. The Iceland trip really spoiled me for good photo subjects. For 2 weeks, I was surrounded with some of the most interesting photo fodder in the world. Since I've been back, everything else seems mundane. Whenever I go out into the yard with the camera, I find myself staring right into the neighbors' faces and beating a quick retreat back inside. Even when work gives me a chance to venture further afield, there don't seem to be many photo opportunities around here... There are lots of lakes and such showing on the map, but when you actually attempt to visit them, there isn't any access and everything is private property -- all built up with people's cottages. There have been a few frustrating photo journeys this summer where we drove for several hours only to return with a couple of half-hearted snapshots.

We bought a canoe, and this weekend we went camping at a nearby lake where we actually did find access (although we risked life, limb and new truck to get there). I thought I would get a lot of good photos, but I didn't find anything there very inspiring. I only saw water and trees without enough contrast to separate them, and a fairly boring sky. Graem took quite a few photos (which we haven't looked at yet), so maybe it's just me.

I have been reading this book by Ansel Adams, as well as his other books: The Camera, The Print and The Negative. In the first book, he mentions that when he visited Hawaii, he was not in the least bit inspired to take any photos, despite the fact that the scenery was beautiful. Ditto with the first time he visited New Mexico, although he would go on to take many of his most recognized photos there. Not that I can compare myself to Ansel Adams, but it's good to know that even famous photographers lack inspiration at times. Actually, I have been amazed to learn that Ansel had many of the same concerns with photography as I do: blown out skies, underexposed foreground, amazing subjects that simply cannot be framed effectively. 80 years later and with digital-everything, photography hasn't changed very much at its core. I'd strongly recommend this series of Adams' books to anyone with an interest in photography.

Here's a photo taken at the botanical gardens in the spring, before the Iceland trip when my enthusiasm was fresh. I may wander over there in the next couple of days to try and get some of that enthusiasm back... Yes, it's kind of boring to always visit the same place, but the flowers are always changing and I'm guaranteed to get a few good shots.

These photos were taken in Reykjavik on our first day in Iceland. There is a lake called Tjornin in the middle of Reykjavik where people gather to feed the birds. Consequently, the lake is filled with ducks and gulls. When I took these photos, I was basically just playing around with my relatively new telephoto lens. It was early afternoon and we still had a bit of time to kill before checking into our hotel at 2pm. We had flown all night, wandered around Reykjavik all morning like vagabonds, and I was fairly exhausted by the time we reached Tjornin.

This was the ideal place for taking bird photos - the people were occupied with throwing bread to the birds, and the birds were occupied with eating this bread... I could basically just snap away, unobserved. Later in the trip, we visited a conservation area that was supposed to have 13 species of duck. I was excited, but I saw only 1 or 2 species... from a VERY great distance. I took a few photos, but none worth posting (or really even looking at twice). Little did I know that my best duck photos had already been taken in Reykjavik.

I love the colors in the photo of the buildings around the lake. I didn't touch the colors in post-processing. What you see here is what I saw through the viewfinder (with the exception that the horizon is straight). This was one of my first times using a polarizing filter, and I like the effect on the colors and the sky.

One of my colleagues was mocking my duck photos... He said that he can't believe someone would go to Iceland to photograph mallards, and that the duck photos probably cause me to lose most of the audience for my web album early on. Be that as it may, this photo of a duck splashing is the most viewed photo in my Iceland web album thus far... Somebody must find it at least worth clicking on.

Drumroll, please! The first of the Iceland pictures is here! Actually, you might find it rather anticlimactic. This is a photo taken from our first day in Reykjavik. We landed at Keflavik International Airport at 6:25am, which was 2:25am Ontario time. We took the Flybus into Reykjavik. We couldn't check into our hotel until 2pm, but thought we might at least drop the luggage off. The Flybus took us to a central bus station where a helpful employee told us that the public transit would take us to within a block of our hotel. The bus schedule told us to expect a bus every half hour, except for Sundays and holidays. We started to suspect that it might be a holiday when no buses came after nearly an hour of waiting. Google later confirmed this suspicion - May 24 is indeed an Icelandic public holiday. Armed with a map, we endeavoured to walk to the hotel. This photo was taken whilst we wandered the streets of Reykjavik in the early morning hours. It was sunny and a balmy 20 degrees. My sleep-deprived grogginess and annoyance at having to walk so far while carrying luggage was wiped away by avid curiosity about the city. We pretty much had the streets to ourselves at that hour on a holiday!

I took this photo because I loved the bright colors and the way the street signs lined up with the houses. The green car makes things perfect. I thought this would be an easy photo to post first since it required very little post-processing. It actually took me quite a while to get my horizon straight. I don't have Graem here to be my horizon police, and I'm not good at judging these things for myself. In this shot, a crooked horizon would be especially bothersome given all of the right angles and straight lines!

Reykjavik is a very interesting city. I found myself comparing it to Halifax, Vancouver and San Francisco, but it really is an entity of its own. It is definitely a 'big city', despite the fact that the permanent population is only about 120,000. There are lots of trendy and expensive restaurants and shops. At the same time, I never felt a sense of big city caginess or isolation. I was comfortable (and perhaps foolish) enough to leave my camera equipment in plain view unattended in our rental jeep.

I loved the Icelandic street signs. I wish I had taken more photos of them. The signs were always colorful, and for the most part very precise. One sign, for example, warned us that there was a 10% grade in the road coming up over the next 0.2 to 0.8km! Precision was mixed with total ambiguity. You can see 2 signs in this picture of a blue circle crossed out with a red line... What could that mean? We spent our whole vacation guessing what "No Blue" might mean. Graem even had a dream about it. It wasn't until we pulled into the airport on the last day that I figured out it must mean "No Parking". There were a couple of other colorful but ambiguous signs whose meanings still elude us.

I'm not really sure what to do with the Iceland photos. I'm going through them and still haven't seen them all. I'm tagging the best ones to go back to and consider for posting. I'm running into the problem of deciding which photos to post and where. So far, I have only identified about 20 really great photos. The problem is that they tend to be from the same day and/or the same location. If I only post the cream of the crop, I'll leave the misguided impression that Iceland = 2 waterfalls and 1 glacier. I certainly don't want to do that. The second tier of photos ranges from 'nice but not stellar' to 'mediocre, might have been taken with an iPhone'. Sometimes the light is terrible, I'm not on the ball as a photographer, or I can't get a clear shot at something without fences, powerlines or billions of other tourists in the way. I still want photos to help me remember these things. People who haven't been to Iceland might still find these photos interesting even if they aren't spectacular.

Red Bubble is for "art" photos - that is a no brainer. I'll post my technically best shots there, as well as some abstract ones. I'll cross-post the very best photos to this blog. The tier 2 photos are problematic in that there are so many of them. I think I'll have upwards of 500 photos to post when all is said and done. A good number will be posted on this blog, I think... but I may set up a Picassa album or Flickr account or somesuch for the rest.

A few of my coworkers have been bothering me to make a travel blog. These are the same people who told me I was crazy to want to go to Iceland in the first place. I don't know about that.. Making a blog is a lot of work. It would give me a venue to talk about things that aren't necessarily documented in my photos - Icelandic people and culture, the food, our hotels, the time that we stumbled on an '80s glam rock party while looking for a place to eat lunch...

I'll ruminate on it a bit, and I'd appreciate any suggestions. Right now I'm too tired to think.