This shot was taken in Reykjavik at the harbour on one of our first 2 nights in Iceland. Believe it or not, it was taken near midnight. Nights are short in Iceland in late May. The building under construction is a concert hall/convention centre. I wish that the conferences I attend would be held in interesting places like Reykjavik!

Here's another shot taken at Hog's Back Park near sunset. It would have been a rather mundane shot, if not for the shaft of sunlight shining through the trees and reflected on the snow. I adjusted the levels a bit to try to accentuate the light on the snow.

I finally have a few days off from work and was desperate to take a photo journey. I have seen quite a few patients from Cornwall, Ontario, and was curious about the place. Since it's situated right on the St. Lawrence River, I figured there would be something interesting to photograph there. Unfortunately, in typical Graem and Andrea style, we did not leave the house until after 1pm. Then, we had a bunch of drawn-out and mundane errands to run before hitting the road. The days are getting longer now, but not by that much. We raced toward Cornwall as the sun raced toward he horizon. We realized that we were destined to lose the race, so made a detour to Morrisburg. I tried looking up Morrisburg, Ontario on Google Maps, but alas it does not exist there. I was redirected to South Dundas, which is somewhat north of Morrisburg, and not on the St. Lawrence.

The temperature today was -20 degrees Celsius. It is probably the coldest day we have had so far this winter. For someone who grew up on the prairies, -20 is really not that cold. It sure seemed cold, though, with the wind coming right off of the water. It was not a good photography day for me. I was hoping to try out the new lens (a 70-200mm f2.8 zoom). I had it set on manual focus from the last time I had used it, and forgot to switch it back to auto. Most of my shots with it were blurry... which actually didn't matter since I couldn't compose a decent shot to save my life today. Partly it can be blamed on the cold, but partly my concentration was just all over the place.

Luckily the wide-angle rescued the day (yet again). As sunset turned into night, I brought out the tripod and took some long exposures. A couple were actually decent. One is posted here, and one is on Red Bubble.

It is supposed to be warmer for the rest of the week. I'm posting this at 5am and I haven't been to bed yet... but I hope to haul my carcass out early tomorrow and find somewhere interesting to go.

This is another photo taken in Hawkesbury, Ontario. It is similar to the one I have already posted, however in this case the sky was more dramatic. The clouds prevented the sun from being overpowering, so no HDR was required.

This photo was taken at a park near Dow's Lake in Ottawa in the first week of December. If you peer into the far right hand corner of the photo, you can see that the grass was not only visible, but still green! Unfortunately that has changed now... Everything is covered by a couple feet of snow which will probably stick around until at least April. At least we were lucky enough to stave it off for this long.

This was my best shot of that day (and really the only shot worth posting). I'm not happy with the exposure. For some reason my RAW shots always look properly exposed, but when I convert them to JPG, they are underexposed... and I can't fix it without blowing out the sky. I guess I'll have to get more adept at HDR technique.

Speaking of exposure, when my computer was out of commission, I used Graem's computer, and noticed that a lot of my photos look very oversaturated on his monitor (especially reds). I wonder if my monitor needs to be calibrated. I hope I'm not making a fool of myself by posting garishly oversaturated photos all over the internet. If anyone else finds my reds blown out and the photos oversaturated, please leave a comment!

In other news, I bought a new lens today! By the time I got home it was too dark to do much experimenting, but I hope to give it a thorough workout soon. I also have more indoor macro work planned with off-camera lighting. So maybe the dearth of new material won't last as long as I had originally anticipated.

We went for a walk around Ottawa last weekend and took the camera along. We walked through Little Italy where all of the roads are being rebuilt. The scene was littered by dirt, gravel, pylons, rubble and little yellow backhoe machines which sat still, abandoned for the weekend. As the sun set, people scurried around the debris, heading off for dinner at one of the many restaurants (still open), or an evening at the pub. Everything was very surreal; it's too bad none of my Little Italy photos turned out.

We walked through another neighborhood... I'm not sure where it was. I can and do get lost within 2 blocks of my house. I'm always a bit leery of walking around with thousands of dollars worth of camera equipment in a neighborhood full of pawn shops, moneylenders, and XXX video stores... but it was interesting and everything turned out ok.

This photo was taken as we were walking on an overpass, overlooking the city at sunset. The view of the city was amazing, but marred by an ugly, tall white building. I looked behind me and saw this. In real life, the sun was shining on the rail on the right of the picture, making it look like a trail of fire. I liked the fact that the road was empty, and that the white lines on the road (from the left) balanced the lines of the rail on the right.

Urban photography is hard. There are so many things to take pictures of, it's hard to isolate a subject without too much background distraction. You have to get used to being out in public with a big camera and big lens. You have to overcome fears of invading people's privacy or of being thought insane... Overall it's a challenge... but I hope to try it some more.

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 posted the color version of this photo on Red Bubble, where it has been fairly well-received so far. It's another photo taken in Val-des-Bois at sunset. A boat had just passed by leaving ripples in the smooth water surface. I couldn't decide whether I liked the color or the monochrome version more, so I decided to post one there and one here. In truth, I think the monochrome one may be better.

My favorite thing about this photo is its simplicity. The trees and ripples on the water are in silhouette - their presence merely suggested by black shapes.

Lately I've been trying to reduce things down to their simplest terms - not only with photography, but with life in general. I used to like only very detailed drawings and paintings - ones where you could distinctly see every leaf and blade of grass, the more detail the better. I viewed stylized art as being rather "lazy". I'm coming to realize that simplicity can be technically quite difficult and often takes more thought than creating a detailed piece. I recently saw a drawing of a tree composed of only 3 lines. This drawing was, to me, more representative of a tree than a more detailed drawing, or even a photo of an actual tree could have been. I had to laugh a little bit at the paradox of that notion. I guess that's what I'm trying to achieve with my photos.

Here is another photo taken on my adventures last weekend. We went to the Stony Swamp Conservation Area just outside of Ottawa. My mood at the time was bleak, as I was certain I had failed my exams and would be wasting another year preparing to retake them. I was especially drawn to the sad desolation of these skeleton trees.

I crept around a bit trying to get a few different perspectives on the trees, but my mobility was limited by the fact that I was ankle-deep in a bog (hence the name Stony Swamp, I guess). When I got home, I tried everything in my power to crop out the leaves in the left side of the photo. No matter what I tried, I wasn't able to crop them without cutting off the branches of the tree on the left, or seriously unbalancing the photo.

I actually found it a bit humorous... Into the bleakest of bad situations, there creeps a little optimism.

Here is another photo from Wakaw. The wide angle is an amazing lens, but it comes with a steep learning curve. Lately I've been trying to focus more on the composition of my photos. Since starting with the wide angle, I find myself back to square one. I have lots of (crooked) horizons smack in the middle of the photo, isolated subjects in the centre with distracting backgrounds, etc.

Right before sunset, the sun illuminated these hills, making the dry yellow bushes look like fires while the valley stayed in shadow. I like the contrast of shadows and light in this photo, and the appearance of the bushes. I couldn't salvage its composition no matter what kind of cropping I tried.

I have a billion things that I should be doing, but I couldn't let this evening slip by without taking the new lens for a spin. This wide angle lens is supposed to be the landscape photographer's weapon of choice. It sure doesn't disappoint! We went to a farm near Wakaw, SK. I was hoping for a spectacular sunset, but the sky foiled my plans by being, frankly, about as boring as it's possible for a sky to be. It didn't matter... There were more than enough things to photograph - marshes, hills, green pastures, and dandelion fields. If I had felt like swapping over to the macro, I would have had wildflowers, frogs and a couple of strange insects. There were also birds galore. I'll have to return before I move to Ontario - someday when I have more time, my rubber boots and some mosquito repellant!

Today I decided to try viewing life from a different angle... an extremely wide angle.

This was taken at the same slough as my sunset photo. There was a still pond where you could see the reflection of the trees and the sky.