This shot was taken in my backyard in early August. I don't see anything particularly special about it, but for some reason I liked it then, and I still consider it postworthy - if only because it reminds me of summer. I hope I have the chance to take some photos this weekend. I'll be heading to Saskatoon for a while, and I don't know if I'll bring the camera. It's tempting, since I'll have a few days free to roam around the old stomping grounds. On the other hand, I probably already have too many things that need to be taken as carry-on, and the weather forecast on the prairies doesn't seem conducive to photo walks. Maybe living out east has just turned me into a cold weather wimp.

When I was just starting out with photography about 2.5 years ago, I read a magazine article where the author spent a whole summer photographing nothing but the brown-eyed susans in his yard. It seemed like a waste of a summer to me, but he did come up with some of the most interesting flower photos I have seen. More recently I have been reading posts on The Online Photographer blog where readers are challenged to spend a whole year using only one camera and one lens. These exercises are designed to enhance one's creative vision... When restricted to a single subject, one quickly becomes bored with all of the usual clichéd shots and starts to see the subject in new ways; a 'flower' becomes a hodge-podge compilation of parts that are interesting in their own right. Ditto with being restricted to one focal length.

I haven't undertaken anything that extreme, but this summer I did spend a couple of days photographing nothing but my geraniums. I got lots of boring shots, lots of shots spoiled by blur and bad light... and a few keepers. This is one.

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.

This is a photo taken in spring 2010 right before we left for Iceland. Ottawa has a tulip festival every spring. A friend was visiting at the time, and so was my brother-in-law. The three of us decided to check out the tulip festival. The timing of the festival is supposed to coincide with the tulips being in full glory... but everything was early this year - we had flowers in our yard the second week of March! By the time the festival rolled around, most of the tulips had seen better days. That's ok... I have lots of photos of tulips in full bloom, but some of the most interesting shots come from flowers that are starting to decay.

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.

I photographed these lilacs at the botanical garden shortly before leaving for Iceland. I have always associated the lilacs blooming with my birthday, because that's exactly when they would bloom when I was a kid growing up in Calgary. In reality, I haven't seen the lilacs bloom on my birthday in more than a decade now. In Edmonton and Saskatoon, they bloom later. In Ottawa this year, they were pretty much done blooming by the time my birthday rolled around. There were lilacs in full bloom when I visited the botanical garden, but I preferred these buds... to me they looked like little fists just ready to burst open and convert their potential energy into scent.

I just got back from a fabulous photography trip to Iceland, so you probably wonder why I'm posting a photo of some (very Canadian) lilacs. The answer is quite simple... I'm finding my Iceland photos overwhelming.

I took more than 3000 photos in Iceland. Tonight I sat down to look at them for the first time. It took forever for my photo management program to load them, and I would say I have probably viewed ~75% of them now... but nothing more than a cursory flip.

I'm in the sort of mood today where I hate all of my photos and I'm quite disappointed in how they turned out. I have a lot of dust on my sensor that will have to be edited out of most pictures. Iceland is a dusty place, and I wasn't as careful as I should have been with swapping lenses. Many of my wide-angle shots are marred by lens flare. I was a lazy photographer too... I left filters on when I should have removed them, left the tripod in the car when I should have used it, and I didn't start bracketing my shots routinely until fairly late in the trip... so blown-out skies, underexposed rocks and blurry waterfalls are common. All of my Reykjavik pictures are lousy, save for some remarkably sharp duck and seagull photos that I might have taken anywhere, and a photo of a residential street I took merely because I loved the symmetry between the houses and the street signs.

Part of this was due to laziness and my general apathy towards life these days (as well as relative inexperience as a landscape photographer). Part was due to the hectic nature of the trip, and the mobs of other tourists. In order to do this right, I needed much more time to wait for the right light conditions, concentrate on my composition, exposure, etc. We spent the whole 2 weeks frantically rushing around the island, and still didn't begin to scratch the surface of all there is to see. I needed to be more like Ansel Adams hiking around Yosemite surrounded by beautiful vistas with only 8 plates to expose. Only 8 plates... better choose your exposures wisely. I think that's what I need to work on in my photography now... take some trips and concentrate on quality over quantity. It's tempting to click the shutter a thousand times when I have so little time for photography, but I think that the only way for me to improve from here is to slow down a bit.

If all of this sounds depressing, it isn't necessarily. I'm often in a mood to hate all of my photos. I look at them later and feel differently. I go through similar phases where I think they are all amazing, and post a bunch. I come back a bit later and wonder what the hell I was thinking, embarrassed to have posted such shite. Chances are that I'll be more optimistic when I view these photos later on.

I have 3 days off this weekend with nothing much to do, so look forward to the first Iceland photos starting to trickle through. Graem uses every lame excuse he can think of to leave here and stay away as long as possible. Lo and behold, he has thought of another one already! I'm exactly where I was before the Iceland trip: lonely and slogging through my non-life, willing it to be over one day at a time.

I had previously eluded to my analogy between drycleaning and vacations. Drycleaning was magical to me when I was a kid... an item of clothing too fancy or too dirty to be cleaned by any conventional means was sent away and presto! It came back clean without even getting wet! Later I began to notice that the stains were never actually removed from the clothing... they weren't even really diminished. You might think that we used a lousy drycleaner, but I have noticed the same thing with every drycleaner I have patronized since. I developed a theory that drycleaners don't actually do anything to the clothes besides press them, repackage them, and give you the expectation that they are cleaner. Clothes that have sat in the closet for 2 years are rediscovered. You can go out for dinner somewhere fancy, look professional for a job interview, and just generally tackle life with a new perspective and renewed sense of confidence! And to think... it's all a nifty placebo effect!

Vacations are the same, if a bit more expensive than drycleaning. Going on vacation doesn't change your life in any way... it's still as lousy or as wonderful, as boring or as stressful as it ever was when you get back. Vacations take you out of the loop for a bit, though... and while you're gone, life is repackaged like a pair of wool dress pants so that you can see things from a bit of an outsider's perspective when you return.

We tried a new drycleaner shortly before we went to Iceland. They affixed yellow tags to the clothing, drawing attention to the stains: "ink stain on front pocket", "sleeves", "hair stain on collar" (what is a hair stain?). The stains were (of course) all still there when we got the clothing back... but this time, we had nice bright yellow tags to point out stains that we hadn't even noticed before! I can't help but feel that I'm being cruelly mocked by my own analogy.

Here's another tulip shot from the botanical gardens. Not much to say today... just getting through the few remaining days until vacation. Who knew time could move so slowly?

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.

I took many photos of these yellow flowers last weekend. Partly it was because these were the first flowers I saw upon arriving at the botanical gardens... and hence the first flowers I have photographed in spring 2010. Partly it was because I liked the way the sun was shining through the petals... but I'm afraid I mostly took these shots out of stubbornness, pure and plain... the wind was whipping the flowers around, and I was determined to get a non-blurry shot. I ended up with a couple of keepers.

This is one of my favorite photos taken at the botanical gardens last weekend. I had beautiful light while I was photographing these daffodils, and I thought I would have some interesting shots. Strangely, most of them turned out looking very 'blah'. Some were blurry (likely due to wind), and some just looked very flat, despite the good light. This is one of the only daffodil shots to turn out. It looks as though the flower in the front is posing for a portrait!

This is my first post in a long time. Jackie died on March 8, and I pretty much lost interest in everything, including photography and living. I also got a new computer and had to switch my photos over to the new hard drive. I have to say I'm enjoying the new system. Editing my photos is amazingly fast. I had been using a laptop with a small screen that was starting to burn out and gave everything a pink hue. I now have 2 gigantic flatscreen monitors (soon to be 3). It's great to see my photos so big, in such detail... and the color is amazing. On the downside, the bigger better screens allow me to see the flaws better. My sensor needs a good cleaning... and some of the photos that had been my favorites are embarrassingly blurry. Graem has pointed out some crooked horizons, but I'm still not able to see them as crooked. That's always been one of my biggest challenges as a photographer - getting my horizons straight.

I'm trying to get my life back in order, and I hoped to spend the last 2 weekends taking pictures. It didn't happen... Work is conspiring to wreck what remains of my life, and then last Saturday I got my compact flash card stuck in the card reader, and spent the day journeying across the city to buy a new one. I lost about 400 photos from the past 3 months, including photos from the final days of Jackie's life. This weekend has been a write-off... cold and rainy. In fact, the weather forecast tells me it's snowing now, though I don't dare to look out the window.

I did make it to the botanical gardens last Sunday, though. I got some decent tulip shots, despite the wind. I don't even think the tulips were blooming yet in Saskatoon last year at this time. Here in Ottawa, there were crocuses and daffodils blooming as early as March 18. Prairie homesickness be damned, I say! I'll try to be better about updating regularly. I don't have much time to take new photos, but I have a bunch saved from the botanical garden. May 23-June 6 we'll be vacationing in Iceland... and that should bring an entirely new breed of photography!

Here is another photo from my experiments with the orchid and off-camera flash. I title this one "Maybe"... as in "Maybe it is good enough for posting. Maybe it isn't". The flash comes with a steep learning curve. I am still quite clueless, but I can honestly say I've improved by an order of magnitude since this shot was taken. This is the last of the older photos I have stored up for posting, though I'm hoping to take the new lens out for a spin this weekend. I've also been doing some more indoor work with the flash, the macro lens, and some very interesting subject matter... but I haven't had a chance to go through the photos and pick out the good ones. Hopefully I'll have something ready to post this weekend.

This is another of my experimental photos using off-camera flash indoors. I love orchids, but haven't had much luck keeping them. A while ago I learned all about orchids and how to care for them. Unfortunately I have never really been able to provide them with the right conditions in terms of light, temperature and humidity. I haven't really had enough time to devote to it either. If I had my way, I would have a huge garden/greenhouse/pond and all of the necessary infrastructure to care for it properly. I wouldn't have to waste 98% of my life working at a job I don't enjoy while living in an environment that can only be described as spirit-crushing. But I don't have my way. So I will have to do my best for this little orchid that was given to me as a present. And the off-camera flash will be my substitute for sunlight.

I haven't been able to figure out how to reply to comments directly on Blogger... though I'm sure there is a way. Someone asked me whether I have had any luck with human portraits. I haven't had much time to work on it... I have taken many portraits of my husband, all of which are too awful to post here. There is virtually no natural light in my house, and the walls are all beige. If I attempt to bounce my flash off of the walls to diffuse it, the resulting photos are an ugly yellow-brown that isn't so noticible with flower petals, but it does wreak havoc with skin tones. Adjusting my white balance doesn't seem to help. I'm pretty sure the technical aspects of portrait photography will fall into place as I practice more with the flash and maybe get a reflecting umbrella or two.

The human aspects of portrait photography are a bit more difficult to handle. I feel bad telling my subjects how to pose. To be honest, I have always hated having portraits taken... The photographer always wants me to twist my head one way and my knees the other, while sitting at an unnatural angle. As a photographer, I can now understand the rationale for doing that... but it still seems contrived. My mom and I had portraits taken when I was 6. I look at those photos and I don't see myself at all. My hair is naturally straight, but my mom spent 3 hours burning my head with the curling iron in order to make it look curly. I was wearing a dress - something I never would have done at that age - and I remember how awful it was to go outside in stockings in December. Graduation photos were the same... An unnatural pose wearing unnatural clothing in front of a wall of fake books. Why not use real books? Come to think of it, why use books at all? I don't remember studying for anything in high school or even really doing much homework. High school is an important time in one's life, but really not for academics. Why can't photographers try to bring out some of the more important things in grad portraits? The growing up/transition from childhood to adulthood sort of ideas? Why not? Because it would take effort... and the kids couldn't be shuffled through en-masse like components on an assembly line.

I'm at an age where my peers are all reproducing, and consequently showing me the 'amazing' baby or family portraits they have had taken. While these photos are technically good, they seem for the most part artificial to me... everybody dressed up in their best clothes... kids dressed up in sailor suits playing with fake wooden boats... Baby sitting on a fake park bench with fake trees in the background looking shell-shocked and horrified. For me, portraits should create memories... The best photos of kids are of them playing in the backyard, grass stains, scraped knees and all. Why does everyone seem to want memories of things that never actually existed?

I did manage to get a few good portrait-style shots at my mom's wedding a year ago... but the best people photos I have taken are by and large candids.

I've been looking at portraits taken by some of the 'old masters' - Cartier-Bresson, Steichen, and a few others... and this is really something to aspire to. But I'm kind of stuck on the notion that most people in modern society have a vastly different idea than I do of what a 'portrait' ought to be.

This Red Bubble reject is actually one of my favorite photos. Spring was very late coming to Saskatoon this year, and I thought my tulips would never bloom. When they finally popped open, it was sudden and violent.

I actually had this photo made into a print. It looks much better to me on paper than on screen.

This will be my last post before I head off to Saskatoon for 10 days. It's also the last photo I have saved up from my fall forays to the botanical garden. These flowers were beautiful, even in decay.

If I find a subject that I really like to photograph, I'll usually take a few shots. Often none of them turn out, and sometimes I get one good one. Sometimes it happens that I get two or more shots of the same subject that I consider 'good' or 'postable'. If I have a few good shots of the same subject, it can be incredibly hard to decide which one gets posted... especially since this means the other shot(s), even if they are equally good, tend to get lost and buried on my hard drive where I can't always find them back later on.

A solution I've employed a few times is to post one of the shots to my blog, and one to Red Bubble. Even if the shots are both 'good', there's usually one that I secretly prefer. These shots are both recent Red Bubble Rejects. I wasn't going to post them here, as I already have a picture of the cornfield, and a picture of the caterpillar on the red and white tulip. Be that as it may, I truly think these ones are better.

This is one of the pictures that resulted from my first experiment with off-camera flash. The room was completely dark except for the flash. It was even too dark for me to tell if my focus was correct. I had no idea that little flash unit could give off so much light. Here it is at 1/64 of maximum power, and I'm using a diffuser to soften the light. The background has a bluish tint that I don't really care for, and it only gets worse when I try to adjust the white balance. Nonetheless, I'm impressed with the flash and I'll have to experiment with it more.

For those who haven't guessed by now, my favorite things to photograph are flowers and insects. I also like to take pictures of dilapidated buildings, rusty machines and beautiful landscapes... but those are not as plentiful in my life.

In winter, everything is grey and dull. Yes, the snow is beautiful... but it's hard to spend too much time outside taking photos when exposed skin freezes in less than 10 seconds. There is a decided lack of sunlight in winter, and no flowers or insects to be seen for 6 months of the year.

In order to combat winter depression, I thought of setting up a little indoor studio to take still life shots over the winter... and maybe to learn to take portraits. I bought a single off-camera flash and I'm considering a more elaborate light set up. The flash has a very steep learning curve... I took a few photos that are interesting, but I'm not sure they're any good. I have one I will probably post another day. I'll have to experiment with the flash quite a bit more before I can truly say I'm in control of it.

I also got some candles and thought it would be interesting to take candlelit flower portraits. These are two of the best ones... Unfortunately my session was cut short because I brought the candles too close to the petals and literally fried my subjects! It's a good thing I was using cut flowers. The flowers were bright pink in real life. I didn't custom adjust my white balance and tried to do it afterward on the computer. I decided I preferred the orangey glow of the candlelight to the 'corrected' white balance.

This is one of my favorite flower macros, and maybe one of my favorite photos I have taken so far. It was taken at the botanical garden just recently. For some reason, the flower reminds me of a pineapple.

This is foxglove, the plant from which digitalis (a common cardiac medication) is derived. I have always loved the spotted flowers on this plant. This photo was taken at the public botanical gardens, though I did attempt to grow foxglove in my garden back in Saskatoon. It claimed to grow in shade, and since my yard was predominantly shade, I decided to get a bunch. Unfortunately, just because something can grow in shade doesn't necessarily mean it will thrive there. The plants survived and even bloomed, but in the absence of sunlight, the flowers were an anemic yellow/green color instead of the usual vibrant pink. The spots were pale yellow and barely visible.