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.

This is probably the most interesting photo I took on my trip to the Experimental Farm last weekend. The wide angle lens gives things a different perspective... I was actually standing mere steps from the yellow house, although through a 14mm lens, it looks far away. This photo also contains something that has been rare since I moved to Ontario - an interesting sky! I really miss the vibrant prairie skies. My brother-in-law recently visited and made the comment that the sky always looks the same in Ottawa. He's right. It's always bright white, or a uniform grey... very drab and dull for a photographer. Last weekend I was rewarded (however briefly) with some amazing color and light.

My ability to post photos over the summer was largely limited by the slowness of my laptop. I needed the laptop to study for my exams, and posting a single photo might cause it to spool helplessly for more than an hour. Now my laptop's performance is marginally better... but I'm the one who is spooling. I can't seem to summon the physical or mental energy to take new photos or edit the ones I already have on my computer. By the time I get up, it seems as though the light is already fading. It's a "balmy" -12 degrees out, and I feel like I'm going to die of hypothermia every time I open the door.

Today was my last real day off from work until December 29th. I was hoping to try out the new lens, but there was nothing really to take pictures of in my yard. The cats didn't want to be outside, and the thought of going for a walk did not appeal to me. Besides... it was about 3pm and already starting to get dark. I thought of swapping over to the macro lens to photograph icicles and got stuck spooling in the process. Hence, a Red Bubble Reject today.

This photo was taken almost exactly a year ago. My camera was brand new, and I couldn't wait to try it, despite the fact that it was -37 out and already dark! The only post-processing of this photo was to convert it to monochrome... though the color version doesn't look much different (sadly no red roof on the house). I've always been impressed by the 'retro' look of this photo... It looks like a picture you would find in a social studies textbook about the pioneers. I was clueless about my camera then, and probably wouldn't be able to replicate that mood/style now even if I tried!