This photo was taken on a recent trip to Calabogie, Ontario... although I suppose it could have been taken anywhere. Unfortunately none of my wide-angle landscapes turned out. These little rusty bumps on a rail on the side of a bridge reminded me of warts. At first I tried taking macro shots of the 'warts', but they didn't turn out looking like much. On the way back I decided to focus on the chain link fence and let the bumps blur into the background. These ones turned out much better.

This Red Bubble reject was taken on March 3, 2009. We had gone out into the country so I could take some photos of Graem riding his snowboard in the drifts. On the way home, we discovered this man-made waterfall and a stream that went with it. The sight made me so incredibly happy it is hard to describe in words. In the middle of a bleak, drawn-out winter, this was the first non-frozen water I had seen in a long time. To top it off, the stream bank was composed of sand! The whole world could be collapsing around me, but if I had water and sand to look at, touch and smell every day, my existence would be a blissful one.

We followed the stream to a lake where ducks were swimming around, taking off and landing. The ducks were much too skittish and far away to photograph. There was an ice shelf at about waist height beside the stream bank. I knelt in the muck, peered under the shelf, and was rewarded with the most amazing sight ever. Ice stalactites hung down from the shelf and were illuminated by the late afternoon sun reflecting off the water. The whole thing looked like a palace made of gold. I took several photos, careful not to bash my (then new) macro lens on the ice shelf or get it wet. I couldn't wait to get home and see the photos, but they unfortunately turned out as a white mess of lens flare and blur. Some of the most beautiful things in nature can't be adequately captured with a camera... at least not without patience, skill and luck - at least one of which I am lacking on most days.

On the way back to the car, I took some photos of the waterfall while standing ankle-deep in the stream. I wanted to take a lot more pictures of the ice-tongues flowing down and the rusted bit of wire on top of the waterfall. It was then that I discovered my winter boots were not as waterproof as I wanted them to be. The photo journey was curtailed, with plans to return in the spring. Unfortunately, I have no idea where this was.

Sometimes I see something and I become obsessed with photographing it. I'll go to great lengths to take a picture, and if for some reason I can't, I feel annoyed and depressed about it for days! I usually end up liking those pictures, even if they don't look like much to other people. This is one of those pictures. I'm not sure what appealed to me about this scene... maybe it was the bright red of the wheel juxtaposed against the weathered wood. This was taken when we visited a ghost town called Bents, SK earlier this spring. It wasn't that hard to get the photo... I just had to climb over a small pile of rusty junk to frame it properly.

I belong to an online art and photography community called Red Bubble. I joined this winter, and it has been a great place to see some interesting photos and share some of my work with others. I keep the photos in my Red Bubble gallery sorted by number of views. When I add new photos, I give them a few days at the top of the page to be seen before sorting them. I figure that this way, the "cream" will rise to the top. This is probably an oversimplification. I'm using the number of views as a surrogate marker for how much people like the photo. In reality, there are other variables at play. Some photos just look more compelling as thumbnails. A more interesting thumbnail might generate a click, even if the photo itself is mediocre. The converse is also true. I think the hummingbird photo I posted on Red Bubble is among the best I've taken. The bird can't be distinguished from the green background in the thumbnail, and I think that's why it has been relegated to second-page obscurity. Some photos fit nicely into all sorts of groups and challenges and develop a greater presence on the site. Others aren't so easily pigeonholed, and rely solely on random visits to my profile for their views.

I have decided to keep my Red Bubble profile pared down to only 60 photos (or 3 pages) and eliminate the ones with the fewest number of views. I decided this after looking through a few profiles of people who have thousands of photos in their galleries. It's rare for me to go beyond the first page when I view someone's profile, let alone scroll through 200+ pages. I want my profile to maintain some sort of meaning.

One of the reasons I started this blog is that Red Bubble on its own is not the ideal forum for displaying my photography. For one thing, it's a site geared toward selling art, and this creates certain biases. The photos most appropriate and appreciated on Red Bubble are polished works, designed to sell and appeal to the masses. I want a forum to display some photos that maybe aren't technically brilliant, but are personal favorites of mine. some of these photos have interesting stories behind them. Others just highlight quirky tidbits and personal fascinations of mine (old machinery, wood macros, flower petals, etc).

The first photos I pruned from my Red Bubble gallery were taken when I was just starting out. Some of these old pictures are gems, but there's a steep learning cure in photography, and I take a very different photo now than I did a year ago. A lot of these older pictures no longer represent my "best" work, and I have let them fade unceremoniously into the ether. It was inevitable, though, that some of my favorites would fall off the Red Bubble site. I've decided to give those a permanent place on this blog. Without further ado, I present you with the first Red Bubble Reject: Rusty.

I got my new camera on December 30, 2008. Despite the fact that the temperature was between -15 degrees and -40 degrees Celsius most days, I was desperate to try it out. Every time I had a weekend off, Graem and I would bundle up and jump in the car with the camera and tripod. We investigated a lot of abandoned farms and houses. After a few hours of photography, I was exhausted from tramping through fields of snow up to my waist. My pants and long underwear were soaked right through, and I felt ready to drop dead from fatigue and hypothermia. Nonetheless, these are among my best winter memories. This is a picture of an old rusty piece of farm machinery taken in February 2009.

I have lived in cities my whole life, and I am very naive about farming. A coworker recently mocked me because I didn't know what a combine was. I knew it was some kind of farming implement, but I certainly couldn't sketch one or point one out in a picture. Despite my ignorance, I am fascinated by farm machinery. I especially like older rusty tools. There's something about abandoned things that I find moving: once-useful tools rusting in the overgrown weeds, once-inhabited buildings now deserted, once-loved toys now forgotten... These subtle reminders of impermanence are my favorite subjects for photography.

The selective blur effect in this photo is created by a Lensbaby Composer. I used to think the Lensbaby was a poor man's tilt-shift lens... now I realize it's more just a toy. It takes some interesting photos, nonetheless.

I used the Lensbaby to make it appear that the old rusty tractor was racing across the field.

I have a strange fascination for machinery of any kind, although I rarely understand what the machines are supposed to do.