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.

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.

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!

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 is a leopard's bane. The leopard's bane has been one of my favorite flowers for a few years now. I discovered it when I was a kid, and I went shopping for perennials with my mom and my grandma. I was allowed to go pick out a couple of plants of my own. I chose a leopard's bane. Its bright yellow flowers stood in stark contrast to my mom's flowerbed, which was a uniform pink and purple. My grandma was aghast that I could choose such an "ugly" plant. The leopard's bane thrived, and eventually even my grandma asked if she could have some to put in her garden. I have several plants now, and each one can produce 40 or more flowers at a time! This bud is just about ready to burst.

Spring always comes late to the prairies, but this year it seems later than ever. We even had snow last week! I've been watching my friends from around the country and elsewhere in the world post flower pictures for a couple of months now! All of my flower photos this year had been taken at the conservatory in the Mendel Art Gallery.

My tulips have been on the verge of blooming for a few days now. I worked all day on Saturday and was afraid I would miss it. Yesterday was cold and rainy - a good day for any sane tulip to stay closed. Today it finally happened! I spent the afternoon taking tulip macros in my own backyard!