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

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.

When I got my new camera, one of the things I looked forward to most was taking macro photos of insects. I had to wait a while to try, since I bought the camera in the dead of winter. I got a few moth and spider shots in Costa Rica. I took more than 100 pictures of the same large beetle over the course of 2 days, and went out at night to photograph giant grasshoppers with long antennae. I also photographed a few different spiders. Unfortunately, I was disappointed when I reviewed the photos later. Some lacked critical sharpness -- including ALL of the beetle photos. The night grasshopper photos just looked bizarre thanks to harsh lighting from my head lamp. I might post some of these photos later when I am feeling less critical (or lacking blog material). In all cases, I didn't seem to be able to get as close to the tiny creatures as other macro photographers seem to get.

Now that I have my teleconverter, I should have no problem getting close! My problem has been, frankly, lack of bugs. It has been a cold, dreary spring, with temperatures more like March than May or June. Last summer, armed with only a little point-and-shoot, I seemed to be virtually tripping over ladybugs, spiders, bees and caterpillars. This year... nada. I took a few bee shots at the Mendel Conservatory, and the results were miserably blurry (there's no such thing as autofocus with the teleconverter).

Today, the sun came out for literally 15 minutes, and I got a chance to practice with this little fly in a now-open leopard's bane (view big for best effect). Hopefully this will be the first of many insect photos this summer!

I usually don't do much post-processing with my photos. For me, the joy in photography is in taking the pictures, not in fussing over them on the computer for hours on end. I sometimes adjust saturation and contrast or experiment with monochrome tones and filters, but that's about the extent of it. Over-processed photos with gimmicky effects always look...well...bad to me.

Today was a rare exception when I decided to play around. In case you haven't guessed by now, my macro lens is my favorite. I have used it enough that I can pretty much point it at something and get the right focus and depth-of-field right away. I'm still getting used to the teleconverter. Sometimes I point the macro lens at something with the teleconverter attached and sway around drunkenly for a bit while I get my orientation back. Today I pointed at an orange poppy and discovered I was quite a bit closer than I had intended to be. As I slowly rocked backward on my heels, the flower petal rising up over the centre of the flower resembled a cresting ocean wave. The orange color made it look like a wave illuminated by a bright orange sun, low on the horizon before sunset. I took the photo, knowing it would end up looking nothing like it had in my imagination. When I uploaded the photos to the computer, I told Graem what I had imagined, and we played around a bit to try to make the petal look like a wave. The result looks absolutely nothing like what I had envisioned. I'm not sure if I like the altered photo, but I decided to post both it and the original anyway.

I have a gadget enabled that lets me see what people type into search engines when they discover my blog. Sometimes it's entertaining... Someone discovered my blog while seeking instructions for building a wooden deck over a pond. I'm afraid I wasn't able to help him/her too much with that. Someone discovered my blog while doing a Google-search for "macro poppies". My blog appeared on page 33 of the search. This poor soul must have really been looking for a certain kind of image to scroll through at least 32 pages of Google detritus!

I decided to dedicate my photo time today to taking macro poppy pictures. Unfortunately, it wasn't a good day for photographing poppies (or really much of anything else). It was COLD, with snow threatened yet again in the forecast. The sky was a flat grey color with no sunshine to illuminate the flowers or accentuate texture. To top it all off, I was becoming annoyed with my teleconverter. It caused every small speck of dirt on a flower petal to be magnified into an unsightly blemish. Luckily I found some freshly emerging poppies that hadn't had a chance to become dirty yet!

Here are some photos from our visit to Bents (a ghost town) earlier this spring. It was my first visit to an actual ghost town, and I hope it won't be the last. Bents is completely deserted. All that remains is a grain elevator, some rusted farm machinery, a general store/post office, a community hall, a scattering of old houses and sheds, a swing set, and other assorted debris left behind by Bents' inhabitants (including these boots and these teacups).

Although I enjoyed my visit to Bents, the whole experience left me with a peculiar hollow sadness. As I traipsed around the general store, camera in hand, trying not to fall through the rotting floorboards, I imagined the store as the centre of a bustling community. I imagined the inhabitants of Bents as the hardy early 20th century pioneers I learned about in elementary school. This was the real wild west!

Despite my imagination's best efforts, bashed-in TV sets and semi-modern appliances hinted at a more recent date for Bents' abandonment. Creeping through one of the old houses, I discovered a door frame where someone had tracked the growth of two children with pencil marks. The last two markings: Tyler April 1988 and Kim April 1988. The height of one of the wall markings, a hockey trophy atop the TV, and the peeling Smurf wallpaper in one of the bedrooms betrayed an irrefutable fact: Tyler, wherever he is now, is the same age as me.

I'm not sure why this revelation bothered me so much. A family abandoning their prairie town in the late 1980s is nowhere near as romantic as the saga of the pioneers, right? Will amateur photographers 20 years from now find poignancy in the wreckage of today's cookie-cutter suburbia littered with iPhones, Poang chairs and plasma screen TVs?

I spend a lot of time living for tomorrow. Life sucks now, but tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow I'll be able to do the things I want to do. The old adage tells us that tomorrow never comes. I find it to be quite the opposite. Tomorrow comes, followed by another tomorrow, followed in rapid succession by a few hundred more tomorrows. Eventually, all that's left is debris - most of it not very interesting.

I wanted to post pictures of something non-floral today. There wasn't time after work to go on a journey of any length, and sorting through my Costa Rica photos just makes me sad and nostalgic for my vacation. The best I could come up with was this bright red backlit leaf. Sometimes a photo can't do justice to the way something looks in real life. This is usually the case with well-illuminated foliage.

I really like the color orange.

Tofino, British Columbia is my favorite place on the planet. Tropical beaches have a secure place in my heart (they're warm and you can swim without a 6mm full-body wetsuit!), but there's something about Vancouver Island that I love. I think I just like the feel of the place.

This Red Bubble reject was taken in May 2008, around midnight on Chesterman Beach. I took macro photos of the driftwood with my little point-and-shoot, while Graem illuminated it with a flashlight. I like the texture of the wood, and the fact that some of the photos look like miniature moonscapes.

This is another Red Bubble reject. Morning and evening have the best light for photography. I have lots of photos taken in the evening or at sunset, but not many in the morning. I am simply not a morning person. Even in Costa Rica, when I knew there were all sorts of amazing creatures to be seen and seascape sunrises to capture, I could not drag myself out of bed. In fact, the only time I am awake at sunrise is if I haven't gone to bed yet.

This was exactly the case the day this photo was taken - August 4, 2008. I went down to the river to take some photos before turning in for the 'night'. This photo was taken with a point-and-shoot, all automatic settings sometime between 4 and 5am. Summers are short in this neck of the woods. There was already a chill in the early morning air, and I was wearing a warm coat and a toque. This photo may not have the best composition or focus, but I love the character of the morning light and the way it illuminates these symmetrical bunches of little white flowers.