This photo was taken in mid October when we went to visit the Parliament buildings. I thought I would visit Parliament as soon as I moved to Ottawa, but it actually took me 1.5 years to get there! It's impossible to find parking there, and the grounds are always crowded - hard to take pictures without a thousand people in the frame, especially since the architecture lends itself so nicely to wide-angle photography.

I did manage to get a few good shots on this visit to Parliament, especially once the sun decided to come out. This shot was actually taken while standing on Parliament Hill and looking across the river. For this shot, I used my telephoto lens at 70mm focal length. I have another shot taken almost from the same vantage point with the wide angle. I think this one is much better. The telephoto is an amazing lens, but I haven't been able to find many occasions to use it. This is one instance where it really shone.

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.

My mom recently moved to Sackville, New Brunswick, and I went to visit her there for the first time in mid October. The fall colours probably would have been more brilliant had I gone 2 weeks earlier, but there was still some bright foliage left for me to see. It rained most of the weekend I was there, but I did get some very good light. I like this particular shot because it was taken right after a heavy rain, and the leaves have that saturated, wet look. The desolation of the highway is also nice... Small town NB is very different from Ontario. This photo is a little underexposed, though, and the light is not stellar. It was still one of the 'keepers' from the trip, and one of my mom's favorites.

I often read about landscape photographers who don't even bother taking pictures if the light is not 'exactly' right. I always considered them to be kind of 'photography snobs'... There is a finite amount of time in life for photography... for most of us, not nearly enough! Why pass up an opportunity to take pictures just because the weather/light is not cooperating? Recently I've come to see their point of view, though... the New Brunswick trip is a case in point. I was half-heartedly clicking away at some trees beside the highway with the sky completely overcast and the sun obliterated. My subject matter was beautiful, but I knew that even if my shots were perfectly composed, I would end up with mediocre photos at best. Bad light makes for flat pictures, with little latitude for adjusting the contrast and colour saturation in post-processing. As I was standing there snapping, the sun came out, setting the foliage on fire and bringing out the colours in the ominous grey/blue clouds. I only fired off two pictures before my mom got worried about the time and we had to go home... but the difference between those two pictures and my 'cloudy' pictures is really night and day. I'll probably be posting those shots soon. Does this mean I'm becoming a photo snob?

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.

This is my first post in a long time. Let's see if I remember how this works. This is a portrait of Tuk taken a couple of weeks ago. Tuk has matured into the most amazing cold weather cat. He's big and burly with a dense coat that would be the envy of any arctic explorer. As the weather gets colder, the other cats stay in and sleep more. Not Tuk. We think he's part Norwegian Forest Cat.

I have actually taken quite a few good cat portraits recently... some I might post later. I stayed up all night yesterday going through my photos from summer/fall 2010 and I have more than 60 ready for posting. I haven't had much time for photography lately, but I'm encouraged by the fact that some of my fall photos are the best I have ever taken. I will be posting them eventually... the only question is where.

Part of the reason I haven't posted is that I've become a bit disenchanted with my current options for displaying photos online. I made a Picasa album for my Iceland photos because I have lots of family and friends who wanted to view the photos without being bothered to sift through a blog. I realized a few things in doing this. First of all- storage on Picasa is limited. I had to severely scale down my Iceland photos in order to post them. Second, all of the photos I post on this blog are linked to a Picasa album... and therefore the same space limit applies. There is a finite number of photos I can post on this blog before running out of space. I calculated that ~2 years of daily posts would do it, assuming no other vacation albums were made. The Picasa album for my blog is also 'public' -- open for anyone to view. I didn't really want random people viewing the photos outside the context of the blog, so I tried to make the album private. That immediately made all of the photos on my blog unviewable... So the whole Picasa thing is messed up.

The blog is not the ideal vehicle for photography, either. The photos are small... enlarging them to fit the screen is sometimes problematic. They get lost in the text. There is no way to view a group of photos in isolation, view a slideshow, or view thumbnails.

Red Bubble is also problematic. I have good computer setup at home, but whenever I view the site at work, it takes an eon to load and sometimes freezes. The site layout looks horrible on the small screens at work. I imagine that this is probably how most people are viewing the site. The newest version of Red Bubble also removes control from the user over how photos are displayed... and again - no way to view a certain collection of photos or a slideshow. In some ways it's more like a self-congratulatory social networking site than a place to display art... and that can be grating.

There are other sites online that will display photos for a fee... Both Picasa and Flickr offer more storage space if you pay. My take on this is that if I am going to be paying for a site, I want to have complete control over it, with a site tailored to my specifications. None of the current photo-hosting sites I have seen can offer this.

I have been thinking that I still want to maintain a blog, but more for writing than for photos. The blog posts may occasionally contain photos, or focus on photography, but it won't necessarily be a photoblog. I think photoblogs are ideal for beginning photographers and people who are trying to encourage themselves to carry the camera more often or just to be more observant of the world around them. This worked for me at the beginning, but in some ways I think I've moved beyond that.

Graem asked me what I hope to 'achieve' with my photography. The short answer is that I don't know. I'm not very achievement-oriented (ie. I tend to waste a lot of time). Do I want to sell my photos? Not necessarily. It is always nice to sell a piece, but unless I become some kind of personal photographer for the stars, my photography earnings will never eclipse my day job - a sad fact I have come to terms with. When I started this blog, my intention was to share the beautiful and interesting things I discover with other people who might appreciate them... and I think this is still my goal.

The thing about dedicated photo sites with full-screen photos, slideshows, and limited text is that they tend to belong to 'pro' photographers or very talented amateurs. One of the things holding me back is that I'm not sure my photography is strong enough to stand on its own. I spent a long time last night going through my best photos from the past 3 years and asking myself that question... "Can this photo stand on its own and tell its own story?" The short answer: Some of them can... and I hope that in the future that percentage will be higher.

As I mentioned, I have more than 60 photos in the queue to be posted, so I'll try to keep posting here and on Red Bubble for now. In the next few months, I hope to come up with a completely different way of exhibiting my photos. Maybe it will be better.

A second post today, just to make up for my recent negligence. The Iceland photos seem kind of stale, and it seems lazy on my part to be posting them. Nonetheless, there were some amazing things there that I haven't yet shared on this blog.

This is a photo from Jokulsarlon (Glacier Lagoon). Pieces of a larger glacier (known as 'calves') break off and float in the lake. The colors are amazing (I expect they would be even better in good light). One thing that you don't get in a photo is sound. The creaking and groaning of the ice was amazing... and frankly a little bit creepy when the tourists went away and everything else was silent.

Jokulsarlon is a major tourist attraction, and boats even run out onto the lagoon at regular intervals. We stayed away from the tourist lookout. In fact, we found another glacier lagoon nearby which was very similar to Jokulsarlon but less popular with tourists. This photo might have actually been taken there, although it's impossible for me to remember now.

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.

This is one of my favorite photos from Iceland. The central hill looks like it's jutting into the sky like a crown. Like so many of my Iceland photos, I have no idea where it was taken. I imagine it was somewhere on the Snaefellsness Peninsula, as it is preceded by photos of the glacier and followed by photos of a beautiful beach called Dritvik. Google Maps does not know where Dritvik is, but I seem to recall it being somewhere on the Snaefellsness Peninsula as the glacier can be seen in the background of some of my shots.

These photos were taken at the Krafla geothermal area in northern Iceland. We stayed at Myvatn for a couple of days. Vatn means lake... so to refer to "Lake Myvatn" is really a redundancy, as is the term "Snaefellsjokull glacier"... as jokull means glacier. Myvatn actually translates to "Midge Lake", which proved to be fairly accurate, as there were little black flies everywhere. The flies didn't bite, but many perfectly good photos were ruined by swarms of them in the foreground.

There was so much to do at Myvatn that we worried about packing it all into 2 days. We ended up visiting the Krafla geothermal area at night. The sun never set in northern Iceland while we were there, so photography was actually possible between midnight and 2am... and that's when these photos were taken!

I think it was a mixed blessing to go at that time. There were no other tourists at a place that would have ordinarily been quite busy. This is a huge bonus. The desolation and time of day made everything far more surreal. There were a few downsides, though... Just because light was present doesn't mean the light was good. My camera can take acceptable shots at ISO 6400, but the best shots will always be the ones taken in good light. These could have been spectacular photos, but as it is they are kind of flat and grainy. By the end of the trip I was so exhausted and cold that I was knowingly sloppy with my photography. I didn't bother to swap out my wide angle lens for faraway subjects, and I fired off snapshots without thinking much about the camera settings.

There is a geothermal power plant at Krafla which looks kind of like a space station. At the power station is a vent which releases pressure and steam from deep underground into the sky. This steam can be seen in both of these photos as a giant plume rising into the sky. Sound can't be reproduced in a photo, but this vent made quite a roar. It was almost deafening. We couldn't hear each other talking, and at one point I wished for earplugs. The roar was loudest right near the vent, but could be heard throughout the whole geothermal area. It added to the surreal quality of the experience... Imagine picking your way through a deserted alien landscape at 2am with the howl of the steam vent reverberating in your mind.

We visited the Viti crater (seen here), and then explored some nearby lava fields with yet more natural geothermal vents. We had to wade our way through a field of mud and soupy melting snow before reaching the lava fields. Once there, there was a nice boardwalk for tourists to walk on, with dire warnings not to step in the boiling mud. Graem thought it odd that there would be a boardwalk in Iceland given the relative lack of wood. Maybe they ran out of wood, given that the nice safe boardwalk ended abruptly right around the time there were gaping chasms in the lava to be traversed. All of my photos from this leg of the journey were rather flat and underexposed.

The second photo is of the power plant and was taken on the way back to the hotel in Myvatn. By that time (about 2am), the sky was starting to get noticeably lighter! The lagoon in the foreground was bright, bright blue in real life.

This photo was taken at Hofn in southeastern Iceland. We were in Iceland from May 24-June 6. May is considered the "shoulder season" - there are a few tourists, but not too many. We didn't pre-book any of our hotels, and didn't have problems finding a place to stay. It was common for the highway to be empty in both directions as far as the eye could see. Come June 1st, the high season begins. We happened to see the ferry come in from Denmark on June 1st, and caravan after caravan came spilling out onto the road with license plates as diverse as UK, Romania, Germany and Spain. This also meant a huge increase in hotel prices. When the Hotel Hofn wanted to charge us 30% more than we had been paying elsewhere, we thought it was just a part of the seasonal increase. The room was ok, but nothing special.

We went out in the evening to look at the ocean. The water was perfectly still, and the sky (at times) was almost the same color as the water. I fooled around trying to take some long exposures by resting the camera on a park bench as I was too lazy to walk back to the hotel and get the tripod. None of them turned out. The best shot ended up being this rather simple composition with a normal-length exposure and interesting clouds.

The Hotel Hofn advertised breakfast from 7am-10am. By my way of thinking, this should mean that a person could show up in the dining room at 10am and eat. By Graem's way of thinking, it means that everyone should be finished eating and ready to clear the dining room by 10am. In either case, we went for breakfast at 9:40 (plenty of time to grab a piece of toast from the buffet and a cup of coffee), only to find that the dining room was locked and breakfast had been put away. I was fuming about the scathing review I was going to write for the Hotel Hofn online, and Graem was insisting that it was actually our fault for being 'late'. When we checked out, they apologized for putting the breakfast away early and deducted 6500 kronur from our bill, making the hotel only slightly more expensive than what we were used to paying (for hotels that included breakfast). I made a mental note to increase the hotel's rating from 1 star to 2 in my review.

I intend to review all of our Iceland hotels, though haven't gotten around to it yet... the pain of being home from Iceland is still too strong for me to think about the trip objectively in the past tense. All of my reviews will be glowingly positive or neutral, except for the Hotel Hofn. If I return to Hofn, I'll probably stay in one of the two guesthouses there rather than the hotel. I know nothing about the guesthouses, but I figure it would be worth the gamble.