Christmas Day and Three More Pictures

Merry Christmas to all! Here are three more images (since I dropped the ball yesterday) from the walk around Ottawa. The first one is of some of the metal work around the locks. I find it interesting since no matter how hard I try to look to the center or the left of the image, I have to look back to the right. The second is a view of parliament from the Victoria(?) bridge. Finally, the third is the Museum of Civilization from the same bridge. Let me know what you think and Merry Christmas again.

Locks in Ottawa


Parliament


Museum of Civilisation

Cape Breton Panoramas

For those of me that follow my photography, you may have guessed by now that I am addicted to HDR photography. This post is one of the few that are not littered with HDR images. In fact, I would dare say that this is the first post where I present to you three different panorama images! The first one is the one of the views from the National Historic Site of Louisbourg, the second is the view of the coast from the site of the Louisbourg lighthouse (away from the lighthouse ... obviously), and finally the third is of the Louisbourg lighthouse and the Atlantic in the distance. Be patient with me over the weekend (and maybe into Monday) since you have a few days of Lighthouse images to come!


View from the far end of Louisbourg


Coastal View from the Louisbourg Lighthouse Site


Louisbourg Lighthouse and the Open Ocean

Our Plant Life

Although I still have a couple more images from the Vintage Wings "Air Show" I figured I'd switch things up a bit and give you a few flower pictures. These have been a long time coming. Having just moved into our new house a couple of months ago, we were left with all sorts of plants and flowers in the yards. It has almost been exciting to see the flowers bloom so that we can discover what exactly it is that we have! The first ones to come out were orange lillies, then came the red ones, the whites were next, and just recently there have been some purple lillies as well. In any case, it doesn't take one long to realise I used that as a chance to practice some flower photography! Here are a few examples of what came from that practice.

Lessons Learned

Bear with me, this is a little longer than you are used to seeing. I wanted to make today's post a little more that just pretty pictures and try to present a couple of lessons learned. The first lesson is photographic and the second one is for life in general (for those that know me well ... humour me and pretend that I am even remotely qualified to be giving a life lesson).
The photographic lesson derives itself from the idea of perspective. The two images below are technically of the same subject (the barn and field) yet are completely different images. When you get to a scene and start shooting, make sure that you move around a bit (or at least change the view by adjusting the direction/tilt/etc on the tripod as is seen here). I hate to tell you this but the chance that you nailed the perfect composition on your first try when getting to the scene is very unlikely (and if you did ... You probably won't be taking photographic advice from me!)To make a long story short, never underestimate the power of shifting your point of view when shooting a specific subject.
The life lesson (again ... humour me) is nothing revelutionary. In fact every one of your parents have probably given you this lesson more than once before. When I took the images below, I was not intending on making an hdr/sunrise/landscape image at all. In fact that morning I got up at 02:45 to try and get an image of the comet that is just becoming visible to the naked eye. Getting that Image turned out to be a big failure. I by far underestimated the difficulty of capturing an image of a faint comet, near a major city, with just a camera and a tripod. That being said, I didn't just go home and sulk in my failure. Having realised that I wasn't going to get the image I wanted, I took advantage of being out (with the intention of shooting) and find myself something else to shoot. Don't be so stuck on achieving(or your failure to achieve)a goal that you completely miss any other opportunities that come along.
That being said, I guess I have no excuse but to follow another piece of advice that every parent gives: if at first you don't succeed .... Essentially I may have to brave another 2:45am to attempt the comet again!

Are you Tired of Waterfalls Yet?

You should be getting tired of waterfall pictures by now. I think that I am. Tomorrow I will probably go back to the other pictures from Kingston that haven't been posted yet. In the mean time, here is another couple pictures of the "watefall find". The first picture is another angle of the same images I've been showing over the last couple of days. The second one is actually further down the river, underneath the bridge, and down a steeper section of falls. Originally the second image was all that I saw. Exploring afterward allowed me to find the falls shown in the first image.

The Next Installment of the Waterfall Find

As promised, here are a couple more images of the waterfalls that I accidentally came across. Usually I like posting the images up here first and then putting them up on Flickr, but I accidentally left these two as publicly available during the day today, so you may have seen them. If not ... enjoy and let me know what you think.

The Magic Floating Apple

You know those green apples always have to be different. You have to not only be good with a camera for a picture like this, but also a knife. You have to be fast enough to cut the apple (in place in the bowl) and take the picture as soon as all the cuts have been made! What do you mean you don't buy that? How else am I supposed to do that? I'm sure the method is apparent to some of you, but it make take a couple minutes to figure it out for others. Even if the answer is simple, it was still fun playing with this one!

Dog Portraits at the Park

It feels like it has been forever since I haven't had the opportunity to get out to the dog park and get some pictures of GuynS. For the horizontal one, I had fun getting as close to the ground as I could while Marie-Eve kept his attention with a giant frisbee! All in all, these couple of images will make a decent change from landscapes up here as well.

My own Top 5 HDR Images

Few words make photographer spark up a heated debate quicker than High Dynamic Range. Some love it, some hate it, some hide from the discussion as if their reputation depended on it. If I've already lost you and you are wondering what HDR is (and are interested in finding out) pop over to Trey Ratcliff's site http://www.stuckincustoms.com//hdr-photography/ for a description of what this type of photography entails (make sure you come back here though!). He also has a great tutorial and many amazing images to peruse if you are interested in jumping into HDR yourself. Like it or not, it is a widely popular form of photography or post processing today. Although it is often a technique I use when tackling landscapes or wanting to throwing an interesting spin on a subject, I definitely agree that some HDR images can easily be taken way too far. Those that dislike HDR may even find that to be the case for the images below, but believe me they can get a lot more "dynamic" than that. All controversy aside, here are my picks for my Top 5 HDR images of my own. Feel free to click on any of the images to get to the Flickr page where you can see it larger (click on "all sizes" at the top of the image) or check out some of my other work.

Pride - Cape Breton, Nova Scotia

Hwy 2 Barn - Ontario

Chapel Point Battery - Cape Breton, Nova Scotia

Smoke on the Water - Quebec

Tree of Life - Ontario

Fly on the Wall

Last week, I literally spend more than 20 minutes and approximately 4.5Gb of my 8Gb memory card taking pictures of a fly. I ended up with three I liked. Here is one of them. I was trying something new for the picture you see below. In order to make it a macro picture I needed a macro lens. My Sigma 17-70mm still didn't get close enough, SO ... this is an experiment that I read about on the internet. I actually held my Canon 50mm f/1.8 BACKWARDS against the body for a macro shot. Cool eh? See the two others on my flickr page here. See the rest of my pictures on my flickr photostream here.

Large

Animals

Here some examples of my animal pictures, all of which can be viewed at different sizes here. You may see a slight bias to my dog GuynS who is always around and happy to have is picture taken.

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Landscape/HDR

Here some examples of my Landscape/HDR images, all of which can be viewed at different sizes here.

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