A weekend at Rockwood

Last weekend Carolyn and I had our first annual Friendfest. The idea is to book a bunch of campsites, invite your friends, and have those friends invite their friends. Theoretically you would meet lots of new people, play games, eat, drink, and be merry. Unfortunately this theory breaks down in the base case, when the organizers' friends turn out to be anti-social bums. [Editor's note: Actually, my sister-in-law Erica did come to visit but we happened to be hiking at the time. Mega bonus points for Erica.]

But as Carolyn and I know, you only need two people to have friends, so we stuck it out for the weekend despite the rain. We went to Rockwood Conservation Area, north-east of Guelph. It's a very lovely area, especially this time of year with the leaves changing colour.

Saturday was a generally miserable day as it drizzled almost continuously, but the silver lining in the clouds was that all the plants were covered in water droplets - a macro photographer's delight!

Feather with water droplets.


Spiderweb with water droplets.


It's not quite a Prius, but my Matrix is pretty environmentally friendly.



Sunday provided much nicer weather so we hiked to the caves along the Eramosa river. Here is a shot of the old stone mill that we passed. They were actually setting up for a wedding as we walked by.



Here is a panorama of the Eramosa river. I have been playing with Microsoft's photo stitching software - Image Composite Editor - and I have to admit I'm quite impressed (that it's free!). This is not an excellent image, but it was fun to create.

Bad food + good company = photographic adventure!

After canceling numerous times due to pre-wedding activities (sounds much nicer than "freaking out before the wedding"), I finally fulfilled my promise to go on another photoroam with my good friend Richard. We decided to trek into the previously unexplored Monarch Woods Park near my house. No monarchs were spotted, but we did catch some of that evening sun, which always makes shots interesting.

I've been experimenting with some backlighting lately.




Afterwards I had Richard over to my house for dinner that I had prepared in the slow cooker. Unfortunately this was the first time trying this recipe, and I overcooked the chicken, and the sauce ended up congealing in the pan. Fortunately my awesome wife Carolyn fixed up a new sauce to mask the chicken (which at this point had a very leathery appearance). Serendipitously, the congealed sauce made for an excellent super-macro subject.

With Richard snapping away at some flowers, I conjoined my 70-210mm and 50mm lenses into an überlens. With this much magnification at your disposal, you can really see another world.



I took a little artistic license with this photo: I applied the "watercolour" effect in Photoshop Elements. I normally don't like resorting to such blatent manipulation... but I do like the effect.


Thanks to Richard for giving me some sagely advice about flash photography. I promise our next venture will include a more appetizing meal!

The Daunting Task

I'm a process guy. I like rules and steps. I like categorization. That's not to say that I'm never disorganized or sloppy... but I'm usually aware of it and it makes a tiny part of my soul cringe in embarrassment. This is why I don't often post photos. I am currently going through the photos from my honeymoon, rating, tagging, and purging them so that in the future I could hypothetically find specific photos much more effectively. I don't think I've ever really needed to do this, but I like the promise of efficiency. Having taken over 2000 photos on my honeymoon, you can imagine this process takes a long time. That is on top of the several-thousand photos I've taken since 2005. Part of me wishes I would just give up my dream of a highly-organized collection so I could just post my good photos and forget about the rest... but it's simply against my nature. I'm resigned to my task and I am determined to follow this path, even if I never make it to the destination.

I hurt

And apparently it's not the first time. I feel like I've pulled every muscle in my body. This is what I get for playing 90 minutes of soccer after not having played in 2 months. The consequence is that today is a sit-in-front-of-the-computer-day, so maybe I'll be posting some honeymoon photos.