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!

One man's misfortune...

... is another man's fortune. As sad as I am for Richard having to get his camera serviced by Nikon, it did afford me the opportunity to borrow his 50mm lens and flash. I didn't utilize them as much as I should have, but I did play around a bit. Here are some of the results. Not that great when I view them on the monitor, but if you shrink them to 3x3cm they look fine. :)


This shot is taken with the 50mm lens. Cats - when they aren't sleeping - are very tricky subjects, because the refuse to sit still long enough to properly focus (let alone trying to set up the perfect composition). This was the best of a series of photos of Jack looking away.


Another shot with the 50mm. Jack got bored very quickly.


Actually just shot with my regular lens, but I had to throw it in. Jack is loving the chin rub.


This is a macro shot, aided with Richard's SB-600 flash. It's amazing what a difference the flash makes for macro photography. You can crank up the shutter speed to get a sharp image (I was too lazy to set up the tripod), and still have a small aperture to a decent depth-of-field. It is much less frustrating.

Alas, Richard's camera has been fixed and is likely in his hands right now, so I must say goodbye to the equipment that he generously lent to me. Goodbye 50mm lens. Goodbye wireless flash. I'll miss you.

Playing catch-up

Well, it's been ages since my last update, so here's a hodge-podge - a smorgasboard, if you will - of visual and textual descriptions depicting my life over the last few weeks.


Ok, this is an oldie, but a goodie. I joined a new team at work a few months ago, which afforded me the opportunity to choose a new work area (read "cube"). Somehow I had some level of seniority, so I got to pick fourth. This is the view I have every day :)


We have asparagus! Right in our back yard! This is from our first cutting in mid-May. We found out that aparagus grows very quickly, and until yesterday we had about 10 asparagus trees.


After moving into our new house, we wanted to treat Jack to a new bed (one that he could fit into). When we got home, we just threw it on the couch haphazardly, but as you can see, Jack found it and made himself at home.


While he was on a business trip, Carolyn's dad graciously lent us his barbeque. That whet our appetite for burnt offerings, and soon we found ourselves the proud owners of a Broilmate barbeque (made in Waterloo!). It's a great barbeque and we use it at least a few times a week. Thanks to Ryan for taking this sharp photo.


One of the joys of home-ownership is having gardens with loads of different flora (and unfortunately, pesky fauna too). We have a group of poppies that have bloomed; here are two that haven't yet. If they weren't plants, I'd say these were having an intimate moment.


Another flower. Does anyone know what kind it is? I'm horrible with horticulture, but I am slowly improving.


Another poppy close-up. I love my macro lens! It's actually not as sharp as I'd like; or rather, I don't have as much in focus as I'd like. But I still think it's amazing to look at the water droplets suspended between the hairs.


This is Jack, jealous of my ability to get outside. Actually, he is quite able to get outside; thanks to my dad, he can open the screen door by himself. He hasn't quite learned how to close it yet. He seems to be in his element when he is outside though; in the past two days, Jack has caught a chipmunk and a mouse. He doesn't quite know what to do when he catches something, so he typically just sits on it. We know something's up when we hear muffled squeaking noises. If only he could learn to catch rabbits.

So why have I been too busy to post? It seems I have to mow the lawn every day... but seriously, we have been slowly chipping away at our renovations. Two weekends ago, we installed three new ceiling fixtures in the three bedrooms (with Ryan's help for the first one... thanks Ryan!). No pictures yet, so I guess you'll just have to come visit. And last weekend I added a new wall-switch and connected it to a receptacle in the living room. And I'm not dead yet! Carolyn, meanwhile, has been busily scraping away the wallpaper, and has finished the second of the three bedrooms. So after one month, we've done a fair bit, but we still have a ways to go.

Water droplets + macro lens = fun!

What a thunderstorm we had yesterday! Our power was out from 7pm until 5am the next morning. We managed to save one tub of ice cream from certain demise, thank goodness.

Sometime between 7 and 8 there was a break in the rain, at which point I ventured to our front porch armed with my D70 and macro lens. Here are the results.

Park Pictures

Last Friday, Ryan and I left work before the sun set and sauntered (well, you can't really saunter properly when it's that cold... it just sounds more dignified) around Victoria Park, taking a few snaps. I got a little more mileage out of my macro lens, which, in case you didn't know, can most certainly be used as a 'regular' lens. With a maximum aperture of 2.8f, it's quite fast, so ideal for the low light situation we were in. It also has VR for when I was too cold to stop shaking.


I love the entanglement of branches; it reminds me of veins and arteries, or perhaps the nervous system.


This shot is of the oft-photographed park benches. You can see the mist hovering above the river.


A leaf in the snow.

The following shots are some closeups of icicles, with the sun as a backdrop. I wasn't so much utilizing the macro capabilities, as I was experimenting with aperture and focus.


This first one is just a plain closeup. If you look at the full image, you'll notice it's not quite in focus; but considering the lack of tripod and the frigid temperature, I think it's good enough.


I'm filing this one under 'abstract'. I think it looks hand-drawn, and it has a wispy/misty feeling thanks to the out-of-focus branches.


This one is a pretty poor composition, but I really like the colour of the sun. It also looks like that icicle was just pasted on top, or shot against a blue-screen with the sun added later.

And here's a knowledge nugget to file away somewhere: Queen Victoria became the de facto first Queen of Canada. The Dominion of Canada was created in 1867, during the reign of Queen Victoria, making her Canada's first sovereign.

The luckiest guy on Earth

Yup, that's me. Because my wonderful fiancée surprised me with a Valentine's Day/(late) engagement/(early) anniversary/(early) birthday present. What could possibly be so amazing that it has to be split across four different occasions?


This, my friends, is the 105mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S VR Micro-Nikkor. Or, in short, it's a macro lens for my camera. Well George, you ask, just what can you do with a macro lens? Well, let me show you.


This is a photograph of a 2005 Canadian penny (side note: I got my camera in 2005, and my first picture was of a pile of change. Coincidence? I think not.) This shot was taken with my super-fantastic 18-200mm lens (Oh, I love it so. It was a godsend in Europe.), at 200mm, and at the minimum focus distance.


Here is a photograph with the camera at the same spot, taken with the macro lens.


And here is a photograph with the macro lens at nearly the minimum focus distance.

Pretty nice eh?


Here is a closeup of a flower (from a bouquet that Carolyn bought for me). You can see the pollen!


Here is another flower. It's about 1cm in diameter in actuality.

I can't wait to test this puppy out in natural light. More photos to follow.
[Note: all photos were adjusted for white balance and exposure]

PS Thanks Carolyn! I love you!