365: 30 Squirrel Time

  Whoa! posting 3 days in a row, not too bad.  I am home from my final shift of the ‘09 tennis season at the Orleans Tennis Club.  I am going back in an hour for the year end banquet but that is just eating, not much work!  We had a round robin followed by the AGM (Annual General Meeting) where members voice their opinions on certain things, vote in the new executive, executive reports etc.  It was pretty boring and at some points even confusing.  None of this relates to the title, its just a recap of what went down for me today.

  The title comes from the fact that since getting my camera I have taken more than enough pictures of squirrels.  I took one on Thursday, then many more downtown of this one squirrel although many were deleted. I’m doing a first today, I’m posting two pictures on one day.  The first one is the one that I took on Thursday and never ended up posting.  The second is one from yesterday that I call super squirrel, and you will see why if you scroll down :). 

  I was in the basement and my dad called me on the phone intercom and told me there was a squirrel out his bedroom bay window so I grabbed my camera and went upstairs.  That’s why the perspective is eye level, I was on the second floor of our house looking straight out at this guy.  It looked like he was eating a lot of the helicopter things that you find in maple trees.

  Second shot for the day is, as I said, titled Super squirrel.  This squirrel was in Majors Hill Park I believe and I got lucky and got him while he was airborne à la superman.

  So there are just a few of the squirrel shots that I have.  I managed to only take 30 minutes to make this post which is pretty quick for me, lol.  I do have another shot lined up already for tomorrow so it looks good for making it 4 days in a row :)  Tonight after the banquet Saturday night hockey starts up which, again as I have previously said, am really looking forward to.  Thanks again to those who read, leave a comment on blogspot or FB and let me know if you are reading.

Until tomorrow,

Ciao,

Dave

365: 29 Fall Corn

  As I mentioned yesterday I went downtown this afternoon after my workshops at the University Of Ottawa.  I took “Why Take English?” which I really enjoyed as well as “Why Take History?” which wasn’t as good, it was pretty much a Q&A about stuff that was in the pamphlets that we were given.  I got my fair share of walking done today though, walking back and forth on campus then down through the Byward market and around downtown.  We started at the beavertails stand in the market, walked down the fruit and veggies stretch, which was pretty empty, then up the York Steps, through Major’s Hill Park, up to the Samuel de Champlain statue near the art gallery and back, to the Rideau Center to catch the busiest bus of my life, the 95 back to Orleans.  When we got on I popped in my tickets and didn't move, that’s how full it was.  I felt somewhat violated at some points just because of the proximity of others and what they would do to let some people off.

  
   This was the first shot of the day actually, and as you can tell by the picture, there was a lot of corn.  I took this picture because I just liked the look of the way the corn was set up.  I took about 140 pictures today, a lot of this one squirrel near the peace keeping memorial.  I actually have too many picture that I want to post now, and I will probably end up taking some at work tomorrow as well.  So there will not be a shortage in that department for a while.  One of my favourite shots of the day is now my desktop wallpaper, twitter background, and as well its on flickr. 

   Tomorrow is my last shift at the tennis club for the season.  We have a round robin then the Annual General Meeting followed by a potluck banquet that evening.  Saturday night hockey also starts up this week which I am pumped for.  I am just looking forward to playing a little more often than my normal hockey cause he have 3 lines of forward plus and extra so there is much more standing and waiting than playing.  Saturday night hockey we usually have like one or two spares a side so there is no excess of players to worry about. I guess that is it for today.

Ciao,

Dave

365: 26-28 Catch-up Again

  Well after my super post on Monday some may have thought that I would made an effort to stay on track.  Unfortunately those people are incorrect.  I have to say honestly that I really am not making that hard of an effort to get out and get pictures every day.  Especially now with the colder weather I think I might be less likely to get out if there is precip. or just really cold weather.  Anyways I did get out today when I got home from Tennis at school because it appears that pretty much every leaf in our front tree had the same idea today and that idea was fall to the ground.  There was a good 2-3 inches of leaves covering our entire yard.  I took a few shots from various angles and this was my favourite. 

   We got pretty cold last night, probably -5° or around there.  There was a wind chill this morning which is just depressing.  Looks like my mom’s flowers in the front garden are done for the year.  I didn’t notice at first but upon further review I started to see flower people in the picture.  The one on the far right is the easiest to see, middle requires a bit more imagination and I don’t really see one on the right but you have a much better imagination than I do.  What I liked about this shot was the detail on the concrete behind the flowers and then the contrast of them on the concrete.  Plus the purple adds a nice pop to the image as well.

   Moved to the backyard and there were more frozen flowers.  This one was a little less colourful than the previous ones.  It was kind of getting dark and my hands with the 70-200 aren’t exactly the steadiest of surfaces so its a little blurry, but I did manage to fix it up a little after the fact (raw is still awesome).  Only thing with RAW which I’m sure there is a website somewhere regarding it is when I go to save as 8 bit the colours get really desaturated so its kind of annoying.  Right now I am just doing save for web and that seems to work well so the only reason I would do it the other way is so that it keeps the EXIF info.  I may have posted some pictures (facebook or flickr maybe) of this flower when it was in its previous glory, it used to be bright red I think.  Again it looks like the frost got to the flowers over the last couple of nights.

   So tomorrow is the University of Ottawa Open house day, I’m doing english, history, and physics demo’s then afterwards I am planning on playing tourist downtown again for a bit.  I did have another shot from today lined up by I may or may not post it tomorrow depending on how tomorrow afternoon goes :).  Anyways, back on track…for now, hopefully I can keep it up for a few days at least. 

Until tomorrow,

Ciao,

David

365: 19-25 Lazy

   Well, this is my biggest slip so far, a week without a post.  I just kept putting off posting cause that would mean catching up on more than a few days which I didn't want to do.  Looks like that plan worked out well. I'm going to end up cheating by posting pictures that I have already taken and many will be from the same day.  Grab a snack cause this one is a marathon. 

   I took this one at work last Saturday, the day of my last post. Nothing really to say besides it was with the 50mm lens. Again I’m trying something new with this and uploading directly through Live Writer and adding EXIF info when you mouse over the picture.  This means that there won’t be larger versions of pictures available because they aren’t on Flickr but if anyone wants any just e-mail me and I will be happy to send them.

   This is another one from Saturday I took when I got home.  This is our maple tree in the front yard.  Its the only tree that we have that really turns colours in the fall. The two in the backyard, one is a Schubert Chokecherry so it is like plum from May-June and doesn’t change after that.  The other tree doesn’t really have leaves to turn colours cause its pretty dead.

   I went to the 67’s game again this past Friday with some friends and brought my camera again. I shot RAW + Large JPG so I was putting like 25mb onto my card with every shot.  After the end of the second period my camera was showing only like 190 shots left.  I deleted a few but ended up not taking pictures in the third.  This one I was very lucky i shot RAW cause I had changed my settings to take a picture of the crowd and forgot to change it back so as you can see by the EXIF it was terribly over exposed.  Plus my WB was off for most of the shots so that made fixing them easy as well.  We were a few (literally 3 minutes late) and we had missed 3 goals.  We only got to see one more and it was for the bad guys.  There were a few fights, and I will probably post the best shot later on.

   I’m digging way back into the archives for this one.  This is from the weekend I played tourist in my own town a couple of weekends ago. I could just post a bunch of pictures from Friday night’s hockey game but I would be bored with that and I’m sure others would be too.  Naming all of these pictures and trying to give them witty titles is harder than I thought it would be.  I’m not thinking very long or hard though and I’m kind of rushing through this.  Trying to find, edit, post, comment on all of these plus add the EXIF, being distracted and other people needing the computer I imagine I won’t finish this post till this evening.

   This is another one from the trip downtown on September 19th.  I think it goes well with the time of year and seeing as its the thanksgiving long weekend.  We had my mom’s side of the family over for dinner last night and I think the number was 22 people.  We had a 28lb. bird I think i heard my dad say and there aren’t that many leftovers.  All of my moms brothers and sisters and their families were here except for one.  Plenty of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, corn, pumpkin and apple pie was consumed by all.  Funny moment of the night: we tied/duct taped two of my cousin’s kids together.

   This is the aforementioned fight picture from the hockey game on Friday night.  The other fight was in our end but the netting over the ends kind of ruined the picture so I ended up deleting them I think, along with like 120 or so other photos for similar reasons.  Most of the good ones are on Flickr now, I may add one or two more during the week if I get around to it, otherwise they will stay hidden. 

   Last picture for the day.  My dad picked up this pumpkin at the grocery store on Saturday. Two bucks for this beauty, you can’t beat that.  I updated Lightroom today so that I can now shoot RAW and JPG and have it import automatically.  Before it wouldn't import either file, it had to be strictly JPG’s on the card for it to import, so I ended up having to import 9.13GB of shots from the hockey game on Friday manually, which isn't so bad except if there were multiple shooting days on the card it would be a pain.  Today was a pretty lazy day, I slept in pretty late, had a healthy breakfast of rice krispies and a good healthy sized piece of apple pie lol.  I did some physics and chem. assignments.  I listened to In-Flight Safety’s We are an Empire my Dear on cbcradio3, and looked through the archives of http://wvs.topleftpixel.com/ which is what “my inspiration” link on the side over there ----------> links to.  I really love that photo blog and its pretty much the reason I am doing this one.  Although I miss a few more day’s than he does. 

   So that is a weeks worth of photo’s in one post.  I kind of feel like I cheated cause they weren’t taken on the day they were posted but I can’t really change that.  They are all fairly recent so its not that bad.  So its taken me at least 5hrs running time to get this done which isn’t that bad considering each individual post takes usually at least an hour to get done.  If you stuck it out to the end and actually read everything I appreciate it!  I myself probably wouldn’t even get through the whole thing.  Anyways, I hope everyone had a good thanksgiving weekend with family and friends and I will hopefully be back with another post tomorrow.

Ciao,

Dave