Dear BP: In Case You Forgot

Dear, BP

I know you've had a lot on your mind these past two months. I know that I have trouble remembering things when I get stressed out, so I thought I'd send you a friendly reminder. I hope the following helps you out:

(All before photos taken by me in 2008. All after photos taken from the Associated Press)

Fog excursion

Last night, I went to go take out the trash and I stumbled into a wonderland of fog. It was so amazing I went inside, grabbed my camera, and told my husband that we were going for a walk, despite that it was after 1am on a Saturday evening.

Now, fog is very challenging to shoot in - especially at night. You can't see very much detail through the viewfinder, so you have to use your knowledge of what is there to mentally compose shots in the viewfinder with the elements you can see. You also have no idea if your camera is interpreting the light levels correctly. And there's always the risk that the camera isn't going to pick up all the detail that you can see so clearly. Plus I was pretty tired, so I didn't want to mess with the tripod.

I got lucky last night, though. A lot of shots turned out, even though many others didn't. I'd definitely like to do something with some of these, but I'll have to de-grain them first.

All in all, I got some great stuff. Take a look:

I love the sweep of the headlights here.

I totally expected zombies to attack us at any time. Totally.

You can't see it, but we were very near the highway, so there were these monstrous tall lights to light the highway. Kit and I kept joking about lights in the sky, since you couldn't even see the poles. So I got him to pose for a silly shot of him being "abducted".

Again, the tall lights are the lights next to the highway.

We kept joking that the rendering servers had crashed.

My photography instructors always said that the key to good night photography is to capture different kinds of light sources to get different color shifts. It's funny how lights that look white or yellow at night shift so radically "on film".

Spooky!

This picture took so long to take I had totally dismissed it as lost. I was delighted that it came out.

On Facebook, a friend left the comment that this photo made him feel like he was playing Left4Dead. I found that amusing.

Willows + fog = awesome.

Kit liked posing in the fog.

Coming back, the street outside our house.

Photography update

I've been doing a lot of photography in the last several weeks since I've been out of work in attempt to build up my landscape portfolio. I'm rather lucky in that, since I only live 45 minutes away from the Niagara Escarpment, there is no shortage of amazing scenery immediately available. Here's just some of the close to 1500 photos I've taken in the last few months.

I want to organize my porfolio a bit more, but the plan is to apply to around 20 Toronto galleries before the end of the year. I've talked about doing fine art photography long enough - now it's time to put my money where my mouth is.

More photography from Florida: wildlife and seascapes

So here's the other half of my Florida photography favorites. It's a bit saddening to be going through them now as we had 15cm of snow on Friday and will be getting 15 more today.

The resort that we stayed at in Key Largo had a small beach. We sat out there one evening and watched the sunset.

Sadly, we discovered that they don't really clean the sea-grass off the beaches during the off season.

This was part of an old bridge, now only open to foot and bike traffic, that goes out to a mostly abandoned island called Pigeon Key that used to be a railroad building settlement. Kit and I walked out to the island and had a spin around. It was quite entertaining.

This fellow was lurking in the bird gardens at Busch Gardens. I have no idea what he is, but those legs sure were funny-looking.

When we went on the boat tour in the 10,000 Islands part of the Everglades, there was an island simply covered with white pelicans. What you can't get from this picture is the sense of scale - pelicans are *huge*. These were at least four feet tall.

Another picture from Busch Gardens. Meerkats are just adorable!

The islands in the 10,000 Islands section of the Everglades are all mangrove islands. Amusingly, it only takes 1 mangrove to constitute an island. As we were headed out to the Gulf of Mexico, we spotted a flock of birds perched on a tiny mangrove island.

More Busch Gardens. Macaws are pretty.

Photography from Florida: wildlife!

So here is some of the promised photography from Florida. There was an awful lot of wildlife to be photographed, and I went pretty hog-wild.

There are white-tailed deer in the Florida keys, only they're about the size of large dogs. We were very lucky to have spotted some while at the Key Deer Refuge. It's sad that you can't really get the sense of scale in this photo.

There are some very large iguanas in Florida. This fellow was hanging out near the visitor's center in one of the parks, but there was a very large specimen that hung out at our hotel as well.

We startled this heron at the beach and I was lucky enough to get a good shot of him flying away.

We stopped at Gator Hole State Park to watch alligators. It amused me to watch the gators pretending to be logs. The reflections did turn out really well.

I'm just a log. Yep. Juuuust a log. Nothing dangerous here.

There were some HUGE alligators in the Everglades. This guy was seven or eight feet long!

It was too bright to tell what this fellow was, but he was probably a turkey vulture. There were more turkey vultures than you could shake a stick at in Florida.

Kit and I were amused by the fact that this flamingo was letting his leg flop down like that.

This picture was taken at Busch Gardens, so I'm not really sure what kind of bird this is, other than some kind of buzzard (honestly).

The COOLEST thing we saw the entire vacation was in the Everglades. We went on a boat tour and saw a pod of dolphins swimming in the wild with a baby. What you see there are two females holding it up, since apparently baby dolphins don't swim so well. SO. UNBELIEVABLY. CUTE.

My newest productivity-killer

You can't see him very well, but this is Constantine - like the Holy Roman Emperor, not like the crappy movie by Keanu Reeves.

This is Rhubarb, Constantine's sister. Clearly, she sees something interesting.

Attack! Rhubarb attacks!

Constantine decides to show his displeasure for the attack on his royal dignity.

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So, as might be obvious from the pictures, Kit and I adopted two kittens this evening. They're happily exploring the house and tearing around making lots of noise. Rhubarb is brave and sweet and not at all afraid to come up for petting and affection. Constantine is not as sure of things as his sister and quite shy, but he can be affectionate when you do pet him.

We're very happy we got two siblings, because they're obviously having a hoot playing together and they'll be able to keep each other company while we're at work. In fact, right now they're play-fighting under my desk.

So that's my latest productivity destroyer. It's a very *cute* productivity destroyer, however.