Near Manitou, in Saskatchewan. At the campsite for the resort at Watrous, actually.
This one was shot with my 35mm Canon. I believe this is Kodak black and white film, tweaked in photoshop.
Spathe Falls, Wells Gray Park, B.C.
This is from our coach tour trip of Scotland and Ireland in 2004. Just another tourist snap. Love bagpipe music! I should find a good clip and attach it to this page... hmmmmmm. No wonder it takes me forever to get anything done in my web site.
This is a seaweed from Botanical Beach just outside of Port Renfrew. I could not find any exotic sea creatures to photo when we were last there. Port Renfrew was the first place we ever camped in our camper van. We had a spot right on the beach, a billion stars, and we had the place to ourselves. Heaven!! So this place holds a special place in my heart, but not in my photo albums, yet!
For anyone who has not read this before -- I am creating 'under contruction' pages for all of the unfinished albums on my web page. I have finished 18 under gardening and have completed 6 of the 18 from Travel. Photography will be a LOT of them, and so will My Town. So, I have barely started this latest pursuit in my chaotic on line life.
This one is from our trip in the Camper van down the West Coast US and over to the Grand Canyon. I was shooting in RAW format so it will be a while until I finish this album. Its too much fun to play in the RAW converter and I seem to spend ages at it.
This one is of one of the locks of the Panama Canal.(2006 Fall) My first trip out for the Canon S3 IS. I am getting better at holding it still without tripod (never take my tripod when we travel. I would never have time to set it up and use it, the way we travel)
This finishes the under construction pages of the Gardening page of my web site. There were 18 of them on the gardening page. I also have 18 to do for the Travel page, next.
The novelty of all that snow in Victoria has not worn off. The light was exquisite this morning. The air is fresh and crisp. The neighbourhood quiet and peaceful. The schools are closed and most businesses. Some people are without power. People are advised to stay home because the roads are mostly impassable. This snow is suppose to last until the end of the week. As I post this, its noon and the sky is blue, the magic light is gone. Its about -1 degrees celcius. I must have added a GB of snow pictures to my hard drive by now. Oh well, it will need to be cleaned up or burned to disk later, perhaps.
We had about 10 inches of heavy wet snow today. It is brighter out now, at nite. I hope it doesn't ruin my hedges again.
I made another big apple pie today. We are fortunate not to have suffered any of the power outage or flooding.
My patio table on the deck gathers a thin layer of water. I can look out my window and see if its raining a lot or a bit with the amount of drops hitting the water. I see it froze lightly last nite. It is about 5 degrees celcius now and the ice is just beginning to melt. Not a great day to drive, as there may well be black ice on the roads.
I have finished the under construction pages for gardening - boquets, Fruit and Vegetables and Bugs.
Loaded the October, November and December "under construction" pages to my website.
I used my Canon S3 IS for the November shot to get the good bokeh on the leaves.
I loaded the 'under construction' pages for August and September. I really like the golden catapillar with his surrounding habitat.
This is going faster than I thought it might go.
I have added the under construction pages to my web site for the unfinished albums of June and July. Only a couple of hundred to go.
This is the photo on my 'under construction' page for Gardening - Alpines. I have decided to make these under construction pages for all the albums I have listed, but not completed, on my web page. Hopefully this will mitigate some of the annoyance people might feel when they try to access an album and get the 'not found' message.
I have finally loaded our trip to Malta in 2003, to the Travel page. I like how it looks. There is one little mistake that I found, but its too small to be bothered with reloading it all. Check it out! www.mmmee.com/03Malta
I tried to clean out the cache of my browser, and managed to clear out a few other things, including my favourites on VFXY. My browser is pretty fast, now though. I spent a bit of time recovering my favourites. Hope I found them all.
I had a quick look at Word Press for web page design. Microsoft has a new page builder in beta, I think. I am still thinking about Dreamweaver, though, as the best one. I want to do my own blog, too, probably with pixel post. But this is in the future, as I have a few things to do at the moment.
The lighthouse on Aruba which was the first stop on our Panama Canal Cruise.
I made an 'under construction' page for the 'alpines' album of my website. It might be a good idea to do this for all the unfinished albums; but it will take me awhile to do this. I am almost ready to load the Malta trip, so I shall finish that first.
This is looking through a window into the kilns and furnaces in the working area of the Glass works at Mdina, Malta. They produce some very lovely quality in glass work.
Today, I picked the last of the apples, made one big pie and 3 jars of apple sauce from the ones that were not going to store very long.
We have been having high winds and record amounts of rain on the island recently. The power has been out in many places and some flooding. We have been very fortunate in not suffering any of these things.
I used my Canon EOS Elan 7e with Tri-X and my 28 - 135 lens. Tweaked it a bit in photoshop. I have finished preparing the photos for this album. Should have it loaded in another few days.
A couple of photos from in the marvelous museum in Naples. This museum houses some excellent old Roman Sculptures and Egyptian artifacts. It is a MUST SEE when in Naples.
These photos were taken with my Canon Powershot A50. One converted to b & w. They are to be added to my Travel Malta album. Slowly getting it finished.
I talked with Bernard from NZ a couple of nights ago. He had a good look around my page and offered me some good advise and help. He noticed that I was hand coding all my stuff and I said I did not have Dreamweaver, yet. He said Dreamweaver adds a lot of unnecessary things that make the page take longer to load. Hmmmmmm. I will have to learn how to use CSS as well as the HTML and java script. When playing with Mirc on IRC I noticed the scripting was slightly similar to CSS. If I can find Java Scripts on the net, I should be able to find CSS stuff.
Today I found some good information about my S3 IS on the Flickr S3 IS discussion group. I don't think I will join Flickr, as I can read their postings anytime I want, but cannot ask questions. You now need to set up a Yahoo account to join Flickr, so I guess Yahoo has bought Flickr just as Google has bought our Blogspot. I still want to get a specific .ca domain and set up a pixelpost blog on it. But I have too much to do right now. I must get more of my present page finished too. Bernard suggested I remove the links from my unfinished pages. Hmmmmmmmmmm. I think it might be easier to do an Under Construction for each of them.
My pansy orchid has been in bloom for the last 3 weeks. It only has one bloom this time. I guess I should feed it more often.
I could not seem to get a good shot of it this morning. All the shots were blurry. I must check the default setting for my Canon S3 IS. It is suppose to be Image Stabilized. My old Powershot A50 got far sharper photos than I am getting with this one. I must have some setting wrong.
My token fallen leaf. Canon S3 IS, date: 05/11/06, 1/160 sec., f/3.5, -0.33 exposure compensation
Canon S3 IS, 1/40 sec., F/3.5, focal length: 72.0mm, Portrait mode to get the good blurry background.
1/25 sec., F/3.5, -0.33 exposure compensation, white balance: cloudy with my Canon S3 IS
In going through my photos of our trip to Pompei I found this one of the baths. I love the sun shining down through the skylights. What a life those Romans lived!
Canon S3 IS with the zoom stretched to the max 12X, on a sunny October 31, 2006. I was shooting from the street down towards the harbor past Capital Iron's outdoor merchandise. These are 3 baskets sitting atop a packing crate. Shot in 'P" mode, white balance at sunny, exposure compensation at -2stops, F/4.0, and 1/1600 sec. shutter speed. This long lens is great fun. It is not as sharp as the shorter lens on my old Powershot. My disk space is filling up fast with these large pictures. I will eventually need to do some serious culling or just burn them all and delete.
I finally learned how to do a 'photocopy' with my scanner and printer. Its quite easy when you take the time to read the manual. Sigh.
We had pears for dessert today. I must go out and see if I can rescue any more of them. It froze last week, and rained torrents two days ago. I am finally over my cold and slowly getting my energy back. I have much to do in the garden and on my web page. Its time to get at it. :)
I have spent the afternoon creating a .pdf presentation with music, that includes these 3 photos from our Panama Canal Cruise. The butterflies and waterfall from our Costa Rica excursion and the cliff diver from Acapulco, Mexico. I must make a page on my website to add these PDFs. They're fun to do. The photos can be higher resolution and larger than my regular page photos, plus they have music. When I get them loaded to my page, I can just link friends to their .pdf instead of filling up their email box. How cool is that?
The other photos on the presentation are for the Cyrs. We got back yesterday from Sequim via the Port Angeles ferry. We had been to the Bremerton Swap meet. It poured rain all the time we were there. I found a few blue glass treasures. Hagar (their dog) is so well behaved. Irene is taking him to clicker doggie school too. Wish I had got pictures of him.
We are having heavy rain for the last 3 days. There are rivers flooding their banks all around the island. We need the rain, but not all of it at once! Our little Colquitz river is still within its banks. Considering its just across the road from our house, that is a bit of a relief.
I got my 36 exposure slide film back from the lab early this afternoon and spent most of the afternoon learning how to scan my slides with my Epson 4870 and how to tweak them in Photoshop Elements. That film is Fujichrome velvia 50 and is highly saturated film. I am not sure I care for that. Its too far off real.
I shot this with Fujichrome velvia 50 in my Canon EOS Elan 7e, set up on my deck, pointed North, for approximaely 8 hours. At some point the battery died, so my time to leave it out next time is debateable.
My star trails were left out too long, perhaps. A shorter period of time might have given smaller radius to the circles. The batteries died at some point in the 8 hours I had left it out, so I am not sure how long the next time should be. Or perhaps just set the lens to the widest setting possible. Hmmmmmmm, there is much I need to learn yet.
My lens fogged up on the second attempt to shoot, so despite my wiping the lens at hourly intervals, I still only have a blank slide, on my second attempt.
It is fun to try this stuff, anyway. I have learned a lot about my scanner todsy, also. I boot up Adobe Elements and go to Import and my scanner. Do all the settings in Professional mode.. I seem to be able to enlarge them from the small slide size, also do unsharpen mask, do noise removal, then any changes in PS, of course.
Tomorrow we leave on the ferry to go to the Bremerton Swap meet with Dan and Irene on Saturday. Should be another fun weekend. There are tons of old cameras at these swaps. Hmmmmmm, wonder if I should start a collection. Maybe I can find a gizmo to show slides with .. not a projector, but one of those little box things that just lights up the slide -- don't know its name.
Today I tried doing a panorama with my Canon S3 IS. I just shot my kitchen area from sitting in my comfy chair in my computer/reading/light garden room. I did not use a tripod nor pay any particular attention to lighting settings or cleaning up the kitchen area for a good set up. I stitched 4 exposures together with the Stitch Assist software that came with my camera. It turned out not to bad, I think. What do you think? I had done 5 shots but the last one was too much out of line and light with the rest. That stitch assist program is pretty cool. I can move each individual shot around to line up any horizontal or vertical lines. I did not try that, but its possible. My camera manual says I can take 26 photos in its panorama mode. Man that would make one huge photo. This one is reduced from 7700 pixels wide to only 1000, as it was too wide for blogspot to load. Hope it shows up on VFXY.
