The winter that wouldn't end. - April 15, 2020

It's been about five days since I've been out shooting anything.. or out of the house even.. I don't really remember. There's been a bunch of snow and grey and un-inspiring cold weather. Even the lunch time walks have been deferred. It's surprising how quickly it's already the middle of April. Today wasn't that great either so I was surprised when the suggestion of the lunch time walk was agreed to.

For a while now when we've walked the circle there have been gophers running around enjoying the spring like weather. I thought a capturing a gopher poking out of a hole surrounded by snow would make a fun photo. So I grabbed my camera and an old lens.

I don't normally bring the camera on the lunch time walk but maybe I should, cause you never know what you might see. As it turns out having the the camera with me also turns on my photographers eye and now everything I look at becomes a potential photo.

I brought a long lens (300mm + 1.4x Teleconverter) to take the gopher photo because you don't want to get too close to them or they'll just run away and pop down into their hole.  The long focal length also offers up a nice compressed view which I used for the photo below after asking Jen to go waaaaay down the path.

white

On the opposite side of the circle we ran into a cold north wind that surprisingly(!) diminished our enthusiasm for walking outside and we ended up cutting back through the community where the wind was largely blocked by houses. Due to the route change there would be no gophers today.

Uncomfortable - March 29, 2020

I must have left a dome light on overnight and now the car battery is dead. A few times this winter when the temperature dropped and block heater wasn't plugged in the battery would struggle to start the car. No problem though, I'd hook up the charger, plug in the block heater, wait a bit and that would do the trick. But now it seems the battery seems deader than dead. I can't use the key fob to unlock to doors and the key doesn't work in the handle lock. I'm guessing the door lock is electronic it just doesn't turn or maybe it's broken somehow. I don't know, I never use the key in the door. Anyway, without being able to unlock the door I can't pop the hood because the little lever is inside the car. If I can't pop the hood I can't charge the battery. I might have to call the AMA to see if they can slim jim the door.

With my car out of commission I was able to borrow Jen's van and was again headed towards downtown. Like the past few days, there were clouds above and towards the east, a heavy cloud bank on the western horizon and a gap in between. The gap was wider than yesterday and I was hopeful that the setting sun might catch the clouds at some point. With the sun directly out I ended up on 10th ave and about 5th street SW. The shot below is just after I'd parked the car.

hard light

Storm Clouds - May 29. 2014

Driving home from work there was this massive cloud in the east.. instead of turning towards home I followed it and was able to get a few pictures that I liked. When I first pulled over I spotted a fellow who must have been a storm chaser. His truck had a little antenna with some spinning wind vane things on it and he was taking pics of the storm cloud. I thought that I was in the right place when I saw him there. I drove over to the field that was full of water hoping to get some reflections.

Dragons and Clouds - July 23, 2013

On the way home from work found myself driving through Bridgeland. There is a dog park on top of the hill there and I stoped to look for wild flowers. Instead I found that there were dragonflies about. This fellow sat on the twig and was reasonably still. I was using my 300mm lens with extension tubes on it. This was the first time that I'd tried the tubes out after picking them up more than a year ago. After a bit of wrangling with the equipment I was able to get a few macro shots of the dragonfly. In the original pic you can make out the lenses on the dragonfly's eyes which is pretty neat. I enjoy shooting macro shots like this not always for the end result but because I'm able to sit and focus (ha ha.. focus) on one thing for a while and forget everything else, like having a bit of tunnel vision. It's a nice escape from my mind - plus you get to stop, slowdown and look closely at something that you normally wouldn't see.

Then later in the evening it looked like there would be some interesting clouds and maybe a rainbow out east of the city so off I went.. reminds me of that aloof person that's always off chasing butterflies and rainbows. Hey, that's me! Anyway, as I was driving down the gravel road following the rainbow but it wasn't very strong and I couldn't find a composition to put it in on. There was this cool light coming from the west where the sun was making its way down to the horizon. I spotted this line of trees that were creating cool shadows on the ground in my rear view mirror so I stopped made a photograph of it.

Further down the road, I came across this farmers field where they had started harvesting. I liked the curves the hay makes on the ground and the interesting sky in the background. I tried to capture it using a couple of filters to block the light from the sky a bit so the camera could also capture the darker-in-shadow foreground.

I left here and while driving back stopped to photograph big storm clouds in the sky. As of yet, I've not posted any of those photos, but if I do, they'll show up here.

Thanks for looking,
Brad.