I have a bit of uneven exposure on the left side of this photo, and I am not sure why.

Jen & Giles

So here is Saturday’s photo. I went out with my friend Craig and we shot some more waterfalls in the Hamilton area.

Tews Falls, Icicles, 57a/365

And another from the same day:

Tews Falls, base

And on my birthday I went took the day off work, as is my tradition, and amongst other things that day took a few photos around the area. The best is probably this one:

Barber Mill

There were a couple more that day that turned out ok:

Tree

Badlands

The first image is the remnants of an old cup and saucer found out back of one of the old homesteads.

Cup and Saucer, 50a/365

And the second I could not resist, it is layer upon layer of ice formed as the water has been draining away.

Ice on Ice, 50b/365

Now don’t complain I posted two photos for one day here. I was extremely busy this week, I went for a few days with very few hours of sleep, as we worked through a network jeopardy situation in repeated maintenance windows each night for most of the week. With all this going on, I did not have the time to shoot during the week, and when I saw two great opportunities today, I was not going to pass them up just because there is only supposed to be one photo a day. It is my photo blog, my personal photography exercise, and if I want to shoot and post multiple photos in one day, then I say I can do so.

Day 49: Saturday marked Callum’s 11 month birthday, so as usual he gets a day to be the subject of the PoTD. In this case I used my handmade wide angle camera with my 90mm lens. I pre-focused to 3 feet, but Callum was very interested in the camera, and scooted up to me so quickly that he ended up in front of the focus area, and is thus a little blurry.

Callum – 11 Monts old, 49/365

Day 43: Today we had some friends over for dinner, and has now become the custom after dinner we had a quick sitting for a portrait. Even with the flash being almost inline with the camera I still should have used a reflector for some fill on the left, and it would have been better to have them another foot in front of the background.

Mother/Daughter, 43/365

Day 42: While I was making dinner yesterday I had Callum in the kitchen with me, in his high chair. He started out interested in the activity around the stove, but a few minutes later he started to head bob, and them fell asleep.

Callum nods off, 42/365

Day38: Gemma & Declan are taking skating lessons, and we are only allowed to take pictures on two occasions. Apparently due to the complete misrepresentation of Canada’s Privacy laws the instructors believe it is a violation of said privacy laws to take pictures of your own children learning sports in a public place.

This last Monday was one of the two occasions on which the privacy laws magically no longer apply . So I snapped a few photos with my DSLR, and then setup my big Bender 4×5 in the middle of the stands, and fired off 4 sheets. The exposure times were quite long, as the light in an Arena is not actually very bright, so as you can see we have a lot of motion blur. If I do this again I will consider pushing my film to iso 1600.

Gemma is the third from the right.

Gemma Skating, 38/365

Day 37: This is a repeat of one of the shots that on a previous occasion came out completely blank. This is a focal plane shutter capable of exposure from 1/10th of a second all the way up to 1/1000th of a second. I cut this out of an old 3.5×4.5 Speedgraphic. I am going to mount it into a lens board adapter to be a shutter for barrel lenses on my Deardorff.

Shutter 37/365

I was looking through pictures taken around Brampton that are posted on flickr, using the explore places function. And I came across this picture:

by Lone Primate.

It is a short portion of 2nd Line, which once upon a time was a significant road. But today this tiny bit is no longer connected to any road, and is only accessible by foot on a hiking trail. I find it fascinating to find abandoned spaces in the middle of all the urban sprawl.

After spending close to an hour last night exploring the associated set of photos on Flickr, I had decided this road would be what I was going to shoot next. I knew it would be buried under snow, but I had to get out there to see it for myself. I’ll be returning again to explore further, and think I’ll shoot in this area a few times as the seasons pass over the coming year.

2nd Line, 36/365

Skaters, 35/365

Yesterday I played with another veg picture. I think the stock pot I used for background worked really well on this one. I used continuous lighting so that I could clearly see the final composition, and not be guessing as to highlight locations etc.

Tomatoes, 34/365

Two days ago I shot a couple sheets of my new(old) focal plane shutter from an old Speed graphic 3.5×4.5 which is soon going to be my shutter to use with barrel lenses on my Deardorf. But once again I have two blank sheets. I’m perplexed as to what I did wrong. It is frustrating to fail, but especially so when there is no learning from the experience. Since I don’t know what went wrong I cannot learn to not do it again.

So the result here is a scan.
It is a scan of a print.
The print is a contact print.
It is an 8×10 contact print.
Which means it comes from a massive 8×10 negative.
And the negative was exposed in a homemade pinhole camera.
The image is the birch tree in my front yard, I thought the wide angle view of the pinhole camea would make it look majestic or something. I was wrong.

8×10, pinhole, contact, 32/365

“It’s like, how much more black could this be? and the answer is none. None more black.”
-Nigel Tufnel, “This is Spinal Tap”

It was only a couple degrees below zero, and the sun was out. I decided to take the kids to the zoo, and figured that I’d get in a photo there somewhere as well. Declan didn’t want to come, but that was OK, since Mommy wanted to stay home as well.

I was going to put Callum up in a backpack so he would have a good view of the animals at the zoo, and we wouldn’t have trouble moving through the pavillions, which are often tricky with a stroller. With Callum on my back, a diaper bag on one side, my large format gear on the other side, and my tripod in hand, it was quite a load.

Now, you know when it is cold out that you won’t see too many animals outside, but there are still many advantages to winter visits to the zoo. I’ve gone to the zoo during the winter many times in the past, and always enjoyed it. There aren’t any crowds, there aren’t any lines, and nobody is in your way when you are trying to see the animals.

But this time wow, not only were there almost no animals outside, the pavilions we went into weren’t that great either. Half the Africa Pavilion was closed, and you had to double back to get out. And in the Americas pavilion it stunk of paint, and Gemma couldn’t stand it.

At the end of the day we headed to the “Tundra Trek” section, as we figured there must be something there outside. But when we got there the disappointment continued. Maybe the Arctic wolves were out, but we couldn’t find them. The Polar bears were certainly absent from the open portion of their enclosure.

At the end of the day we had been walking around the zoo for 2 1/2 hours, and I never once saw anything that caused me to want to set up my camera. I could have taken a picture of the cheetahs, but it didn’t look like much of a photo, and I really figured something better would present itself later.

In the end it was a pleasant hike, but when you add up the costs it wasn’t worth the trip this time.
Gas $15
407 Tolls $15
Zoo Admission $36
Lunch $17
———-
Total $83

Oh, and the photo of the day, it isn’t from the zoo. After I got home I figured I’d just try something silly with some of Declan’s toys. This photo was supposed to be backlit by flash, with everything in silhouette, looking dark and mysterious. But alas I cannot go more than a couple days without making significant bone headed mistakes. So the mistake this time: the camera lens was still set on time exposure mode, when instead it should have been set to 1/60 of a second. So what we ended up with here is the room light revealing the whole scene, and the presence of the flash isn’t even noticeable.

Sentinel, 30/365

We went to both Tiffany Falls, which were frozen, and Sherman Falls, which had water flowing. At Tiffany quite a few ice climbers were gathered around, and taking turns trying the ascent. I moved back down the creek bed and took this picture with my 150mm at f16 1/15s.

Ice Climbers, 29/365

Another lesson to remember, when using Post-it notes to mark your holders with which film is in which holder, please remember to remove the Post-it before inserting the holder in the camera. Having a Post-it note inside of your camera is not conducive to capturing a good image.

Post-it note

At Sherman Falls I tried my B+W ND3 (1000 times) filter to shoot a long exposure of the falls. I think it turned out OK. Using this filter my exposure which had been a thirtieth of a second without the filter became two and half minutes, given the falling water a nice blur.

Sherman Falls
[click for a larger view]