Green Grass Of Home

I know that lots of you out there don't share my love of the cold weather.  I've been thinking about the lot of you these last several days as we've gone through some of the coldest days that we've seen this winter.  I won't lie, I'm not looking forward to the summer months.  I hate the heat, humidity and sweat that comes with them.  However, since I'm a nice guy at heart, I thought I'd take a little trip through my archives to see if I could find a little something to warm your souls.  This was actually a little bit more difficult than I had thought since most of my photograph during the summer months seems to take place after the sun had gone down.  After some digging, I came upon this photograph that I took a few years ago.  I was on a little walk with My Lovely Assistant on the bicycle path near the Champlain Bridge in Brossard.  I really liked this little part of the path with the small hill of green grass, the trees full of leaves, a blue sky with no clouds to be seen and the bike path that grabs you at the bottom of the photo and brings you right around the curve.  This photo was shot at f/7.1, 1/400sec, ISO 400 at 70mm.  Don't worry folks, before you know it the days just like this one will be back, and that's when you can expect me to put some frozen river photos in an attempt to trick my brain into thinking it's not really as hot as it really is.

Cloud City

I think it might be time for a flashback to elementary school and a pop quiz.  Here's the question, it's not really difficult.  You're in the process of recovering from a rather long bout of the flu.  You find yourself with a day off.  Do you, A)Stay at home and take it easy or B)Go outside in the -20 degree weather to take some photographs?  If you chose 'A', you probably made the right choice that 9-out-of-10 television doctors would prescribe.  I, however, am not always known for making the right decision, so I chose 'B'.  It was the second cold snap, or I guess the new buzzword is 'Polar Vortex', of the winter and I had missed out on taking some photographs the first time because I was doing the 'Day Job'.  I really wanted to make my way down to the St. Lawrence river in order to take some pictures of the vapour coming up off of the water.  Last year, I posted a photograph that I had taken a few years before on a similarly cold day.  However, I was always a little disappointed with it because there was no vapor on the water.  This time I had all of the vapour I could have wanted and then some.  I began my morning by dragging my butt out of my warm and comfy bed and then putting on as many layers as possible.  A brisk Metro ride and walk later, and I found myself  back on Île Sainte-Hélène, at the exact same spot where I had taken some photographs of the fireworks a few weeks before.  As I had hoped, there was lots of vapour coming up off of the river, thick enough at times to block out the buildings of Montreal just across the water.  The vapour was so thick at times that you could see the shadows from some of the waterfront statues actually climb the vapour as if it was a wall.  You can see an example of this in my third photograph.  The other thing that I really like about these cold days is how blue the sky gets.  I really like the blue of the sky on these freezing cold mornings.  I almost didn't get any photos at all.  As soon as I got to the waterfront, I took my camera out of it's bag and I couldn't adjust either the aperture or the shutter speed.  I was able to change shooting modes, but not the settings.  After a couple of minutes of swearing under my frosty breath, I took out the batteries and held them in the palms of my hands for a little bit (thanks for the tip Pierre).  I put the batteries back in the camera and thankfully everything began to work properly once again.  Well, except for dust spots.  For an example of what Montreal would look like with the Chicken Pox, keep on reading.  The original plan was to just get some shots from the waterfront and head back to the comfort of home.  However, since I was already on the island, I decided to hit a couple of sites I've been to before and take a couple of extra photographs before calling it a day.  After all, it was only -28C with the wind.  The first photograph was taken at f/4.5, 1/640sec, ISO 100 at 24mm.  The second photograph was taken at f/2.8, 1/2000sec, ISO 100 at 65mm.  Photograph number three was taken at f/2.8, 1/2000sec, ISO 100 at 25mm.  The fourth picture was taken at f/13, 1/320sec, ISO 100 at 24mm and the fifth photograph was taken at f/10, 1/200sec, ISO 100 at 24mm.  I tried playing around with different camera speeds in order to create different effects with the vapour.  Some of the shots taken at slower speeds kind of make the vapour come a little more alive as the slower speeds captures more of it's movement.  Had I brought a tripod with me, I could have probably used some longer speeds, but the sun was very bright so I would run the risk of over exposing the photos.  I'm still happy with the shots I came home with.  Just to finish us up, here's a panorama style shot that I like to make.  It was shot at f/13, 1/80sec, ISO 100 at 24mm.  For those of you who have stuck around, here's the dusty shot of Montreal.  I used the Levels tool in Photoshop to make the dust more clear.  I clean my lenses every time that I use them, I use a hand blower to clean the sensor on the camera, but my dust problems only seem to be getting worse.  If any of you have any tips, feel free to let me know.

Christmas Eve on Wellington

Way back on Christmas Eve, while the rest of the "In-Laws" were off saying their prayers, and saying a few for me as well I hope, I was out in the minus -20 degree weather taking photographs.  Maybe not the best choice, but I was given the okay by My Lovely Assistant to skip the service so I could wander around town and take some photographs.  So, imagine the pressure that I'm feeling at the moment.  I skipped out on the Christmas Eve church service to take photographs.  I hope that they like these, otherwise my invitation to Christmas this year might get lost in the mail.  As previously mentioned, all of these photographs were taken in the early evening of December 24th.  I was walking along Wellington street in the borough of Verdun, very close to where My Lovely Assistant's sister, who was hosting Christmas Eve this year, lives.  I walked down the street a little bit until finding myself at the corner of Wellington and De L'Eglise where I plopped myself and my tripod down and began to snap away.  The first photograph that you see in this set was taken a little further up the street, but all of the rest were pretty much taken on the same block.  I didn't bring lots of equipment with me for a couple of reasons.  First, it was freezing cold outside and I really didn't plan on fumbling around changing lenses while watching my fingers, and camera, freeze.  Secondly, while I consider myself to have the size that would prevent such happenings, Verdun has a bit of a 'past' to it and it just takes one 'crazy' to make things uncomfortable.  I wasn't looking to be uncomfortable, so off came the battery pack, which proved to be a bit of a problem as my tripod latch was still attached to it which meant a quick walk back to the house.  I also only brought along my 18-55mm lens, otherwise known as 'the lens that came with my camera which never gets used anymore".  I wanted to give it a little bit of action, and the lens is small enough so that I could fit my camera into my pocket while I was walking.  It was dark out, so I was obviously out looking to take some long exposure shots of both the buildings and cars that were going by.  Traffic was kind of light, it was Christmas Eve after all, so I had to make the most of the few cars that actually did pass by.  Over the course of the hour and a half that I was out walking the streets, but batteries drained down to about half power due to how cold it was.  With the first shot that you saw here on the page, I wanted to get a shot of the street with the ball shaped decorations that line it.  I took a few test shots to find out what kind of exposure time would work best and I settled on 12 seconds.  As soon as a car approached, I waited just before it passed me to pull the trigger and then counted down from 12 in my head before releasing the trigger.  The photograph was shot at f/13, 12sec, ISO 100 at 31mm.  The long exposure allowed for me to capture the light trail of the car that passed by, creating a nice red line that you can follow through the photograph.  The second photograph follows the same concept as the first.  I placed myself at an angle to see both the church and the traffic that flowed on the street.  I liked the red lights of the church and wanted to make sure they would be in the photograph, as well as the cars that were passing by.  This photograph was taken at f/13, 29sec, ISO 100 at 18mm.  The third photograph features yet more light trails.  I liked the store signs on the left of the photograph and also that it allowed me a clear view of the traffic lights.  I wanted a real long exposure time so that I'd be able to capture the entire red, yellow, green progession.  I used a really small aperture to make sure that the photograph wouldn't be washed out by the lights of all the passing cars.  This one was shot at f/29, 48sec, ISO 100 at 35mm.  The fourth photograph was of the same traffic light on my corner of the street.  I kind of like taking photographs of traffic lights.  This one was shot at f/29, 34sec, ISO 100 at 35mm.  The fifth photograph was shot from the same side of the street as the church.  The building on the right had bright red lights and I wanted to catch the glow from the windows.  This one was taken at f/16, 13sec, ISO 100 at 27mm.  The final photograph from this set is a 'gasp', Photoshop creation.  I know, I speak badly of Photoshop, but it can be fun to play with.  This last photograph was taken f/10, 10sec, ISO 100 at 18mm.  Then in Photoshop I played around with the Levels tool and also used the Colour Balance function to add a whole lot of red to the photograph.  After that, I was about to make the cold walk back to the party when I was surprised to see My Lovely Assistant, her father and sister walk out of the very church that I was talking photos of, so I was able to warm up a bit during the ride back to the house.

Still Trapped Under Ice

Give the people what they want.  That's something that you often hear in the 'arts'.  Well, the people have spoken pretty loudly this week and a whole bunch of you seemed to really like a photograph I put up late last week.  If you want to revisit that photograph, you can follow this link.  Since I had taken all of these over the Christmas holiday, they were in the process of being forgotten to my hard drive as other photographs had been taken since these.  I was really hit hard by the flu last week and thus had lots of 'couch time' where I was able to go through many of these photos and play around with them a bit.  That led to the photograph you all saw last week, which was liked by a whole bunch of you.  Speaking of which, don't forget that you can also visit my Facebook Page and don't forget to 'Like' stuff while you're there. Yes, I'm just like everybody else out there, I like it when people tell me that they like my photographs.  That's part of the reason why I always go to the same places to get my photographs developed when needed.  It's a nice rush of 'awesome' to be told by the clerk that they really like your photographs.  The same goes with the comments I get over on my Facebook Page, and the few comments that I've gotten here on the Blog.  So, this is kind of a round-about way of saying 'Thanks' to everyone out there who takes the time to visit the Facebook page and the blog.  A whole bunch of you liked the ice shot, so here are a couple more.  There's not really much more that I can say about these photographs that I didn't already say in that first post.  What I was really trying to capture with these shots were the lights.  The ice was really nice, but I really liked the way that the light reflected off of the ice.  It kind of reminded me a blood flowing through a vein.  The light was flowing through the ice.  I think that this can really be seen in the second photograph.  If you look at the long frozen branches, you can see the light reflected in all of them.  The first and third photograph are a bit more noisy, but it was that loud mix of different colours that drew me into taking the photographs in the first place.  The first photograph was taken at f/5.6, 4sec, ISO 100 at 80mm.  The second photograph was taken at f/22, 13sec, ISO 100 at 68mm.  Photograph number three was taken at f/5.6, 8 sec, ISO 100 at 55mm.  I actually used three different lenses while taking all of the photographs that I did of these lights, which were on display at Mom & Dad's house.  I used a regular, wide-angle and telephoto lens for different shots so that I could make sure that I got every possible angle that I could think of.  I spent close to an hour taking these and many other shots, but as always, it was more than worth the time.

Ready, Aim, FIRE!

Remember a while back when I mentioned that I had three updates to the blog all prepared and ready to go?  Time to use up one of them.  This set comes to you originally from November 11th, 2013.  For Remembrance Day, I headed out to McGill University in downtown Montreal for the annual ceremony.  You can see some of the other photographs I took during the event by following this link.  Those of you with sharp eyes will notice that it says '2013' on the watermark.  That's because I actually had these photographs ready to put up here on the blog back in November, but other things came up, and these guys ended up getting pushed back.  Most of the time you hear me talking about the aperture when I'm discussing the photographs that I took, but this set was purely about shutter speed.  I didn't find myself in a great location to take some photographs of the actual remembrance ceremony, so I broke off from the pack near the end and headed to the back of the grounds where all of the heavy artillery was located.  Part of the official ceremony is a 21 gun salute.  I wanted to see if I could capture the muzzle flash of the gun going off.  For that, you need lots of shutter speed.  I originally began shooting at f/2.8, but it would blur out more of the image than I wanted.  After a couple of blasts, I settled on f/7.1 as a good aperture as it kept everything nice and clear.  It was kind of an overcast morning though, so shooting at f/7.1 presented problems for speed.  That meant it was time to up the ISO.  I took shots at several different ISO's, beginning at 100 before finally ending up at 800, which offered me enough speed to get the photo that I wanted.  By looking through the viewfinder, I was able to see what speed the camera had calculated to use for me.  Foolishly, I thought I'd be able to catch the flash just by listening for the gunner as he made his call and trying to snap the photo as the gun went off.  All I ended up getting was smoke, smoke and more smoke.  No way was I fast enough to try and shoot by ear.  That meant it was time to shoot in Burst mode.  Essentially, I put my finger on the trigger and let the camera shoot away. On my fourth attempt, I finally got what I wanted, fire coming out of the gun.  The first photograph was taken at f/7.1, 1/2000sec, ISO 800 at 55mm.  The second photograph was taken at f/7.1, 1/2000sec, ISO 800 at 55mm.  Here are the final two photographs to finish the set.

f/7.1, 1/2500sec, ISO 800 at 55mm

f/7.1, 1/3200sec, ISO 800 at 55mm

You may have noticed the speed went up on those last two shots.  I was shooting in AV mode, meaning that I chose the aperture and the camera chose the shutter speed.  The sun must have broken through a little more on those last two shots so the camera adjusted by upping the speed a little bit.  It's fun to look through these photos like an old-fashioned flip book, and watching the gun go off through my pictures.

Light My Fire

As the days spent on my couch continue to grow, I find more photographs to play with.  My philosophy has always been that everything is worth being photographed.  I've always believed that even the smallest of details can make for an interesting photograph.  Take this photograph here.  It began life as the photograph of a nearly spent tea light.  My Lovely Assistant has this table decoration that is a rotating nativity scene.  When you place four tea lights at the corners of the decoration, the heat from the flames causes a fan at the top of the decoration to turn, which then makes the decoration rotate.  I waited for one of the tea lights to have pretty much used up all of its wax so that the metallic base could be seen.  Then, using my Macro lens, I focused on the burning end of the wick and began snapping away.  I really like all of the different colours that this photo produced.  The yellow of the flame, the orange of the burning wick and the burned golden colour given off by the near empty casing.  I also really like the light blue tracing that you can see near the bottom on each side of the flame. This shot was taken at f/2.8, 1/500sec, ISO 400 at 60mm.  I cropped in a little tighter on the flame and voila.  Fun little projects like this are easy to do and often produce some very cool results.  If you like this photo, feel free to follow this link to a shot of some candles I took a few years back.

Waves Of Chocolate

Since I've been feeling rather miserable these last few days, I decided to take a trip through my hard drive to see if I could salvage something out of the photos that I've deemed 'problematic'.  Such was the case with the what you see here.  This was originally a picture of a very delicious chocolate potato chip cake.  However, I couldn't get the flash to work properly.  Here's a little trade secret, always blame the flash.  While playing around with different crops I noticed that the texture of the chocolate was pretty cool, and the way that My Lovely Assistant had spread the chocolate icing resulted in some very wavy shapes.  This photo was shot at f/6.3, 1/250sec, ISO 100 at 24mm.  I played around in Photoshop with the Levels function and then cropped pretty tightly over the icing to create the photograph you see here.  I think it's kind of interesting, though I'm also pretty loaded on cold medication so my judgment may be off.  I'll let you decide.  Just for kicks, here's what the photograph looked like originally.  Yes, it was delicious.

Trapped Under Ice

My Lovely Assistant and I have pretty much been knocked out of action over the last few days by some different strains of the flu.  No point in going further than to say that massive amounts of Tylenol, Lambert cough syrup, Halls cough drops and Tropicana orange juice have been consumed.  All of those companies can thank me later for the free publicity.  Speaking of free publicity, have any of you had the chance to visit the Facebook page of The Lost Fingers?  Or the twitter feed on their website?  You really should take the time to do so as they were kind enough to link back to a post of mine from from January 4th which was full of photographs that I took of them.  Do me a favour and pay them a visit and I promise that there will be no more links in the rest of this posting.  Getting back to how we're all sick at the moment, I drove My Lovely Assistant to the day job this morning and quickly discovered that everything had been covered by some freezing rain.  Not a very serious amount, but enough to remind me that I had taken some ice pictures over the Christmas holidays while visiting my parents.  They had a nasty freezing rain storm a few days before Christmas, and everything was still covered.  Including the shrubs in the front yard.  I tried to focus on one of the branches, making sure to include some lights in the background while also making sure to grab the longs droplets that had turned into ice.  I also positioned myself so that the street lights would reflect on the ice, giving them what I think is a nice colour.  This shot was taken ta f/5.6, 1sec, ISO 100 at 43mm.  I then cropped the image tighter to 8" x 12".  Most people don't like freezing rain, with good reason, but I hope that you'll all like this photograph.

Saturday Night's Alright For Fireworks

At this point in time, it should come as not surprise to long time readers that I enjoy taking photographs of fireworks displays.  I haven't taken a formal survey, but I think it's safe to say that if you were to take the time to look at all of the updates I've posted here since August 2012, fireworks would likely be my most photographed subject.  This past Saturday was the final show of the Telus Fire On Ice winter fireworks.  I had a couple of potential locations in mind, but I chose to return to Île Sainte-Hélène.  I was still stinging from my last visit to the island where I came home with no photos at all.  While I stayed on the island, I changed my shooting location.  I wandered a little bit, passing a Fox who wasn't very happy to see me and grabbed whatever it was he was eating and took off in another direction. I soon found myself at the La Ronde parking lot.  You've all seen one of photographs taken from this location before.  I had thought about going there to photograph the fireworks the week before, but ended up deciding to wait since my batteries ended up being dead.  One of the great things about this location, is that it allows me to crop in some different sizes than the usual 8" x 12" that we're used to seeing.  I was able to crop a couple of these shots at 12" x 6" and even 12" x 4".  The result is what I find to be a nice panorama style shot with the fireworks going off at one end of the photograph while the skyline of Old Montreal fills up the other end.  I also really like the reflections of the fireworks and the buildings that can be seen in the river. I think my favourite shot of this set is the one at the very top of the page where you can see the fireworks hitting the river below.  It was also very cold when I took these pictures, and you can see the smoke/steam coming out of several of the buildings of Montreal.  I also like the little star effects caused by the long exposure times which can be seen on the very top of a couple of the buildings. Just a couple of fun things you can spot in these photographs.  With that in mind, I also took a couple of photographs of the skyline without the fireworks, so don't be surprised if you see some of those pop up here some time in the future.  Time for us to get a little technical.  The very first photograph from the top of the page was taken at f/13, 7sec, ISO 100 at 68mm.  The second photograph was taken at f/13, 11sec, ISO 100 at 66mm and then cropped to 12" x 6".  The third photograph was taken at f/13, 10sec, ISO 100 at 24mm.  The fourth photograph was taken at f/13, 6sec, ISO 100 at 24mm.  Here are a two more photographs that I wanted to share to bring an end to the set.

f/13, 4sec, ISO 100 at 24mm

Cropped to 12" x 6"

f/9, 4sec, ISO 100 at 24mm

Cropped to 12" x 6"

No real reason why that last shot was taken at f/9 compared to the others.  I just wanted to try out some different apertures.  On that note, those of you who are tired of seeing photographs of fireworks, you should be good until the end of June when the next Loto Quebec Fireworks competition begins.  For the fireworks lovers like myself, I can't wait for them to begin.

Frosty The Silver Surfer

In an effort to practice what I preach, here are a couple of photographs of a little Christmas tree decoration that My Lovely Assistant gave to her sister as a gift just before our Christmas party.  This little guy was in the process of getting lost in the shuffle along with lots of other photographs I've taken over the Christmas holiday when I remembered my words from a few updates ago.  I need to stop saving these photos and get them out there for people to (hopefully) see.  I was in the process of selecting photographs that I took on Saturday night for what I had hoped would appear in this update, but it was taking longer than anticipated.  Rather than just spend more time doing that, I decided to let this the surfin' snowman catch a wave.  This little guy caught my eye as I was taking some photographs of My Lovely Assistant's bûche de Noël.  I liked the way that the lights from the tree were reflecting on and through him.  I tried to take a few shots using my flash, but I quickly found that the flash was killing the effect created by the Christmas lights in the tree.   I was going to have to shoot these photographs by hand, in low light, which meant it was time to up the ISO.  For those of you who were paying attention while reading about the bûche de Noël, I mentioned that one of the photos was shot at ISO 1600 because I had forgotten to reset my camera after shooting something else.  Now you know what that something else was.  The second photograph allowed yours truly to make his second appearance inside of a Christmas bulb.  I still like the effect of the lights on Frosty, but I also like the light effects of the blue bulb that is in the top right hand corner of the photograph.  The backgrounds are blurred out in both photographs because I've always really liked a blurred background.  It helps to make what you want to stand out, really stand out.  The first photograph was shot at f/2.8, 1/40sec, ISO 1600 at 64mm.  The second photograph was taken at f/2.8, 1/25sec, ISO 1600 at 40mm.  I also cropped the second photograph to 8" x 8".  It's not a size that I usually would go with, but I felt it looked better as a square than the usual rectangle.  You don't have to take my word for it, feel free to decide for yourselves.  I've included the 8" x 12" version of the same photograph at the bottom of this page.  Feel free to let me know which you prefer.

The Lost Fingers & Valérie Amyot

Those of you who took the time to read about my photographs taken during the New Year's Eve fireworks display at the Old Port of Montreal may have also read the part where I mentioned that My Lovely Assistant and myself also attended a live concert by The Lost Fingers.  The Lost Fingers are a jazz group who also do jazzed up covers of songs from the 1980's & 1990's.  We really like them, so our New Year's Eve plans were locked when we saw a sign saying that they would be performing at the Old Port on December 31st.  On this night, they were joined by singer Valérie Amyot.  I had my camera with me to shoot the fireworks later that night, but I was hoping that I'd be able to find my way close enough to the stage to be able to take a few shots of the concert as well.  I had brought my telephoto lens with me because I thought that at best, I'd be probably stuck in the middle of a crowd, fairly far away from the stage. Much to my surprise, when we got to the Old Port the crowd wasn't as large as I had thought it would be.  Might have had something to do with the freezing temperatures as well.  People kept arriving on the site, but they were generally walking past the stage and headed down further to the docks of the port, I suppose to get a good spot to watch the fireworks.  I stood by the stage for a little while when the desire to get in there and start snapping away began to be a little bit to strong.  I made my way to the edge of the stage, and a few songs later, thanks to some people deciding that they'd had enough and were ready to leave, I actually found myself right against the metal barrier that separated the crowd from the stage.  While I was stuck to the left of the stage and unable to get closer to the center, I was still closer than I probably had any business being, and also closer than I had even thought that I would be.  I pulled out my camera and wasted little time in snapping away.  It was great to be a pretend concert photographer for the night.  This experience ranks right up there with the great opportunity I had back in July to get close enough to the stage to take photographs of the Girls Wanna Have Fun outdoor concert in Greenfield Park (you can see those photographs here, here, and here).  It was really fun.  The music was great, and there was even a little bit of snow falling from the sky.  I really like the photos where you can see the snow blowing in the background.  The first photograph was taken at f/2.8, 1/500sec, ISO 1600 at 70mm.  The second photograph was taken at f/2.8, 1/200sec, ISO 1600 at 70mm.  The third photograph was taken at f/2.8, 1/250sec, ISO 1600 at 70mm and the fourth photograph was taken at f/2.8, 1/200sec, ISO 1600 at 70mm.  Here are a couple more to finish up the set.

f/2.8, 1/200sec, ISO 1600 at 40mm

f/2.8, 1/400sec, ISO 1600 at 70mm

As I said earlier, I transformed myself into imaginary concert photographer for the night, and I tried to stick by the rules of a concert photographer as well.  That meant that I just stayed in my spot for three songs, snapping as many as I could in that time.  I then moved along, leaving my spot for another, as had been done for me.  I was really happy with the results, I think they look great.  Even better, I remembered to reset my ISO back to 100 before the fireworks began.  A double victory.

Tasty Christmas Reminder

One of the biggest problems I have running this blog is that sometimes I'll go through a period of time where I will take lots of photographs, but don't find the time to get them up here on the blog.  I always have this fear of running out of photographs to put on display, even though I currently have photographs taken as far back as last May that have yet to have their fifteen minutes of internet fame.  Not to mention all of the photos taken before I began running the blog.  As a result, I then find myself in a situation where photos get pushed back down in the pecking order.  I've actually got three sets of 'updates' that have been ready to be posted since early November 2012, but have yet to be posted because something new has come along.  I suppose I shouldn't complain.  It's good that I'm shooting as much as I am.  However, I now find myself in a situation where I have loads of Christmas photos that will very soon be not very appropriate for the time of year.  It's hard to get excited about images of snowy Christmas lights...in April.  So, in an attempt to get a few of those X-Mas photographs out there, I'd like to begin with some photos I took of the bûche de Noël (Yule Log) that My Lovely Assistant made.  This was the first of two that she made for different Christmas parties.  She decorated her bûche with some coloured sugar dots, pieces of caramelized almonds and the letters to spell out Joyeux Noël which were little gingerbread cookies.  It was almost to pretty to eat, but eat it we all did.  The first photograph was taken at f/8, 1/250sec, ISO 1600 at 25mm.  Yep, forgot to change the ISO again.  The second photograph was taken at f/13, 1/250sec, ISO 100 at 24mm.  Both were taken using my flash, which was bounced off of the ceiling (thanks again Marilyn).  I, and about everyone else at the party, can't wait to eat it again next year.

Happy New Year

The more things change, the more they stay the same.  Or, something like that.  Those of you who have been around since last year, or at least since the last update, remember that last year for New Year's Eve I ended up dragging My Lovely Assistant and myself through shin-deep snow, high winds and somewhat wet conditions to get some photographs of the annual New Year's fireworks display, down at the Old Port of Montreal.  This year, I decided that rather than watch from across the river, we'd actually go to the Old Port itself for the show.  There was live music provided by The Lost Fingers, a group we both enjoy, so we figured we'd brave the cold and celebrate the New Year with a bunch of strangers, rather than alone on a snowy island.  I was a little bit unsure about where to place my tripod in order to best capture the fireworks as I had never shot them from this location before.  I kind of had an idea where the blasts would go off, but until the explosions actually happen, you're never 100% certain.  The countdown to midnight began and I had one hand on my remote trigger and the other on my tripod, ready to move if necessary.  Much to my happiness, I was exactly where I needed to be and I spent the first twenty minutes of 2014 snapping off photographs of the fireworks over some of the beautiful buildings of Old Montreal.  Afterwards, I was even able to have a little bit of a conversation about art with one of the 'characters' that you find around the Old Port.  I hope he was able to enjoy some of this frozen champagne.  In the meantime, here are a few of the photographs that I took.  The first shot was taken at f/11, 5sec, ISO 100 at 24mm.  The second shot was taken at f/11, 6sec, ISO 100 at 24mm.  Here are a few more.

f/11, 6sec, ISO 100 at 24mm

f/11, 8sec, ISO 100 at 24mm

f/11, 9sec, ISO 100 at 24mm

f/11, 8sec, ISO 100 at 24mm

That's six of the several that I ended up taking.  As you probably noticed, I shot all of the photographs at 24mm.  I like to shoot fireworks as wide as possible so that I can later decide if I want my final image to be vertical or horizontal.  You see a little mix of that here.  I like the vertical shots as they are nice and tight, really making the explosion the star of the photo.  I also like the horizontal shots as they give a wider view of the entire scene.  You see more of the buildings, as well as the crowd that was watching the show.  If you look real close, you may even be able to see a few faces of people who were being photographed by others in my shots.  They remained still enough to be seen during my long exposure times.  It was a great way to bring in the New Year and I was glad that even the -23C weather didn't keep us away.  Thanks to everyone who took the time to visit in 2013 and I hope you continue to do so during the year to come.  Happy New Year to you all.