Day 59 - Striking a Balance

Another day brings another snow storm to Fredericton, this time a disgusting mixture of wet snow and rain that came to a climax just as I was heading home from work. This kind of weather certainly doesn't invite me to go out and take photographs!

That's why today's picture was taken indoors, inside the bus that took me home through the yuck. In this case, I tried to find a way to capture the balance between the warmth and comfort inside the coach and the wet nastiness of the outside world. I tried a whole pile of manual settings to get it just right and finally settled on this one: I wanted to keep the shutter speed at 1/60th of a second to avoid shake-induced blur but, with the low-light conditions, that forced me to open the aperture right up and lose some depth of focus. Even then, I was concerned that the images would be under-exposed.

No problem, actually. I quite like the drama of the lighting in this shot. The outside world, which might have been over-exposed had I adjusted for the dimness of the interior of the bus, comes across damp and dreary. The panel light in the bus gives the interior side of the shot a crispness that pleases me. All in all, I think it's a pretty cool photograph.

Day 58 - A Photographic Enterprise

I liked this window display when I first saw it and have enjoyed it every time I've walked past. I wish I could remember the name of the store but it always slips my mind: it's a science fiction, comic book and memorabilia store in downtown Fredericton that's filled with neat things.

I find it interesting to take pictures of window displays in shops, mostly because I think of it as me adding my creativity to the creative efforts of someone else (namely, the person who set up the display). Sometimes, you want to capture the window exactly as they set it up. Sometimes, however, you want to frame your shot to re-create the image, to focus attention on an interesting detail or two. In this case, I like the angle of the spaceship and its busy location in the window. I also like the green guy in the bottom left corner. I wonder what Captain Kirk would do if the Enterprise ever encountered him in outer space.

Day 57 - Sunny Snowbank

From Patti comes this interesting image of Marlee, huddled into the side of a snowbank in our backyard. After a pelting storm that added more than a foot of snow to the already thick carpet that blankets our yard, the sun came out and gave our dog a chance to do some snowy sunbathing.

We often think of Marlee as being white in colour: photographs like this one prove otherwise. She's a cinammony cream colour and we're certainly at no risk of losing her in a snow storm. Meanwhile, we've got another 15 centimeters of snow coming on Monday so we may just see our five-foot fence disappear entirely from view. We've had many interesting experiences since moving to New Brunswick but snow is truly the most overwhelming image of this province for me.

Day 56 - Snowfall in the Backyard

We're getting hit with another blizzard here in New Brunswick tonight. Expected accumulation of the white stuff is 35 centimeters (14 inches for our American friends) but we're well on our way to beating that prediction. The streets are almost impassable and walking the dog has become hazardous: the combined snow from this and previous snowfalls is easily higher than Marlee's head. It's the kind of night when she trudges through the shoulder-high snow for a couple of steps, then turns to you and makes a face that says, "Are you kidding me?"

I thought the combination of nightfall and snowfall would give me a chance to play with the manual settings on the Olympus without even having to step foot outside again. I put the camera on top of a jar on the windowsill in our kitchen, pointed at the backyard. I then set the shutter to stay open for 15 seconds and tried a bunch of pictures at different aperture settings, placing no trust in the internal light meter as I worked. The meter told me the top photo was just slightly under-exposed and the other two were strongly over-exposed (if you can believe it!).

All three pictures tend toward a sepia-toned black-and-white feeling, due to the lack of light and monochromatic colour scheme in the frame. The top photo (f8 at 15 seconds) is my favourite. Its shades are deep and soft and the snow itself has a texture to it. The middle photograph (f6.2) is still nice, with more details coming through on the trees thanks to the extra light but the snow is starting to bleed out. I find the lowest photo seems like it was taken in daylight almost, which is interesting in a way, but the image itself loses something as a result. Look at the snow in the last picture: it's almost completely lacking in detail.

Day 55 - Roll Up the Rim

I saw the best TV commercial for Tim Horton's annual contest, Roll Up the Rim To Win, today. I won't spoil it for you by describing it in detail but it caught me completely by surprise when I realised it was actually a Tim's ad. Great stuff.

And so, in honour of that ad and the contest itself, I offer these two photographs to document a strange Fredericton phenomenon: planting your Tim's cup in the snow once you're finished with it. I believe that you are supposed to place it with great care, sometimes flat in the snow, no coffee spilling, and sometimes at a jaunty angle, still free of spillage, as if you've put it there temporarily to cool the drink down a bit.

It's sort of a civilized form of littering.

On a single walk home from work, I saw at least six of these cups, displayed so neatly in snow banks. I can't figure it out. It wasn't until I had walked past four of them that I decided to start taking photographs of them. Not magical by any means, the photographs, but an interesting presentation of a social habit that seems to have caught on around here.

I, myself, am a bit of a sucker for the Roll Up the Rim contest, buying more Tim's coffee during the period of the contest than throughout the entire remainder of the year. And, of course, I never win. I think I've won a couple of coffees, a cookie or two, but never anything more substantial. Oh well, it's obviously great marketing for Tim's. As is that TV commercial I mentioned at the top of this blog entry.

Day 54 - Winter Bulbs

Large-scale ornaments on outside trees seems to be a popular decorative idea here in Fredericton. It can often be a very lovely sight.

In fact, I think these particular ornaments are quite pretty when you see them in the neighbourhood. This photograph, however, makes the display seem discordant and unappealing. I think there is simply too much in the frame (the three bulbs, of three colours and three shapes, the red light bulbs, the branches, the green cord, the strings, the snow, the shadow) to be pleasing.

Again, I didn't see the full effect of the picture until I got it up onto my computer screen. I had really liked this little outdoor display. I did it a real disservice by photographing it the way I did. I probably should have pulled back a bit, allowed one element (the branches or the show, perhaps) to dominate so that the other bits did not overwhelm the senses.

Oh well, lesson learned, I guess.

Day 53 - Wistful Flowers

These lovely little flowers look desperate to escape their glass prison, don't they? I saw them there in the upper-floor sunroom and I just thought: what a sad sight! Tiny flowers peering out longingly at the world. Oh jump, little flowers! Jump!

I never know how a picture will turn out until it shows up on my computer screen. I think I took this photograph because I felt the flowers looked very sweet up there in the window, a nice decoration. I didn't realise that, by failing to zoom in close enough, I would make the scene more wistful than anything.

Day 52 - Seats from the '70s

This photograph makes me laugh. I wish I knew what made me take it and I wish I could understand why I get so much joy from it. I don't know: what do you think it could be?

These are the very strange seat covers of a bus from the Fredericton Transit System. They just seem so '70s that they really capture the essence of Fredericton to me. The bus is as modern as any bus I've ridden in a Canadian city but the design, the atmosphere, the decoration is about 30 years behind the times. It's like Mary Tyler Moore with modern technology!

Day 51 - A Mailbox

A recent illness left me physically unable to photograph so I'm going to have to draw from the archives to provide images for the four days I missed.

For some reason, I'm very fond of this photograph of an askew mailbox on a brightly coloured home. It has a nice feel to it and I like the way the red of door and the grey of the shingles balance, with the black mailbox in the centre of the image. No magic to the actual picture taking: just point and shoot, really.

Day 50 - Hello Saki

As you might have figured out from this blog, we think the world of our golden-doodle, Marlee Marie. I think she's the cutest, sweetest dog in the whole world. I also think she's a bit of brat but...

Then I see a dog like Saki (pictured on the right). Wow, is that ever a gorgeous dog. I don't know what breed he is (Malamute? Husky?) but I just think he's such a purely beautiful dog. He and Marlee get along very well so meetings like this one on the street in Fredericton are generally happy occasions. Saki is a kind and gentle dog, exactly the kind Marlee likes.

I just find it interesting to see the two of them together: Marlee so cute and curly and unkempt and Saki refined and lovely. The only frustration is with the camera: because of the delay between pressing the button and the shutter clicking, I miss an awful lot of great pictures.

I'm pleased that I captured this one, though.

Day 49 - An Oak Leaf Cluster

I don't understand oak leaves. At least not the ones around Fredericton. They seem to want to hang onto their branches all the way through the winter. We've had something like seven feet of snow and there are the oak leaves, hanging around, minding their own business, refusing to fall down and join all their friends and colleagues on the ground.

I've never noticed this before. Is this normal for oak leaves? I think they're quite a lovely colour, though, and as the snow melts they add much needed flavour to the landscape. Too bad the point-and-shoot camera has such trouble focusing through the branches to capture the moving leaves. If you look very closely, I think you'll see that the leaves themselves are just a bit fuzzy in this shot.

Day 48 - Moon Over New Brunswick

A beautiful moon, in full bloom, hanging between the goal posts of the new all-purpose field in South Fredericton as evening sets in. What could be better?

I took several shots like this using the Olympus' automatic settings but I worried that the low-light conditions would force it to push its shutter speed so low that the photo wouldn't work. So I rubbed a flat spot on a snow bank, set the camera on manual, then closed the aperture as far as it would go (f8). That forced me to use a shutter speed of something like 1/8th of a second, no problem since the camera was sitting on a stable surface.

I snapped the shot. Then I checked it on the screen on the back of the camera and I'm glad I did. The internal light meter had fooled me into slowing the shutter speed too much. The first photo was actually over-exposed so that you couldn't see the detail nor the reddish colour on the moon. So I sped the shutter up one level (to 1/16th of a second) and tried again.

Thank goodness I checked. The second picture is so much better. The sky is a deeper blue and the moon is alive with colour and detail.

Day 47 - Bus Reflections

Fredericton buses gather like a herd of blue and white elephants outside the King's Place Mall just about every half hour of the day. I've taken many pictures of them, trying to capture the clumsy busy-ness of them but, so far, all I've achieved is a bunch of pictures of buses lined up placidly along the street.

That being said, I'm pretty happy with this image of one of these coach's sideview mirror, with its interesting perspective on the front of the vehicle. I'm also pleased with the way the building above King's Place frames the right side of the image in severe perspective, distorting even further the sense of space in the photograph.

Day 46 - Back to the Coffee Shop

Apologies that I didn't get out to take new photographs today. I'm afraid a combination of awful weather and ill health kept me indoors and inactive for the day. So I offer another interesting picture from my recent visit to Coffee and Friends in downtown Fredericton.

This still life features a porcelain mug and a steel tea pot, neatly arranged and served up in low-light conditions. Once again, by forcing the shutter to remain open longer, I feel I've added a depth and richness to the colours of the objects in front, a warmth almost (if you can call off-white and burnished steel warm).

I'm also pleased with the composition of the picture, with the rounded shape of the mug's handle matching the plump tea pot in behind, both of which contrast with the straight line of the side of the mug itself. The shine of light on both objects works for me and I'm particularly pleased that I managed to avoid including the ugly drip of coffee that mars the side of the mug just to the left of the picture's edge.

Day 45 - A Valentine's Rose

Happy Valentine's Day. This rose is brought to you by our beloved golden doodle, Marlee Marie, who seemed to think the three-foot plush flower was for her and her alone.

The simplest of point-and-shoot photographs, this one involves the auto setting and the flash, trying to catch the puppy playing with the rose. I find that the Olympus sometimes struggles with focus in this kind of situation and there is usually a fairly long delay between the time I press the shutter release and the camera actually takes the picture. I've missed a lot of interesting action because of that.

Anyway, I compensate for that possibility by taking more shots, just to make sure at least one turns out. And I'm happy that this one did.

Day 44 - Coffee Break

I think I'm happier with this photograph than it deserves. Taken at a local coffee shop (Coffee and Friends on King Street in Fredericton), this picture reduces a fellow coffee drinker to three constituent parts: a hand holding the newspaper, a hand holding his coffee cup and his nose.

I'm not sure if I think it's art or hilarious or a bit of both. The odd thing about the photo is that, while I did do a little cropping to it in iPhoto, I cut off the left side of the frame, not the right. I actually blocked the man out of the frame on site, leaving only the three remaining bits. I'm weirdly proud of this photo and I don't really know why. For some reason, I feel it captures (for me at least) the essence of the coffee break.

Day 43 - Foosball Abstract

Sometimes interesting photography comes simply from looking at commonplace objects differently.

For example, I really like this close-up picture of a foosball table at one of the residences on campus at the University of New Brunswick. By placing the camera very close to the blue players in the foreground, at about their level, I have created what I think is a very intimate shot of the game. The focus in on the red men in the second row, meaning both the blue players and the ball (in the back) are just slightly fuzzy which creates an interesting effect.

I tried photos like this without using the flash but the result was a bit of a dimming of the colours so I went with the flash-aided picture. The clarity and vigour the flash brings combines with the intimacy of the close-up framing to bring new life to an old past-time. I think it gives a new perspective on the game, don't you?

Day 42 - A Bottle of Red

Drinks and then dinner at the Garrison District Ale House in downtown Fredericton provided a nice opportunity to play with the very slow shutter speeds on my Olympus camera.

I placed the camera on the table, its lens tilted slightly upward by placing it on its own lens cap, and set the aperture to as closed a setting (f8) as is possible, to cut down on the amount of light that would enter. I then slowed the shutter as much as I could without overexposing the image (10 seconds, I think) and pressed the shutter release.

The result is this warm, rich photograph where the wine glass and bottle in the foreground as well as the static elements in the background are all in crisp focus but the people themselves, who are moving, are fuzzy. I know, it looks a bit like an advertisement for Robert Mondavi but I am still very happy with it.

The long exposure makes sure the colours are rich and pure while the details stand out. I'm really enjoying this kind of photography.

Day 41 - Distant Spire

I like the idea of this photograph better than the actual picture. I thought the church spire in the background behind the houses took on a somewhat ghostly, spiritual look through the snowy air and hoped to catch that quality in the shot.

Unfortunately, the cloudy skies reduced the available light so much that the picture came out a bit flat, in my opinion. If the houses in the foreground were brighter and more colourful, I think the steeple in the background would appear less substantial, more ethereal. Too bad.

I'm not saying this is a bad picture. Far from it. But it's not as good a shot as I had hoped to get as I stood there in the snow, setting up the camera. I'm not sure there was any way I could have gotten what I really wanted: how do you make the foreground vibrant and bright while still allowing the snow to shroud the church spire in the background?

Day 40 - An Elven Wizard

Meet Etcetarian. He is my alter ego in the world of Dungeons and Dragons. He is an elven wizard and, today, in his first ever "Encounter", he personally vanquished all seven foes sent against our valiant party.

Etcetarian, the figure, was prepared for me by a colleague at work who is also a member of our party. I'm impressed with the detail on this tiny figure and I'm pleased I was able to capture that detail in this photograph. I tried a variety of camera settings for this shot but, perhaps not surprisingly, the best came when I used the automatic settings with the flash.

My goal with this shot was to use the two objects in the image (the figure and the character description sheet upon which he stands) to represent the incredible complexity of the game itself. That meant I wanted the figure in sharp focus and the sheet itself to move from focus to blur, which I think captures the current state of my own understanding of Dungeons and Dragons. After my first Encounter, some things are clear in my mind but many, many other things are still a complete mystery.

Day 39 - An Elevated House

This strange sight greeted me as I walked home through a blizzard of wet snow: a house on stilts. Actually, there were two houses on stilts side-by-side behind a huge muddy hole in the ground. It looks like they lifted the buildings right off their foundations, set them aside, then dug everything up.

I guess they plan to put in new foundations, perhaps even a couple of basements, then drop the houses back into place. Because of the angle of this photograph, you can't actually see the pit that lies between the photographer and the elevated building. A bizarre sight, however. I can't say the photo does it justice but it's the best I could considering light and distance issues.

Day 38 - Street Scene

We had a hard time choosing a photograph today, not because we had so many fantastic pictures from which to choose but because, out of the 30 or so I took on my walk home, not one jumped out at us as rising above the rest.

That being said, I'm still quite fond of this picture. I think the house on the right, with its red-brick fence and cream-coloured trim, is quite beautiful but, when I take photographs of it straight on, the camera tends to flatten it and render it rather mundane.

By changing the angle, by moving the fence and house to the right side of the frame, I think I've managed to capture some of the beauty it possesses. The white snow brings out the red in the brick and I hope the whipped-cream topping on each of the fence "posts" adds a little whimsy as well. I also like the colour of the home on the left of the picture, a nice counter-point to the brick's reddish tones.

Day 37 - After the Snow

Fredericton got another foot of snow overnight, leaving the city with impassable sidewalks, snow-laden trees and finally brilliant blue skies.

This photograph is intended to capture the latter two elements: the evergreens in the centre are weighed down with the white stuff while the last remnants of cloud clear out to make way for the beautiful deep blue of the sky. The camera's automatic settings do a great job with photos like this so it really is just a matter of pointing and shooting.

Day 36 - Sunshine and Ice

I walked all around this tree and this icicle, trying to find the perfect angle. With the sun still rising in the clear blue sky, the light was beautiful but I wanted to make sure I got the right combination of sparkle from the icicle and drama from the background.

I think I got what I wanted with this picture.

I am particularly pleased with the sharp focus on the needles and ice in the foreground, then the soft focus of the background (a snow-covered rooftop). The sparkle in that background snow is an unexpected bonus and I think the small patches of blue that peek through the trees add a nice touch as well.

As I said a couple of days ago, sunshine equals good pictures and I think today's shot is further proof of that axiom.

Day 35 - Light and Dark

One of the challenges of a project like this is dealing with the contingencies that arise throughout the year. Such as illness. I've not been feeling very well this week and so, on days like today when I'm completely wiped out, I have no energy to go out and take a fresh photograph.

My original plan was to post only photographs that were taken on the posting date. This would force me to be consistent and be creative. I've had to abandon that plan this week and, to be honest, I'm not sure that's a bad thing. It's allowed me to post good photos from my archive rather than mediocre pictures simply because the mediocre ones were all I took on a particular day.

Today, for example, I am posting a photograph I took on my walk home yesterday. Another sunshine photo. I like this picture almost as much as the one I posted yesterday so I'm happy to have reason to share it with you.

I like the contrast between light and dark in this picture, which, thanks to the strong sun, takes on an almost black-and-white quality. I like the way the sun makes the front of the building stand out so strongly against a dark background and I like the lines of the building itself.

These kind of flat-front houses are common in Fredericton and in the Maritimes as a whole. They hug the street and often offer brightly painted wood siding. In this case, however, the light is so bright I'm not really sure what colour the building is. Beige? Yellow? White?

Day 34 - Sunshine and Red Doors

We finally had some decent weather here in Fredericton: not too cold and brilliantly sunny. With that and the slowly expanding days (sunset doesn't take place until well after 5 p.m.), my walk home from work was pure joy.

I took full advantage by wandering along York Street with my camera in hand, snapping pictures of whatever took my fancy. Sunlight makes for interesting photographs, I think. Of course, with such a casual approach, you never know what you're going to end up with until you get home and download the pictures to the computer.

That's why I was thrilled to see this little gem flash onto my iMac's screen. I took the picture because the shadows on the two red doors caught my eye but, once I started looking at the shot on the screen, I saw so much more: the soft sunlight warming the lamps, the wonky house numbers, the tops of the doors; the subtle shadow, like a blanket, swaddling the scene; the ornate design of the wooden doodad between the doors; even the brightly coloured, hand-made sign in the one window and the drooping chain in the other.

So far, I think this is one of my favourites of the year. It's a point-and-shoot photo but the light and shadow, the same-but-different-doors, those crazy numbers all make it a winner to me.

Day 33 - Snowfall Warning

A heavy-snowfall warning in Fredericton came to flaky fruition this afternoon when we had 20 to 25 centimeters of the white stuff dumped on us in a matter of hours. I took this photograph at about 5:15 p.m., just when dusk was settling in.

Now, I'm going to admit something to you. This photo is a bit of a cheat. In order to enhance the blizzard-like feel, I closed the aperture as far as it would go on the camera, then chose the slowest shutter speed I could get without allowing in too much light. I think the settings were f8 for the aperture and 1/6th of a second for the shutter speed.

What does this do? It increases the depth of focus and allows each snowflake to move quite a distance while the shutter is open. This makes it look like there is more snow in the air than there actually is. If I had taken the shot with a shutter speed of 1/60th of a second, for example, each flake would have been frozen in the air, individual, visible. This way, because their movement is captured in the picture, it looks like there are more, that the air is literally thick with snow.

The second, smaller photo is more evidence of cheating but, this time, a cheat that actually takes away from the impact of the photo. I made a copy of the top photo, then used iPhoto's "Enhance" function on it. The program automatically deepened the colours of the trees, mailbox and pole. It's a cheat because it's an artificial way to "improve" the photo. It is a failure because, by deepening these colours, it makes the objects more visible and the snow seem less overwhelming.

Neat, eh?

Day 32 - Pastel Evenings

I was under the weather on two counts today (it was bitterly cold outside and I am not feeling well) so I didn't get a chance to go photograph hunting. Instead of trying to find another indoor still-life, I decided to go back into my Fredericton 365 archives to find a good shot that I haven't already used.

I was very happy with this photograph when I first saw it on the camera but other shots seemed more immediately interesting. My first response to this one was that I felt it looked a little too much like a postcard. The more I look at it, however, the more I like it and see qualities in it that go beyond mere postcard prettiness.

For example, I love the pastel colours in the early evening sky, with the patterns of clouds complementing the gentle blues, purples and golds. I also like the way the darkened shapes of the graveyard and the city beyond still retain enough detail to catch the eye. I am pleased with the composition: the tall, full tree to the left, the spire in the centre and the sparser trees on the right. I think this photograph works in ways I didn't at first realise. And I'm happy to have a chance to share it with you.