Photo favourites for December

#1: Street Lamp and Decapitated Statue (336)

#2: Starry-Eyed Moon (352)

#3: Bridge at Night (354)

#4: Dancing Tree Lights (358

Raise a glass. With this blog entry, we will have completed our review of last year's 365+ daily photos and chosen our twelve favourites by month.

It turns out December of 2011 was an impressively rich time for me, from a photographic standpoint. I had a hard time narrowing down the selection to five and am happy with the final product. It was an extremely productive month!

#5: Skater (362)

As usual, please look these images over and cast your vote, using the Comments feature or via email or in person. Which is your favourite photo from December? Once I have all the votes in and a winner declared, I'll start thinking about producing a calendar for 2013, using the twelve winners and a select few of the runners up. Want one?

Confirming my Hopewell hopes

A while back I posted this black-and-white photograph of a particular flower-pot rock at Hopewell, taken from the book This is New Brunswick, by Jessie I. Lawson and Jean MacCallum Sweet (Ryerson Press, 1951).

I promised to try to take the same photo, showing the same rock from the same angle, the next time I went to the Hopewell Rocks Provincial Park.

I had found a shot in my collection from 2012 that showed what I thought was the same rock (I was right, by the way) but wanted to make sure with a more carefully planned picture.

The new shot is still not a perfect recreation (I was a bit rushed as the tide was coming in) but it's not too bad.

Amazing how much has changed, isn't it? And yet how much has stayed the same. The "face rock" to the right (which is actually standing behind the rock that is central to the photo) hasn't changed much but a full one-third of the main rock is now gone. Neat, huh?

A Flash of Hummingbird

Hummer, with flash and cropping

Hummingbirds are turning out to be the bane of my photographic existence. I don't know how many times I've encountered one of these tiny little beauties and completely failed to get even a remotely decent picture.

First off, they're small. Very small. Tiny even.

Second, they're quick. Even though one of their most remarkable characteristics is they're ability to hover in the air, hummingbirds don't hover very often, usually flitting from place to place in rapid movements.

Third, hummingbirds rarely land and rest. At least when I'm around.

And fourth, hummingbirds are skittish little things so that any attempt to get even a little bit closer with your camera makes them fly off into the distance.

So I end up trying to take them from at least twenty feet away so as to avoid scaring them. That forces me to use a long zoom (they're about two inches tall, remember) which makes simply getting them in the view finder difficult.

I try to keep the shutter speed as high as possible, in order to try to freeze their speedy wings, but also need to keep the aperture small so that the depth of focus remains good in case they move.

The hummingbird in context

And then, of course, there's that ruddy autofocus which, at twenty feet, is more likely to find the pole to the left of the bird or the leaves down below than the hummer itself. Ugh.

So last night, we're out in our backyard having dinner with some visiting friends and a little hummingbird shows up at our honey suckle bush. We get our cameras and try, try, try to get some decent shots.

The fact that daylight was fading proved both a curse and a blessing. A curse because it meant there was little light to work with, forcing shutter speeds down and apertures wide. A blessing because, well, it actually convinced me to try shooting on the Olympus' automatic settings, using the built-in flash.


I'd never thought of doing that before but, surprise surprise, it worked pretty well. These are the best hummingbird photos I've ever taken. Not that I'm saying much with that but still...

November's photo favourite is...

November's Favourite Photograph: "Impermanence"

"Impermanence". Surprise surprise.

I honestly believe that "Beer Taps" is the best, most interesting photograph of the bunch and yet not one person voted for it nor even mentioned it as being among their favourites.

"Jumpy Lights" is also an interesting photographic experiment but received little support while "Magic Pods", with its interesting shapes and textures, was also mentioned by only one person.

I find this amazing. And yet, I can't disagree with the support that both "Dog Days" and "Impermanence" received. I love both pictures, for their simplicity and their beauty. Maybe I can learn something from this: complexity and technical brilliance does not necessarily make a good photo.

And poor, poor "Waiting for the Wind". I don't think people even noticed it, despite the fact that it was the first shot on the list. I hope New Brunswick isn't insulted by that. And... I think it's a pretty good photo!