Day 308 - Waiting for the wind

A little NB patriotism for you. Here, the strange New Brunswick provincial flag flutters over the old post office building on Queen Street in downtown Fredericton.

Despite my antipathy toward the flag itself, I'm quite pleased with this photograph. I like the way the building frames the flag and I like the gust of wind that unfurled the flag just long enough for me to get this shot. For some reason, I'm ridiculously pleased with the fact that the corner of the flag does not intersect with the top of the building so that the flag is completely encompassed by the sky.

I've also figured out that I can't think of a single other word for "flag", hence its repeated use in that last paragraph. Oh well. This photograph was taken with the Olympus fully on automatic: my contribution was seeing the interesting composition and then waiting for the gust of wind before pressing the button.

Day 307 - Taking liberties with Her Majesty

New Brunswick's Legislative Assembly building dates from 1882 (even though its front wall features a prominent "1880" carving) and, according to the descriptive plaque in the foyer, is made of sandstone with a mansard roof and matching towers (see bottom photo). It is currently in the process of being refurbished, with the exterior work being done first.

I trust that, as part of that refurbishment, the tradespeople won't display the same lack of respect that the workers who installed security cameras and pigeon-proofing showed when they defaced this poor carving of the Queen that keeps watch on the building's front doors (see upper photo). Yes, that is actually pigeon wire sticking out of Her Majesty's crown!

This photograph was not as easy to take as it might at first appear. The carving is located inside the arch of the doorway, meaning there wasn't much light to work with. Since the Olympus' flash washed out the details on the face and crown, I had to figure out a way to get a decent exposure while not losing too much depth of focus nor adding too much shake. I have to admit, I cheated a bit. I kept the shutter speed at 1/60th while allowing enough of an aperture to keep focus throughout the shot.

In other words, I underexposed the image on site and then fixed the exposure on my trusty old iMac.

I was also forced, because of the harsh angle at which I took the picture, to rotate the image slightly so that the carving appears straight in the photo. Neat what you can do, isn't it?

The lower photo is of the building itself. You can't get far enough back from the front wall to take a photograph of the entire building with a nomral lens so I had to zoom way out and accept the distortion caused by the use of the shorter lens (somewhere close to 28mm). Unfortunately, you can't fix that on the iMac.

Day 306 - The photographer's gain

Some time ago, I posted a photograph of a man on a crane, working on the top of the Fredericton City Hall clock tower. What I thought was going to be a quick fix has turned into a major renovation of the outside of this historic building.

This new photo shows the tunnel they've constructed that leads into the city tourism information bureau on the first floor of the City Hall building. Looks inviting, doesn't it? "Come on in and find out what we're all about!" it shouts at the passing tourist.

The tourist's loss is the photographer's gain, as this scaffolding-and-mesh structure serves as an interesting subject, with its many lines and colours, the perspective it provides as it moves into the background and the contrast between the structure itself and the curved shape of the bricks on the ground. A challenge to get the lighting right but a neat photo nonetheless.

Day 305 - Jack says "Hi"

Happy belated Hallowe'en everybody. Believe it or not, this is the FIRST Jack'o'Lantern I have ever carved. He adorned our brand new front porch last night for the Hallowe'en festivities and we even got a compliment about him.

In order to get some shots of Jack lit from within by a candle, I got out my mini tripod and started taking shots at various aperture and shutter speed settings to see what would work best. Needless to say, as I fiddled with the camera, the evening darkness also grew denser so it turned into quite a challenge.

The top photograph is the first one I took. It's got an aperture of about f4.5 with a shutter speed around four seconds. It's a good, crisp picture but I wanted to see if the flickering flame of the candle could be more visually interesting with a smaller aperture and a longer exposure.

The lower shot was taken under much darker conditions and with a 15 second exposure. This resulted in a dark photo (no matter how long you made the exposure, there just wasn't much light) so that Jack's face stands out better but the slower shutter didn't seem to do much with the flickering flame. My guess is that the light from the candle was already diffused as it passed through the carved features of Jack's face, so that, even if the flame itself moved while the shutter was open, it made no difference to what the camera saw and captured. The question of course is: which photo do you like better?