geocaching | photography | adventures
357/365: Santa’s Latté Helper.
One of the variables that goes into wrapping Christmas presents in a house with two cats, is, well, the two cats. There’s nothing quite as entertaining to a feline member of the household as wrapping paper, tinsel and ribbon. So, as you see here, they’ll offer to “help” you to wrap the gifts. We managed to get everything wrapped without too much collateral damage. Thanks, Latté
356/365: Everywhere
Spent the day, and the night geocaching in a winter storm. We have a saying in the BFL Crew that we’ve gone caching in everything but a named storm. On the way back to our homes we travelled the 400 through King City, and stopped at the service centre with the Tim Hortons in it. Since we were having a lovely weather event with wind and snow – that wasn’t happening in Toronto – CityTV was up here filming things like blowing snow, and the garbage cans migrating across the parking lot. Pretty sure they filmed me trying to catch up to my hat that blew out of the car once I opened the door too. So, I returned the favour and made their news truck/cameraman my photo of the day. Look close at the truck and you’ll see the wind wrapping the snow around it.
355/365: Loading, Please Wait…
An image of my latest gadget getting loaded up for use. This is my little eTrex 30 GPS which is considerably smaller and lighter than my older GPS units are. I’ve prioritized on having a good backcountry GPS for some of my future trips and this little fella can go up to 25 hours on one set of batteries. Perfect for those overnight hiking trips.
354/365: Wetland Before the Storm.
Quick image of a wetland near my office before Thursday’s winter storm hits. This is the preliminary clouds just setting up. As for why I’m at a wetland during my lunch? Because there was a geocache located nearby!
353/365: The Cleaning.
Look again. This photo probably isn’t what you think it is from your first glance – and that’s what I like about it. This rather dramatic scene can appear to be a scene of destruction – flames of doom with smoke filling the sky. But that’s not what it is at all – this is a car wash, with the brushes climbing my windshield while I sit inside with my foot off the brake. Since I had the camera in the passenger compartment I decided to have a little fun. The red glow comes from the tail lights of the car in front of me.
352/365: Bokeh Penguins.
Since I got my 24-70 lens, I’ve been meaning to try it out for something like this – bokeh out the Christmas tree lights. These lights are a bit smaller than usual just for the record – it’s fibre optic lights but still. I grabbed a few members of my “penguin family” and placed them a little over a metre away from the tree and focused on them. I’m rather happy with the lens for this sort of thing.
351/365: Eyebrows are Overrated.
Today’s photo was taken at one of my favourite places for a date. Since it was my birthday, and a milestone one at that, my wife took me to “The Melting Pot”. This is a fondue restaurant we discovered last year on a trip to the USA and then we found there is one in Toronto as well. Despite it being over an hour to get here from home, we’ll gladly make the trip over here passing hundreds of other options along the way. This photo was taken at the dessert phase of the meal – this is a white chocolate fondue with banana and cinnamon. The flame is from the cinnamon being applied to the mixture, which already has a small flame. It tasted even better than this looks 🙂
350/365: Christmas Tree Abstract.
Images cast on the wall from a Christmas tree’s lighting. This was spotted at a family Christmas party.
349/365: BFL Crew at Happy Trails To You.
Here’s an image of BFL Crew members at one of this year’s more popular night caches from BFL Boot Camp 7. A few of us still needed to get around to visit GC40Y3Y BFL 7: Virtue – Happy Trails To You, so that was the goal cache for the evening. As expected by the many happy logs on the cache, it did not disappoint. The final is a great spot as well, for, say, a group portrait.
348/365: Geminids.
Ok this was a ton of fun. First time trying the stacked star trails technique. I spotted enough meteors on the way home that a full blown photo shoot was in order tonight. The night started with clouds but opened up between the magic 10pm-2am that the Geminid shower tends to peak. I went out with two DSLRs, my D200 with a 10mm lens pointed north and set to longer exposure times. This image is from my other camera, the D800 with my 24-70 on it, aimed smack at Orion and set for a series of 10 second long images at ISO 1250. I stacked this using StarStax and you can clearly see meteors between the star trails, and a few planes heading to Pearson lower in the sky (dashed lines with red dots).