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119/365 : Waterfall on the Bruce.

Today I hiked just over 33 kilometres of the Bruce Trail with a group of geocachers. As usual, I lugged my DSLR out for the hike as well (hey, what’s another 2 Kg in your pack…). This waterfall was one spot the main group reformed as it seems everyone wanted to stop and admire the waterfall here. I had a hard time deciding which photo of the day but at the end, I settled on this one. I find I very often like to go black and white for the final photo on Bruce Trail hikes … particularly as I was discussing things like Ansel Adams and black and white photography with Steve on this hike. We both pointed our cameras at many of the same subjects but I am quite confident not one of our photos turned out to be the same!

random thoughts, Uncategorized

118/365 : Nemesis.

I’m a homeowner. Well, I should say, my wife, the bank and I own a house. Those of you with condominiums, apartments or groundskeepers (I wish) probably don’t understand the title of this photo. It’s just a dandelion after all. I have a fairly small property, but some times I feel I have more of these growing than the local golf course. One issue is that we can’t (shouldn’t) spray the things and pulling them out of the ground is easy enough. Convincing the Catholic High School I back onto to pull THEIR weeds on the other hand is next to impossible. So for every dandelion I pull, 50 take their place, reseeded by the hundreds of them just the other side of the fence. So, before I decapitated this little fellow, I decided to take it’s picture. At least I can get that little smile!

Another reason for taking the picture? It was the closest thing I had to shoot after cleaning my sensor this afternoon. 

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117/365 : AntiVroooom.

Busy day which kept my mind off my camera unfortunately. This is from my travels home … ordinarily I would be moving 110km/h around here but today so such luck. Stopped was more like it. So today’s photo is a contrast to yesterday’s motoring one!

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116/365: Vrooom! Vrooooom! Weeeeeeeee!

Tonight I had the most fun I’ve had outside my geocaching canoe trips. The project team at work went out to blow off some steam. The chosen activity? Go cart racing. While I really enjoy a good lap around a track in a cart, I *also* appreciate an opportunity to practice my panning shots. Here, my supervisor in the I.T. department zips by at top speed (about 40 km/h for these carts). Overall I had the third fastest lap and my team also came in third. 

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115/365 : Goodbye Zellers.

Paid a visit to our local Zellers store. The one that has the line “Truly Canadian” on the outside of the store is one more example of big Canadian businesses that have fallen to the Americans. The chain was purchased by US retailer “Target” from HBC (Hudson’s Bay Company) … you know, that company that used to own most of what we call Canada today. Target took this one step further and flipped the store over to Wal*Mart – the classic store that comes to mind when we talk about the local guy going under while the big box moves in. Except in this case the department store is closing so the big box can move from the other side of the mall and add a grocery department. The old Wal*Mart location in the mall will make way for an expanded food court and something like 25 new stores. My favourite Fish’n’Chips place better make the cut at the end of the day! 

The actual photo is from inside the Zellers, where they are now selling off store fixtures … shelves, mirrors and the like. Very depressing to see it actually.  

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114/365 : Oh Crêpe. 

Well, today’s photo is an indoor photo because Mother Nature has a sense of humour. Instead of April showers we get April snowshoers … but no accumulation around home or work just bitter cold rain with wind whipping it up. Get home from THAT commute (from hell) and, well, quite possibly the best part of my day. Kristen has made crêpes. Have I mentioned how much I love crêpes? 

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113/365 : Red Waves.

I love abstracts, and textures. This is a textured woodgrain wall at a Tillsonburg restaurant, called Niko’s. I took a bunch of photos here, and wished I had my Nikon available but then again setting up the tripod and strobes and such would most likely be a bit disruptive to the restaurant – so here’s an image from my far more discreet iPhone4S. As they say, the best camera is the one you have on you. 

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112/365 : Why Knot?

Took a trip out to Vaughan Mills today with Kristen. We love going to the Crêpe place at the east end of the mall. We nearly didn’t though as we noticed the Szechuan restaurant nearby. Kristen pointed out these interesting rope knots in the wall decorating the entrance.

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111/365 : BFL Phoon.

Tried an experiment last night while caching with the BFL Crew. I brought a piece of cardboard with the letters BFL stenciled into it (cut out). This card was placed in front of a light source and it was all pointed at a graffiti covered wall under a bridge where we were caching in Brampton. I’m painted in performing a “phoon” on the right hand side of the image (geocachers like to phoon a lot). I say painted because this whole setup was a form of “light painting”. My appearance was setup with an off camera flash heavily zoomed in and with a grid on the flash to control the spill. I wish I had a bit more time to perfect this a bit more but there will be future light painting shoots and at this point the rest of the group was getting close to finishing the multi we were working on. Steve (Team Goju) spent a lot of time here as well with this project as at this point in the day night we were both looking to fulfill our photo of the day. 

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110/365 : Lobster Curry.

Today was very much dedicated to work. Worked all day, furious pace with project roll-out coming to a peak. Afterward, we were taken out to a local Indian restaurant and treated to a few things I can only hope I can figure out how to order in the future. Pictured here is the lobster curry and a couple sauces. It tasted even better than it looks.