Montréal, Thursday

Our first day in Montréal took form as a quiet stroll around the Old section of town. The greatest challenge of the day was the search for a ‘good’ espresso to appease the various mid morning ailments suffered by the travelling party. On the way to a decent coffee at lunch we wandered around Old Montréal,

Old Montreal

After finding a decent Espresso for Sarah, and baguettes for the hunger we visited the Basalisque Notre Dame,

Old Montreal

Finally, as the sun drifted low over the city I walked through McGill university campus and up Mount Royal to visit the squirrels,

Old Montreal

Click on each of the photos to see more!!!

Countdown to Carry On

Being one to never take the easy way out coupled with a certain stubbornness often leads to easy things becoming inexplicably hard. Take my current predicament, it involves a large quantity of gear and a backpack. More correctly, a large amount of gear strewn across my floor and no backpack.

Rewind…

I am, as many of you are aware, off to Canada for a week. Formally for the Universitas 21 Undergraduate Research Conference. Informally described as ‘The greatest university funded student rort ever’. To put the record straight, It is a week long conference and cultural experience in Montreal, Canada. Cultural experience implies that anything is legit.

Back to the gear strewn across the floor, any normal person would most likely leave some of it at home, I do however *need it all, hence the conundrum. There is a solution, it is just in the shop, on the rack, waiting for me.

Adelaide…

Common sense suggests that one does not just jump on a plane to Adelaide without a valid reason. Common sense also sometimes heads out to lunch. So whilst awaking from a stint of somewhat impaired reasoning I found much to my delight a fully paid trip to Adelaide booked. Discovering later that my credit card had been used wasn’t so much fun.

So onwards and upwards, or as popular opinion would have you believe, downwards to Adelaide. On my mind that night as I slipped off to sleep, What had persuaded me to travel into the depths of the deep south?

photofile…

“Whats a photo Blog?” I was asked. The answer is not that dissimilar to a normal blog. Just that instead of pulling material from inordinate day to day life this ‘photo blog’ will concentrate on photos (surprise surprise) and what went on before I hit the shutter release. Even if a picture tells a thousand words sometimes it might be worth another couple of hundred just to find out what went on behind the lens.
For example, lets have a look at this photo, (No explanations yet just have a look at it…)

Personally I am not one to add lengthy captions to the base of each photo, in the galleries you will find a fairly short caption stating that this photo was taken in “Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia” followed by shutter speed, aperture etc… all the things you really want to know. But those things really don’t tell you how the photo was taken do they?

I could have had much the same result with double the shutter speed and one stop larger aperture (*more details on this to come). Look closer, at the horizon now… yes slightly skew isn’t it… how did that happen you may ask, artistic licence?, optical effect due to the hills on the right? or was it something more sinister? In this case it was a dirty great lamb kebab I was munching on which meant that only one hand was capable of holding my camera. So after all that when you probably expected tripod, ND filter and careful exposure meetering all the photo really came down to was. Which buttons can i reach without getting tzatziki all over the expensive end of my camera.

Which leaves us with the real caption:
Byron Bay Sunset as seen looking north from ‘Hippie Rocks’, Captured on a Canon 350D with patented Lamb Kebab lens support, New South Wales, Australia.

So welcome to my photo blog.