Off on a whim…

I’m off, on a magical, whimsical journey to trace the path of the mythical snow fairies through their winter playground. That’s right, I’m leaving these shores again! Only this time I’m going to try to bring you with me. As you may have noted whilst reading the introduction, words aren’t my strong point, so the sojourn is to be photographed and uploaded over the sub-etha net to guide headquarters.

Dates are as Follows:
San Francisco: 2nd to 8th Jan
Snow Bird, Utah: 8th to 19th Jan
Jackson Hole, Wyoming: 19th to 26th Jan
Salt Lake City, Utah: 26th to 29th Jan
Calgary, Canada: 29th to 31st Jan
Canmore, Canada: 1st to 17th Feb
Home in Melbourne 19th Feb

The intrepid reader can follow progress here at jamesd.com.au, including RSS feeds and a new map section Where in the World enabling googlesque plotting of my current position.

Leaves

Sunday left me with no doubt that autumn leaves (fall for those north of the equator) are deserved of all the praise. Montréal once again turned on the good weather. We were treated to some spectacular colours as we wandered through both the Gault Nature Reserve and Île Sainte-Hélène.

Île Sainte-Hélène, Montreal Canada

Squirrels…

Whilst North American viewers might find my preoccupation with squirrels somewhat disconcerting, they (the squirrels) are everywhere! squirrelling away nuts to the tops of the trees and approaching passers by, as if to check they aren’t just a moving tree full of nuts.

Squirrel...

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!!!

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.