Rustico lighthouse

Wooden lighthouses are a feature of the Canadian and US east coast. They're very picturesque. This one is in Rustico Harbour, on Prince Edward Island, just over from the Blue Mussel Café (blimmin' great place to eat, by the way, lobster suppers oh yes). The photo was taken pretty late in the evening, when most of the light had gone. I set my tripod up in the middle of the dirt track leading to the beach and snapped a couple of quick shots. The sky had gone salmon pink and the evening was just gorgeous.

Prince Edward Island (or PEI as people call it) is Canada's smallest province, it's an island about the size of the Isle of Wight tucked away in the Gulf of St Lawrence between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. It's very sleepy and rural, its chief claims to fame being potatoes and Anne of Green Gables (see this earlier post). Rustico was first settled by the French colonists who arrived in the region in the early 17th century, displacing the Mi'kmaq Indians. The early French colonists were known as Acadians, and their colony 'Acadie' or Acadia. During the colonial wars of the eighteenth century the British sent an army up from New England, settled Halifax, and threw the French out of the maritimes. The Acadians were turfed off the land and resettled in other parts of North America - many of them in Louisiana (then still French). So now you know where the word 'Cajun' originated.

Many of them returned to the region a generation or so later, and French is still widely spoken throughout PEI, Nova Scotia and especially New Brunswick. Despite the elapsed time, people still get pretty emotional about the "ethnic cleansing" that took place - in marked contrast to the inclusive policies adopted towards the francophone citizens of Lower Canada, or Quebec, after the capture of Quebec City by Wolfe's forces.

Details: Nikon D70, 75-240mm lens @ 180mm, f/9, 1.6s, ISO 200, 15 August 2005, 6.45pm. Placemark.

Gadget heaven

Today I'm taking a time out (another one) from the usual chocolate box pics and posting a shot of my lovely new toy. Yes, my Macbook Pro arrived today... :)

Oooh it's lovely. A wonderful bright wide screen, there on my lap, with a keyboard that just makes you want to keep typing... I have a few niggles, but my brain is suffused with gadget acquisition endorphines and I can't bring myself to say anything negative about it. So look, there's me taking a photo of the mirror widget, using the built-in iSight camera to capture myself capturing the computer. And look, there's my other favourite gadget, my Nikon D70! Heaven.

Details: Nikon D70, 50mm lens, 1/125s, f/1.8, ISO 200. No placemark today. :)

Humayun's Tomb

Amazingly, it wasn't until my fourth trip to Delhi that I visited Humayun's Tomb. I have no idea why this site is so little known, at least in comparison with the better-known Taj Mahal (built in the same style by Shah Jahan seventy years later). The Taj is one of the wonders of the world, and should certainly be seen by anyone visiting the region, but Humayun's Tomb is almost as impressive architecturally, and has the advantage of being very uncrowded, set in beautifully restored Moghul gardens, and right in the middle of New Delhi. You can take a taxi from any of the central hotels and be there in no time.

Humayun was the second Moghul Emperor and established the tradition of being buried in a lavish mausoleum. In fact it was his widow who had the mausoleum built in 1562. It took eight years, and apparently she had the Afghan architects who constructed the building executed once it was finished, to stop anyone building something similar. The Tomb is next to the main railway line, close to Lodhi Gardens and to the main road that leads from India Gate and Sundernagar down to the South Extension. I must have been past it dozens of times without realising it was there.

I thought I would start providing Google Earth placemarks to accompany some of these photos. These will be included in the 'details' section at the end of each post (I've added them to a few recent posts to get the ball rolling). If you have Google Earth installed, just click on the placemark link to home in on the location in question (if it does not launch automatically, just open the downloaded file in Google Earth).

Details: Minolta Dynax 5, 50mm lens, exposure not recorded. New Delhi, October 2003. Placemark.

Pebbles

This is very similar to one of the wallpaper images that comes with OS X (part of the 'nature' suite). I've got to say, I prefer mine. :)

This is another photo taken during our Vancouver Island holiday last May. Yielded lots of good photos, that trip did. I had my 105mm macro lens mounted, and shot standing up looking straight down towards my feet. The fact that the weather was very overcast helped as the colours of the stones would have been washed out in direct sunlight.

Details: Nikon D70, 105mm macro, f/7.1, 1/500s, ISO 400, 18 May 2005, Wickaninnish Beach, Vancouver Island. Placemark.

Frog

I found this frog basking on a rock next to Kingsmere Lake in the Mackenzie-King estate in Gatineau Park, Quebec, just north of Ottawa. It was so blissed out in the sunshine that I was able to get really close to it and take a few shots. These were the photos that finally made me cotton on to the problem with colour profiles and the internet. The browsers I generally use, Safari and Firefox, can read various colour profiles and display images correctly. The problem is that Internet Explorer, the browser most people use, can't. I hadn't realised this, and had been happily posting images for months using the PhotoPro RGB colour space. After posting this photo I happened to look at it in IE and I realised that all my pictures looked horribly washed out to anyone viewing with IE. Oh dear. Of course, the solution is simple, I convert to sRGB and embed the profile before uploading to the net.

Details: Nikon D70, 105mm macro, f/13, 1/160s, ISO 200, 25 June 2005, 9.42am. Placemark.

Bled ducks

Jyoti once went to Bled, Slovenia, for work and came back raving about the lake and the castle. Now for a woman who isn't too keen on mountains, this has to be a good sign, so when we were thinking of places to go in the summer of 2002, small baby in tow, Bled featured on the list. It's a town in the Julian Alps, a few kilometres south of the border with Austria. The lake is circular, incredibly picturesque, and just the right size to walk around with a pram in a couple of hours. We'd almost completed the circuit, and were just under the cliff-face at the top of which lurks the castle, when we passed under this overhanging tree. By now the sun was shining brightly and some ducks had taken refuge in the shade. The interaction of the light on the leaves and the startling green colour of the water combined to make a really striking scene.

Details: Minolta X-500, 50mm lens, exposure not recorded. Bled, Slovenia, August 2002. Placemark.

Dandelion seedhead

Ooh ooh to celebrate the move I'm posting a pic I was saving for a special occasion. ;)

This dew-soaked dandelion clock is a favourite macro shot of mine. It was taken a few seconds after another favourite, the spiderweb I posted to launch this blog back on the old site.

It was an early morning in August on Prince Edward Island, by a ramshackle deserted wooden house. The circumstances were perfect for handheld macro shots. Strong sunlight from an angle, with plenty of dew still on the ground. I got down on the wet grass and supported my 105mm f/2.8 Micro Nikkor with my hand to take this shot with blue sky as the background.

Details: Nikon D70, 105mm macro, 1/125s, f/20, ISO 200. 16 August 2005, 7.12am, Rustico, PEI. Placemark.

Migration

For the last two entries I've been duplicating posts between this site, hosted by Blogger, and my original photoblog, created with iWeb and hosted on my .mac account. This will be the first post published here only. I've decided to retire the iWeb photoblog - for now, at least. Blogger offers much more flexibility and additional features such as comments which make all the difference.

Previous entries can still be seen at the old location. I may plunder them for images to post on this site, though I have plenty of material in my digital shoebox to keep me going for months if not years.

So... welcome to the revamped ottoblog! I hope you like it, I hope you'll come back, and I hope you'll leave comments.

Timmy's

I'd never heard of it before coming to Canada, but here, it's synonymous with coffee. People get very emotional about it. Last week they opened a branch for the troops in Afghanistan. This week they're in the news again, they have their IPO and it's the headline story. CBC interviewing people in the street, hearing them say with a straight face that they drink Tim Horton's coffee because they're proud to be Canadian... You really shouldn't pay too much attention to that stuff about Canada and Europe sharing core values. Canadians are much more like Americans than they like to think. Wrapping themselves in the flag comes naturally to Canadians. The people behind Tim Horton's know this, and exploit it. They sponsor 'community' programmes (giving hockey sticks to poor kids, that kind of thing) and advertise off the back of this.

And just who are the people behind Tim Horton's? Giant US junk food chain Wendy's, that's who. Not so Canadian after all, eh? And where do they stand on genuine 'values'? Fair trade coffee? Nope. Organic, shade grown? Nu-uh. Recycling waste in their branches? Not that I've noticed. The fact is, compared to other coffee chains, even the evil Starbucks itself, Timmy's scores very low on corporate social responsibility. Where it scores high is on a uniform product sold in uniform branches on every street corner in the country, at a consistently low price. Quantity over quality, price over principles. But, after a couple of years here, I'm beginning to think these are core Canadian values.

More on this another day...

Details: Nikon D70, 18-200 lens with zoom burst, 1/6s, f/6.3, ISO 800. Bank Street, downtown Ottawa, this evening. Placemark.

Three years

Three years ago today, Bush launched "Operation Iraqi Freedom".

Iraqis: at least 100,000 dead; countless human rights atrocities; standard of living far below what it was in February 2003; prospects dismal and getting worse daily. Terrorists: laughing it up in their wonderful new base of operations as they welcome a flood of new recruits. The rest of us: living in fear, wondering what happened to our civil liberties and the cherished 'values' that we were supposed to be defending. All of this: predicted by millions of us worldwide on and before 18 March 2003.

"We told you so" hardly seems adequate...

Details: Nikon D70, 18-70mm lens @ 50mm, f8, 1/125s, ISO 800. Downtown Ottawa, 30 November 2004. Anti-war demo marking Bush's visit to Canada after his re-"election".