Full Wolf Blood Moon Total Eclipse

It was exciting to watch the full moon eclipse tonight under clear, cold skies. Being relatively close to the Great Lakes, we generally have more days and nights with at least some cloud than without. The temperature is very cold but it could be colder in mid-January. This moon comes with plenty of labels. As well as being a Wolf Moon, it is a Perigee Moon (super moon), a Blood Moon as well as a totally eclipsed moon. I don't plan to stay up to watch the reverse show as the moon returns to its full brightness in a couple of hours.

Postscript: I did another edit in the morning with my best shots. Photos are hand held with a Canon SX50 superzoom camera.

Five Minutes from Home

We enjoyed summer-like weather over Thanksgiving weekend with clear skies and warm sunshine for several days in a row. Ontario is a great place to visit to view spectacular fall colours, from the Agawa Canyon in the north to the Niagara Peninsula in the south. Huntsville and Algonquin Park are favoured destinations in Central Ontario and anywhere along the 900 km of the Niagara Escarpment between Hamilton and Tobermory you are guaranteed to find superb of autumn vistas. I read the colour reports in the newspaper and planned several road trips in my head and then discarded them due to time constraints and the price of gasoline.

While driving to get groceries for Thanksgiving dinner, I took note of brilliant red and gold stands trees right in the city beside the shopping centre, the local library and the nearby Tim Hortons restaurant. I decided to drive around our end of town within five minutes from home and look for the fall beauty here.

The next morning before sunrise I took a thermos of tea to a nearby park and watched the golden light illuminate the trees along the river.

Why do we tend to think things will more 
beautiful...richer... inspiring... somewhere else?

Photographic Memories

Our girls and their friend planted giant sunflowers in the garden in 1988

On May 25, 2011, Taylor Jones, a 22 year old resident of our city started a new blog on Tumblr called "Dear Photograph". His idea went viral and he has received worldwide recognition for his work and has signed a book deal.  Do take a look at his blog as it is a very interesting blend of old and new photographs. Today I pulled some photo prints from an album and experimented with the concept. It was harder than it looked to line up an old picture in a current context.

My youngest brother visited our family in Canada after his wedding

Raven is not interested in the big salmon my husband caught in 1989

We had our dog Thor from 1990-1999 and the Becka thinks this is around 1998. Somehow we count time in dogs.

Snowy Owls and More

Three Bridges Road

I took a drive after work one sunny afternoon along my favourite country roads north of the city. I was on the look out for Snowy Owls, Rough-legged Hawks, an elusive Red-shouldered Hawk and whatever else might catch my eye. If I found nothing but rays of sunshine, I would have been satisfied.


It is always interesting to drive by well kept Mennonite mixed farms and to see people going about their daily business. Flocks of Snow Buntings flew between corn fields and the edge of the gravel road and Horned Larks sang their tinkling tunes from fence posts.

Photographers and Snowy Owl

I turned onto another road and saw a line of vehicles parked near a field. A group of photographers were focused on a female Snowy Owl sitting on the ground. This was my first Snowy Owl sighting of the winter but I didn't stop because the area was busy enough already. There are many responsible wildlife photographers, but some will disturb birds hoping to get an exceptional picture. Some birding forums are discouraging birders from reporting rare sightings to protect the birds from harassment. On the way home I drove by the section of river where a Red-shouldered Hawk had been seen on a regular basis. A photographer with big gear had parked his pickup truck on an angle blocking half the roadway so he could get a picture of the hawk. He effectively stopped anyone else approaching the area.

Song Sparrow

I enjoy taking pictures of birds, but am just as happy watching them or focusing through my binoculars. I prefer to walk along a path rather than parking myself for long periods of time waiting for one bird. Recently, Raymond Barlow, a skilled local nature photographer, shared his photos and tips at a photography club. As a professional he spends many hours in the field looking for wildlife but he is committed to ethical practices in his work. He has a blog on nature photography called Nature Images Online Magazine that is well worth checking out.

Near the end of my little road trip, I saw my first Song Sparrow of the season. Maybe he was telling me that spring is just around the corner and that he would stay long after the Snowy Owls, Snow Buntings and Horned Larks went north again.

Wordless Wednesday: Art

Ottawa, Ontario

Barry's Bay, Ontario*

Any bush, Ontario

*taken by my husband

New Toy or Tool?

Technology changes so quickly that it is hard to keep up with what it new in computers, smart phones and cameras, to name a few gadgets. I have lost track of the number of computers I have purchased in the past 15 years.

I bought a Canon Powershot S3IS a couple of years ago and added a 1.5x teleconvertor which gave me 18x optical zoom, great for closeups of birds and people at a distance. My brother bought the S5IS last year and I was impressed with the improvements in his camera compared to mine.


My husband knows I enjoy taking pictures and he encouraged me to get a DSLR and some "big glass", but I was reluctant to walk around with that much camera hanging around my neck. A 500 mm lens is quite long and expensive.


After some research, I decided to stay with a familiar camera and upgraded to a Canon Powershot SX10 IS which has a 20X optical zoom without a teleconvertor. And I am very happy with my purchase (for less than $400 cdn), which I bought with an option of return within 30 days if I didn't like it. It is not bulky, does not slow me down when I walk, and the 20X zoom is equivalent to a 550mm telephoto lens. There is no doubt that DSLRs take superior pictures, but I will stick with a point and shoot (that has lots of manual options) for now.

Full moon, taken by The Becka with my camera (hand held)

I am looking forward to going to Winterlude this weekend and hope to have unlimited opportunities to use the new camera. And maybe I will take the time to read the manual instead of relying on my usual hack and shoot style of photography.

Digital Camera Bloopers and More

Peekaboo!

I read that the expected sales of digital cameras in 2008 in United States alone was expected to exceed 40 million units. In 2007, 37 million cameras were sold in the America. Digital cameras have created huge numbers of new casual and serious photographers who can take hundreds of pictures a day if desired without being concerned about film and developing costs.

Do you think my butt is too big?

I use Flickr to share my favourite pictures and to browse through photos taken by others. Upwards of one million photos are uploaded daily on Flickr* from four million users around the world, an absolutely mind boggling number of images. There are people who upload every single picture they take to Flickr (and Facebook) with no editing or elimination of poor shots at all. I would estimate that for every 100 pictures I take, perhaps five to ten are worth sharing at the most. Some pictures I keep for personal reference, and every so often I go back and cull the pictures on my computer before I store them on an external device.

Please look at the camera!

There are privacy concerns raised with so many cameras clicking around us all the time. Most of us find the camera a harsh judge of appearance and do not like to see indiscriminate pictures of ourselves, especially as we get older. HP has come out with a camera that offers slimming photo editing options that can make the subject look ten pounds lighter instantly. How about a camera that makes someone look ten years younger?

Those twigs in the foreground are very annoying!

This week I was out on a very cold but beautiful day when I came across a number of less common winter birds. I dropped my walking poles and backpack and stood quietly trying to get pictures while not scaring off the birds. Here are some of my worst shots. I have tried to be selective by not showing all of them. At least these pictures have a bird in them. See if you can identify them and I will post some better pictures at the end of the week .

You are so beautiful! Why won't you pose for me?

* These stats taken from the Flickr blog in 2006. Undoubtedly the numbers are higher now and there are over 3 billion pictures hosted at this site. In the past minute, 5200 pictures were uploaded to Flickr according to information on their home page.

Now for some unabashed bragging, mainly so my parents can say, "She got it from me!"
Every day the top 500 most interesting pictures uploaded to Flickr (out of about 1 million) are featured on Explore. I have had 7 pictures on Explore and am proud of them. Some photographers I have as contacts have had 50 or more pictures on Explore while others who take equally excellent pictures have had none. Go figure! I do not know the formula.

Here is my Explore poster. (click to enlarge) I didn't even know about Explore until someone emailed me to tell me I was on it. Here is link where you can check to see if your Flickr photos have been chosen.

The Best Night Sky Ever!!

I have featured Andre and Neil's photos here before but these pictures are the most unique I have ever seen in their Flickr photostreams. As I have mentioned before, these avid amateur photographers work with my husband. Neil is on the executive of our local photography club, GRIPS.

They went on a company fishing trip last weekend to an area absolutely free of artificial light. The company founder's cottage is here, between Belleville and Ottawa ON and believe me, night is very, very dark. Andre and Neil worked together on these images. Neil describes the technique below.


"This is from our company fishing trip this weekend. The cottage is in north eastern Ontario. The sky was amazing. The North Star is the one in the centre of the circular star pattern. This was a 34.5 minute exposure. During the exposure the stars around the north star appear to be moving in a circular direction. The earth is actually rotating around the axis of the North Star so it appears still."

Do visit their Flickr sites (Neil, Andre) and view these images in large size. (Copyrighted and used with permission)

Lost and Found: SD Card Corruption

I have always enjoyed taking pictures. My father introduced me to SLR cameras years ago and I have many colour slides of people and of places I have visited. Film and developing had a cost attached so we were more careful in shooting as one had to pay for the good and bad pictures.

Digital cameras have changed that! I am able to shoot 100 pictures in a day and keep only 25 without cost concern. I have taken a couple of thousand pictures this year and had about 400 of them on the SD memory card in my camera. These were some of my favourite shots and while they had been downloaded to my computer, they were not yet backed up. On Saturday we spent much of the day at the market with my brother and his family and there were about fifty new pictures from this outing on the 2 GB card.

I proceeded to download my new pictures and received the message, "No images on card". Impossible! I knew there were hundreds of photos that had not been deleted. Melissa from Empress of Dirt wrote a timely post last week about some freeware that successfully found pictures she had accidentally deleted from her memory card. I downloaded the software but it would not run on my system. But thanks to her I knew a solution was possible.

The next stop was Walmart where I put the card in a photo machine. No images! The young clerk told me my card was corrupted and those pictures were lost.

He did not know me...I do not give up easily.

I bought a card reader, which I should have had in the first place, and searched the internet again for a solution. A program called PhotoRescue allowed me to download a trial version to search for my pictures and then required payment to retrieve them on my hard drive. Amazing! In 10 minutes it located 480 pictures and I happily paid $29 to keep the program. There was no loss of quality to the images.


Forensic experts have tools which can find files which have been deleted from hard drives, voice mail systems and memory devices. A while ago our voice mail system at work was upgraded and messages deleted months before reappeared on the new message box. Beware! Electronic evidence is not removed as easily as paper is shredded in a machine.

I hope I do not have to use my "forensic software" again, but have it ready if my SD card becomes corrupted again. I have reformatted it and also bought another card. This list of memory card do's and don'ts was on the internet at this site. I broke about half of these rules regularly but will change the way I use my memory devices in the future.

From the website Digital Inspiration:

Here are some tips that may prevent memory cards from getting corrupt and prolong their life as well:

» As far as possible, use brands recommended by the camera manufacturers.

» Never turn off the digital camera while photos are being transferred to the PC or vice versa.

» It is always advisable to reformat camera cards at regular intervals depending on how frequently you use the digital camera.

» Use the camera controls itself to reformat the memory card, don't do this via your computer.

» Do not switch to the View (or Play mode) while the picture is still being written to the disk.

» Do not shoot the next photograph while the previous one is still being written or saved to card's memory.

» Make sure your camera batteries are properly charged. Shooting images with a low battery may sometimes cause problems. If the camera batteries fail while the image is being written, your card may get corrupt.

» Weird but true - Don't delete files from the Memory card using Windows Explorer. Either use the Camera controls or the photo management software supplied by the Camera vendor.

» If the memory card is showing problems frequently, it's probably time to invest in a new memory card before disaster strikes (again).

» Never eject the memory card while the camera is till ON.

» Do not use the same memory card is different cameras.

PS: Memory cards in the story above refer to all storage media formats including Memory Stick, Secure Digital [SD Cards] or even CompactFlash.