Ottawa

Here are some images of the Canadian Parliament and some other interesting architecture from my recent trip to Ottawa.  I will be posting some images of the Winterlude (which was the primary reason for the trip) in a few days.

Day 278 - Silhouettes

These shots are from yesterday.  They were taken with my point & shoot camera and didn't turn out that well, so I converted them into B&W.

Day 234 - Relearning the Alphabet: The Letter "A"

"A" for Airport

Taken at the Detroit airport -

I was really fascinated by the display of lights to soft music while I was changing terminals.  I knew I had to snap this scene even though there wasn't a lot of time between connections.

Taken with my 18 - 55 mm lens, handheld at ISO 800.  I slowed down the shutter to 0.3s, as I wanted to capture the busy traffic flowing through this area - passengers rushing to catch their next flight.

The composition for the first shot could have been more centred, but I wanted to include the motion blur of the passer by.   However, the colours were mesmerizing - therefore I decided to keep it regardless of the not-so-pleasing compo.

Trying to get some city shots

Yesterday, I went out with a friend hoping to get some nice shots of Montreal downtown, just in time for the photo contest that's been announced at work. However, we apparently chose the wrong day as far as weather was concerned. It seemed a perfectly fine, bright and sunny day, but I did have my apprehensions, because I feared it just might be the perfect recipe for washed out photos and for the case of the blinkies. And that's exactly what happened.

Another lesson learned was that when it's too cold, it's not good to go out unprepared. Both my friend and I were inadequately dressed, and even within the short time we took to set up the tripod, our fingers were freezing and we could barely manage 10 shots between ourselves - not good at all!

Third lesson was that it would have been a better idea to take photos of the shaded side of the church, rather than to take the side that had the sun shining on it - it washed out the photos completely, the photo at the top is a perfect example of that.

Later, what I did do was use my point and shoot to take a couple of shots of the sunny side, so I could look up the EXIF data of the photos in case they turned out well enough, to learn from them; and lucky for me, they did turn out pretty decently (photo below - no post-processing applied to this).

While walking around the Westmount area, we came upon another church that seemed really interesting with its leafless creepers and architecture.  And I loved the windows!  Here are some shots of those, and they weren't on the point & shoot.  I only applied a crop to both.  The shade actually helped in making the details pop out on the walls.

Some other photos from this set are also worth adding here, since I have a dilemma - I don't know how to declutter the photos of the tree branches that interfered with the shot.  However, viewing it on the screen doesn't make them look all that bad now.  I also wanted to capture the different colours of the row houses in a single shot, but my point and shoot didn't do a great job of zooming.  But overall, not too bad.

And now a couple of interesting doors in the neighbourhood.

Conclusion - None of my shots are good enough for the contest! :-(