The Birds and the Bee

Its been a REALLY long time since my last post on this blog.  Life kinda got in the way. I also haven’t had much time to go out and take pictures anymore so thats another reason for the non-posting.  Anyways, I found a spare afternoon one day and decided to be like Elmer Fudd and hunt in my backyard.  I was trying to hunt for those rabbits that keep visiting and digging in our backyard but I didn’t see them so I opted for birds and bees instead.  I propped up a chair in the middle of the backyard and sat there waiting for whatever came in shooting distance.  I quite enjoyed the experience of mindlessly shooting everything in sight, although it did leave me with WAAAY too many photos of bird silhouettes flying in the sky…. lol. I managed to find lots of birds but only one bee, hence the title of this post.

“The Bee – This was kinda a lucky shot and everything I wanted to be in focus was in focus. That bee flies REALLY fast!”

“Beautiful Sunset that day”

“Bye Bye BIrdies”

Daylilies

We’ve had a REALLY hot and dry summer in Toronto so far.  Its been so hot and dry that I have never seen our backyard so lifeless and dry that whenever I step out into the backyard I would hear the brown brittle grass (well, whats left of it) crunching under my feet on every step!  The state of our backyard right now is really in stark contrast to what it was about a month and a half ago when the weather was nice and mild and everything in the backyard was full of life and ripe with photographic opportunities!  Thankfully I took a lot of pictures of the backyard during that time so I’ll have stuff to process for the future.  Think of it as saving for a rainy day except that I saved the pictures for the opposite reason.

Anyways, here are some pictures of the daylilies in the backyard when they were in full bloom. I love how the flowers are backlit by the warm sunlight and makes it seem like they’re glowing… And who said that you shouldn’t shoot against the sun?? 😛

Revisiting the Canon FD 35mm f/2.0

A couple of months ago I purchased a Canon FD 35mm f/2.o lens to mount on my Olympus E-P3, now this is a manual focus-only lens on this camera body.   I had originally thought that manually focusing on an LCD screen would be a piece of cake and how I would make a boatload of beautiful photos with this lens, but how terribly wrong I was.  I ended up not using the lens as much as I had intended to because of the difficulty I experienced with manual focusing, which was also exacerbated by my deteriorating eyesight.  So it stayed in storage until I saw it again a couple of days ago while rummaging through my camera stuff.  I decided to take it out for a trip to the backyard as I felt guilty for having neglected this gorgeous piece of glass for a couple of months.

Revenge of the Crocus

I had previously posted about how the crocuses in the front yard had bloomed, but at the time only a couple of flowers were open.  Today, however, was a different story. It was a gorgeously warm day and I guess all that warmth and sunshine coaxed the remaining crocuses to bloom. The plant box in the front yard had a carpet of crocus flowers!  They were calling to me, so I decided to take another stab at taking photos.  I also thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to bust out the macro lens!  I haven’t used my macro lens in a long while and I had forgotten the difficulty of taking macro photos.  The really thin depth of field + my unreliably shaky hands = potential disaster; I would have used a tripod but that would have just slowed me down (and I didn’t have a tripod that would go down that low on the ground).  So I just cranked up the ISO and remained as steady as I could while taking the photos.  I think it worked out well!  Enjoy the photos!

Happy First Day of Spring!

“The crocuses (croci??) decided to bloom exactly on the first day of spring!”

Where did winter go (or did it even arrive?)? I can’t believe its already the first day of spring! It certainly felt like spring today with the sun shining brightly and the warm winds blowing.  Since the weather was so nice, I decided to do a bit of spring cleaning in the yard and in the process, realized that the crocuses had started to bloom. I’ve never really seen them bloom this early, usually they would bloom around April.

Since crocuses aren’t the most hardy of flowers, I decided to take their pictures while they were still fresh (tomorrow will apparently be 26 degrees Celcius and that could potentially wreak havoc on those delicate petals). Too bad these aren’t the saffron-producing type of saffron, I could have made a small fortune (or a big pot of paella… mmm…). Enjoy!