Say Hi to Rex and Lady (bet you’ll be able to tell which is which without me giving you any hints).

I’ve always preferred dogs to cats, but some convolutions of the universe knotted together to drop these two into our home: Our neighbour’s cat (a stray who goes to them for bed and breakfast) got knocked up and had some babies; We’ve had a crazy mouse infestation in our walls this year; When we saw these two, we knew they were way too cute for their own good so we decided that we’d better look after them.

They are currently in training. I’m getting them used to flash photography…

We’re back from our 11 day trip to Ecuador (Quito, the capital city, and the Galapagos islands). The most difficult part of preparing for the trip was deciding what photographic equipment to take with me. The Girl insisted that we carry my 180mm macro lens, which I never ended up using.

What I did end up using was my brother’s Crumpler Whickey and Cox camera/laptop backpack, his 70-200mm f/4, my 17-40mm f/4 and 24-105mm f/4, 1 light stand, 1 shoot through umbrella, 1 580EX II flash, my SD500 compact with underwater case, and of course the 5D II. Add in assorted gels, filters, blower brush, lens pen, and wireless triggers, and there was barely enough room for clothes.

Luckily for us we didn’t need a lot of fancy clothes.

We toured the islands as part of a GAP Adventures group. There were 15 of us tourists in the group and GAP gave us duffel bags to repack our suitcase contents into. This made for much easier travel between islands.

The trip was an extremely active adventure full of hiking, biking, and snorkelling. The weather cooperated, the animals posed for photo ops, and our assorted bangs, bruises, and electrocutions were minor issues compared to our rewards for enduring them.

Not only did we luck out with all of that, but our group leaders were absolutely fantastic.

I’m slowly posting pictures of the trip to flickr. The lack of high-speed at home means that it’ll take at least a couple of weeks for all of them to get there, but as you’ll be able to understand once you see some of the shots, I’m glad that I carted all of that camera equipment around with me.

The islands truly do live up to their nickname, “The Enchanted Islands”. Their enchantments will remain with me for as long as I live and I’m pleased to see that the Ecuadorian government is taking extreme measures to preserve the biologic uniqueness of which the islands boast.

At some point in the near future, I’m sure we will all be able to look at the stewardship of these islands as an example of how we should all live and interact with the world about us.

Summer has finally arrived here in Cowland. We’re seeing consistently dry, hot weather now and you can see that people out and about are in much happier spirits. Summer is only about a month late.

I’ve been busy trying to stay out of trouble.

So far I’ve succeeded.

Our annual summer party rainfest (it has rained every year except for one that we’ve had the party) went off successfully again — no injuries, one broken fence gate, some assaulted frogs, and 2 overfed dogs.

I’ve been schooled and am schooling.

The latest person to school me was Rudy. I was refreshingly pleased to be given a few insights into his political thought processes. He argued some political points with me on facebook recently, but did so with intelligence and practicality. He’s someone that has made his own political decisions through reason and research rather than as a crowd-following Lemming.

I’m schooling myself in photography, as many of you know. It’s my newest hobby and I’m working my way through a stack of books, from visual composition, to using Adobe Lightroom. Playing with off-camera flash is the coolest thing I’ve come across in a very long time. It’s actually what’s keeping me away from this blog the most. Fragileheart has patiently volunteered her time to a couple of photosessions for me to work on my lighting.

Here’s an example of what off-camera flash can do for you. Take for example a painting that was created with heavy brush strokes or a palate knife. The surface of a painting like this is as important as the image itself. The strokes convey texture, emotion, and movement to the underlying image.

Straight-on, or flat, lighting produces this:

Lighting from the side produces this:

The trade-off (isn’t life full of these) is that the more texture you show, the less saturated your colours become. The trick is finding the right lighting ratio and angles to strike a good balance between colour saturation and texture and thereby do some justice to a piece that will still be best viewed live.

The usual suspect.

My annual summer bloggin’ slow-down is currently in full effect. You might see some stuff on here every now and then but you’ll definitely see more stuff from me on Twitter or Flickr because those are places that I can hit and run.

Summer is just too short here in iglooland to spend it typing my crazy life’s details. Don’t worry, I’ll be back. I always return.

Talk to you soon (I hope). I’ve gotta go and chase another visitor away…

Spring weather is here, and with it comes a very active interplay of high and low pressure systems. All sorts of displaced strangeness occurs such as the sounds of songbirds and wild turkeys in the middle of a blizzard, hot sun and yet the existence of snow banks, and this:

It’s a water jug that I filled at home so that I could water the plants at work. It was filled in the morning and looked entirely normal. By the end of the day the high pressure system that had moved in crushed the bottle.