An interlude: Taking my camera for drives

Early last year, I decided it was time to challenge myself in new directions. I decided to learn to be a better photographer, learning my camera and lenses and settings, learning to use Lightroom and Photoshop for image storage, organization, and editing. To learn to go beyond taking photos of only plants (and occasionally cats) and to expand my areas of interest. 

I will never be a professional photographer the way some of my heroes are--Freeman Patterson, Ernest Cadegan, John Sylvester, among others--but I learn from each of them from studying their work. I have learned to see in a different way than I once did. And I find the joy not in exotic locales, but around me. I derive enormous pleasure out of exploring my local world. Just shunpiking my way down back roads in Kings County, where I live, or other counties in the province, has yielded me much in the way of photographic delights, adventures and learning. 

What makes a great photo? It's the photographer's eye, to begin with, not the tools. I took the above photo on a cold, blustery day about a month ago--with my iPhone. From my car window. I shared it on Facebook to rave reviews from friends, who loved the mood of it. Which is what I was going for, not technical perfection. 

 This, on the other hand, was taken with tripod, my Canon 70D, ND filter, etc...it also captures a mood. I had just as much fun making one as the other.
What I tell people is this; the camera is like the oven, the photographer is the cook. You create the image, and the camera captures it. Don't think you need a dozen lenses and an expensive camera to have fun and make beautiful pictures.

 There are certain things in my world that I have a deep and abiding love for. Living in Canada's Ocean Playground, on the mighty Bay of Fundy, I am part water creature, and love being near the shore. I adore lighthouses. All lighthouses. This one is at Cape St. Mary's, Digby county, with a little fog playing with the atmospherics.

 I am very fond of crows and ravens, which are extremely clever birds. I caught this one sitting on the fencepost leading to the French Cross in Grand-Pré, and just had to preserve the moment. The crow graciously stayed put for me to get a few pictures before soaring off on important crow duties.

We have a group of artists in Kings County who every year throughout the summer do an outdoor  show around the county called Uncommon Common Art. Every piece is different, in different media, from fibre to metal to found objects and more. This is part of a recent installation, also in Grand-Pré, which is left standing over winter. Can't wait to see what goes up this year.

Naturally, being a gardener, I am very fond of trees, and I find them moody and rewarding subjects any time of the year. During a recent autumn storm, the surf was rocking and rolling along the shore by Halls Harbour, and I loved the steadfast trees, unphased by the weather. 

Another day took me further down the shore into Annapolis County, on a summer day of torrential rainfalls and thunderstorms, resulting in streams full to overflowing and cascading off the rocky cliffs like some sort of a tropical other-worldly place. 

Taking photos of people doesn't really interest me because I'm not good at it and people puzzle me rather a lot. But things that people MAKE is quite another story. Specifically, buildings. Old buildings. Abandoned or otherwise falling-down buildings. I have a huge affection for them, whether it be a seemingly nice, but very much abandoned house like this one, or some of the huge barns that are found all around the province (and elsewhere, but most of my building capturing has been in Nova Scotia. Some in Newfoundland last summer and a little in Iles de la Madeleine, but we'll get to those in due course.)

So, because this is my blog and I can post what I want, some images of life in my part of the world. I'll do this from time to time, and hope you'll enjoy--and more importantly, that you'll be encouraged to take your camera for a walk, or a drive, and see what you can find that makes your heart glad.

Rockin' out: Garden tour with the alpine gardening enthusiasts

No matter how many years we garden, or how old we get, there is always, always something more to learn about plants and gardening. That's one of the appeals for this hobby/ avocation/ vocation/obsession to me. I love learning about plants, being introduced to species I have never seen, developing a new appreciation for a particular genus or variety.

This is one of the reasons I cringe when someone tries to call me an expert gardener. I'm truly not. I'm experienced,sure, but to me experts know a huge amount about a particular subject. I'm a happy generalist, with an interest in most all plants, though definitely there are some I don't like. But I can see myself developing more of an interest in rock or alpine gardening.

Yesterday, I joined other members of the Nova Scotia Rock Gardening club on a tour of a couple of gardens here in the Valley. Each was very different in its own way, and equally stunning. Both gardens aren't exclusively composed of alpines; the owners have a number of plantings, and a few dedicated areas where their delicately lovely alpines are, and some beds that incorporate both standard garden plants and alpines.

This garden belongs to Frank and Jana, and I've never been here at this time of year before. It was extremely hot yesterday so we didn't spend quite as long there as I would have under normal conditions. Plus, with the book deadline looming nearer, I was intent on photographing some plants that are being included in my manuscript, and that I didn't have plenty of real good photos for. Otherwise, I'd probably still be there, asking questions and learning from these enthusiastic, generous gardeners.

With alpine gardening, one of the main components is "location, location, location," as the realtors say. You need to have excellent drainage, and preferably full sun. I remember an enthusiast telling me that part of the lure of rock gardening is that these tough plants will thrive in areas of the garden where most other plants will not.

This same individual told me that the plants thrive on neglect, to a certain extent. I got thinking about this and it makes sense. Thinking of the conditions in an alpine site--short growing season, cold temperatures, and lots of wind--it makes sense that such plants have to be tough, low growing and able to survive a lot of extremes of weather.

Plus, for the person with a small gardening area, you can sure cram a LOT of different species into one garden! This garden is actually fairly large, and I have absolutely NO idea how many species Jana and Frank have included, but it's dozens...probably hundreds. I must ask when I go out again soon--on a cooler day, mind you!

I saw many, many different species and varieties yesterday that generated "I want THAT" response in my gardener's soul. This one generated the biggest reaction, though (partly because gentians weren't blooming yesterday, mind you.) I think it's a sedum.

That sedum or whatever it is affected me so much, I'm going to do the "Antonio Banderas as Puss in Boots Big Eyes" look at Jana and see if I can't cajole or buy a little cutting of this because it's gorgeous. Such colours. Such nice textures. Such....want want wantiness!

One of the characteristics that also appeals to me in a rock or alpine garden is that they cause you to slow down, to admire and think and crouch down to look at the various textures and wee blooms and foliage and shapes of the plants. Juxtapose something like the patch of wee ice plants below (Delosperma, I think.) with some of the towering, giant perennials that I wrote about in my Chronicle Herald column today (where they messed up my email by confusing it with my twitter address, sorry to anyone who tried to email me), and you'll see what I mean.

I love big plants, but little carpets of beautiful jewels like this make me equally happy, know what I mean?

Next post, I'll show some snippets from visiting Rosaleen's garden, on the South Mountain across the valley from me.

The Bee-loud Hamamelis: Gardening Gone Wild Picture This Photo Contest

Today is the last full day before official spring turns over on the calendar. I spent a good part of it sitting in the sun watching honeybees hanging out in an 'Arnold Promise' hamamelis. Then I thought that all this bee-watching might result in a fun entry for Gardening Gone Wild's Picture This Photo Contest for March, where the theme is "Awakening'.

Not only are plants showing decided signs of waking up and getting going, my friends the bees have woken up and man, are they hungry! They're also amazingly tolerant and gentle creatures, because I sat with both my cameras beside this witch-hazel, patiently following the busy little bees flitting around from flower to flower looking for nectar, and they didn't get at all offended. I think they know a bee lover when they see one. I know I'm very glad to see them.

So, even though I'm a Canadian outcast, up here beyond the confines of the contest boundaries...I'm tossing another photo into the competition, just for fun. There are some amazing entries again this month, so best of luck to all who have captured a glimpse of spring's awakening, and thanks again to the good hosts at GGW for helping us to become better photographers.

Bzzzzzzzz.

Winter flower by the seashore: Gardening Gone Wild Picture This Photo Contest

For months now, our friends at Gardening Gone Wild have been presenting the Picture This Photo Contest, which challenges bloggers to open their eyes to the wonder of the world around us, and to catch a little of that wonder with our cameras. Then share it with others.

I haven't entered before, partly because I'm in Canada and even if I had a winning shot, they couldn't ship plants here without going through enough security checks (phytosanitary certificates, etc) to put us in qualification for a G20 conference. But I wanted to participate just to show support for the folks at GGW and all the information they, and their guest judges, have given us over the past months.

So I'm offering up this little picture for the theme "Winter Light".

I went down to the wharf here in Scotts Bay a couple of weeks ago, on a day when the sun was out, it wasn't blowing 95 miles an hour, and it wasn't as cold as our priminister-bot's heart. It was getting close to sunset and the shadows were long, but I encountered this frozen stem of a Queen Anne's lace (Daucus carota) flowerhead while walking along the rocky shoreline above the water, and took its photo.

What I especially like about this photo is the glistening hints of rainbow in the crystals of snow behind the plant, and the echoes of light in the relatively calm waters of the Bay just behind this cliff. Plus although the seedhead is frigid, its seeds all but gone, there's a whisper of spring promise in the fact that the seeds ARE gone. Plants will bloom again here on this stony promontory.

It works for me. I hope you enjoy it, too.

Wordless Wednesday: The sound of (winter) silence

Red & Blue & Delicate Green...

It's funny what snippets of verse will hang on in our minds for seemingly ever. When I was a child, I used to get these small bi-weekly (I think) magazines during the summer, with stories and games to occupy the elementary schoolchild's mind. I don't remember the name of the magazine, or the name of the story from which this snippet of verse came, but it's hung on forever in my noggin:
"Red and blue and delicate green, the king can't catch it, neither can the queen
The rain and sun will make one soon, answer this riddle by tomorrow noon!"

So it was that I was entranced by our beloved photographer David Perry's latest photography assignment, only he referred to Red, Green and Blue. The assignment was to just play with the three colours; to let our inner kid go. Good enough!


The trick for me was finding something red I wanted to play with. Red isn't my favourite colour by a long shot, except I do love it in the garden. And curiously, I have a number of red fleece pullovers for wearing outdoors through the fall and winter, as part of my 'Push against the winter blahs' prescription. So I used one of those as a backdrop for the things I photographed, including this curious section of a many-pointed star made out of metallic foil and paper. It looks like a flower when you look at it from one angle, like a star when you set it up on a table. It's actually sort of like the Moravian glass stars that Anna used in her assignment.
There's a very cool tea room down in Melvern Square, near Kingston, NS, which sells fairly traded items from nations such as Thailand and India. This bracelet is made of glass beads in a rainbow of blues from turquoise to cobalt, and is one of my favourite things though it cost very little. Set it on a favourite silk scarf, added a deep blue filter to really bring out the blue, and voila: an explosion of cool, rich, soothing blue.

I have a lot of green in my house; my office walls are green, lots of plant leaves, etc, etc. But I wanted something rich and emerald green to play with for this project. I found what I was looking for in a drawer; a string of Mardi-gras beads given to me last year to promote the Acadian festival in Clare. Dropped onto a rich green tablecloth, they suited my purposes perfectly.

This was so much fun, I actually did more photos, most with several items in each shot, and then made up collages of them. But I think we'll save those for the next post, just to keep with the purity of this project. Thanks to David for creating this assignment, and for the thoughts he shared in encouraging us.

Apres Storm...more views.

Like so many others along the east coast (and probably, further west/centre Canada and the US) we got royally pasted last night with an assortment of weather. First, a bunch more snow, then assorted ice and rain, and then it got cold again. Oh, and the wind is blowing, full tilt screaming gale off the Bay of Fundy. Yee hah. So the windows have even MORE stuff on them. But Yolanda of Bliss was correct in her comment on the previous post--I neglected to add the nose and tongue prints from little cats that are on most windows in the house, at least those where Cat Television viewing is best. 

Today we have sun at times breaking through the clouds scudding overhead. My spruces are pointing the wind direction, and now the snow has a hard crust on it so the birds aren't leaving tracks. Hubby just told me that the wind was so bad earlier this morning and the roads so icy that several people driving cars were blown right OFF the road; one above us on the flat stretch, one down in the Bay proper. No one hurt, but that's just a bit of commentary on what the wind gets like. It isn't Les suetes winds like scream around Cheticamp in Cape Breton, or the wild wind I saw in the Labrador two summers ago, but it's still vicious by times. More on that presently. 
Ten years ago next month, we decided to buy our house before we even went inside, based on the barn, the greenhouse, the view, the yard--and this window. It frosts up, of course, because it's not insulated. But I look at it from my office every day, and the coloured and textured glass panels inevitably make me grin and grin and be happy. The staghorn fern likes it too, though I move it on very cold days. 

Yes, that is snow drifted up almost to the deck doorknobs. Don't worry. We have two other doors we can use, although Rowdycat will be annoyed because he generally comes to THIS one when he wants to come in. Since the snow is now a frozen mass of ice, I don't expect it's going to get cleared off any time soon. Longsuffering Spouse had enough to do chiselling his way into the barn doors and cleaning enough of the driveway to get out. And I don't do snow shoveling. 
No picnics here anytime soon, that's for sure. And the Christmas tree, out there since 4 January, still hasn't had to be cut up and used as mulch on the fussbudget plants in the gardens, because they're all buried in snow. 

A wider view from upstairs, showing the still-horseless pasture (peeved horse in barn kicking stall walls), and the more-restless waters of the Minas Channel, part of the upper Bay of Fundy. If you're interested in this phemonenal body of water and the lands around it, you can see a geography lesson about where I live at this post from our Geography Project of last year. 

This is a photo from another day, another gentle gale of wind, down at the wharf in Scotts Bay. It gets a trifle bombastic down there. But yeah, I love where I live and I wouldn't live anywhere else. Most days. Sea people need to be able to keep an eye on the sea or else we get decidedly out of sorts. 

Though it's sunny today, I've declined to go outside, deciding instead to work on assignments, read blogs, drink coffee, and be cajoled by Spunky Boomerang, who thinks we should go for a nap. Of course, Spunky's role in life is to nap most all day and night, follow me around, and assist with working by laying or sitting in front of my monitor. And yes, that's my foodie friend Charmian's blog on the monitor, and a World Wildlife Federation calendar of penguins on the wall. It was a random shot so I didn't fiddle with exposures or anything, hence the outside is washed out. And Spunky is tired. I might just have to help him nap. 

Rooms with Views...

One of my favourite photographers in the world, David Perry, challenges me with every post and every photograph he shares. Tuesday, he took it one step further, challenging us to show him something of our gardens. Not perfect. Not pristine. Not even sun-shining.

I promised to do that today. And today was a grey, grey day. But I promised. So I walked from room to room with my camera, mostly from a couple of the upstairs windows, and let the camera see whatever it wanted to see. I had my zoom lens on initially, and left it on just to see what it would be like.

One discovery: the windows seriously need washing. Fog, rain, snow, sleet, wind, and salt-mist will do that to a window on the outside. Wood stove heat, flies and general living-life will create window-art inside. For the photo above, of clematis on the front arbour, I opened the front door. 

Then I went upstairs and took photos from the room directly above. That's ice in the bowl of Scotts Bay, with the tide half-in. Or half out. 


Further out in the water, no ice. Since we were at about half-tide, there wasn't much water screaming around Cape Split. When the tide is running, the riptide is around 8 knots. 

In the back yard, we have snow sculptures where the snow is mere inches deep in spots, and several feet deep in other areas. Petitpoint of bird feet under the rosebushes and birches. Tangle of grapevine with punctuation of teasels around the obelisk. 

The only real colour in the yard right now is the blue blue arbour in the back yard. Everything else is in shades of white or black, sepia or cream. The hollyhock sculpture is made from recycled oil drums. The horse hasn't been out in the pasture for over a week--there's ice under that snow, and that can be treacherous for a horse. 

Outside my office window, east: The big Catawbiense rhododendron acts as a thermometer, hauling its leaves down and rolling them tightly, offended by cold. In front of it, feeders on the metal hangers provide me with lots of views of birds feasting, and provide the cats with bird television, of course. 

South office window. Grey grey day, with just a momentary glimpse of an anemic sun, almost eclipsed by the blown glass orb hanging from the curtainrod. Normally, my office is washed with light if there's any sun at all, and cascades of rainbows from the crystal snowflakes. Today, the sky was exhausted, and so was the writer. 

Same window, different lens, straight out window and hoping the dirt on the glass won't show. Those marvelous spruces bound our land, act as huge moody windsocks, and brood in even the finest, fairest of weather. I love the spruces. I love our views, most days. 

Tonight, the weather is raging. Tomorrow, we may well be encased in crystal outside, and the views will have changed again.