Here is an example. I shot this Saturday morning about 8:30 AM. ISO 200, 1/60s at f11, if memory serves. The near edge of the image is the water about 8 feet from my feet. So you can see that, at f11, everything from infinity to at least 8′ in front of me is in focus.

This is in part how cell cameras work. Most of them don’t have any focus mechanism – their sensors are so small and the focal length of their lenses so short that even at moderate apertures like 4 and 5.6 everything from a couple of feet out is in focus.

I’m not completely happy with this image – I think I should have included a line of shore to give some context, and the tones particularly in the foreground aren’t where I want them yet, but it illustrates the point. The little tree is presented in contrast to the vast expanse of river and the trees on the far shore..

The river is also rising – that little tree probably rooted last summer after the flood.

I’ve been needing (well, not needing) wanting a wider lens for landscape work. For example, when I made this photo, I was desperately wishing that I had something in the 24mm range. For landscapes, short focal lengths have a couple of advantages. First, they take in (as you would expect…) a wider view of the scene. And second, they have greater (at really short lengths, much greater) depth-of-field than normal focal lengths.

They also have a few drawbacks – because they jam more than a ‘normal’ view into a given frame, they distort. Foreshortening, in particular, gets stronger the wider the view. Also, because the depth-0f-field is so much greater, selective focus is less useful.

They work well whenever you want a big sweep, or where you are close to things. Like in a city.

They’re not so great for portraits.

These are all about 2′ across. They are lying on a stony beach in Campbell River, BC, near where HouseApe 1.0 used to live. There are heavy tidal currents here, probably a couple of knots at the peak, and there is violent wave action during the winter. The stones are smoothed and softened by this – their hides are sensuous under the fingers.

I spent a wonderful morning photographing these in 2008. Who knows when I will get up there again?

This is Hastings Park. The 4th race, I believe. August something-mumble, 2012.

This is part of Carmi’s Thematic series.

I finished this one yesterday morning, and I have another one in the queue, which I worked on this morning but am not totally happy with yet.

This was shot at the PNE in August, 2012, and processed by me, yesterday. This is a detail of a performing drum troupe.

This is part of Carmi’s Thematic series.

Taken at the PNE, August 2012.

This runs counter to Carmi’s goal, which is to get people out and looking at new growth, but ya know. I have a couple of images of new growth, but they aren’t leaves. And this is a leaf. So there you go.

When I was but a shaver, I lived in Goose Bay for a while. I remembered it fondly for many years, although I can’t really say why. It was cold, grey, and insect-ridden. The brief summer got only warmish, and the last of the snow didn’t melt till school was out. However, we did manage to get into trouble for tobogganing off a roof onto a snowbank. It wasn’t as dangerous as it sounds: the roof was that of a 1 storey rancher at the end of the row, and the snowbank came to within a couple of feet of the eaves.

At the time I lived there, you couldn’t get there by road – you flew. In the summer supplies came in by ship.

Now you can drive there, and I’d like to do the loop in what is still one of the most remote places on the planet. People will probably say it’s unspoiled, but I’ve been there, and you can’t really spoil it. There’s a reason that almost nobody lives there.

Meanwhile, spring has broken full-force here in the Lower Mainland.

I have a colour version of this, but like this one better. It needs more work yet and even when that is done this won’t be a stick-it-on-the-wall image – I have long tried to make a good cherry blossom B+W, but it’s much harder than it looks.

This past weekend was a busy one – HouseApe 1.0 went off to a cadet thing, 2.0 got back from a school thing, and 3.0 went to spend the night at a friend’s, where they ate crap and played many hours of video games.

We, meanwhile, hauled ourselves off to Home Depot, where we bought a power washer. The advantages of the local clime are many, but there are disadvantages too. Left to themselves, things get a coating of mold, mildew, and moss here. In the Okanagan, where I grew up, if you put down a concrete slab, you could expect it to look pretty much the same forever providing you swept it once in a while. Here, concrete gets dark and slippery.

Anyway, on Saturday morning I washed part of the back patio, the basement stairs, and the walkway down the side. Then Chris and I took the New Miata off to Richmond to get a knockbox. On the way back we stopped by a big new spice store and got vanilla beans and strawberry syrup and raw cane sugar (the powdery real brown sugar kind, not the refined-and-then-molasses-added-back kind).

We were motoring back top-down (the rest of Canada is cursing me) when we saw a rainstorm off in the distance. We got home, got in the house, and had just got our shoes off when the downpour arrived. Timing!

It only lasted a few minutes, and then I went out to annoy the neighbors some more. I washed more of the back patio, half the deck, the back stairs, and the front steps before dinner, where we watched The Bourne Identity, which neither of us had seen before.

Sunday we went grocery shopping. The rain had settled in solid, and I cleaned and cooked – I made marinara with meatballs and chicken cacciatore for later in the week, then pork burgers for dinner, and grilled chicken also for later in the week.

We also went to the liquor store to get wine for the cacciatore and while we were there we were looking at vodka when this odd little woman came up and barged between us. She started talking to Chris about vodkas, something about Polish ones and she was Polish, although she had no accent. If you’ve seen elderly Polish women, well, she certainly looked the part, but she was poking at the bottles and talking to us about them. It wasn’t until later that I wondered if her problem was that she couldn’t read and she was looking to us for clues.

Last night was Game of Thrones, then sleep. The sleep of the righteous, the sleep of one who has powerwashed and made meals for the week.