September Rain

Hello, and welcome back!

It’s been a wet month, with lots of rain and mist and even fog. A sunny chilly morning brought lots of dew, making the dragonflies lethargic and showering them with bling:

I need more practice with focus stacking, and getting the camera to use the right intervals. I do like how the eye and body worked out above, but anything completely out of focus ends up being a large fuzzy blob (left side around the wing). One suggestion I’ve heard is to use a smaller aperture for more depth of field. I’ll have to try that out, but it will require higher ISO settings, introducing more noise. I could use a flash or other light source to compensate, but a large part of my intent is to capture these scenes as found, unstaged, and undisturbed as much as possible, so that will be my last resort. Moving on…

The English Tea Garden in Assiniboine Park is usually busy, but on a rainy day it empties out and becomes a photography playground:

A misty morning in Bird’s Hill Park really showcased just how many spiders there are, and how prolific they are at producing webs. Every path had strings going every which way, and full blown webs were everywhere. The spiders themselves were missing, however, maybe hiding in the warmer foliage below:

Then the sun broke above the mist, and for a moment, it looked like Manitoba had mountains in the distance. Happily a few geese flew by to punctuate the scene:

A welcome break from the wet conditions came a few days later, with a nice golden sunrise, and a familiar chair which I photographed a couple months ago. The chair hasn’t moved, but the scene has changed quite a bit:

I am curious how long that chair will remain intact.

Nearby, the harsh contrast, along with the shape of the path and clouds acting as a mirror, told me I’d want this in black and white:

Back in the city, the fog came in heavy one morning. I was thrilled, but unfortunately I couldn’t make anything work until this wide shot of part of downtown:

After that things improved. I don’t normally do “street” photos, but this person had a colourful umbrella, and I saw them coming with lots of time to spare, so I just had to click. At 1/20th second, their legs blur, but that’s expected.

A few days later I returned to my old haunts, an abandoned rail line that runs through the middle of the city. I walked for a couple hours in the rain, and was rewarded with a new discarded chair. I’m going to have to make a zine about “chairs in random places” :)

The above image was bit tricky to work with in post processing, since the chair is black and the foliage is dark green, and they are affected by similar edits, but I think I managed to bring the chair out a bit. I’ll have to revisit this scene and see if the tree turns a more photogenic colour in the next few weeks. Ideally, it will rain again…

On a non-photographic note, it’s odd how quiet it is, there are two busy streets running parallel to the tracks half a block away in each direction. Here are a few others from that session: