November

November, super interesting month, I had a raccoon spend the day in my backyard, I went to ProFusion, continued documentation of Ontario place and the Science Centre and I spent the better part of the week in Jury Duty and more Curling

I thought I could keep up with doing a weekly entry but I could not, little to much work also some weeks are just boring and I have nothing to write about, I don’t think anyone wants to read about me writing a job applications 🥱

So I’ve decided to scrap the weekly blog post and just go with a monthly post about what I’ve been up to and hopefully another monthly story post about a photo adventure.

Raccoon Story

I was coming home late Tuesday from a curling game and as I was putting the bike away I startled a raccoon. Now I’m not sure where it started but I found it about half way up the telephone post and it just kinda stoped an and watched me as I put my bike away. The next morning I believe it was the same one still in the backyard. It was moving slowly, vary slowly but it managed to clim the fence so I didn’t give it mush worry, 2 hours later it was asleep on the fence. When it woke up I watched it move around as it looked for ways down the fence.

I’m well aware that distemper has been common in raccoons this year, but this little one wasn’t showing any of the common signs. To help it get off the fence I put up a couple of wood boards to create a ramp back in to my yard and to the water fountain. It finally figured it out and slowly went down and had a long drying of water. I ended up going out again give it another ramp from the fountain the ground. When I did this it started running away from me but stopped half way up the first ramp and watched me. It spent most of the afternoon wondering the backyard looking for places to sleep. It ended up sleeping in a sunny spot on the back deck until some squirrels started yelling and it moved back off to the garden. I couldn’t stay and watch it all afternoon but when I got back around 5pm it had moved to the neighbours yard and was sleeping in there garden, when it was nice and dark out side it woke up again easily got up the fence and wondered off looking much better then it did when I found it in the morning

November 18, 2024 - Almost nothing left standing

Ontario Place

The destruction is complete, over 850 trees have been removed, the silos have been torn down and the log ride that looped the man made mountain has been tore down. I’ve been documenting the redevelopment of the site making weekly visits since October 5, when clear cutting began under the cover of darkness. I need to make one more trip out as I don't have any photos of a completely baren West Island, once I have those I'll be able to put a full photo series together.

Science Centre

It’s November 9, currently the building is empty, all the exhibits have been removed and the indoor rain forest has been cut down completely. I'm hopefully that the building will be saved and get recognized as historical significant. I would really like a photo of the building with snow on it, so I'm hoping for a colder and snowier winter this year

Profusion

This is such a fun event I look forward to it every year. This year I have no budget for new equipment so I was just window shopping and adding to my with list. This year I was looking for a lighting kits, Strobe and Continuous,  as I want to start building a proper professional studio kit and upgrade from the speedlite's I've been using.

I checked out printers at Epson and Canon as I'm looking to do more printing but would like to upgrade my old Artisan 1430 (only have 4 ink colours) I'm going to be honest I have only had Epson printers, School used Epson printers and Epson did not impress me at the event. Canon on the other hand, they did impress me. We talked about the Pro 1100 that was on display and the Pro 1000. the colours on the test prints looked amazing but they always do for these events the big part that sold me on the printers was when the rep said that during covid he left his printing lab for almost 2 years and when he came back they all worked perfectly, no lines thought first prints no clogged nozzles just perfectly working printers. For some one that doesn't print all that often right now that’s a big sell point for me considering I haven't used my Epson for since the summer and will probably need to spend an hours running cleaning cycles on it

 I had a great talk with the rep from Laowa. I was mostly interested in the new 12-24mm (maybe 34) Shift lens. Yes, a shift lens designed for architecture and I'm really excited about it. The other one was the new 100mm Macro Tilt Shift lens. In June I was about to buy a used 90mm Macro Tilt Shift from Vistek. That was until I looked a the product pics and realized how old it was as well as reading that it was the old rental lens. It just looked to used for $800.

I have a bit of an obsession with tilt-shift lens since the architecture class in college. I ended up renting the lens and tested it for landscape and product shots. I loved the 24mm for landscape shots, getting perfectly straight trees in the foreground and I actually just photographed trees for an hour. I like using the both the tilt and shift functions for product photos but 24mm was just to wide for anything I was doing. Anyways… I've been looking for a good deal on tilt shift lenses ever since and I think these two might be it. Now I just have to wait until they have a Canon mount.

Jury Duty

I wasn't selected but I still spend three full days heard two cases and wasn't even close to getting picked for either of them. I don’t care that I spent 3 day there I care more that I was in a crappy waiting room and couldn't get an outlet to plug the computer in. this is important since my battery is dying and cant keep a charge, using a program such as lightroom or photoshop only gives me an hours of work time. I didn't get a lot of anything done that week

Curling

I've been spending most of my weekends at the club coaching others. I was a coach for a Development League (Curlers with 1-2 years experience that want to get better) and now that I'm free from school and have nothing else to do on a Sunday I'm back to coaching the youth groups

That it for this month. I'm hoping I'll be able to get out and do some winter photography in December but I also want some snow on the ground, holiday baking will be happening though so I'll probably be doing some food photography at a point

Have Fun