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Most of the time when I am up at the cottage in Georgian Bay, I feel I am lucky if I manage to get to see and photograph a single loon, usually from a great distance.

So I was thrilled to find no less than three loons had landed relatively close by in Oberlin Bay early this morning, just in view from the deck of the cottage. At first I thought maybe it was a family with a fledged chick, but from their behaviour I could tell that this was simply one round in a fight for territory by at least one of the birds.

This is the best picture I took of the trio, of what are presumably two males sizing each other up with a female watching the outcome:

A Trio of Loons Sizing Each Other Up

Here’s the “fight sequence” that came immediately before it; mainly a lot of posturing with none of the birds actually taking a stab at each other.

Annie had picked some daisy flower-heads found on the island, and placed them in a china bowl filled with water. Vanessa contributed a rock which sat in the center of all of this. As the sun was setting the angle of the light highlighted the texture of the flowers, and I took a few photos, of which this was my favourite:

Daisy Heads Floating in a China Bowl

After taking the pics I asked Vanessa what the piece of wire on the rock was for. She pointed out that it was a little figure of a person that she had made. Ooops! 😉

A pair of Trumpeter Swans have taken up temporary residence in the pond at Woodbine Park. Many pictures were taken — and here are some of them.

While I was taking the pictures, I was approached by a pair of teenage girls, and one of them asked whether these swans had walked here. Not sure where she got that idea, but I set her straight. 😉

As usual, I headed down to the bottom of Woodbine Beach to see and photograph the Canada Day fireworks.

Had my trusty Olympus E-510 set up on a tripod and took these pics. Some are shot using the built-in “Fireworks” mode (which opens the shuttle for several seconds) and others were shot in “normal” mode, just to see what would happen. They seemed to have worked out pretty well actually, appearing less “streaky” than the ones with long exposures. See for yourself.

Blogger made it next to impossible to properly update my site, and have now finally gotten around to shifting things over to WordPress, which at least has some mechanisms for uploading pics easily.

I started going through the process of trying to update blogger, but in the end gave up after all of the roadblocks to what ought to have been a simple, straightforward process. The final straw was clicking on a link for advanced instructions, and coming up with a dead link. Ugh. WordPress, here I come!

Things may be a little bit creaky here as I get things set up under WordPress. For some reason only the last 50 posts were imported, and none of the posts seems to have a title. However, this should give me the opportunity to go back in time and add pics from previous trips and of other interesting things I have seen and taken pictures of with my camera.

Yea WordPress! Boo Blogger! 😉

Postscript, August 1, 2011: WordPress is turning out to be a great blogging engine, its many plug-ins making it easy for me to tweak things (like the default photo size, tagging options, etc) over Blogger.

Unfortunately the Blogger import engine only tackled the last 50 posts, and I have many more than that, with entries dating back to 2001. So it will take me a while to restore things back to what was originally there.

While renewing my site account with BlueHost recently, I realized that the size allocated to my domain (and sub-domains for that matter) is almost limitless, so will be posting more pics to the site.

From the site stats most people are coming her for the pictures, so all the more reason to showcase what I have shot over the years. (From a personal standpoint, it’s also interesting to see the progression in shots taken, as I get better with some techniques and slowly acquire better gear).

One of our backyard plants is infested with aphids. It’s still a very healthy plant, and part of the reason why we’re not too concerned is that it is also covered with numerous Ladybug larvae, which are feasting on the aphids.

Got out my macro lens and liked this shot the best:

Ladybug Larva

Had a lengthy wait at Beijing Airport, as I got there early, and found out after I arrived that the flight time had been pushed out a couple of hours in order to switch over crews. So I had a lot of time to do some last-minute shopping in the airport, have dinner, wander, and take a few pictures.

In the end I caught some images of the sun setting over the plane I was going to fly home, which I thought were striking:

Air Canada Flight Just Before Sunset

Air Canada Flight at Sunset

My last full day in China. Woke up early and went for a walk around the grounds before the heat of the sun took hold. Here are the pics I took while walking around the Chateau Changyu grounds:

I was invited to join the members from the firm that was hosting the localization summit for a team building event at a place called Chateau Changyu, about an hour-and-a-half’s drive north of Beijing.

I considered staying in Beijing to go see The Forbidden City and The Great Wall, but I had visited both on my last trip here and wanted to see and hopefully explore some of the countryside, which this trip offered.

Chateau Changyu is an interesting place. First and foremost, it is a winery, which was one of the draws of the place for me, a chance to do some comparisons to what I have seen at home, in France and in Southern California. It is also basically a theme park, the “theme” being a chance to visit a old French (or German?)-style village while still in China. It was a popular place for brides and grooms to be photographed against a faux-European background featuring a Neuschwanstein-ish castle (which is where the winery cellars are housed). So you get the incongruous setting of a small European village surrounded by extensive vineyards set among iconic eroded Chinese mountains in the distance.

I attended some of the presentations, ventured into the cellars, and waited out a thunderstorm. After the storm passed, the bright late afternoon light set against a dark sky made for some very striking shots, which can be seen in the gallery below.

I was given some wine to taste while there, and while it was not the best I’ve ever had, it was also far from being the worst. I am pretty sure we will be hearing more about Chinese wine, since they seemed determined to make a dent in the market. The consensus though is that the local market needs to be educated first, as there were several stories of a locals chugging back expensive wine like pop. Am sure that too will change, and clearly there is an enormous market for good wine emerging here.

Second day of the localization summit in Beijing. Inna Geller gave a presentation on how to assess and minimize risk in localization assignments, and a new software tool that embraces machine-translation (through the mediation of a human translator) was launched by CSOFT. Here are some pics I shot from the day’s events: