Capt Mondo's Photo Blog

Was out walking the dog and noticed that the sky down by the beach was full kites. Turned out to be an event called Windfest which I had never heard of before, but they put on a great show.

Shot many pics, of which these were my favourites:

Another walk with the dog looking for interesting critters to shoot with the camera. Saw this tiny butterfly, which was only just over a couple of centimeters long.

Turns out to be a Hobomok Skipper. While looking it up I couldn’t make my mind up as to whether it was that or a Zabulon Skipper (gotta love the names in either case), but according to this, which says that the Zabulon Skipper is not found north of Pelee Island and that in “anywhere but extreme southwestern Ontario the Hobomok Skipper is unmistakable”. Well alright then, Hobomok Skipper it is then. 😉

When I stepped out the door early this morning on my way to work, I saw the Moon and Jupiter high overhead. I immediately stepped back inside to grab my camera, fit the telephoto lens onto it as well as the tripod.

Clearly I had missed the closest conjunction point several hours earlier, but I figured this was still worth a shot.

(Hmm, Jupiter doesn’t even appear in the thumbnail image above, but it does come through as a multi-pixel circle when seen full-sized. Key thing was keeping the Moon and Jupiter in the same shot. Oh well…)

Ages ago I started to make a cork board, since we drank a fair amount of wine (having a family vineyard certainly helps) and it seemed a shame to throw them all out. I got a frame for it, and started setting down rows of corks.

This morning Vanessa asks for a cork board to pin of her jewelery to. This was sufficient impetus to put in the final few rows of saved-up corks to finish off the job.

Got to the Canadian National Exhibition around 12:30 and managed to find a good spot to view the Canadian International Air Show from. I brought along my f/2 200mm and my f/4 300mm lenses along with me to put them both through their paces. I tended to use the 200mm on the larger or faster planes in order to freeze their motion, and the 300mm on the smaller ones, trading off speed for detail. It wasn’t the best day for taking pics of flying planes, as the skies became cloudier as it went on, and was finally brought to a premature end when the front of a thunderstorm came in. Given that most of the show is over the water and facing south, in most cases side of the plane facing the audience is in shadow, hence the need for a fast telephoto lens. Still, it was a good and rousing show.

I arrived just as three members of the all-female parachute group the Misty Blues jumped out of an airplane. This was followed by some aerial gymnastics by Mike Wiskus in the red Lucas Oil bi-plane, and then some precision flying by the members of the Heavy Metal Jet Team. (The Heavy Metal Jet Team site only mentions having L-39 Albatroses and T-33 Shooting Star, but doesn’t mention what seems to be a swept-wing MiG which had a prominent place in their show). After that came more aerial acrobatics by Pete McLeod in the Red Bull Zivko Edge 540. Then came the Lancaster from the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton, one of only two Lancasters still flying. While it flew by they had an pilot who had flown 19 successful missions in one during WWII (and was shot down on his 20th mission), who was given a rousing round of applause by everyone in attendance when he finished. I didn’t catch much of Rick Volker‘s show in his Sukhoi SU-26M since it was mid-afternoon by that point and I desperately needed some food and drink! Then came the demo of the A-10 Warthog, which buzzed by the waterfront several times. At that point the air show was called on account of bad weather, though the MV-22 Osprey buzzed by — allowing me to get a single shot of it as it went by — on its way to shelter at Pearson International Airport.

Here are some of the better shots I took from the show:

Took myself and the girls to Fan Expo. Here are a selection of some of the pics I shot while there:

Went down to the St. Lawrence Market to get some bagels and to take the opportunity to shoot some pictures of Buskerfest, which was happening on the street right in front of the market.

Didn’t end up taking too many pics, but these were my favourites:

Took the Go Train from Danforth station to Exhibition, and arrived at the C.N.E. grounds just as it opened at 10am.

My main reason for coming was to shoot pics of the Warrior’s Day Parade. I like taking pics at this event because, a) who doesn’t like a parade? b) the pomp and pageantry is fun, and c) I like capturing the moment where a personality is revealed under the uniform. Also, it is a kind of homage to my parents, both of whom did their part in WWII.

I saw a couple of old WWI-era planes circle the grounds prior to the show, and I wondered if there was going to be a fly-by to help celebrate the 90th Anniversary of the parade. The answer was no as it turned out, but they were still fun to see, though I didn’t have my 300mm lens which would have brought them into focus.

Instead I brought along my heavy-but-fast (f/2) 200mm lens, which was its first outing at a parade. Figure I would trade off getting the types of close-ups I could get with my f/4 300mm lens but which would likely be slightly blurry due to motion for being able to freeze the motion of the people going past. For the most part that seemed to be a good strategy, and in some pics it is even possible to read the names on individual’s name-tags in the pictures I came away with.

I think the most moving for me was this one:

Am guessing that this is the father or maybe older brother of the soldier in the photo who was killed in Afghanistan. [Postscript: I was right, the photo the man is carrying is of Joshua Baker, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2010].

Here is a selection of some of the many pics I took:

At the beginning of the month I was able to replace my existing phone under my plan, and instead of going for another BlackBerry, I’ve opted for an iPhone.

My old BlackBerry 8320 has been good, and has been around the world with me, but it’s time to move on.

BlackBerries have always done email well, but that’s about it. The Web experience on my BlackBerry has always been dismal/disappointing/frustrating, the games were usually uninstalled shortly after being installed, and they have a stupidly-low amount of on-board memory. When I saw that the new BlackBerries still had ridiculously low amounts of memory (512 MB vs. 16 GB on the equivalent “base” iPhone on the plan) that helped clinch it.

But it’s not so much the hardware as the software you can run on it. My wife loves her iPhone, and we have an iPad at home so am already very familiar with the apps that can be used on it.

So bye-bye BlackBerry! I think the only thing I will miss is the tactile mini-keyboard.

Here are a couple of pics of my battered BlackBerry:

Took the dog out for a walk early this morning prior to our trip to see the girls up at Camp Couchiching, and I finally got some decent pics of some male goldfinches flitting about some blue flowers at Woodbine Park. Here are my pics from what I shot: