Capt Mondo's Photo Blog

Am heading up to the cottage tomorrow and staying for the weekend, so tonight was my one and only chance to see any of the Streetfest portion of the local Jazz Festival. The “jazz” festival is increasingly a misnomer, since the majority of the bands playing are Blues, Latin or something other than Jazz, but the music is fun, free and good, so what’s there to complain about? Unfortunately one of my favourite bands from last year — Big Rude Jake — was not making a return appearance. Oh well. 🙁

The day had been the hottest so far this summer, hitting a peak at 37C, and with the humidity feeling much hotter. By the time the bands started up things had started to cool down, but it was still hotter than most people would like. So the energy of some of the bands was a bit “muted”. Diablo de Puente was particularly sedate compared to what I had seen them do last year. (Postscript: apparently the people from a local fitness place brought them cold, wet towels for cooling down, and the energy of the band picked up considerably afterwards).

This was the first time I have taken my f/2 200mm telephoto (and my trusty Olympus E-510) to the festival, and I wanted to see how it would perform in the relatively low light conditions you get after the sun goes down/the music starts up. On the whole, am happy with what I came away with, and the “Supersonic Wave Drive” makes for fast and smooth focusing when needed.

I managed to make it down to Wineva Avenue before heading back, so what you see here is only about half of the extent of the Streetfest festival. In terms of the acts there were several welcome returns by the like of the Dr. Draw, The David Rotundo Band, Fathead, and the Downtown Dixieland Band, but it was good to see a lot of fresh blood as well, including the likes of Dr. Nick and The Roller Coasters, Sambacana, K.C. Roberts and The Live Revolution, and Suzana da Camara.

Here’s a selection of photos I took while roaming Streetfest:

Saw a honeybee buzzing around some flowers, and even though I didn’t have my macro lens on my camera, I thought I would give things a tree with my f2 200mm telephoto from about a meter-and-half away to see what I could get.

It turned out much better than I expected, and here’s the best pic from the lot I shot:

Honeybee Close-up

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: