Industrial Chic Brick Shelf :-)

We collected a few old weathered bricks from the shores of Lake Ontario in Durham Region, before we moved. I had wanted to eventually use them in our new place as little wall shelves. I found some cool customized brackets on eBay that sort of contrast with the natural shapes of the worn bricks. We were originally thinking of putting a little rectangular piece of bevelled glass on top but seeing them up without glass, I am kind of liking them as is. I put my little crystal owl ornament on this one. I have 3 other ones to use around the condo once I decide where I want to put them.

Moving Day (s)

Spent the last weekend and up to Wed, moving. Tues was to be the only moving day, but it ended up being Wed as well. Thank God for the kindness of a friend who allowed me to use his truck the second day. We are in our new place now, just have a lot of stuff to sort through. However, I am not one to leave it long, I'll be getting through it all by Christmas if it kills me. Though we have not had a chance to go for any walks, we did see one bird fly by the window - a pigeon lol! No lack of exercise though. Carrying, lifting, moving stuff, packing and repacking and such, we are beat. My mistake was not booking the ay after the move off though in reality, there was not supposed to be any "moving" on Wed. I was dead on my fee Thurs, still am today, but went to work. The subway was a joy :-( lol! Ah, I'll get used to it. The Go was expensive but I guess you get what you pay for. Our move was not the nightmare it could have been, considering 2 days before our scheduled move, the owner of our old building puts a note on our door that the driveway around the apt building was to be paved. Well, too bad, we were ppulling our moving truck up still, and we did. We were done fast thanks to my son helping. The second day of our move was by far way way harder. However, we lucked out as it was spitting rain in the am. but stopped. Hopefully, in the next month or so, we'll get out to the bluffs and Rosetta Park again.

Couple of Kookie Bird Pics

Going through photos off and on the last couple of weeks, I've run into some that bring back cool memories or that deserve a "oh, I remember that day!"

There's so many but a couple are here:

American tree Sparrow eating from John's hand

Mallards flying funny - they look placed in - wings all aligned

John's Canon and a Panorama

Since my camera has been out of commission, I've been using John's Canon. I love the value transitions Canon gets, though John has a good lens on his, better than Nikon. Though I will stick to Nikon out of use familiarity and also lens compatibility with the ones I have already, one being an old old manual lens I love.

During walks though, I've been using his camera. I forget what model it is. It is about the same age as my 7+ yr old D70 though. We don't have a 70-300 for his Canon so I've been stuck using the 35-70mm lens again. So, no pics of birds lol! However, his lens has an aperture of 2.8 which I LOVE! I can do close up images of cool little textures and lower light shots than with my lens, which has only a 5.6 aperture ability as its widest open ability. This is closer to my manual Nikkor lens, which has an even wider aperture than that.

I shot a series of images of the sky over Lake Ontario, always haphazardly, hand held and just manually panning lol! John helped stitch them together in a panorama and remove a hint of tree branches on the very right of the picture plane which added nothing, and took away from the flow of the image's composition. I cannot use Content Aware Fill with PS Elements as it does not have it. I do that kind of thing manually in Elements but then it destroys the pixels somewhat and noise to match the rest of the noise in the image often needs to be added. Content Awareness Fill is an amazing amazing tool!

The colours here, the way the light seems to be opposite, dark and light transposed, almost creating a Rorschach like feel, are so appealing to me.