Fisheye lenses and me

Here are a couple of images taken yesterday at a brook...it was not an ideal day to shoot water because of the sunny conditions: I prefer overcast when shooting water to control the reflections, because it is nearly impossible in sunny conditions even with a polarizer...the black and white image was hand held, taken with a fisheye; I really liked the reflection of the trees on the rock ...looked like a petroglyph...found that I'm becoming a real fan of the fisheye 15mm...it always makes me smile when looking at my fisheye results..sometimes they are fascinating, sometimes just plain funny.

Ides of March

These images were taken in the last few days; at last, Spring is more apparent in every walk I take in the woods. I can detect the feel of life coming back to the earth; and after the bitter winter we had, it is most welcome.

Canadian Rockies in Feb retrospective

Here are a few more images taken while in Alberta, Canada last month. I have reviewed mentally this tour taken during one of the coldest recorded weeks in the area...it seems to me

that you lose all creativity and desire when you are slowly freezing...these images are not what I would have wanted, but they are the result of my viewpoint at the time which was: get warm..get the damn shoot over with and get in a car with heater blasting...there was one day when the temps were about 20F so that is when these two images were shot..the bottom one is with the Canon Fisheye 15mm..the top is with my favorite lens the Canon 17-40mm F4L..it is the lens that best defines my personal vision..I have just purchased the new Canon 70-300mm F4-5.6 L lens..will try to get some images to post later this week taken with it..I am hoping it will replace the two lenses usually taken on photo trips: Canon's 70-200mm F4L and the Canon 100-400mm...if it works well, it will be nice to have one less lens in my backpack..

February in the Canadian Rockies

Well, being in the Canadian Rockies, near Nordegg, in February was very very cold. It was beyond my cold tolerance photographing in that area. What I have learned is that it's necessary to have the best equipment because quite a few of the eight people on the Darwin Wiggett Winter Magic tour suffered from equipment failure, also there were frostbite issues because at times we had to expose fingers to change lenses or make adjustments; my Really Right Stuff ballhead never failed me, even at -35C...my Canon 5D also never failed to operate..many of the others had issues with other brands of ballhead; Arca swiss heads did freeze up. I feel that my images are not as good as they could have been because all I could focus on was keeping warm or getting somewhere warm: a half hour was about it for me tolerating the extreme temperatures...my new 15mm f2.8 fisheye lens from Canon was amazing..took some great shots that are very unusual yet interesting...glad to be back home again and warmer...changing the filters on wide-angle was a real challenge; just using my hands became challenging as the moment they were exposed to weather they were freezing.