Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, last (and only) time I was there, in 2005. It was wet, windy and foggy. I processed this picture in a way to make it look older, like the kind of picture you’d see hanging in a bar somewhere.

Another sunset over Lake Ontario, as seen from Port Dalhousie in St Catharines.

This is the fifth post in a series. Jenna and I went to Ottawa for a weekend in the middle of October, finally–neither of us had yet been there, even after several years in Canada, and considering that Ottawa isn’t really that far away from Niagara. Jenna wanted to go to a conference on global health so it was a good excuse to go.

Jenna requested that I post this picture, of the central block and the Peace Tower of the Canadian Parliament through the fog.

I finally got to take a close-up of a dragonfly. A bunch of them were swarming in the garden all evening, and one obliged to sit on a flower for a while so I could take pictures. I used the 50mm with one +4 close-up filter (magnification filter) and one +2 filter. I was extremely pleased by the outcome. This picture is actually true macro, meaning the dragonfly depicted is greater than 1:1.

The Manitoba Legislature, home of the provincial parliament, is a pretty impressive building, and a monument to the ambitions this city had in the early days of the 2oth cewntury. Winnipeggers owe a lot to the people of that day, whose entrepreneurship ensured that the city now has a lot of historical buildings with lots of character, and not just urban sprawl and blight.

We got a free tour of the building, but strangely enough, among all the trivia our tourguide had to offer (fossils in the walls — that’s pretty cool), she didn’t mention it was heavily influenced by freemasons who may have intended it to be a replica of King Solomon’s temple… The CBC produced a very interesting documentary about this, see it on youtube (quality isn’t very good).

I went out to take pictures of the sunset, and finally try out my Cokin graduated neutral density filters. I bought them back in April, and I still hadn’t had an opportunity to use them. I found out that I just had to make myself an opportunity, so I went out.

I took this picture of the Assiniboine River around 10:30PM, long after the sun had set. The picture was taken with a 10 second shutter speed, but with max aperture. To control the light I used all three Cokin filters, which darkened the sky while letting through all the reflection from the river. Hence the camera picked up lots of red wavelength from the sky, and the the water looks like a vibrant blue veil. I’ve not done any post-processing at all (let me know if you think it needs it!).

Notice the family of geese in the lower right corner!

Merry Christmas to everyone!I’m celebrating Christmas this year with Jenna and her parents in Michigan. We’re having a wonderful and relaxing time here, despite the economic gloom hanging over this country currently. Here’s a picture I took last Christmas when we were in Norway celebrating with my family. It is one of my favourite pictures, even though there’s fish on the table (well, salmon is quite decent for being so fishy).

And here’s a picture of Morpheus and Jenna in the snow. He’s very traumatised.

Once I had tweaked the first picture, applying the same effect to other, similar pictures was easy (though not all turned out).

I took this picture of the mall nearby the other day. The sky really was this vibrant, no fakery involved!

• Nikon D70, two second exposure to capture the light streaks.