so yesterday i got home from work and was hanging out with the cats and then i realized that i had no pictures. so i grabbed my camera, my tripod and said good bye to the kittens and headed outside for what turned out to be a two hour photo shoot around my neighbourhood. i took sooo many pictures and would have taken more, but my battery died. so i came home. i was playing around with long exposures again and with the night time flash. this pictures was one of my first shots. i kind of like the way the light is behind me.

next i turned the corner and started shooting trees. i think that bare trees against the

darkening blue of the sky is so pretty. i never managed to get exactly what i wanted though, because the tripod was useless in this case because i need to be pointed up, not straight ahead. at one point i was laying on the grass beside the sidewalk holding the camera to my chese trying to capture the moon through the lacy branches. this was the same point that some people passed me on the sidewalk laying straight on my back pointing a camera at the sky. i said "hello." what else do you say? anyway, it didn't work. too much shake. i took this picture and didn't think much of it, but bethany really likes it. she likes the colour of the sky and the eerie neighbourhood look and he shadow of the tree. so i'm adding it to see what you think. after she said that i saw some more value and looked at it differently. i like the way the windows glow i might add.

this is the picture of the day. this school bus caught my fancy and i took a lot of different shots of it at different angles. and i used the lights of passing cars to light up the scene in different ways. in this shot, a car was just entering the intersection from my left and flooded the scene with the yellow light. you can see a streak of light from it too. the more i look at this picture the more i like it, down to the birdnest in the tree. i was at this location when i got confronted from an indocanadian man in his minivan with his family. they all stared at me expressionless while me and the man talked. he said "excuse me, are you taking clicks?" "pardon?" i asked. "are you taking clicks?" "yes i am." i admitted. i mean the camera on the tripod in front of me kind of gave it away. he asked what i was taking pictures of and i tried to explain that i was taking it of the bus and the tree, but i knew what he wanted to discuss. he layed it out on the table "because i just drove by here and got my picture taken." he told me. so then i needed to explain about how the exposure was too long and his car wouldn't be seen in my picture, just the lights... he looked at me blankly. "it's just a privacy thing." he told me. "well don't worry, you're not in it, just the car lights in a streak..." i tried to explain again. all four faces looking at me were blank. i explained again. "mmhmm." he said, clearly bored but still not listening. but soon he left and i decided that i had enough at that location too.

i took a lot of traffic pictures at oak street. i was just facinated with the streaky light effect and did it over and over and over. i tried to put myself in some of them, but ended up looking scary instead of neat. although one of those i was waving and it looks like the streaks of light are going right through my hand. but i also look drunk or something.

there was a really run down looking apartment and i decided to take a picture. just as i did a guy on the bottom floor walked into the window, ie, into the frame, and turned when he saw the flash. uhoh. i thought. i'm getting out of here i thought. so i grabbed my tripod and waltzed down to south west marine and took more traffic shots. a guy crossing at the light asked me what i was taking pictures of in a friendly but i kind of believe you're not all there upstairs kind of way. just of cars and lights i told him. "actually, can you just press the button?" he asked, pointing to the crosswalk button. "oh sure!" i said obligingly. this is my favourite traffic/lights picture. a bus came by in the middle of my exposure and the wind from it tipped my tripod back and that's why the lights are all squiggly.

i had more ideas for granville street but the first one i did, which needed a lot of fine tuning, was the last one the battery could handle. i love the freedom to experiment that a digital camera gives you. it doesn't matter if a lot of your pictures are duds, you can just keep taking a shot over and over until you get it the way you like it and not worry about wasting film.

jordan stayed over last night and tried to set up my wireless keyboard and mouse, but the laptop of steve kept saying it needed a windows xp cd. which i don't have. he tried to get around it, but that didn't work and now it's not set up right at all. jordan even took apart the keyboard tray and made it lower so the laptop could fit on it and everything. he gets an a for effort.

er was disappointing in that IT WASN'T ON AGAIN. i mean what is up with that??? i hate it when they leave you with a cliffhanger and then don't show it for two weeks. how annoying is that? but jordan was happy to watch three old episodes of the office. i went to bed.