Castle Mountain

On the way back to Canmore from skiing at Lake Louise, I took this shot of Castle Mountain through a pretty dirty passenger window of the car. Not too bad huh?

Oiler Pregame

My friend and roommate was kind enough to give me a spare ticket he had for a recent hockey game between the Oilers and the Minnesota Wild. It was a fun night, and our Oilers managed to win the game! I wish the Oilers had managed to put together a better season this year. It's looking like they won't make the playoffs this year :(

Rain?

A few weeks ago my roommate and one of our friends put on their MSc free beer. It has become quite a tradition in our department to have a free beer when you've finished a graduate degree. My friend Jeff and I racked up quite a bill at our free beer.

This was shot out of the window during that free beer. I kind of like it.

Blur

Diane gets the credit for this photo. On our way back from Jasper last month we found ourselves in some pretty snowy and windy weather. Diane tried taking some photos from the moving car, and this is the best one of the lot. I think it's pretty neat, myself.

Winter Sunset

This was a couple weeks ago on my way home after I dropped Diane off at the airport. I saw the sun setting and had my point and shoot camera on me so I pulled over and grabbed a couple of shots.

Lunar Eclipse

Okay, two photos today. Here's one of my photos that wasn't cropped. Enjoy!

Lunar Eclipse Mosaic

Well I had a free night, so I thought I'd give shooting tonight's Lunar Eclipse a try. I think I did alright, with quite a few images turning out okay. Probably the toughest shots were the ones where there was still a bunch of the moon not eclipsed yet. My telephoto only goes to 200mm (multiplied by 1.6 for my rebel XT), so I wasn't really able to get up close to the moon. I decided that each photo on its own wasn't all that amazing, but put in a mosaic seemed okay so that's what I did. Hope you like it!

Clareview Sunset

I was coming home last night and had to stop to take some photos of the beautiful sunset. I think it turned out pretty well, what do you think?

Sunshine Mountain Village

More focussed on the village itself this time than the surrounding landscape. It's a beautiful area isn't it?

Sonata Arctica Show Review

This was a long time coming. I've been so busy this last week that I haven't had a chance to talk about the latest Sonata Arctica concert here in Edmonton.

SA made their second appearance in two years at Edmonton's Starlite room last week. I was able to get tickets and go, so I continued to support the band's efforts to increase their North American fanbase. If they keep coming back they should do just that ... this show was sold out!

My only real complaint about the show was that it was too short. They got on stage late due to the doors opening at 8:00pm, and two opening bands on the slate. The first opening band "The Order Chaos" was not too bad. They only played three songs, but I might have to look into their music a little more to see if I like it. The second band was called "Sanctity", and they were ... almost as different from Sonata Arctica as you could get and still stay in the same genre of music. Sure they had metal riffs on the guitars, but where Sonata Arctica is classy, melodic, and appealing, Sanctity was rude, crass, and unappealing. I couldn't wait for them to get off the stage.

It's too bad SA couldn't play a longer set. They totally have the repertoire to play a two hour or longer set, but because of the late start there was no way that was going to happen. Still, they did play a good set, and I enjoyed getting the chance to try and take some band-in-action photography and video with my P&S camera. I think I did a decent job!

Big news as well, Edmonton... Nightwish is coming to town to play the Starlite room! I've already bought my tickets (you can get them in a presale from a link off their webpage). So once I see them, then all I've got to see is Kamelot and Rhapsody and I'll have seen my top 5 favourite metal bands! How exciting!

Heraldk

Sunshine Mountain Village

This is a great view of the sunshine mountain village coming down from one of the runs. It sure was a beautiful day!

Untouched Powder at Sunshine

Wow. Sunshine sure was beautiful while we were there. The sun was shining and in places you could see untouched snow for miles!

Skiing Sunshine

Two weekends ago, we used Canmore as home base for a couple of days of skiing. We had some great weather, and Sunshine sure lived up to it's name! The snow was gorgeous, and I got a bunch of quite good photos that I'll be posting in the next little while!

Light!

When I get new lenses I tend to run around my house looking for stuff to shot. This was taking with my new lens, but it was a shot I had never tried before and it turned out better than I expected.

I'm jumping around a bit in my backlog of photos. I've taken so many photos in the last couple weeks that I've wanted to get some of my favourites out earlier than they would've had I posted them in chronological order.

I'm also playing with Aperture 2 which came out earlier this week. My impressions: It is waaay better than Aperture 1.5. I'm really impressed with the performance improvements. Anyone else use Aperture?

Hello Down There!

Some of our group of Maligne Canyon hikers went further up the canyon. I would like to do that in the future, but I was cold so I continued up to the cars, but was able to get a shot of the small group that did continue.

Winter

This was really more fitting when I took the shot in the middle of a coldsnap in Edmonton. It's warmed up considerably since. This is my balcony - I had a couple of plants growing there including a tomato plant. There's still one tomato that I never harvested on there.

I don't often take moody pictures like this, but I felt it worked really well, particularly in black and white. I took this while playing with my new EF-S 17-55 f/2.8 lens. It's a wonderful lens!

Canmore at night

Taken hand-held with my new Canon 17-55 f/2.8. A couple of friends and I went on a ski trip to Banff recently. This was taken on our way to get some munchies at Sobeys before retiring to our hotel in Canmore.

Snow-cicles?

In Maligne Canyon there is a little cave that you can crawl into that's pretty neat. We didn't go in this year because it was pretty cold and we didn't want to add an extra half hour waiting for people to crawl in and back out again. We did stop at the entrance though, and this year there were these columns of snow on the rock outcropping above the cave entrance. Neat huh?

Distant Mountain

Taken from the recent CS Department ski trip which hit Jasper for the last weekend of Jasper in January. On Sunday of that weekend, we traditionally do the Maligne Canyon hike which is pretty spectacular. This the view about 1/4 of the way up the hike.

Daybreak

Once in awhile I'm up early enough to catch the sunrise out my window. This was a pretty good one and I was awake enough to fumble for my camera to take the picture!