When you live in Ottawa and you’re not sure what you feel like taking a picture of, you can always go down to Parliament Hill and get one of the peace tower.
Usually there are a few citizens down there exercising their right to protest. This person is opposed to forced evictions and black jails in China, and I heartily agree.
The not-so-eternal flame was out today. They shut it off now and then so they can clean the pennies out of the pool. I think Stephen Harper’s kids get to buy candy with it.
Taken with a Sigma 10-20 mm wide angle lens on a Nikon D60. I like standing right in front of things when I take their picture. I think choosing any other angle than straight ahead begs certain questions, such as “why that angle? Why not this other one?”
You don’t have to have a reason to stand right in front of something. It’s obvious.
This is Pic 1000. Woo-hoo!
A year ago today:
Pic 659
Veritas
December 19, 2009
Two years ago:
Pic 308
La crèche
December 19, 2008
5 Comments
Standing right in front of buildings is also a useful way of documenting their change over time in a consistent manner, such as my post on the facade of the Metropolitan Bible Church (made more interesting by the facade’s removal). I didn’t learn the trick until I went to Justin Wonnacott’s exhibition at the Bytown Museum. He uses that position exclusively to document Somerset Street.
Still, there is a dimension that is (literally) lost. For example, if you look at a straight-on photo of Joseph Tailors on Somerset, it isn’t really apparent that the building is an old house with a rectangular single-storey “snout” sticking out the front, which is apparent from pretty much any other angle.
Congratulations on number 1000.
More impressive than the quantity however is the quality you have exhibited over that span.
I hope there are many more to come.
That’s an awesome shot and one I’m planning on replicating once I get moved to Ottawa this coming July. I’ve just recently invested in a wide angle lens (Tamron 10-24mm) and I love it so much. I really like the sky and the way the parliarment buildings look – what did you do in post processing? Currently that’s my weakest area as I’m still learning how to process raw files.
Charles, thanks for stopping by. I always turn to your blogs when I want to learn the facts about Ottawa. (This blog, on the other hand, is pretty much of a fact-free zone.)
Dave, thanks. It’s great to see you out & about.
Sean, I do most of my post-processing in Lightroom and a little bit in Photoshop. For this picture I straightened the perspective and applied a graduated filter to darken the sky, and then I lightened up the tower and the figure on the left with the brush tool. After that I applied a bit of sharpening and a lot of noise reduction. (Many people would say too much, but I like that flat shiny look.) All of this in Lightroom. I usually only use Photoshop for pixel-level manipulation, like removing a purple fringe or a tree or something like that. BTW you can do most of that in Photoshop Elements, which is a lot cheaper than full Photoshop.
Robin,
Thanks for the response. I’m using lightroom myself and have an educational copy of photoshop 4 (I teach at a university) and am getting a little better at post production. I am also slowly working my way through the lynda.com tutorials for lightroom.