I’ve wanted to post these photos form my trip to Niagara Falls for a while now. Seeing how it was the first week of summer and today was such a hot day out, I thought reminiscing about a frozen water fall would help cool things down.

I took over 400 pictures while there and then cut that down to 180 during editing.

Winter is without a doubt the best time of year to visit the falls. The Ice flows and frozen lakes make for awesome photography.

These were some of the photos that had turned out best.
Click an image to go to the Niagara Photos Page.

See the rest of our Niagara Photos here.

As you can tell, this one below isn’t actually one of my photos. The red line is the GPS track we took while GeoCashing on the American side of the falls. We crossed over to Buffalo for the day and found this cash on the 3 Sisters Island.

I have to say if these islands were on the Canadian side they certainly would have been closed to the general public to keep people from swimming into the falls, especially in the winter.
But to be honest, the Americans took every safety precaution necessary to make sure nobody uses these islands as a jumping off point to plunge them selves in to the falls.

“DANGER Do not enter water”

It seemed to work. I read the sign and a didn’t jump.

Check out what I’d managed to dig up this week.  These are some of the old photos I developed during my year in the St. Pat’s Photography Club.

These are from back in the days of darkroom. Before PhotoShop, when we were developing picture straight from roles of 35mm film.

It took a lot back then to get one right. No auto focus, no digital tuning. And then if you managed to get all that done properly, you had to hope some moron didn’t open the doors to the darkroom while the lights were out, wiping out everybody’s work in a hell-fire flood of ambient light.

These pictures were kept in much less than ideal conditions however it seems that scans turned out well.  So even if the originals do end up going back in the box, I’ll have these around for a long time to come.

Click on any of the photos to enlarge

This weekend was Doors Open Ottawa

The busy bees were working hard at the SunTech Green house.

I Had a lot of luck with the macro lens.

The only problem with taking shots of bees with the macro is you have to get a little to close for comfort to the hive.

Tomatoes are much less prone to attack. Unless they’re of the killer tomato variety. As you can see these ones were forming a swarm.

Then from the macro to the binoculars. We watched the kite surfers on Britannia beach after visiting the water purification plant.

… from a Can.

Shotgunned not Stirred

I attended the Net Neutrality rally downtown this week. This is the first protest at Parliament Hill that I’ve ever been to. Primarily because it was the first time they have ever been protesting something that I actually cared about.

What is Net Neutrality?
It’s the idea that internet traffic and content should flow freely without interference from those that run the networks. This could be referred to as the high-tech equivalence to freedom of speech.

I was personally there to show support for our smaller Canadian ISPs and help stop the restrictions being put down by the larger industry oligopolies. This can be clearly seen in Bell Canada’s Internet Traffic-Shaping efforts.

There’s Ben front row center showing his support along with about 200 others including ISPs, the media, members of parliament, the general internet using public and the Server North team.