Buildings At night in Montreal

Inside Notre Dame In Montreal.

Shots from the Tam Tam’s at the Base of Mount Royal in Montreal

As promised some photos first we have what they call the Niagara of the north Kakabeka Falls Just north of Sault Ste. Marie

Neat Falls with a story or two behind them. One is about the Chief of the Ojibwa Peoples, youngest daughter, named Greenmantle that was kidnapped by enemy warriors of the Sioux and forced to lead the enemy warriors to launch a surprise attach on the Ojibwa people. Greenmantle pretended to betray her people and lead them by canoe down the river. Skillfully she lead the string of canoes though the rapids before the falls and at the very last second she dove from her canoe and swam to shore. The Sioux warriors were taken by surprise at her escape that they were busy trying to figure out to catch her when the fall took them by even more of a surprise.

Next are photos from a Water fall at the Aguasabou River gorge I haven’t got a story behind them but they are pretty.

Anyway we are getting ready to leave our Camp site and fire off to Ottawa

Hit Miranda’s blog for an update on where we’re at. Pictures to come tomorrow (hopefully!)

In Thunder Bay I am. It is good times this driving thang. I am hoping to Make Sault Ste. Marie Tonight and then Toronto and St Catherine’s tomorrow afternoon. I have driven around till I found some Wifi and I am checking email and posting blogs. I just stopped at a place called Kakabeka Falls and Spent and Hour or so getting some good photos. I will post them the next time I have Wifi and a little time.

So I am now in Dryden Ontario. Which is a lot farther then I thought that I would get. I am parked at a Husky in a parking lot in a puddle, and I am getting ready to crash out for the night. I am finding this car sleeping thing to be working out pretty good thus far and I haven’t even blown up the air mattress yet :) I am nice and cozy in the back and I am getting ready to have a better night’s sleep then the last. I was parked in the legislature grounds in Regina in what I thought an out of the way street with no one around but I had people all around my car all night I am sure that I didn’t roll over every time there was some near the car they would have tried to steal it. A car with out of province plates is a good target I guess. I am sure that it will be better tonight for I am in a well lit parking lot with lots of 24 hour people around and I am parked in a large puddle :)
Well I am tired and I still need to find my cell phone charger.

So I sitting in a Husky Dinner just west of Winnipeg, and I am going to have a bite to eat and move on down the road. The original Plan was to drive the first day to Regina and the second to Winnipeg. But here it is 3:00 and I am already at Winnipeg, so I may just keep going and see how far I can get. According to the map I can be in Ontario in about 2 ? hours or so we shall see. The Sun is starting to show its face a little bit here and there bit I fear that the rain that I have been driving though will catch up with me. I hope the entire drive isn’t all gloomy and cloudy like it has been. Miranda says that it is super sunny and clear in St Catherine’s so that is good. Any way I am going to get on.

So I am leaving Regina after Driving around for an hour or so tiring to find a good wireless network. I spent the better part of last night taking pictures of the Saskatchewan Legislature. Photos soon. But if I am going to make Winnipeg I better get at it.

So here I am in a Truck stop dinner in Saskatoon. I am going to have a quick waffle and I will be on my way again. Man you think that when you are driving from major city to major city in Saskatchewan they would clearly label the route when you enter the city limits You know like they do every other city when you are entering Calgary there is a sign that says Edmonton Use 16A or something like that right and you can then take the route specified till you get to the next road and it will tell you Edmonton Use the Deer foot north in North Battleford or Saskatoon North Battleford didn’t even say what way the highway was. I had to stop and get a map to get across Saskatchewan.. I mean it is a hunk of prairie with rivers and towns I didn’t thin it would have required one.
LOL They have a Bacon and Eggs Waffle on the Menu but I think that the waitress miss heard me, cause I am now eating Bacon and Eggs But no waffle. Its ok cause after I ordered it I really didn’t want one. maybe she read my mind. I left late from Edmonton I didn’t clear the city till shortly after noon. It was crazy packed on every street that I went down. I ended up taking Crazy Industrial back roads to get out form the Hughes after I got Fuel. I must road trip often or something cause when I stopped for fuel at the Hughes I got my traditional 5 bottles of Jones with the fuel, and the girl behind the till said ahh going on a road trip again I see, you do that a lot. LOL

I have tried being polite and I have tried to be patient. I have tried to be a nice neighbor, but I think it is official that the bar beneath us has got to go. Miranda and I have gotten in from a day that started at about 7:30 am. We shot a wedding today and have been at it hard core since then. So we roll in to our home at 11:30Pm tonight exhausted, sore and ready for bed. Except I live above a bar that is taking their sweet ass time working out the soundproofing issues. Needless to say listening to mindless techno music and Drunk jackasses
fuck around in the bathroom is having an effect on my sleeping. I have called down and I have called the owner and well I wouldn’t be blogging my distain if those things had worked. I am getting a little bit tired of this Bullshit and if they don’t rectify it soon I am going to start lobbing dead fish through the front door on a semi regular basis. K you know what I am going down this is Bull shit… …Well I am back and it looks like the night manager will call me when he gets in tonight. So it a rerun of sleepless in Edmonton for me till the fucking bar closes. I have contemplated drilling a small hole in the floor and releasing a bunch of really smelly gases at random intervals to drive out the patrons till they go under and I can have my peaceful existence back. Arrrg

So I am here at work on my last day for at least 3 weeks. I am also hacking up my left lung with a cough that has been hanging around for a few days. I wouldn’t even be here today but I have a meeting with my manger. We are getting things planned out for the wedding on Friday. This is going to the toughest thing that we have done yet. I am both looking forward to it and not looking forward to all at the same time. I am sure that it will be all good but it is a lot of stress and worry on my part.
On a different note we are almost ready to fire off to the wondrous eastern Canada next week, the car is tinted and there is a bed that is going to get set up in the back. I have new tires and I have gotten the annual running out of fuel out of the way. Last night we were crossing the hi-level Bridge and were waiting for a light on the other side and the car started to buck and stall. We were like WTF mate!! The light changed and we went and the car ran out of gas two blocks later. I would never had looked at the gauge but Miranda the clever one that she is was able to figure out what the trouble was before I started to take the engine apart :) Thanks to M&M we were able to get the diesel that was needed and still make Chilies for a bite to eat. But that is that I am out of here.

Well here it is I am at home and I am blogging! I don’t think that this has happened in a long while. I am waiting for a wedding to copy over to my laptop so I can work on it well it is taking a bit so I am going to post a hello. I got the flashes yester day and they are the shit I am uber excited and can’t wait till tonight when I go out for a night shoot with Andria We are going to go to the Legislature and play in the pools and get harassed by security guards. It will be good times indeed. The Ledge guards are actually quite mellow about stuff, which is not a normal security guard trait. Often I think it is an inherent fear of cameras stealing their souls or something because most are real authoritarian assholes. Anyway I am going to take the car in to get its tinting done today at about noon so I should get some other stuff done.

Well here it is Wednesday and I at Yup You guessed it Work. 7:00 Am at work :) It is far to early to be at work I think but well the time goes by very quickly.

I have some new flashes that are on order and they Left NEWARK, NJ at 7:47 this morning. We ordered two canon 550EX’s and a ST-E2 Transmitter. These are the end all and be all of on camera on location Flashes, & we got them in anticipation of a wedding that we have next weekend that may have a multitude of low light situations. They are so cool, let me geek out on technology and talk about them for a minute. These are what we call E-TTL flashes which means Evaluative through the lens metering, & how they work is this. SLR Cameras have an internal light meter that measure the reflected light that is coming of a subject and suggests the appropriate settings that would give a good exposure. Now this is a highly simplified version of modern TTL Metering systems, for they are far more complex on how they determine what light you want to capture and what light you do not. (an example is a white wedding dress and a black tux, because they reflect light in different intensities it depends on what area you take your measurement from or the exposure can be way off.) Now older flashes you have to use a formula to figure out exposure. The Film speed (ISO), the Flash Rating, the lens arpature, the Distance to subject and a moment to figure out. The Canon 550EX’s are cooler then this because they can talk to the camera and use the light meter in the camera and it be controlled via a on camera transmitter. You can do lighting ratios and all kinds of other great stuff. I could go on for ever but I am sure that I have bored most of you. Needless to say they are uber cool flashes and they should be here tomorrow if they clear customs.
I had another Photo shoot With Twilla yesterday. This was an out and about photo shoot that was good times. She brought her sister along to help haul the stuff around and for company. We wandered around downtown and changed in Second cups and Starbucks bathrooms. There is a lot of people that think that these coffee house chains are bad but I think as an out and about photographer there is much to be said about a clean change room every 3 or 4 blocks :) I accidentally deleted one of my gig flash cards before I was able to dump it to the Jobo which is a lot of photos and a lot of time but, Miranda and I spent a couple of hours last night trying out different file recovery programs till we got all the data from the flash card. Interestingly enough I had a hard Drive start to bite it this week, so I exchanged it on warranty. I ghosted my drive over to the new one and got it all set up and ready to go. So yesterday morning I turn on the computer and the new drive was clunking and not winding up at all. So I had to take that drive back as well. I however had already f-disked the drive that I ghosted over so we had to spend a bunch of time recovering the data of that drive as well. I tell ya the laughs never end at the jerks Residence.

I also met with Andria for coffee yesterday. We have planned a fun night time shoot for Friday so I get to try out the fancy flashes and such it should be good times and I am sure that we will be sufficiently harassed by security. Good times will ensue

The golf got new tyres yesterday and is going in for window tinting on Friday. It is almost ready for its cross Canada adventure. I really need to clean it out before Friday maybe after I get off work today.

I Plan to have coffee with Roy tonight which is good times, He calls all the time and I am always busy so I making sure that I have the time tonight.

Man I need to get cat food, I got up this morning and the kittens were patiently looking at me with pleading eyes. It is not like they are starving or anything they just have no wet food. But man you would think that I was feeding them rotten cabbage by the way they act. I love Cats :)

Well Here I am at work and it is Sunday so it is sort of slow. That means that is it blogging time :) We have had a busy and productive week the last while working on the webpage and last minute wedding consults. We booked a new weeding for next year and I have an engagement shoot next Sunday with the bride and groom to be.

We had planned to have our photo shoot with M&M yesterday. We were going to get them all done up in wedding getups and have a shoot that would show our style, but with all our scheduling and what have it didn’t work out quite as planned. We may be able to look at doing it when we get back form Toronto and Montreal.

I also had my first photo shoot with a new model Twilla on Friday. It almost didn’t happen again because I was going to have to go to the Tux shop and help pick out a tux for our Saturday photo shoot, but she didn’t get my message to cancel and we were able to go on like nothing had changed. She is by for one of the best models that I have worked with, full of energy and she has a good idea about what she is doing so I think there is a chance to get some great stuff from our shoots. I have another one this Tuesday so stay tuned to see the outcome. For now…


Getting the plans down for our trip east. It is getting closer and closer to becoming reality. I don’t know what I am more stoked about the trip or the prospect of driving across the country alone. Yup you heard right. I absolutely love driving super long distances by my self, I used to do it all the time drive for a couple days and call it a road trip. I think that there is nothing that is as cleansing to the soul as long times in the car by ones self with a shit load of pixies and other road trip music. I think that it is the best way to think about different aspects of life. All the answers to life the universe and everything can be found in a car and a long long stretch of hi-way. I plan on getting a lot answers because I am going to be in a car for at least four days and I will be all by my lonesome. I am also setting up a few photo shoots with models in Toronto and Montreal. I think that I am going to keep it simple and not book to many models and leave us open to do what we want when we are out there.