Brandon is so damn creative, I guess that skips a generation or something because neither Maggie or I are. They’re doing photography for art at school right now and earlier in the week I let Brandon bring his Canon EOS RP & Canon RF 35mm lens to school and this is what he captured.
Those are some really great shots for an 11 year old and it makes me so happy to share a hobby together, even if he is beating his old man lol.
So I was off on Friday and decided to go for a drive, I ended up in Algonquin and had a bit of fun with my DJI Mini 2 & old Go Pro Hero 2.
Mmm those beautiful fall colours are in full effect! I also took two videos…
Unfortunately I forgot to record the take off but the drone got about 4km out before it lost connection and returned to home, I got the connection back probably 30 seconds afterwards and just let it return.
Next I put the Go Pro on the roof of my car and drove across Highway 60. Unfortunately about 2/3 way in condensation from inside the protective casing started to accumulate right in front of the camera lens which is super annoying grr.
I’m not very good at editing videos yet, I had to stitch together a bunch of clips from the Go Pro and while the transition is seamless, I think the video got outputted at 720p even though YouTube sensed it’s 1080. Well anyway the old Go Pro Hero 2 video is quite poor so I went out last night to get a used Go Pro Hero 5 which can do 4K, still old but since I’m just playing I didn’t want to spend too much money yet. We went for an autumn drive today through a recommended route and the footage there looks so much better but will talk about that later.
Yesterday we didn’t do too much it was rainy so a slower day is just what the doctor ordered. Today well I’ll talk about today with tomorrow’s post.
Saturday after dropping Brandon off at his Scouting event, I went to Oakville to pick up some roof rail cross bars for the Lexus NX, since we do a lot of road trips I’m thinking that a roof top storage unit would be a good thing to have so I needed to get the cross bars. Picked up a used set of Lexus NX OEM bars, there’s a bit of wear but overall in great condition and installed them last night, when I was driving today I noticed that they make a humming sound when I drive. Kind of surprised, figure Lexus would have tested for that but perhaps it was the damp conditions and with a cargo box installed it’ll be different. I guess we’ll see…
Today I went with Eddy & Mario to do a photo walk and we started off at Allen Gardens. That place is a lot of fun and I’d love to bring the family but there are a lot of homeless people who live in the park. Makes me wonder what they’re going to do in the winter, it’s suppose to be bad and I’ve read that Toronto’s shelters aren’t very good. Unfortunately our various levels of government are not very good with dealing with the homeless & those with mental illness so I worry about what those people will have to go through.
The flower photos along with Eddy’s eye & Mario were taken with the Canon EF 100mm F2.8L IS USM macro lens, I’m debating if I should get the RF but frankly I don’t really do macro enough to justify the extra costs… I guess we’ll have to see but I must say it was super fun. The combination of the macro lens & 45 megapixels from the Canon R5 means I can get some really great shots. Unfortunately for my blog, I need to cut the images down to 24MP but yeah the level of detail I can see here at home is amazing.
From Allen Gardens I drove to park near the old bus terminal and we walked around first to Dundas Square to see the nurses protest. I’ve always thought those who work in health care definitely deserve more (pay & help) and I totally empathize and support their positions. With COVID19 still running amok, they need everyone’s support. Those shots were taken with the Canon EF 16-35 MKIII USM lens, Mario was had his new RF 15-35 but I’m not sure if he took any photos.
After lunch we went to the Old Mill in Etobicoke and there was either a Cooper’s hawk or Red Tailed hawk enjoying a meal. Very cool to be able to see one up close and I absolutely love birds of prey! The salmon are going to spawn and they were jumping everywhere so I had to prefocus on where I saw them most and hope for the best, unfortunately the rain and fog didn’t really help with image quality but they’re not so bad. I really love the Canon RF 100-500mm too, the range is just so damn handy!
We called it quits and 3 and I dropped the guys off then came home to do some cleaning. Monday is going to be pretty hectic, have a pretty full day in the home office tomorrow so just chilling the rest of the evening.
So this came in the mail yesterday and I was quite surprised, Maggie ordered it.
It’s a Fujifilm instax mini 11 camera, works like those old school Polaroid cameras with a cartridge and film. Well whatever if it gets her into the hobby then that’s ok with me, it’s big and a bit awkward but with an immediate photograph, I can see how the thing has a bit of novelty.
This weekend was rather relaxing. Saturday I took the family to Torrance Barrens for a hike, I went there once last year to take photos of the stars and thought it was a pretty cool place and wanted to see it during the day. Unfortunately the path I wanted to try out was rained out so we took the outer path and it was a lot of fun. Maggie & Brandon enjoyed the walk, it wasn’t too hot and there were none of the annoying bugs.
I have to say the drive off Highway 11 to the park is one of the most fun roads I’ve ever been on in Ontario but then again I haven’t searched for many fun roads. The speed limit is only 60 km/h but it’s super windy and changes elevation quite a bit so I even had a hard time maintaining that speed on the twisty parts. The Lexus NX 200t is not a sports car but it handles heads and shoulders better than my old Toyota Prius and yeah I definitely enjoyed that a lot. We got back and in the early evening I cleaned out the NX, there was a lot of small pebbles & sand from our shoes from the hike and I can be pretty anal about keeping my car clean.
Today we didn’t do much other than have pho for lunch, mmm how I missed it! Stayed home and kept things at a minimum today, talked a bit about our retirement plans (which is fun to think about) and pretty much just chilled. Back to the meat grinder tomorrow…
I put together a time lapse from our astro shooting spot on Highway 60 just outside Algonquin and man was it busy! I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise being Friday of a long weekend, it’s about 1 1/2 hours worth of 15 second shots stitched together at 30 fps. Sigh I need to let these things go on for longer, all of my time lapses end with the galactic plane starting to show up grr…
The rest of the weekend was pretty low key, went to one of the houses in Oshawa listing it for sale so hopefully it sells quickly. Went for drives, ate out and cleaned the cars.
Mmm the pho from Vietnam Noodle Star on Midland & Finch is so good, Brandon had the small and even though I wasn’t hungry I had to get the large. 🙂
Cleaned both cars and I stuck the Lexus NX 200t into the garage, it’s still my toy but we really should drive Maggie’s CT 200h instead since it’s so much better on gas. It looks pretty good all dolled up too, I’ve always liked the look of that car.
Finished off the weekend with a BBQ and I’m stuffed! Back to the grind tomorrow, it’s going to be busy but it’s alright I had a great weekend and hope that you did too.
Friday night I went with Brandon (Mario & Alan came too) to Algonquin park so I could show the boy how beautiful the stars are when you’re in the right place and he loved it. I was a bit worried frankly, driving up the clouds were pretty thick at times but once we got near Huntsville it cleared right up thankfully.
Hehe I used Brandon as a prop, a little light painting with my small Olight I3T. 🙂 The picture is of the Andromeda galaxy, that was shot at 500mm with the RF 100-500 lens at 1 second, ISO 25600 and F7.1, handheld! I leaned up on the rear of the Lexus NX 200t to get a nice stable shooting platform and it worked pretty well! Man I really want to get one of those tracking tripods now, maybe…
Oh yes the Airshow London photos are edited, I’ll post those next week.
So a week late but wanted to do a post about our whirlwind tour of Atlantic Canada. This time we visited 3 cities, Fredericton, St. John & Halifax and we had a great time. First the environment is much nicer than Southern Ontario, rolling hills, forests and large parks available within a short driving distance, if you like nature they have lots of it out East. Unfortunately for us it rained 4 of the 6 days we were there, at times quite heavily but we made the best of it.
We first drove to Fredericton to spend for one night then to Halifax where we walked around the city and saw some of the local sights.
Brandon loves the water and that’s pretty much the theme around the vacation, water and activities that we did on it lol…
The next day we went whale watching with Mariner Cruises, it’s on Brier Island and that was quite a drive but so worth it. Had to take two ferries but the hump back whales put on a show and they swam right next to the boat!
There were a total of 4 hump backs that we saw and at times they got so close that I couldn’t even take photos anymore. Due to the salty air, I didn’t switch lenses so 100mm was the shortest focal length I had.
Here’s some slow motion 4K video I took with the Canon EOS R5, this was going on for a good 5 minutes before I started to take the video too! What amazing creatures and I’d totally do it again, the staff was friendly, boat clean and it was just an overall great experience.
The next morning we visited Peggy’s Cove, it’s iconic and it was scheduled to rain hard starting around 12 so we made the best of it.
I took these two drone videos (I checked with the tourist office first) and it gives you a sense of scale and how large the rocks are.
It was pretty darn windy but the DJI Mini 2 handled the wind like a champ and had no problems staying steady. I actually came back at night when it wasn’t raining but there’s absolutely no lighting and with it damp I didn’t get much farther than the board walk.
The next day it rained most of the day letting up in the late afternoon and we walked the boardwalk at downtown Halifax.
The air just smells fresher, yeah I’m leading up to something. 😉
Maggie wanted to learn how to surf so we took the opportunity for them to learn. I was tempted to go too but frankly I want to take photos of the family more so while they were having their fun I did my thing. 🙂
It’s definitely harder than it looks, Maggie is more athletic than I am and she had trouble standing up. Brandon was lazy and just laid on the board but he had fun so that’s all that mattered.
We loved it so much that we started to look at houses in the area. We drove by a few in Halifax, drove back to Fredericton to look at some and to St. John as well. Real estate out there isn’t crazy like it is here in Toronto and doing some quick math, we think that if we sold just our principle residence in Toronto we could buy a very nice house out there (paid off), buy another investment property in Ontario to generate income, buy a vacation property in Florida and both of us could retire immediately! Man that’s mighty tempting, not something we’ll do on a whim but yeah it got us thinking about our options.
The median income out there is quite low, even if I didn’t retire I could make Toronto money while living in a cheaper place so that’s also very enticing… We’ll think about it long and hard, I told Maggie we should rent an Airbnb for a month, work from there and see how it is. May do that next summer but all in all we must have seen like 12-15 houses so yes we’re seriously considering it.
We ended the trip with Brandon going for a swim in one of the local rivers, that kid loves the water and yeah why not let him do one last swim right…
It was a great trip, we had so much fun and are seriously considering moving out there and exploring our financial options. When I was younger, I never thought I’d be able to retire but now here I am with an option to retire if I wanted it bad enough. I guess we’ll see what the future brings. 🙂
Last weekend I brought up Brandon’s Canon EOS RP & the RF 35mm F1.8 IS STM lens to do a time lapse, it was fun but I found this a bit boring as it’s only the galaxy moving across the sky.
I’m also thinking about getting another Rokinon 14mm F2.8 lens for a more wide angle shot to do time lapses with. The 35mm is a great lens but a bit too tight…
Saturday night my photography group went close to Algonquin (where Mario and I scouted) to do a photo shoot and it was so much fun. There were 10 of us, in my car I took Vanessa, her husband and Hyacinth (we’re all fully vaccinated), it was a long car ride but seeing as how it was a new moon, the skies were very dark. 🙂
The glow in the distance I “think” is the light pollution from Gravenhurst but who knows maybe it’s Toronto lol. While I enjoy taking photos of the stars, this time around I tried something different to have something interesting in the foreground and it worked wonderfully. For some of the photos where the people are lighted well, I did some light painting with my pocket flashlight and ya it worked out great.
We stayed till about 1:30am then left, after dropping my carload off at their homes, I got back at 5am (ugh) and slept till 9am on Sunday. Surprisingly I wasn’t a zombie and today I’m fully recovered. 🙂
Unfortunately while I was there, Mario asked for a hand with his settings so I set my Canon EOS R5 attached to the tripod down on the ground and well I guess the ground wasn’t flat because it took a tumble.
Thankfully the camera landed lens hood first onto the ground and took the brunt of the impact. Sure it broke but a lens hood is relatively cheap to replace ($100 and another is on the way already), I have a few scuffs on the B+W filter but no actual damage on the lens or camera body. There are no marks on the R5 at all so yeah I really lucked out here!
Anyway a great night was had by all and I want to do it again already! Soon, soon…
