Downtown Halifax at Night

Digital original

My first real love in photography was architecture, rooted in my exposure to European art & architecture as a child. As I live in Canada, the architecture I really love (western-European medieval & gothic) is not readily available, so I have to make do with newer buildings. In Halifax, one of the most interesting "new" buildings in the central Library, with a cantilevered top floor, which is a delight to photograph. In this case, using my 17mm tilt-shift allowed me to really exaggerate the jutting out of the top floor.

Digital original

As this evening grew dimmer, I began to play with the interaction between man-made lighting and architecture, with the above bouquet of metal posts being the first subject I approached with this in mind. I really enjoy the interplay of shadows at the top of the composition, though I did keep wishing I could have had control over the lighting inside the building - as it is still under construction, the visual noise of the unfinished building site detracts from the central focus of the image.

Digital original

 The last set of images I made were created on the walk back to my car; by this time there had been a light sprinkle of rain, and the roads were wet and shiny, which made for lovely light reflections on its surface. The tilt-shift lens created a lovely rendition of this new build, which melds with the older ground-floor building (initially a Zellers, then a night club) in quite an effective way. Again, the evidence of construction (the unfinished cladding on the left side of the frame) is distracting, but fortunately the building is not going anywhere, so it will be easy to revisit this composition at a later time, once the construction is all finished.

Another Flower/Bee/Macro Mashup

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A common go-to location for short photo field trips is the Halifax Public Gardens, for obvious reasons. What is not so obvious is how lovely they are in the fall; by this time the park staff have become more relaxed about their "do no walk on the grass" stance, and yet there are still a wide range of lovely flowers to photograph.

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The added benefit of photographing in the gardens in the fall is that with the cooler weather, the bees slow down, so it is much easier to focus on these lovely little insects. During the height of summer, they are certainly around, but they seldom stay still for more than a fraction of a second, which makes it much more challenging to get the bees in the right place, but once it cools off, they slow down, and sometimes stay in the same flower for minutes at a time!

Digital original

In the end, it was the bees in flowers that stole this session - hundreds of photos of them yielded some lovely results, adding to the already sizable number of bee-flower photos I've made during previous visits to the Public Gardens.