This is the beautiful scene when looking from St Michael's Abbey in Northern Italy. The valley is known as the Susa valley and the view from the Abbey is pretty spectacular!
I pulled this photo from almost a year ago, but I'll have some more recent photos up in the next little while. I got several really good photos this weekend at my family reunion so those photos will make there way into this collection soon!
One day last year we had a particularly heavy rainstorm. Afterwards I was treated to a rather strong rainbow across the street from my condo. So naturally, I took a photo!
On the way out to Jasper for the annual CS Department Ski Trip, 2007 edition, I just had to stop the car so I could take a shot of this. To me, it looks like a slightly surreal photo. The mountains in the background are distant and look almost like there were drawn in. I rather like the trees on the left - they add a little character to the photo. What do you think?
My Grandparents celebrated their 54th wedding anniversary last week and for it, our family went out for a nice dinner. It was rather nice. I had my camera there, so I took several photos. This one, was the bouquet that someone gave to my grandparents. I rather like how it turned out.
On the way down to Kimberley on a BC highway, we were treated to a rather beautiful scene where the moon shone brightly over the mountain. It was too pretty for me to not try taking some photos. Afterwards, I really wish I had brought my tripod to set up and take this photo because it was hard to get it to turn out really well. This is the best of about 15 attempts. The longer the exposure the worse the photo got since I couldn't hold it still. *sigh*. Next time, I'm bringing my tripod!
I went out with a small group of friends this past weekend to do some skiing at Kimberley. It was awesome! The snow was amazing, the weather was incredible, and all in all we had a great time! Sorry about the late photo this week - I've been trying to get my life in order after returning late on Sunday night.
This lamp was situated between the condo on the hill we were staying at and the Kelsey's restaurant we went to eat dinner at. On the way back, I got this photo that I really really like.
Another fabulous picture from our recent Marmot trip. I particularly like this shot because the clouds behind this particular mountain almost seem to be shotting rays out in 4 identifiable directions. Almost like it has a crown or something.
Enjoy!
Diane and I tried out the Good Eats method of pan-seared steak a couple days ago - and it turned out pretty awesome. This steak was a little on the rare side, but very very tasty. All the juices in the meat stayed put and made the steak very tasty to eat!
A view of the Jasper townsite from Eagle Ridge in Marmot Basin. This was also from the recent CS department ski trip. I really can't believe just how beautiful the weather was!
Sorry this upload was late - I managed to forget about uploading a picture until today!
The Maligne Canyon is a pretty amazing experience each time we do it. Here's Diane standing in front of some frozen ice.
This is a photo taken through the car's windshield as we were driving up to Marmot Basin. The gradient colour on the top is from the coloured strip at the top of the windshield. I'm actually really surprised that this photo turned out as well as it did since it was taken through a dirty windshield. Sometimes my camera totally surprises me.
Last night, my friend Jeffu and I held our part of the department tradition of buying beer for anyone from the department who wanted. It was an astounding success. To be honest, I was blown away by how many people came *and* how late people stayed. This picture is of the bill afterwards. We did pretty well, besting several other free beers in recent memory.
I've just returned from a wonderful weekend of skiing at Marmot Basin. We had some truly marvelous weather - with the temperature staying above -5 degrees for the most part. The sun was shining for the majority of the time on both days as well! Because of my camera's size, I didn't really feel comfortable bringing it with me all day, so I didn't quite get as many pictures as I would've liked. However, I did bring it up near the end of the day on Sunday to make sure I got some of the scenery we were treated to on a clear sunny day.
This shot is of the knob chair lift at the top. I rather like the effect in this photo ... what do you think?
A wonderful view of the city of Torino, Italy from the top of the tallest building in the city: The Mole (pronounced mo-lay). The view from there was absolutely amazing. You'll notice that the city is incredibly level. In fact, buildings in this city were not allowed to be higher than a certain height for many years which means that everything spans out around the Mole in all directions.
Inside the Mole is a cinema museum, which was a really cool spot to spend an afternoon wandering around in. A glass elevator takes you up the middle of the building, giving you an incredible view of the building inside before taking you up to this view outside!
Enjoy!
I finally got my brand new 24" monitors from Dell. I missed their delivery yesterday, so I had to go pick them up today. Now that they are all setup, I am totally happy with them so far. They are ginormous! A couple really nice features about these monitors is the plethora of video connections they can take. I am very tempted to get a cable splitter and a cheap vcr so I can watch TV on one. They happen to have picture-in-picture and picture-by-picture which is pretty cool!
Anyways, this is my setup - pretty fancy huh?
My sister got a huge toblerone bar for her help in the Christmas eve service last month. Unfortunately, she's allergic to particular nuts, so she kindly gave it to me. I saved it for the first poker party I had in the new year, and before chowing down on it, I decided to try out a photo. What do you think? I don't do a lot of close-up photography, but I think it turned out kinda neat.
This is another shot while we were in the small town of Susa. To be honest, I'm not sure why I like this picture so much. I could have sworn I saw a picture or a painting very similar to this somewhere, but now I cannot tell you where that was. Still, I kind of like it - it isn't the prettiest house around, but this is in kind of an alleyway of sorts so this house looks kind of different than other houses in the village.
This arch is actually visible from the aqueduct picture I posted last week. This picture is taken facing the aqueduct. I was pretty surprised with how well this picture turned out. Most of pictures I took like this ended up with the arch being entirely too dark.
Merry Christmas everyone!
This is just outside the small town of Susa in Northern Italy. I waited for a long time to try and get a people-less shot, but the couple sitting on the left there never left. I lost patience (and the group I was with) so I snapped this picture and moved on. Now that I look back at it, I kind of like how this turned out!
I believe this structure is an old aqueduct dating back to Roman times. A little while later, we would see a small arena as well which was pretty cool.
I loved this little town, and I was a little surprised to see that I hadn't uploaded any pictures from it yet. I will get around to that in the next few weeks because I got some lovely pictures of this town nestled in the Italian mountains.
It took me awhile to find a word that I wanted to entitle this picture with. I finally settled with Admiration, because it works for me on several levels. First, Diane is admiring the plants at the Devonian Botanic garden. This was at my cousin's wedding that was held there this past summer.
Really though, admiration is a good word because I very much admire the love of my life ... Isn't she beautiful?
From a photographic perspective, I happen to also love this photograph even if it was someone else in the photo. The colours of Diane's dress are lovely next to the green plants and the warm rocks shining in the sunlight. What do you think?