Holly

One of my favourites from Killarney, this is Holly. She's a three-year-old Jack Russell Terrier, and every photo I have of her is blurred.

Playing Tour Guide

Since I'm only posting record shots recently, I thought I'd add this one of Downtown Killarney.

The red building nearest the camera, on the left, and the blue building beyond are the source of two of the photos in my 'Killarney Colours' post. Grey siding marks the spot for ice cream and worms; tucked in out of sight is the boat launch and LCBO trailer. The green roof is Gateway Marine, home to an awesome cheeseburger, and the two white buildings past that are hotels.

Behind the camera is the General Store, and further back is the pedestrian bridge to Killarney Mountain Lodge. The B&B where I stayed, the Blue Heron, is out of sight in the distance - over the hill and around the bend - which is also the part of the road where the black bear was standing when I walked 'home' the night before. (It was just a little bear, no bigger than the ones that hang out in Yosemite National Park. Brett will know what I mean, and Penny tells me that the little ones are sent out by the big ones as bait.)

And that's all of downtown, as seen with a 180mm telephoto lens.

(943) Bluffs

Shot with my E-3 + 35-100 in one of the windiest places in the city, on a windy day.

It's nice to know when I'm doing my dumbest thing of the week.

Windswept

I went out to take photos with a friend today, and the weather was perfect - light to medium rain, 10 degrees celsius, and wind hitting 60km/h.

This blog is now five years old, with the first photos being of the whippets, posted at the start of October in 2004. While I did spend some time promoting it on some weekly theme boards, for the most part this has been a personal project, and is almost entirely visited by friends, family, and people looking for photos of Sunken City. That's about seven people a day.

Just over 18 months ago, I decided to start a new blog where I would write reviews of whatever caught my interest. It's now getting over a hundred hits a day, and will overtake this one for total visitors some time this weekend.

(942) Red and Blue

I'm still going through my Killarney files, so there may still be some rocks and trees coming up.

Yellow with Black Impact

Just to show that I'm not a snob, here's an effective use of the typeface "Impact".

(Impact, like Arial, is one of Microsoft's core web fonts.)

Attention to Detail

I don't usually intentionally take ugly photos, let alone post them, but this one bugs me. And I'm gonna tell you why.

This is a simple sign, designed to convey a limited amount of information: the company and individual selling the property, their contact information, and its market status.

The main body of the sign - the white text on light blue - is in Adobe's Myriad, and if it looks familiar, it should: it's also the font used by Wal-Mart, Apple, WestJet, and the header of this blog. It's a very popular font, modern but with humanist tones, and it's often used by big companies who want to seem laid-back and hip. (Frutiger, which is used by CIBC, is very similar but slightly pointier.)

The rest of the main sign is a bit of a stumper for me; it looks most like Hoefler Text but with lining instead of ranging figures. Even without a precise identification, it's a classic typeface, very much from the Garamond/Jannon family, drawing its inspiration from Western Europe c.1500. For what it's worth, Hoefler Text is a fantastic typeface, and it's what I used back when I was marketing toward real estate agents. But it's a bad combination with Myriad.

And then it really falls apart into the abyss of Windows/Word 'design'. They may have been trying to match the look of the "for sale" text with the add-on "sold" sign, but they hit Times New Roman (Bold) and then stopped trying. Look at the serifs on the S and shape of the O, and it's a clear miss; this is a typeface designed for legibility in newspapers. The salesperson's name is in Arial Black, which has the single redeeming virtue of not being as offensive as Arial, which is what his job title and phone number is set in. Arial is a shameless derivative of Helvetica, which is mid-century modern, and its sole reason for existence is to let Microsoft be compatible with the then-dominant Apple's desktop publishing market without the burden of paying licensing fees.

While I realize that every step toward professional marketing comes directly out of an agent's take-home pay, why would I trust a company/individual that can't create a professional and consistent image for themselves to be able to sell something worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Killarney Colours

I went to Killarney, Ontario, with my camera club. The early-October timing was so that we could photograph the fall colours, but the trees weren't cooperating. Not that trees are all that interesting, anyway.

My goal was to gather enough sounds, video, and photos to create a 4-5 minute slide show that would be entirely my own creation, which (AFAIK) isn't something that's been done before in my club. As a result, I was thinking more for series than individual photos, and working with a few set themes and set focal lengths.

This is probably my favourite series, but I'm still in the early stages of editing and compiling all of the material I've collected.

(941) Trees and Pond

I'm going to call this a pond because there was a beaver lodge in the middle of it.

Highway 637, outside Killarney, Ontario.

Trees and Cliff

I looked at my GPS, and it said that I was in the middle of Lake Huron.

Quoi? (Or in English, WTF?)

Georgian Bay, Ontario.

(940) Image Not Available

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I've been away for the weekend, so there's no update for this week - but there will be lots of photos of rocks and water soon.