I made it, and a special request

A long weekend, 4 days. Canada Day weekend. The first Canada Day I actually remember was 1967. Yeah, the one with the cheesy CA-NA-DA song. I won't put a link to it here. Even just thinking about it has it running through my brain. Gawd. To get it out, I'm going to get my favourite Canada song going, because I know you want to be Canadian please.

No, I don't have any idea what I'm going to do to celebrate. At this point I'm getting caught up on relaxation. My biggest priority today was to sleep in. Which I did. Which was fine. The only problem is that the traffic is much worse. I could list where all is under construction, but if you think all Anderson Road and Southland Drive west of Elbow, and 14th St from Anderson to Heritage, you've hit the highlights. Oh, and we can't escape going south. The ring road construction is right beside 37 st and starting to eat the intersection at 130th. Patience and extra time is required to escape, or to visit us.

As a photographer, I take photos mainly to please myself. Some of what I like in a photo would be difficult to explain to other people, and I don't feel any particular need to. These days I'm balancing between trying to get some specific shots I have in mind, trying to improve my skills, and just enjoying being out with the camera and actually LOOKING at the world.

It's nice to hear that other people like my photos, and there is a place to take photos that mainly please other people. Some of those happen for the local community association. The ones for races are a bit different, I think. I like to get photos of people interacting with each other, and I like to put the emphasis on just one or a small number of people. You can check out the photos from last weekend here and see what you think.

I got a special request from a special friend. So over the last several days I've been keeping an eye out, and an ear out for the buzz. Normally when I shoot bees I'm trying to get their faces. It's difficult. Normally they are up to their eyes in flowers, and they move extremely quickly. I try to get the focus right and let the camera fire several times. Most are throw aways, of course. That's to be expected.

But here we go. The only thing wrong with the first and last ones is that the flowers aren't purple. (Columbine and a rose.) I tried to fix that in the next series of shots. There were 45 taken on the purple mint in 1 minute and 20 seconds. I'm amazed this many were good enough to edit.