Kingston Mills Scenery

Brace yourself: This post has 4x as many photos than all previous posts.

In the past, scenery has always been my least favourite thing to shoot.  No matter how beautiful it looks to my eyes, I've never managed to accurately translate what I see on to a photo.  I've tried and tried and have always been disappointed, and it only takes so many disappointments to become discouraged.  And to be honest, portrait shots seem to be more rewarding, since you can physically see a person's happiness and hear their thanks.  That's why even if I find a good landscape, it'll always just become background to a model.

This weekend, we were taking a family trip out of the city and naturally I brought my camera along.  It was about 2/3rds into the long stretch of the highway when we stopped for some gas, and heading back on pointed us towards the setting sun.  I'm not sure what I was thinking given my track record, but I picked up my camera anyway and snapped up a few shots, this one being my favourite:

We were going pretty fast which explains the extra posts on the light but this photo turned out so much better than I expected, it really give me new hope and set the tone for the rest of the trip.

Going to a park (or so I was told, apparently Kingston Mills is a lock station?  I had to Google what that was too), I was happy to get my fill of flora and fauna (hint hint: theme of this week's upcoming TBT).

"Dandelions can be pretty too" - Anita

Is this a heron? I think it's a heron. It looks like heron.

Stretched for this shot, and the camera focused on a branch instead of a flower

Bzzzzzzzz

 We had a family friend who came along with us to go fishing, so we followed him around as he had been here before and knew where he was going.

View from the fishing spot

View of the boardwalk

Old habits die hard

I couldn't help reverting to old ways thinking that the scene would look better with a person in it.  Lucky for me, the posts made a pretty good stand while I walked leisurely into the shot (yes, that's me in the photo).  Unlucky for me, it completely changed the perspective of the shot and we see one big post instead of a row of four.
Our friend was having minimal luck with the fish, but there was this other lady, who showed up for no more than 5 minutes and hauled out this monster.

Still has the hook in its mouth

Look at this monster

Woman included for scale

She actually didn't bring a bucket and ended up putting it back into the water.  Shortly after, everyone scrambled to where she was and tried to re-catch the same pike.

The sun was starting to set and I was mesmerized by the beautiful scene before me.  I knew I had to take as many photos as possible and hope and pray at least one or two will turn out nicely.  Fortunately (or unfortunately? considering how long editing took), I ended up with many photos that I loved.  It was a grueling process trying to identify the subtle details that made each photo unique, and then deciding which ones I liked best (big shout out to Daryl for bearing with me!)

Here are the top 4 with timestamps included (I couldn't narrow them down any further than that!):

7:27

7:35

7:46

7:52

Which one do you like best? (I'm not sure who I'm asking as this question, but I suppose I'll just throw it out there).

Given the bulkiness of this post, I'm thinking of playing around a bit with the layout of the site.  More details to follow in tomorrow's post!