Month: July 2011

Photo of the Month – Rithet’s Bog

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Hi Folks:

Somehow I missed the ‘Photo of the Month’ post for June so I thought I’d do something a little different this month.  I was out at Rithet’s Bog the other day, making photographs of the butterflies, bees, dragonflies and other little critters and I came across a number of Lorquin’s Admiral butterflies.  Since my June 2010 post was on butterflies, it seemed only appropriate to do another one.  This time I selected four images and combined them into one 4-across image using Lightroom’s print module. Continue Reading →

Eating Our Way Through Victoria… Cafés

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Hi Folks:

I remember reading somewhere that Victoria has the second highest number of restaurants per capita in North America… so much good food, so little time…  With all of those choices Marcia and I have become a little sedate in our selections – frequenting mostly places that we’ve been to before like Floyd’s and Red Fish Blue Fish.  We ‘ve written two ‘Eating Our Way…‘ posts now on some of our favourite coffee (and tea) tasting places in town, but we have another few to add to the list: Continue Reading →

More Little Wisdoms

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Hi Folks:

A few months back I wrote a post called ‘Little Wisdoms‘ because I often get these short insights – sometimes when I awake in the morning and sometimes during the day.  Most of them are pretty short and almost all of them get posted on Twitter, but I’ve started making a collection in a Word file as well.  I’ve accumulated another stack of them so I thought I’d share them here.

Hugs,
Mike.

Continue Reading →

Hello in There

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Hi Folks:

Last Friday Marcia and I were at the Cornerstone Café for their ‘Open Stage’ night, and it was wonderful to see this continuing parade of people get up in front of the microphone – this person singing and picking a guitar, this person doing some very loving slam poetry, the next person reading what they’ve written, and so on.  And sitting there in the audience, it occurred to me that if you saw these people on the street or in the elevator you’d never know that she loves opera or that he’s working on a novel or… Continue Reading →

Photographing Moving Water: Another Look…

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Hi Folks:

I’ve written two other blog posts on using digital techniques to mimic using a slow shutter speed when photographing moving water.  They are:

Photographing Moving Water &
Photographing Moving Water Revisited

If you want to go and have a look at them, I’ll wait… Continue Reading →

International Free Hugs Day!

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Hi Folks:

It’s not (yet!) commonly known, but the first Saturday in July every year has been designated ‘International Free Hugs Day‘; that meant it fell on July 2 this year.  Not that we ever need an excuse to hug people, but in order to celebrate we took our ‘Free Hugs’ posters down from the shelf and headed downtown.  We also brought along a stack of ‘Hug Certificates‘, of course!

For our last ‘Free Hug’ session we were down on the walkway of the inner harbour, but we chose a different location this time: In order to celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the Canadian Navy last year, a bronze sculpture called ‘The Homecoming‘ was erected at Ship’s Point.  The sculpture shows a young girl running into the waiting arms of her father, returned from sea.  It was a perfect location for us!

We held our signs aloft and waited, but not for long.  Very soon we had a reasonably steady stream of people coming by to hug, be hugged and, in some cases, to have their pictures taken.  Several people asked why we were doing this, and we simply told them that it was International Free Hugs Day!!  A couple of people wondered if it was a tourism promotion put on by the city;  that may be a good idea (‘Hug Me, I’m from Victoria‘ T-shirts?  Hmmm…) but no, it’s just something we enjoy doing.  We hugged young people and old people and everyone in between.  We hugged both locals and visitors to our city, all with gay abandon.  We were instructed on how to say ‘a hug’ in Portugese (um abraca, I think), and basically we had a wonderful time!  Hugging is good for you (and the person who’s hugging you), doesn’t take a lot of time, is non-fattening, doesn’t cause cavities and contributes to world peace!! Continue Reading →