On Saturday after leaving the funeral reception, Lac Saint-Jean, and taking some last photos of the valley from the road, I told Georges I was driving and he had to hitch hike back to Quebec City. He stood there with his thumb out and I told him NOBODY would pick him up unless he made a bit more effort.

"C’mon," I yelled. "Show some leg!"

So he did!

(I think his mouth is full of cherries here. He beat his own record of holding 62 pits in his mouth at one time — I counted 67 that he spit out one by one while driving. If you see a sudden growth of cherry trees by the side of Highway 175, you’ll know why.)

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I don’t think I have ever met anyone who WANTED to have her picture taken so much.

Georges and I were taking pictures by Lac-Saint-Jean on Saturday when a speedboat and a seadoo pulled up to the dock. A little dog ran onto the pier first, and when Georges went to take its picture, this woman behind the dog spotted George’s big telephoto lens (300mm), ran towards us, leaped up on this picnic table and started posing. Completely unprompted, and we weren’t even taking her photo to begin with.

Stunned, Georges started shooting and this went on until it was time for us to go. Afterwards, he turned to me in the car and said, "I have never seen anything like that before." He was so surprised he hadn’t set his camera properly and said next time he’d be more prepared.

Prepared! I don’t know if one could be — this woman was like a firecracker at the company picnic!

I hope Georges posts his photos, because I had the wrong lens for this and took only a few. Georges, on the other hand, has some great shots and some, er, interesting ones in the mix, too, that will likely never make it to the internet.

Here’s some proof that the sun actually did make a brief appearance over the weekend, but over the Lac-Saint-Jean region of Quebec.

The photo above was taken by Georges, with my camera. The other photos are by me.

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Charny, Quebec (south of Quebec City)

I visited these falls earlier today, although it was not nearly as sunny as in the video below (shot by someone else). The spray made for an interesting natural glow to the photos, though, as did the sun trying desperately to pierce through the grey clouds.

The weather’s been distinctly non-summery here, but I’ve been enjoying myself immensely, nonetheless.

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I shot this photo last night in rather blustery conditions (pelting rain and driving wind), but Georges brought his tripod and patiently waited for me to set up my camera, take some test shots, and decide when to call it quits. I called it quits after I saw this version, which is better viewed larger: View Larger On Black

Not bad, but as Georges says, my kit lens (18-55mm, the widest angle I have) is producing barrel distortion and there is some blurriness, too. True! But I didn’t have a wider lens, we were both getting soaked, and I think under the circumstances, this photo is not bad… Georges is a tough crowd! (But I think I might have convinced him that my Pentax K100D is a decent camera compared with his Canon Rebel XTi. Take that, Georges!)

I wondered while packing for this trip if it was too distracting and antisocial to bring along my computer, but Georges and I just spent the last two hours recalibrating his Apple computer display, rejigging his application preferences, and discussing geeky stuff, so it was worthwhile to bring it after all! Yay for Mac users!

Unsurprisingly, I only have the energy to post this video before I go pass out. It’s after 1am and we arrived near midnight from a day that began at 5:30am to make the drive two hours north of Quebec City, where I did something new by crashing a funeral in a rural town.

Yikes!

Well, not the actual funeral (for whom the bells toll) but the reception.

Er, but don’t the bells sound nice?

Photos and stories later, after I recharge my batteries.

I’m writing this in recovery mode from the wonderful dinner you see here (and more, consumed but unpictured), prepared for me by my host in Quebec City. It is my first visit here and I rolled up at dinnertime from a long drive that started in Toronto this morning. Look what I was greeted with!

I had two passengers with me from Toronto to Montreal, people who each responded to my ad in Craigslist for a shared ride east. There was another person who was a tentative but didn’t come because he SLEPT IN* and I said we weren’t going to wait for him. But the three of us who did travel had a quick five-hour drive to Montreal thanks to music and plenty of easyflowing conversation. I dropped them off downtown and found my way to the Pont Jacques-Cartier to continue to Quebec City.

Strangely, THIS bridge photo was the only one of the batch I uploaded from my cameraphone via email that was posted to Flickr. I have several others, but I’m not reposting them now in case they’re all delayed in a data bottleneck and get released in the middle of the night, making me eat my words… really, I can’t eat my words, in fact, I can’t eat anything else — did you see my dinner plate? I’m going to crash and burn now, because Georges warned me it is going to be A VERY EARLY MORNING. We’re heading up north!

* There’s more to this story, it’s funnier in person. Remind me to tell you later!

Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ-1

Along Highway 8 between Hamilton and Cambridge, Ontario.

I wish I’d had more time to stop and shoot farm pictures; this is the only one I was able to take. I did a little Photoshopping on the colours and the sky.

www.answers.com/topic/make-hay-while-the-sun-shines

It’s an absurd hour and I have to get some kip and go to work, but I’m writing this post, anyway, at the risk of glaring sleepy typos.

Kingston, Ontario is the halfway point between where Tanya and her new hubby (not that there’s an old one!) Graeme are currently vacationing in Montreal and my current home base of Toronto. So no, we weren’t all lured to Kingston by some magical mystery tour or anything like that, it was simply geography that brought us there.

the newlyweds

We took advantage of Kingston’s geographic position for one night — no, actually, a few hours. But a few hours over some beverages and of course the requisite savouries that deserve their own photo ops. To wit:

ahi tuna crisps — click on the pic for full description

Needless to say, after a few hours of driving starting with Toronto rush hour traffic, these went down VERY well.

I’m trying to remember the first time Tanya and I started writing back and forth in Orkut, but it’s been something like three years of writing and photographs and MSN Messenger. Lemme tell you, a lot can happen in three years, and a lot certainly did. And here we are now in some random place in southern Ontario — an Aussie from Brisbane, a Canadian from Moose Jaw who lives in Hong Kong, and a Canadian from, um, Winnipeg? Vancouver? here and there? who lives in Toronto — coming together so we can actually communicate without typing or the use of data packets zipping through the ether. Ain’t modern living grand?

Here, a couple more food shots to whet your appetite:

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Photography enthusiasts seem go on and on about light, but it really is what makes the picture. If the lighting isn’t good, even vivid colours go flat. I prefer natural light, but I also like to take photos at night because it’s an entirely different atmosphere to the same scene during the day.

Some pics from Beaver Lake, on Mount Royal (Montreal):

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As you probably guessed, there are no beavers here. And it’s hardly a lake, more like a pond… just like the similarly beaver-less Beaver Lake in Vancouver’s Stanley Park — which is more like a bog.

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My cousin Wagner, who took us up here, just called it “The Chalet”, which is more in keeping with a winter theme and not difficult to imagine as a buzzing hive of activity when Beaver Lake turns into a skating rink.

For natural lighting, nothing beats the drama of a mix of brilliant summer sunshine and charcoal grey pending rainstorm:

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Both of these were taken off St. Catherine Street during the Jazz Festival.