Warning: Kid Friendly Zone

Some people just don't have a knack for getting kids to sit still for a perfect picture. I don't believe this is something that would work for me. I'm a big guy. Kids are always wary around me for the first couple of days. Sit down shots are not going to work. So I rely on subterfuge and reverse psychology to make nice photos happen when I'm around kids. I never stoop to bribery. But if someone else has already loosened them up with a well timed treat I will be there to swoop in.


One of my favorite MOs is to walk outside and find a place to review and cull through my recent shots away from the kids. After a few minutes they will come find you. The silly things they do when they think you are busy make some of the best pictures. Especially if they are unaware you had the camera switched on. These two little girls avoided the camera all morning then were curious where it went.


Another is playing with the child and seeing what kind of mischief they can get into when they don't know the camera is on and ready to shoot. This only works well with one on one situations because you can steer the kid away from real trouble easier than trying to calm down three or four after they are wound up. It also works better with boys. Here is an example of a young man who thought it would be fun to splash water from a rain barrel and didn't know how cold it was going to be.


A good example of a way to get great photos with a group of kids is Hide & Seek. You can either follow the children around, or play as 'IT' yourself. Both ways give you all kinds of opportunity to catch them at their giddiest. Be prepared with an extra battery because they will want to see the pictures after each round to make sure you caught them.


And finally, the all time greatest way to get candid shots of kids in a group situation: The Kids Table. Hey, it gets them laughing, thinking you have been banished from the adult realm. It gives their parents a chance to get plates ready in peace and builds trust with the children. Just don't try stealing anybody's juice. they take this stuff seriously nowadays.


All of the above photos were taken with the Kodak DX6490.

The Relaunch

This page had fallen victim to the oldest blog pitfalls in the book – lack of direction and questionable motives. So, instead of looking out for the things that I find wrong with this fair city and province that I choose to call home, I have decided to turn it around and explore some of the stuff that are unique and beautiful about Lower Canada – with a camera.

I will first drop the two great footnotes that will define the new page. 1) I am a hobby shot. This is my learning curve with a camera. I’ve been taking pictures for years and finally got around to learning something about it. 2) I am a man without wheels. The stuff I visit and find to shoot will be decided by who I got where with. Most of the subject matter will be Montreal based. That doesn’t mean it will get boring. I promise to work hard to bring new and vibrant things to these pages.

Even though I take photos every day, I won’t necessarily be posting a new daily shot. Probably more like day off safaris spread out over the week. I will keep a stable of horses to trot out in an orderly fashion and try and spread out shots taken on the same outing even if they are not of the same subject matter.

For this first post I want to discuss some of the cameras I have owned. Like most teenagers, beer money was way more important than photography equipment. I bought a Vivitar snap shooter when I was 17. Flashy and blue. It was small and great for bringing along to punk rock shows and parties. It lasted me a couple of years before giving out. The only actual metal on the camera was the ring that held the wrist strap on.

After that came a Kodak Advantix T60. One of the APS rigs with the panoramic function. Went through about 50 rolls of film and did not have a lot of wasted shots because of focus problems. It had a flip up flash, so red eye was well under control also.

In 2004 I got a great deal on a Kodak DX6490 digital camera. It was a 4mp that had 10x optical zoom. I used it through until Christmas 2010 and it served me well over the years. By this time I was taking pictures every day. Pictures of the family. The dogs. Clouds. Out taking pictures in snow storms. In six years and two months I took 25,493 shots with that camera. I still keep it in my camera bag as a back up and if I need to shoot video. The realization that I would have to upgrade came one day when I bought a 4GB SD card and the camera would not recognize it. When it was built 128 MB and 256 MB cards were the craze.

For Christmas I got a Canon Rebel 1000D (XS) with the included 18-55 mm EFS lens. Since then I have added a kit that included an EFS 55–250mm lens, a lens hood, a UV, Polarizing and FLD filter kit, and a tripod. After six months of studying the manual and religiously reading online resources (the best of which I found to be Geoff Lawrence’s dot com Tutorials and Tips), I am ready to start sharing my learning adventures. Here we go!

It's all greek to me.....

Montrealer loses battle to paint Greek flag on garage door in Quebec Superior Court

ALAN HUSTAK

The Gazette

Sunday, August 24, 2008

MONTREAL - A Pierrefonds man has been ordered to remove the huge Greek flag painted on the garage door of his house because it violates the borough's esthetic standards.

Quebec Superior Court judge France Charbonneau ruled last week that nothing prevents Theodore Antonopoulos from flying the Greek flag on his property, but that by painting blue and white stripes on a garage door he has violated a municipal bylaw that governs the overall look of the street.

"A municipality has the authority to set uniform standards within its jurisdiction and for the buildings within it," she writes.

The ruling has taken Antonopoulos by surprise.

"It's a shock to me. I haven't been informed, and the flag is still there," he told The Gazette this morning. "I will speak to my lawyer and see if there are grounds for an appeal. None of the neighbours have complained to me about it. None at all."

© The Gazette 2008

Now I don't know about you, but why the fuck would a superior court judge, who is so backed up, what with meth addled rapists and such waiting years to get their day in court, feel the need to take such fast action about the color coding of one poor bastard's garage door. I mean there are all kinds of better ways to spend his time. Personally, I think if you want paint a mural of Ron Jeremy and Bill Clinton playing poker with those dogs from the painting, knock yourself out. There are whole blocks, metro cars, buses etc. looking like something straight out of the Road Warrior thanks to graffiti and tagging, but this guys garage door is an obscenity. You just know that people are going to bombard the newspapers with photos of buildings painted white and blue from all over Quebec. I wonder if they would have bullied this man if it had been a Canadian flag guarding his Geo Metro.

Memoirs of an Idiot Hunter, Part I

I was out for an early morning stroll on Wellington street in Verdun today (picture oldschool small town main street, shopping district 15 blocks long) taking in the sights ( breakfast cafe patios, hookers with their thongs showing in three or more places) and smells ( fresh croissants and danishes at Gaummond, roofing tar on the next block) and came across something I just didn't understand.

In the doorway of a down and out pet shop, was a pink cardboard box. I go to check it out. On top of the box is marked " kittens, two months old" in blue marker. The box was then taped up eight ways to Sunday, and laying in the already ruthless sun. Oh, I forgot to mention that the saint who did this poked two holes in the top of the box with a Bic pen.

So this wonderlunk had the brains to leave the kitties with their mother till they were weened, looked after all their needs, then stuck them in a cardboard box to roast for a few hours before the pet store owner sobered up and decides to open. Real genius. I'm surprised he hadn't tried mailing them to Bubbles in Sunnyvale.

I looked around and spied a stack of boxes in front of the Dollarama, bound for recycling and walked down, got a good size crate and folded it in three. At least this way I could shelter them from the sun without killing the airways.

I'm gonna go by in the afternoon tomorrow to check in on them at the store. Hopefully they made it.

Finally The Pendulum Swings Back.....

I was really pleased this week reading stories out of Ontario, that municipalities are starting to take a stand against bottled water. London is phasing the sale and distribution of it out of all public buildings by the new year. Now Toronto is looking into similar steps. Sure there will be public outcry ( hello smokers and cell phone toting vehicular death machines) for the first little while.

Its not a total ban, just the governments saying they have to do their part. You can still sit in your 2 1/2 apartment smoking up a storm, and rest easy, knowing that you have both of your closets half full( gotta save room for a few flats of WildcatXXXmax Dry) of that water that was on sale at such a good price last month. But all your clothes fit on the shower rod anyway. And learning sponge bath without hot water will be easy - especially when you realize that the five quarter full, lukewarm bottles from yesterday are enough to do it. Now you are truly recycling my friend.

I can't wait for Montreal to jump on the bandwagon. Its great that the STM has finally put paper recycling boxes for their newspapers, but placing bins for plastic at exits would be a great idea too.

It's not like we don't have good tap water in the northeast. It's not as if it tastes like fertilizer(howdy Saskatchewan). Time to give it a try.

The Wild Winter That Was 2008.

You know, Montreal really does roll the winners as far as winters go. Who can forget the savage seven day stretch of -30 temps in January 89? How about the viciousness of the Icestorm of 1998? It's now the 10th of April 2008 and I still have over three feet of snow in my f@#king backyard.
We should have known that with the mild November and start to December that we would have to pay for it on the other end. The city really did its best to keep on top of the snow removal,at least our section of the city, but the sheer amount of snow dumped by four major ( 30cm plus) storms caused lengthy disruptions to traffic, life and living in Montreal this Winter.

There is an old Cucumber Rock song that goes ' don't know what you got till it's gone'. I came to learn just how true that is this winter. The whole point of living in a lower apartment is having the backyard for the dogs. Space for them to play in and call their own. When your four and five foot fences disappear they think they own the whole damn block. Let them out for a quick pee before bed and it turns into a T shirt & shorts chase down the alley in minus double digits yelling at two retarded jailbirds who can't quite pull together an organized getaway. Murray, the Samoyed mix used to be real good at it. Gone for days, till we could find out which pound he was at. I think the whole concept of leaving the general vicinity of the food dish was a little confusing to Nalin, and she was slowing him down. At one point we were having to tie the fluffy one up if he was going out. That didn't work for him at all. What's important in the end is that there were no major incidents and both of them made it through the winter safe and healthy.
The great thing about a cold brutal winter like we had was the lack of flu season. The warmer temperatures of the last few years bred virus on top of virus. Not this year. I've already got my fingers crossed and bought a new shovel for next year.

Raffle winner saves giant lobster
By Les Perreaux



Click here to find out more!

MONTREAL — Goliath the giant lobster was hours away from a scalding, steamy end at a Boston-area Super Bowl party when Marlene Casciano looked deep into his beady eyes.

Casciano bought a raffle ticket, won the 20-pound New England bar prize and set off a rescue mission that will land the large crustacean in a Montreal aquarium.

“I really wanted this after seeing the lobster, just the sheer size of him was incredible,” said Casciano, who says she normally eats lobster like “a good New Englander.”

“People were explaining to me that he would have to be really old to get to that size. It just seemed to me he deserved to live rather than end up in a boiling pot.”

Casciano was with friends at a bar called Steamers in Taunton, Mass., when she caught a glimpse of the lobster, likely aged somewhere between 30 and 50 years, with a crusher claw the size of her forearm.

“I was actually holding the tickets and started praying so we could rescue him,” said Casciano, who works at a Boston executive training firm.

“I was so excited.”

After winning the draw, she named the beast Goliath for his obvious girth as well as in honour of the Super Bowl champion New York Giants.

As a diehard fan of the defeated New England Patriots, it seemed fitting to toss her own Giant into the ocean from a Cape Cod beach.

“The bar owner got such a kick out of me,” she said. “He started explaining, ‘No, you can’t just dump him on the beach, you need a boat, it would have to go deep in the ocean.’ It wasn’t as simple as I was thinking.”

Goliath went back into the bar’s lobster tank for the night, and the next day Casciano started calling wildlife experts, including the New England Aquarium in Boston.

It turned out the Montreal Biodome had just been in touch about acquiring a giant lobster, should one fall on the doorstep of the Boston aquarium.

Serge Pepin, the Biodome’s curator of animal collections, says he was looking for a large specimen for his aquarium’s 2.5-million-litre tank.

“Large lobsters are pretty rare and pretty impressive for the public,” Pepin said.

“American lobster is a key species of our collection plan for the St. Lawrence ecosystem. We have smaller specimens that are not so easily seen, so this specimen will be wonderful.”

The day after the Super Bowl, Casciano swaddled Goliath in towels soaking in salt water and ice packs, and bundled him into her car for the hour-long drive to the Boston aquarium.

The rubber band immobilizing his finger-snapping claw fell off.

“So there he was, alone in the car with me, with his crusher claw free,” she said. “It was a bit nerve-racking, but he didn’t move around at all.”

Goliath is doing well in a quarantine tank at the New England Aquarium, brandishing his claws at anyone who comes near. He is expected to move to Canada once paperwork is completed early next month. He will likely go on display a few weeks later.

“He’s very alert, and being very aggressive about defending his territory,” said aquarium spokesman Tony LaCasse.

LaCasse said there is an important conservation element to Casciano’s good deed. Biologists and fishery authorities in Canada and the United States try to discourage feasting on large lobsters.

The reproduction rates of lobsters over five pounds are exponentially higher than those of the one-pound lobster more often found on plates.

In parts of Canada and Maine, which produces 80 per cent of the U.S. lobster supply, anything more than five pounds must be thrown back.

LaCasse says large lobsters make up a small market share, and are often desired more for the spectacle than the meat.

The big ones don’t even taste very good, Pepin adds.

“It’s not so good to eat, the flesh is tough, it’s really not so interesting.”


I am so there at the Biodome as soon as this bad boy shows up. What a great story. He is gonna so rock the St Lawrence tank. Snapping at the 6 foot Sturgeon and Arctic Char. A great excuse to go back soon.