Some more spring flowers for your enjoyment this Friday... first... the magnolias are in full bloom:

I've also been playing around with different lighting effects.  I'm not nearly at the Strobist level (and haven't started using off camera flash yet), but I'm definitely more aware of lighting and lens interactions.  Here is a fresh tulip just out of the ground:

Have a great weekend everyone!

Attacks on basic constitutional rights like this are becoming more and more common:

Brendan Colin Jones, 25, was sitting on a park ledge on de Maisonneuve Blvd. just east of Berri St. At one point, he swung around southward and his feet were on grass behind the ledge.

The Victoria native's ticket cited his offending behaviour as "using urban equipment for uses other than those intended."

Montreal police Sgt. Ian Lafrenière said Jones was told "several times" that he was sitting "somewhere else than on a park bench" and in so doing was guilty of an infraction.
...
He saw police approach people who were drinking alcohol nearby, took out his small digital camera and shot some photos.

"I saw this as an opportunity to observe how police deal with underprivileged people," Jones recounted.

Then a police officer came by and asked if he had been taking pictures.

"Once I realized she was attempting to get me to give her my camera, I became confused and told her I would not give it to her," Jones said.

"I had not committed any crime and had been sitting peacefully, just like many others around me."

The officer's two partners joined her, and Jones slipped the camera into his pocket. The police then told him it was illegal to sit in a city park when not on a bench and he would have to leave.

Although this happened in Canada, this is becoming more and more common everywhere, including the United States.  In some cases, people who video record arrests have been arrested under "wire tap" laws.  In this case, a private citizen was in a public place, and took pictures of uniformed police, while performing their duty.  All of these things are perfectly legal, and in a free society, should always be perfectly legal.  The police didn't like this because it opens them up to scrutiny, and so they decided to use an obscure law to penalize this person for something he had every right to do.  They cited him for "misusing urban equipment".  In some cases I've read, they've taken memory cards and claimed it was illegal to take pictures of them.

In this case, they fined him for using a wall as a bench.  Interestingly enough, the park was designed so that the walls were supposed to be used as benches!

Asked about fining someone for sitting in the park, Jean-Yves Duthel, spokesperson for Ville Marie borough mayor Benoit Labonté, said: "If they do it in respect of the bylaw, there is no problem."

The purpose of the granite surfaces at Émilie Gamelin Park is to have people sit on them, said Montreal architect Gavin Affleck, a specialist in urban spaces.

As a budding amateur photographer, I find these stories especially disturbing.  I've often times thought about what I'd do in a situation like this, and I still haven't quite decided.  My current thinking is that I carry multiple memory cards at all times, and if I saw police approaching, I'd try to swap out a blank card secretively.  Perhaps it would be smarter to always have a couple of pictures of something on the card I'd swap out so it looked more believable.  I'm not sure.  What has this country come to that I have to think about these things?

Springtime is here... and the daffodils are popping out of the ground... which means that it's not allowed to snow this weekend!

Have a great weekend everyone.

I spent a few hours yesterday at Doctors Park with the Cream City Flickr group.  Despite it being pretty cold on the beach, I had a great time, and even managed to get some interesting shots.  You can see my collection here, and you can see a sampling of everyone else's work here.  Here is a slide show of my shots:

The steeple at First Congregational Church in Wauwatosa.  It's a Tosa landmark, and was rebuilt several years ago.  I was over there a while ago and took some pictures, while messing around with the different settings trying to understand how to take good low light shots.  Here are some of them:

Other than that, my camera has been fairly dormant lately.  Have a great weekend everyone!

Not so much my normal fair for Flickr Friday today.  Instead I'm going to direct you to this link, which has some fantastic photographs from about 30 years of American history (1939 - 1969).  Take a look at each of them and think about life back then.  I suppose if you lived back then, its a bit different than for me who wasn't alive then.  Then think about what people will say about pictures we take today in 40 to 70 years.

For no other reason than work has gotten to me, and I need a pick me up.  Here's my aunt and uncle's dog Hannah.  I took this picture over Easter:

She's an Akita/Shepherd mix.  How can you not love that face?

So it was colder than I was hoping, and I was starting to come down with a cold of my own, but I had a ton of fun on Saturday at Marquette with the Cream City Flickr group.  You can see a sampling of their work here, and here is a slide show of what I thought was worthy of posting (with the entire collection here).  There are some absolutely amazing photographers in that group, so it's well worth stopping by and seeing what you can do with a camera.

Thanks to Scott for setting this one up.

No Flick Friday again today... I just haven't had a lot of chances to get my camera out.  But... expect some good stuff soon, since I'll be participating in the Cream City March Photo Walk at Marquette University tomorrow.  If you're interested, check out the details here and come on out with the rest of us.  I think it will be a lot of fun!

I decided to save this an extra day for Flickr Friday... I hope ya'll don't mind.  I did brave the cold Wednesday night with my tripod and tried to get some decent shots of the lunar eclipse.  I've embedded a slideshow with all the pictures, and you can see the complete set here.  If I'd been thinking more clearly, then I would have used the timer on the camera to reduce the amount of shake on the pictures which might have made them more clear, but they turned out OK despite that.

I was talking about computer graphics yesterday with some of my coworkers, and was reminded of POV-Ray, which they'd never heard of.  I actually used it a little bit back at MSOE as part of a computer graphics course.  It's a 3D graphics program which performs ray tracing.  Ray tracing is an extremely complicated, but very accurate, means to determine lighting and shadows for a 3D image.  It's not used in computer games, because it's not real time, but the results are fantastic.  POV-Ray (which doesn't seem to be actively developed anymore) used to have an annual competition where people could submit their best scenes.  Here is one of my favorites from their Hall of Fame:

It's not an actual photograph, but you'd have a hard time telling the difference wouldn't you?

This weekend I went wandering around the Milwaukee area looking for some good shots.  Here's a small sampling of what I found.

As always, you can click on any image to see a larger version.  You can see the rest here.

And if he'd had more Red Bull, he wouldn't have been face down on the street...

I think I'm starting to see the allure of the camera phone.  This was taken with my enV after losing a poker game in Waukesha.

This is pretty cool.  The Library of Congress is working with Flickr to post it's archive of photographs online, and allow anyone to tag them.  You can view all of the LOC Photos here.  For your viewing pleasure, I've picked out a handful.  There is more than a century's worth of photographs waiting to be uploaded.

About this time last year I got my Nikon D40 as a Christmas present to myself, and during the year I took several hundred pictures with it.  So I thought it might be appropriate to go back, and pick out some of my favorite shots from the year and pull them together.  I created a mosaic of my 18 favorite shots, and added them to this Flickr Set where you can view them individually.

Was there one that I missed?  Browse through all my pictures from last year and let me know.  My next roundup will be my favorite posts from last year.