Birthday Bliss

My birthday present this year was a be-yoo-tiful new Nikon D90 digital SLR camera. I'm still baffled by all of its settings and buttons, but it sure does take some very fine photos. Even the bad photos are better than with my old camera: the underexposed areas have very little noise and the edges do not have the significant warping that I found with my other camera.

I got a lens with a fixed focal length (meaning it does not "zoom"), but a very large aperture (f 1.8) so I can get a really shallow depth of field if I want one and can get more natural light in low-light conditions. I'll admit, I'm having a hard time getting used to not zooming in on things. I'm not sure how long it'll be before I invest in a telephoto lens. But this lens comes highly recommended (the expert whose blog I consulted said he uses this lens 90 % of the time).

As soon as the battery had enough juice to snap a few pictures, I took the camera out to play. (You may have heard me giggling.) [As always, click the pictures to enlarge them.]

These flowers, spiderwort, close up each day as the sun hits them.

This picture is of the same flowers as above,
but taken in the cool of the following morning.
Look at the bee's wings!!

I need to work on the white balance.
I think that purple is supposed to be brown.
Yet the other colours are correct. Hmm.

I want to turn this into a wedding invitation.

For my birthday, Steve took me down to Kingston for a bit of a romantic getaway (and because he had a work-related function, so we combined business with pleasure). We met and married in Kingston, and then went back while Steve did his master's degree, so the city holds lots of fond memories. It's also quite a tourist destination, so it has some nice places to dine (and drink).

We took a detour through Smith's Falls and stopped to snap
a picture of the mural on the side of this building.
It wasn't until I enlarged the photo that I realized the
doors (and the dog) on the "front" of the building were paintings too.

Once in Kingston we settled into our room
(a suite at the Marriott - free with our Marriott points!),
then went to a pizzeria recommended by a colleague of mine
and found a table in the quiet courtyard out back.

The sun set, the lights came on, showing off the rough limestone walls. (Kingston is often called Limestone City because so much of the original architecture was built out of the stone so prevalent in the area.)

This picture was challenging to take,
as the camera wanted to base its exposure readings
on the light at the top.

We had his-and-hers after-dinner drinks.
Can you guess which one is mine?
(I tried to capture the beading of Steve's scotch
around the edge of his glass. It's hard to see.)

It was still too early to head back to the hotel, so we walked around the corner and found another courtyard - this one decked with enchanting fairy lights!

We sat in that festively lit alcove.

I loved being able to intentionally blur the focus on those fairy lights.

And we laughed.

The next day, which happened to be my birthday, we attended the change-of-command parade (no pix), then stopped in for a short visit with some old friends (no pix) on our way back to Ottawa for birthday cake.

Winnie-the-Pooh is well loved at our house.

YUM! Carrot cake.

So THAT was my forty-ninth birthday! Pretty good - and it wasn't even the big 5-0!