A few of the POTN crowd were out late on Saturday night in the More London area (City Hall and the immediate vicinity).  The plan was to stay up all night and get some eerie shots of an empty London when the sun started to rise at around 4am.  From a group of 6 of us, only one managed to stay up and get those sorts of shots.  I wasn’t that one.

Far too cold for this fair weather Canadian so I was back in my warm flat with a hot tea by 3am.  Respectable for an old man like myself, but not good enough to reach the initial goal.

I did however, manage to get in a bit of light painting before throwing in the towel.

As always, there are more light painting and light orb photos in the gallery.

I spent the day with Matt, Bonnie and Lord Crawley of Crawley roaming around London’s Wetland Trust shooting all things great and small.  Of particular interest in this meet were the small things.  Lee has managed to get a few people hooked on macro photography with his daily updates of creepy crawlies (no relation) he finds on his lunch break.

It’s been ages since I’d done anything fun with my macro lens and over a year since my last visit to the trust, so it seemed like a perfect way to spend a Sunday.

I’ll be perfectly honest…if it wasn’t for Lee spotting most of these interesting critters and pointing them out to me, this album would likely be full of dull close-ups of flowers.  As it is, there are only a few dull close-ups of flowers.

There are quite a few more in the gallery here.

Our first official holiday together and we choose (at length) the tiny, volcanic island of Santorini.  It seemed warm enough for an early May holiday, romantic enough for couples and most importantly, there were direct flights from London.

We had an amazing 5 days, zipping around the island in our cabrio Smart car visiting the various historic sites and shopping centers.  I think this was the first place I’ve been to where the souvenir stalls were almost all unique, so I actually enjoyed browsing the shops for once.  Usually tourist destinations have hundreds of copies of two distinct shops: t-shirts in one & location specific memorabilia in the other.  Think fridge magnets and shot glasses.  Though I shouldn’t complain about shot glasses, as I try to pick one up from every place I go to.  Santorini had them as well, but I managed to get a unique, hand painted one here.

Our hotel was brilliant!  The owner was more than helpful and you could really feel his love for his island in all of the small details of our 5 day home.  The pool was constructed to resemble the shape of the island (complete with raised bits to stub your toe on), he’s created copies of the famous churches (pictured below) and windmills, and even went so far as to create a three dimensional scale replica of the island itself.  All of the towns were labeled and the roads depicted with great care.  We’ll definitely be staying there again when we return.

Anyway, I took a LOT of photos during our trip.  So much so that my battery died on the second to last night (halfway through a 2 hour star trail exposure).  Of course I didn’t have a backup battery or a charger, so we made ample use of Danni’s little point & shoot camera for our final day of excursions.  I’ll know better for next time…all of the time spent reviewing images sure puts a drain on ones battery.

Here are a couple of my favourite shots from the short week.

There are a lot more photos in the gallery here.

In the ongoing effort to introduce new slices of culture into my life, Danni picked up a pair of tickets to see the ballet performance of Cinderella.  Having done years of ballet she’s an obvious fan and has talked about taking me for some time now.  I think choosing a familiar storyline was a good idea as I’m not artistically minded enough to extrapolate any meaning from interpretative dance (or any other subtle forms of expression for that matter).

As we were getting all done up for the evening, I thought I’d take a couple of quick photos of us looking shiny.

If you’re wondering whether or not I enjoyed myself, I did.  I would go again, but mostly due to knowing how much joy Danni gets from attending than for me.  Give me a hockey game any day!

We went back to Canary Warf again this weekend after our slightly failed attempt a couple of weeks ago.  This time we jumped through the proper hoops and got a permit to be there, so the security guards (who were all very friendly) weren’t able to send us packing.

Ian wasn’t able to make it this week due to a football related knee injury, so I was joined by none other than Lee Crawley from Crawley (the gent who created my new toaster icon).  He’s done some cool light painting in the past, but I believe this was his first orb outing.

We even tried to combine our 2 light painting styles as seen in the above image (the light ribbon to the left), and even more so in this shot.

Still kicking myself for not creating a proper orb in this shot, but I could only manage a 1 minute exposure so had to do all of that in the time available.

This is the first time I’m posting watermarked images, which I know can be a bit annoying.  They are however at almost twice the resolution I used to post images at, so there’s good news with the bad.

The rest are in the gallery here!

ps:  thanks again to Ian for sorting out the permit for us, and to Lee for being my trigger man and making sure my compositions were ok while I spun the orbs.