On the Monday of my Canada Day long weekend, I decided to go out for a little walk on the quay with my camera. Just for fun, I put on my general-purpose lens, a 24-120mm. The idea was to force myself to consider subjects that I don't normally consider.

Well, it worked. I barely knew what to take photos of. As I started out, I found a beaten-up, broken dolphin to shoot. While I was shooting I decided on black-and-white for the final version, even though the camera always captures color.

Well, maybe that's wrong. The camera might actually have a black-and-white setting, but if it does, I haven't ever used it. Converting to black-and-white in Photoshop gives me much more control over the final image.

I didn't find any other subjects on the same scale as that dolphin. As I wandered down the quay, I came to the boardwalk, and the tones and textures on the boards caught my attention. I started taking photos of the boards, pointing my camera straight down.

Actually, I was thinking black-and-white for that one, too, but the browns looked better. These shots started me thinking about taking textural photos, so I started to look for other interesting textures.

It turns out that there weren't a lot of them nearby, and as I wandered along the next thing that I decided to shoot were some flowerheads. I think this is a hydrangea, but don't quote me on that.

Next I came to a spot on the boardwalk that has wooden benches, some surrounding planters and some with tubular metal backrests. These seemed good for texture shots, and I spent some time standing on them and around them, taking photos, keeping my camera pointed straight down.

To get the textures to stand out in these photos, and in almost all of the photos in this entry, I've done a little more than usual in Photoshop. Normally, if I have to do more than a little in Photoshop, I don't like it, but for these shots I enjoyed the chance to exercise some of my seldom-used brain cells.

So here are four shots of the benches and the boardwalk around them, each given different treatments in Photoshop.

At this park, around the submarine and the playground equipment, the ground is covered with bark mulch. It was late in the day, and the sun was off to the west, so the mulch had interesting patterns of lights and darks on it, corresponding to little hills and troughs made by people's footprints. I couldn't quite get my camera far enough up to capture the whole hill-and-trough effect, but I was able to get a couple of hills and troughs in each photo I took. Here are two of them. The second one is cropped tighter than the first, and in that one I also brought up more of the texture of the individual pieces in the mulch.

Nearby, there was a short retaining wall that was made with some sort of treated wood that had some really nice surface detail. I knelt down and then sat down to get photos of it directly from the side.

Then I took a few more shots of the stacks of bricks, this time from the side.

A nearby tree had this interesting bark with something growing on it. I liked the photo better sideways; in real life the tree had grown from down to up, not from right to left.

This shot is of the cement in a ramp where a driveway crossed the sidewalk. It had lots of little rocks in it, and interesting grooving. I presume the grooving is to channel rain away and provide grip to tires in the rain and snow.

I decided against venturing into the train yard, instead allowing myself to be distracted by a Caterpillar 330C that was across the street at a construction site. It was up on a big mound of dirt that was being used to load the ground before they started excavating and building on it.

There's been a lot of construction in the neighborhood recently.

Near the big cat, I found these stripes.

That was the side of a container (as in "containerized shipping"). It was another photo that seemed better on its side than upright.

I was nearing my place, and so I headed back to the river side before going in. Out in front of the building where I live, I saw my friend Annie. (I have several friends named Annie; this was the furry one who lives a few doors down from me with Jodi and David.) She walked over to say hi.

And once she had rubbed the side of her face against my outstretched hand, she sat down and engaged the world in a good contemplation.

That seemed like a great idea to me, so I hurried on home to sit down and do some contemplation of my own.

Still contemplating,
Tom