Ice Fishing on Lake Ontario

Just a quick shot I took several years ago of an ice fisherman on Lake Ontario to add to the collection of fine photos to be found at https://darkpinesphoto.wordpress.com/2015/03/08/ice-fishing-lines-out-on-elliot-lake/.

My All-time Favourite Models (with a Side of Fractalius)

Mrs. HoaiPhai has beautiful eyes, and this is the nicer of the two.

I love taking photos of just about everything but by far the most daunting subjects are people and other living creatures. They also happen to yield the most rewarding images if everything works out. My problem with living subjects is twofold…

1. Living subjects tend to move occasionally and I have a leisurely photographic technique and slow reflexes, and…
2. I hate having my own picture taken so I imagine that my subjects are similarly photophobic, causing me to feel uncomfortable imposing myself on them (even if they’ve requested me to photograph them).

Linda Evangelista, Heidi Klum, and Cindy Crawford are professional models and are good-looking (no, not all models are attractive) but they have nothing on my own favourite amateur models. What makes a good model, in my opinion, is someone who…

Weekly Photo Challenge: Movement

My sister-in-law peddling along the Welland Canal. [recycled image from one of my previous posts]

Movement. Anyone who knows me will tell you I avoid it except when it involves acquiring food. I try to justify my sloth by claiming to preserve energy lest I contribute to accelerating the heat death of the universe.

Happy Canada Day! — A Photographic Celebration of a Warm but Shivering People

A maple donut, a beer, and a BBQ… what could better symbolize Canada Day? I looked all over town for a special Canada Day donut to share with you but couldn’t find one, so I had to make my own. I guess a donut is so blatantly Canadian that the donut industry feels it’s a bit redundant to emblazon such an icon of our country with any sort of embellishment. Maybe they have a point… you don’t see Americans painting bald eagles red, white, and blue on their Independence Day.

Sunday July 1st, 2012 marks Canada’s 145th year since Confederation and 30 years since we became a fully independent country. And what a great country we live in!

Recumbent Review: The Plucky Apple iPad 2nd Generation

When I first booted up my new iPad I saw this logo and thought, “Hey! My apple has a crack in it!” Whatever happened to the old rainbow apple?

About the Recumbent Reviews

Welcome to the fifth Recumbent Review!

This series of articles normally examines photographic equipment and accessories from an ordinary user’s point of view but this time we’re doing something a little different… we here at the HoaiPhai Research Laboratories are going to take a look at one of Apple’s iconic tablet computers, the iPad 2nd Generation, from a real-life PC guy’s perspective. Hopefully you’ll enjoy yourself while learning a little something that might help you make an informed purchase (or make you feel all warm and tingly inside about a purchase you’ve already made).

By the way, I composed as much as I possibly could of this post using my iPad!

What I Did on My Staycation: Part II

I stuck pretty close to home during the last leg of my 2012 Staycation.

For those of you just joining us, this is the third part (even though the title says “Part II” — the real first part was “The Prologue”) of my nine-day staycation tale! It’s the last one, I promise.

This instalment deals with what I did after Mrs. HoaiPhai’s family got on a plane and headed to California to begin Phase III of their own vacation.

What I Did on My Staycation: Part I

Ahh… it’s so nice to get a little time off work!

For those of you just joining us, this is the second part (even though the title says “Part I” — the real first part was “The Prologue”) of my nine-day staycation tale! Don’t worry, what I mean to say is that the staycation was nine days in duration and not that it will take you nine days to read this post. It is, however, a fairly lengthy post so you might want to take a sick day off work on Monday if you don’t make it all the way through this weekend.

In a nutshell, my wife’s sister, her sister’s husband, and their granddaughter came from Korea and stay with us for five days. There… you’re pretty much up to speed but should you want to get completely up-to-date, check out “What I Did on My Staycation: The Prologue“, a fairly quick read.

Weekly Photo Challenge: “Freestyle”

Flying the white flag… I’ve given up waiting around for whoever is responsible for letting us all know what we’re supposed to post in terms of Weekly Photo Challenge topic material. [Actually, that’s not a white flag, it’s a former face-cloth that has been re-tasked as a clean-up rag hanging on the clothesline.] More photos follow my rant.

It seems that the good folks down at WordPress’ Weekly Photo Challenge screwed up big time! Whoever was supposed to inform us of this week’s topic has, thus far, failed to do so. Ironically, last week’s theme “Unfocused” remains a full two days past when we have come to expect the new theme to be announced, possibly indicating a lack of focus on the part of the (possibly former) WordPress employee so charged.

Super Moon

I know, it’s old news already — I’m two days late posting “Super Moon” pictures.

I dragged Mrs. HoaiPhai down to the end of the street on Saturday night (May 5, 2012) to spend half an hour waiting for the Moon to rise only to find out that, for some reason, I thought it would come up in a slightly different spot than I had imagined, so all my shots were taken with branches all around and not the row of buildings I had planned. Nevertheless, here they are…

Getting in Touch with my Feminine Side

A little while ago, blogstress par excellence Bliss hit the publish button on her Colorblocking a Classic post. In case you missed it and are too lazy to click on the link I provided, it’s about a Couch purse.

I like Bliss’ posts, a lot of which are about girly stuff, like purses, earrings, new shoes, doilies, and avoiding colour clashes. Anyways, I liked this particular post in spite of the fact that it was about a purse and I’m a man with an unblemished record of staunch heterosexuality* and non-transvestism* (except for that one Hallowe’en over thirty years ago when I dressed as a woman because I was told that I wouldn’t be allowed to get into the party without a costume — and I didn’t like wearing the panty hose one little bit!). I found that if I substituted references to the purses with thoughts of cars while reading her post, it turned into a great discussion! I even contributed to the whole thing by redesigning the bag with a “man’s touch”. It was a hit.