Saturday, February 28, 2009

The invasion

Our house has been invaded. There are tell tale signs everywhere. The fridge is overflowing with food, the house is warmer, there is snow piling up outside (although I'm not sure how closely this is related to the invasion) and most telling my parents are sleeping in the spare room. It's lovely to see them and we are taking the opportunity to be proper tourists, plus they've hired a car so we can explore the area in a way that is impossible without one. The day they arrived so did the snow, which is great for skiing but I'm not sure my mother was that impressed with two days of driving snow and -20C temperatures. The snow stopped and we were treated to a couple of beautiful sunny days with fresh snow perfect for skiing. During the blizzard we explored some of the local indoor sites as well. The very interesting Whyte Museum, which gave some history of the area, as well as a photography exhibition which we loved! We also visited the Cave and Basin which was very hot and very smelly... mmmm, sulphur.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Cameras, snowflakes and water

Well, we haven't written anything new on our blog for a very long time.  Partly because being in one place nothing much changes.  Skiing has not been our main focus and instead we started becoming more interested in photography.  To the point that we decided to buy ourselves a new camera (as a combined birthdays and christmas present).  We try and take at least one interesting photo a day.  One aim has been to get a good photo of a snowflake - the main problem with this is how rarely it snows.  The second problem is that when it does, being REALLY cold the snowflakes are generally 1mm across... quite hard to get a decent photo of that.  Occasionally you get lucky and one will be 2mm across, so those are the ones we have attempted to photograph.  The third problem with this is that after 10min your fingers start to go numb and develop frostbite.  So as an alternative indoor activity we tried to photograph a single water droplet.  Lots more fun and without the problems mentioned above.    To further waste money on photography as a hobby we set up a website with some photos at www.80weeks.smugmug.com 
Feel free to post photographic missions for us, and we will have fun attempting them!