Pic Spocket

Our good friends Eric and Lyne from Quebec were visiting few days ago for the weekend. We went to visit ‘The Henry Ford’ Museum in Detroit.

The Henry Ford is really something to see. Of course, there are cars and other vehicles there, including some very rare pieces like the limousine in which JFK was shot. But it’s much more than cars or even planes. There is also machinery, famous homes, and other artifacts and inventions from American History. More details on the museum on Wikipedia.

On a Friday this early in the year, the museum was very quiet, good for photo opportunities. The only drawback was the very low light situation. This called for big apertures and high ISO settings. Here are a few samples. As usual, more are available in the album linked below.

The weather is really coming around here after a cold weekend last week. We stopped by Jackson Park last Saturday to play with Newton.

He really needs to spend some of that energy he has! He really enjoyed the outing, except for the car ride. We brought the camera with us. Here’s a few shots taken that morning.

More in the album below.

Spring is just around the corner and we can’t wait to take advantage of it! Last year, we went several times at the Ojibway Park (5-10 minutes drive from our home) in that period. It’s a nice place for birding and see all kind of other wildlife. We’ve seen some white tail deers, groundhog, chipmunks, snakes, bats, etc.

Preparing for the season, I’ve looked through last year pictures and decided to put some in our photo album. Here are a few samples from the Ojibway Park in spring of 2007:

Birds

Other Pictures

Also, we went 2 times to look at the migrating birds at the Point Pelee National Park. This is a bit further from home (maybe an hour), but it is worth it. It is a very well known spot for birding. Here are a few pictures from there as well:

I am sure we will visit these 2 places again this spring. More pictures from last year can be found in the respective albums, in the “Fauna related Outings” section.

Ojibway	Point Pelee

On Sept 29, we went to Toronto for the weekend. The weather was simply gorgeous for late September. After a walk downtown, we went to the Chinese Lantern Festival 2007 for the evening. This outing provided mutiple photo opportunities!

These lanterns are made by master craftsmen coming from china for this event.

Here are some of our favorite lanterns:

See links below for complete albums…

We went to the Holiday Beach Conservation Area two consecutive Saturdays, Sept 15 and 22, to have a look at the migration of Hawks. This place is renowned for its birding. Each fall, thousands of birds of prey take a stop in this area before heading south.

Common species observed includes hawks, vulture, eagles, falcons, etc.

On September 22, was the “Festival of Hawks“.  This was very interesting as we could see some of these magnificent birds from up-close. There was branding demonstrations, and you could “adopt” a bird before releasing him back in nature.

See the photo gallery linked below.