Shot ~20 minutes after the previous photo. After I took this shot, I had to spent the next few minutes cleaning up my gears.

Shot with my 70-200mm with a 1.4x extender. Because I like to shoot wide open landscapes, I don’t use this fine lens enough :( I’ve tried shooting on the opposite side of the creek during sunset with the sun on my back – I much prefer this side of the creek.

There’re many useful Greasemonkey‘s Flickr hacks out there. Here’re a few that I like:

• Background Color: Cool slider to hide everything on a photo page but the photo itself.
• Photo Rank: I find that this is more useful than scout.
• Auto Page: Saves me a bunch of clicks on “my contacts recent photos” and “recent activities on my photos” listings
• Flickr’s Left Panel Sucks: Enough said there.

Found these inspiring words and thought I’d quote it here:

Either we have hope within us or we don’t. It is a dimension of the soul and is not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart. It transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

…

Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out. It is hope, above all, which gives the strength to live and continually try new things.

– Václav Havel

Mosquitoes were buzzing all around me and ants were crawling up my legs; yet I couldn’t move because I was hand holding a GND filter in front of the lens. Didn’t want to ruin the shot, I just stood still for the duration of the exposure. Luckily, I only needed a 10 seconds exposure. After the shot, I jumped around like mad, wiping ants off my legs. Three days later, I still have many red spots on my legs – a small price to pay to get the shot.

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Sometimes, Mother Nature paints some of the most breathtaking strokes that I’ve ever seen.

This was shot about 20 minutes after the previous photo.

Heart found in the water … in a blink of an eye, sun disappeared, heart faded … clouds and light lingered for a while …

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