This weekend Angela, Myself, Jason and Tanya headed to Ottawa for the last weekend of the Tulip Festival. On Saturday morning we headed out for a walk up the canal to Dow's Lake to see the sights.

Since it was the last week of the festival, most of the tulips were looking a little sad, but there were still plenty of things to see. I will probably post a small photo album on Picasa soon. In terms of photography, I just put myself into "tourist" mode and mostly took random snapshots as we wandered around.

We actually wandered around a lot that day... much more than we were expecting. We started by walking from the 417 up the canal to Dow's Lake to look at tulips. While we were there, we took in a busker show (where I was pulled in as a helpless victim... why do I always get picked for these things?), and then from there we walked up Preston Street to Somerset and into Chinatown for some food.

After that, we took the bus back to Dow's Lake and decided to see the arboretum. While walking through the arboretum we made the random decision to continue walking up to Hog's Back Falls. Once there, we hung out at Mooney's Bay while Adam went home to fetch a car so that we could drive back to Dow's Lake in time for the fireworks.

Because we had been wandering around for much longer than expected, my tripod was still back at the apartment. Luckily, we got front row seats right at the edge of a dock on the lake, so I put my wide angle lens on my camera, zoomed it out all the way, and carefully placed the camera right on the edge of the dock. I set it for a 30 second exposure, and just kept pressing the shutter release throughout the entire fireworks show (pausing once or twice to make sure things made sense).

So, with that explanation... here is one of the better photos I got of this year's fireworks. If you wish, you can compare it to a similar photo I took three years ago with my film camera.

Technical details: This was shot with my Rebel XT + 10-22mm at 10mm, ISO 100, f/11 for 30 seconds.