The Canadian Snowbirds. The elite of the fighter pilots. The ones that are allowed to do acrobatics in their planes where normal jet fighters are supposed to go by the book. When we speak of the Snowbirds, everyone is in awe. People watching a show with the Snowbirds invariably will fire up the Top Gun theme in their cars.

Twenty years after the movie it is still going strong as a theme… The Canadian Forces Snowbirds (431 Air Demonstration Squadron) is a Canadian icon comprised of serving members of the Canadian Armed Forces.

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“You have your head in the clouds!”, my mother used to say. As a young boy I was a dreamer. I was also the tallest kid in the classroom, so the expression was somewhat lost on me at the time. I thought my mother was just talking about my superior height, not about my daydreaming. So I continued to dream. Dreaming I was a pilot, dreaming about living in the wilderness, dreaming about… you name it.

Until someone told me when I started wearing glasses at the age of 8 that being a pilot was out of reach. So I dreamt of other things. Funny enough, I never dreamt of becoming a programmer or IT specialist. Probably because that didn’t even exist fifty years ago. Last weekend I had my head in the clouds again.

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Writing about and shooting birds does not bore me. Most of the time. But sometimes I need to show something else, just to remain “interesting”. So, instead of simply giving an account of my May Long Weekend, I thought it might be a change to write about a different trip.

This time it was a trip to the Brokenhead Bog, a little north of Winnipeg. Recently they have constructed a nice boardwalk so you can enjoy the bog/marsh keeping your feet dry.

Read more: Bogged down for a while…

It is for most Canadians THE weekend of the year. It kicks off summer season, opens all summer activities, the “cottages at the lake” and much more. This year, May long Weekend didn’t disappoint with the weather either. Two great days and one day starting off a bit great and ending great as well. I always thought that a long weekend in Canada always had at least one rainy or snowy day in it…

This year, I had the possibilities to go out every day and thus recharge my batteries a little bit. As a result, the store of pictures of birds and nature has been replenished somewhat.

Read more: May Long Weekend I

Dreaming of Spring Break, whenever that may be. Catching my subjects and my pictures whenever and wherever I can has become a more permanent style of shooting for me, lately. It looks as if the weekdays follow each other relentlessly, omitting the weekends altogether. It would be a bit exaggerated to say that I don’t remember the last real weekend I had for shooting, but that one is already in a past, close to the closet of memories.

Lightroom is a fantastic tool to remember, the catalog is always there, even if your pictures are off-line. The thumbnails show you what has been, and sometimes that makes me think I want to do this or that all over again. That usually never happens.

Read more: Spring break, without break

Every year around this time we do the same thing. We whine when it gets cold again and we rejoice when it gets warmer. What we usually forget is that this happens every year, more or less around the same time. This year is early with warmer weather. Warmer weather also brings newcomers to Manitoba.

Manitoba is a special place in North America in the fact that it is central. Most of the migratory birds come through here, then move on to either north, east or west.

Read more: Welcome to the newcomers!

Your own home is often seen as the ideal working place. Let me tell you one thing: it certainly is the most pleasant place to work in, but you need to be very vigilant about working hours and time off. For a long time I have now been working on a huge project, private for a company I work with. The project is now finished and delivered, all I have to do is deal with the unavoidable typos and bugs.

What does that have to do with photography? Well, being “on call” for fixing bugs and other annoyances results in no real time off. Lunch breaks become working hours as colleagues will more often than not call you during that time as not to interfere with their usual activities. As a result, your lunch break becomes a time of higher stress than the rest of the day. After a while you feel your energy dripping away, never to be recovered.

Read more: Lunch break