What can I say…taking some time away has just been what I needed after a busy first half of the year. My husband and daughter and I have made use of our time together as a family and enjoyed all sorts of great things together.

My sweet husband is also a budding photographer, and we took a hike up a mountain on Thursday to capture some scenics. Taking photos of landscapes is so totally different in many ways than taking portraits of people. The settings on the camera go from f/4 to f/22, and that allows me to capture MORE detail in focus. In portraits, you actually want the background all soft and blurry, but in landscapes you want it sharp from front to back. Here’s just a sampling of what I saw…keep in mind I don’t have any photo editing software with me while on vacation, so these are pretty much out of the camera as is.

Here’s something fun taken with our new fisheye lens.  There’s some bend in the trees, but it gives a really great super wide view.

This is the Lake Okanagan…and like the Loch Ness, there’s rumoured to be a sea monster living here called the Ogopogo.  Look at the cool pattern in the water…don’t you think that must be caused from a swirling sea serpant?