Well, it’s been a pretty good weekend, finishing off a nice 10-day (or so) stint in Hamilton. As usual, I was crazy busy. I shot a million-dollar house for a friend’s mom in King City. The house was beautiful, inspired by Spanish architecture, with lots of stucco, terra cotta tiles, and arches galore. The lot was huge, with rolling lawns, a winding driveway, and studded with mature trees. The interior is a bit dated, but carefully decorated with quality pieces. I wish I could afford to buy this place and turn it into a photography playground! 😛 The photos will go on the MLS listing for the house. Hopefully they attract some potential buyers for the home.

The only time I was available to shoot these was from about noon until 2pm on Saturday, so I had to deal with some pretty difficult light. In the end, I took a few bracketed exposures of the high contrast scenes and layered and masked them in Photoshop. Not quite HDR, because I wanted them to look natural, but essentially the same purpose.

I’ll be heading back to Montreal tomorrow afternoon on a train. I’m looking forward to the change of pace. I’ll be up in Montreal for 10 days, staying for the jazz festival next weekend. It should be a good time. I’ve been in Montreal for jazz festival weekend before and it’s nuts… they shut off about half of downtown to traffic, and there are outdoor stages set up everywhere. With the hot weather approaching, I predict a trifecta of cool music, cold beer, and good times.

I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my server lately. That means my website and email will go down unexpectedly. The problem is that it tends to die on Friday nights, leaving me without email until I can get an on-call technician in Montreal to go into the datacentre and reboot it. I have a bad feeling that the hardware is starting to die, and I’ll have to replace it. Ugh.