The stone ruins are situated around the elegant gardens which at this time of year are just beginning to shows signs of tulip bulbs breaking the surface.
By the time that I turned around and headed back to the car, the walkway was well coated with ice and snow and driving conditions were interesting for a mile or two but it wasn’t long before we had left the area of the freak snow to return to city streets where only a bit of rain had fallen.
This trip to the Mackenzie King Estate in Gatineau Park had certainly had its interesting moments but I was soon to find out that eating in a restaurant with my family could be almost as interesting :-).
TECH INFO:
I began and ended the day using my Nikon D300 with my Nikkor 17 – 35 f2.8 lens but when I arrived at the Mackenzie King Estate I switched to my Nippon Kogaku (Nikon) 55mm f3.5 Micro-Nikkor because it has a deeply recessed front element and I have found it to be ideal in this kind of bad weather.
This 1960’s vintage manual focus lens is very easy to focus with the big focusing ring. The scalloped focusing ring is an interesting feature which was replaced by a diamond hatched lower profile focusing ring in later models. I purchased the lens used. Various iterations of this lens come up for sale on ebay quite often.
