Eileen Seto's photos

Part of the magic of the fall season is seeing wild mushrooms pop up on the forest floor. These are puffball mushrooms in their prime before their spores mature and their flesh dries up, at which point they become “puffable” ! The macro setting on my camera brought out the dainty studs on their surface for which they are known as the Gem-studded Puffball.

Lastours Castles in southern France September 2019

Comets have always sparked the imagination. In the old days, they were seen as omens bringing doom and disaster, messengers of the gods. These days our scientists tell a different story. Comets may bring with them a variety of organic molecules including amino acids, the building blocks of life. So it's possible that these ancient visitors to our solar system may have seeded life on our planet! Omens and science aside, there's no doubt that the appearance of comets will continue to fascinate humankind for as long as we watch the skies, if only for their rare beauty. Taken on July 23, 2020 from Ottawa, Canada.

Peggy's Cove near Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Solar prominences (the red loopy bits on the right edge) visible at eclipse totality. Due to the brightness of the sun's corona, I was not able to see them with my naked eyes, so was delighted to have them show up in the photos. The sun's "secret" revealed!

I'd always wanted to see a total solar eclipse with my own eyes. This year, I finally made the pilgrimage to the eclipse path, and what a sight indeed it was! Shown here is the "diamond ring effect" just brief moments before totality.

This is my favourite beach along the west coast of Vancouver Island, Canada. It's a short hike in through a beautiful rainforest, and if you want to camp overnight, you can pitch your tent anywhere on the beach. Just be careful not to get flooded at high tide!

A scenic lake near the geographic centre of Vancouver Island, between Campbell River and Gold River.

From my archives, a shot from early last year, before handrails were installed along the breakwater. Today with the handrails, walking the breakwater is a totally different experience. Viewing this photo is a bit of nostalgia for me.

An abstract image taken after sunset on top of a local mountain. The peak offers 360-degree views of the city and surroundings. The dark band at the top below the sunset colours is the Olympic mountain range in the distance, and the lighter band below that is the ocean. The rest of the image is urban.

This is my favourite beach along the west coast of Vancouver Island, Canada. It's a short hike in through a beautiful rainforest, and if you want to camp overnight, you can pitch your tent anywhere on the beach. Just be careful not to get flooded at high tide!

The best viewing for the Perseid meteor shower this year was a couple of weeks earlier than the shower's peak, because of the moon phase. Luckily, this timeframe coincided with the peak of the lesser-known Delta Aquarid meteor shower in late July. I camped out on Mystic Beach along the west coast to get a good view of the show. I saw some quick 'n' bright fireballs, and my camera caught several faint ones. Make a wish! (Or two, if you can find the really faint one!)

My first trip to Sandcut Beach to see the pretty waterfalls along the sandstone cliffs saw a very low flow of water. This is the main waterfall, with a secondary one just visible to the right in this photo. The water flow is much higher in other seasons.

A highlight of my first trip to Hornby Island was seeing the sandstone formations at Ford's Cove. From a distance they didn't look like much, but up close the intricate patterns were endlessly fascinating, so much so that we almost missed the last ferry off the island – which wouldn't have been all that bad!

Landslide Lake is a pretty destination on the Elk River Trail of Vancouver Island. The lake got its name when a magnitude 7.2 earthquake hit on June 23, 1946, causing a portion of Mt Colonel Foster to break off and slide down. (The break-off area is visible in this photo on the far right side of the mountain peak, just below the cloud.) The damage is still obvious today, though new growth is starting to heal the slide.