About a month ago (may 3rd to be precise) Coaxial and I went for a walk about the New Westminster Quay with cameras in hand, and I am just getting about to blogging the results now. :) I wanted to try out the new 16-35 that replaced the old 16-35 as well as check out the areas of New West that I haven’t photoed yet. It was a ridiculously nice day out with bright blue skies (i know I just said that I don’t photowander in the sun) and puffy clouds.

The best part of this photo is the Star Choice Satellite dish :)

Interesting light was happening on this manhole cover so the triptych was in order!

When i was a little kid i used to play with G.I.Joes in weeds like these! I pretended that they were huge trees in an epic forest.

There was a lot of aweful graffiti about but these were the best of the bunch

16-35 =awesome! I love how the wider the lens the less dramatic the contrast of light and dark is.  My fish eye is almost always bang on exposure from light to dark.  Here I had some help filling in the shadows for the sun was reflecting off a huge white building and filled in the right side nicely! :)

Walls with wires are cool!

Train Tracks and blue skies = fun

The Skytrain bridge looked surreal this day. It sort of looked like it was a painted backdrop in a lower budget Sci-Fi show.

Coaxial may have found a new calling as a hillbilly.

Ya so a month old but swell none the less! Enjoy! if i get around to it i may even pull out photos from the perogiy party that we went to afterwards. But dont hold your breath! :)

Yesterday I decided that I was going to take a day off! A real day off! Not a I idly work all fracking day not really working and not really not working and then wondering why I am getting so stressed about stupid little things in life kind of day off. Nope I took a full-fledged day off. To do that I shut off my computer and totally ignored my phone/facebook/twitter and did nothing work related.  What I did do was get creative and it all started with this thought!

My guitar case is stupid boring!

I found myself wondering is there a great stylish guitar case that represents me as an ‘artist’ and is not the Iron Maiden style airbrushed mural of skulls/dragon/snake or rose entwined knife stabbed though a bloody heart on a crest formed out of rotting top hat wearing skeletons! I searched the Internet for an answer and the closest I came to awesome cases is this company called Postal Monkey. While on the right track with neat graphically intense cases none of them reached out to me; that and they specialize in Electric Guitar cases.  The only acoustic cases they have are Leopard fun fur and faux Louis Vuitton print. While it was not an Iron Maiden epic odyssey mural, also not really for me. The next option was to cover my guitar case in stickers and though that somehow express my personality.  Stickers like ‘everything is better with bacon’, ‘Sub Pop’, and the ever favorite ‘I am a rocker I rock out!’ and this is exactly what I started doing last year with my brand new SKB case. However, it would seem that guitar case technology has not really improved in the 10-15 years that it has been since I bought my last case, because in less then a year the case was broken and a total mess.  While the case was covered under warranty, transferring stickers didn’t seem to be covered, so I was sitting back at square one with a boring bland guitar case, and my personality left fully unexpressed.

Those that have been to our studio have probably seen the awesome table that M refreshed from something that was bland and beat-up into something awesome and wicked perrrty, if you haven’t been to the studio go here and see what the hell I am talking about. So then I started thinking, I wonder if I could decoupage myself up an epic awesome case, so nearly a liter of glue and a pint of Polyacrylic later I came up with these.

The photos for this one are from a couple of Blurb books that I had sent in a while back as a test.

These are the maps that we used to navigate our way across Canada in 2004.

Some of them like Saskatewan were hardly used while others like Ontario were all beat up and nearly destroyed. I think it is neat that parts of the case traveled around like a vagabond in a beat up old VW golf.

Decoupaging this music stand was really an after thought.

I used the books that come with a Diana+ camera that are filled with the history of the camera as well as some neat examples of the Diana+ work.

Wanna know how to do this?  M has a step by step instructional on the art of decoupage

As I said before I don’t often get a chance to play with high contrast shadows, However, with all the super nice weather we had last week I have been stepping out of my usual comfort zone, that and I was already horribly sunburnt from the weekend. All in all good times!

So yesterday was what we call a day off! Meaning that for half the day i did work and the other half I didn’t. I did fun stuff instead! Fun stuff which I will share later today if I get it finished and time willing. Yup it is really fun stuff though. :)

Normally i don’t really like to photo walk on super sunny days, mostly do to the fact that i am proof positive that the sun actually trying to kill me, but partly because I like the soft light and even shadows of overcast days. As such i am not often privy to bright blue skies!

…that resulted in me seeing the balancing rock guy, and having legs that now want to kill me. All fairly crazy stuff really.  This guy balances rocks for tips I think. At least the hat with money and clippings of his fame all placed out made me think so.   If i could balance a rock I would put out a hat as well.

I wandered about UBC the other day while waiting for stuff. That is a freaking gold mine of awesome waiting to be explored i tell ya :)

I know that it has been for ever since I have really blogged anything but I have been busy and junk. I could go off and discuss all the awesome things that I been up to these past few weeks but I wont because the list gets longer and more daunting with each passing day.  Suffice it to say that It has been a bunch of good times that none of you will get to hear about :)

So I am wiping that slate clean and simply moving forward as though I have been diligently blogging away about the fun and exciting life of this Jerk, and trust me it has been swell.

I decided this year that I wasn’t going to kill myself with inhumane amounts of work. A plan that is failing miserably thus far but I am going to continue pushing forward with it anyway. Part of this pushing forward is to do other things, you know things that are not work related at all. Like camping, hiking, biking, jamming and insert some other activity that is me not sitting on my fat ass in front of computers for multiple hours a day like some fat, undeservingly narcissistic, mouth breathing world of warcraft addict that I am sadly starting to resemble. We had a weekend free, but being that I am insanely busy, I asked Coaxial if he could find us something fun to do. The only guidelines I provided were it had to involve some sort of camping and I demanded some sort of strenuous activity. I am slowly learning to delegate things and not feel that all tasks need to be done by me and only me so I happily deferred to the far superior camping/adventure planing skills of coaxial. He sent us some simple directions and some GPS co-ordinates and after a crazy busy day we packed up and followed these directions up past Squamish to camp. Strike guideline one of the list!

As for guideline two the strenuous activity, this was “hey lets climb cypress mountain and look at some snow and possibly a glacier!” I like both snow and glaciers so after a hearty breakfast off we went!

The hike goes something like this, drive as far as you can on a logging road and then park, cross a creek (river) and then go up, straight up the mountain. After an hour or so trying to find a safe creek (river) crossing we did just that.

The climb is 900 vertical meters or something up from the logging road and almost all of it was covered in stupidly deep snow. We had no problem standing on the top though with a few exceptions :)

Just so we could explain how steep it really was :)

I may have ruined my legs for ever! :)

That night we played with fireworks

We made a lot of eggs :)

Drove a great many places

We even managed to mire the xterra in many feet of wet snow :)

All in all an awesome weekend was had by all!! June 20th is our next camping adventure I think.

Photos of my wet rainy beetle. These are actually from the archives of the instiute circa 2007

We have moved on up in the land of our parking! Yup we went from this

to this

Ya I know it is a little bit over kill with the razor wire and locked gates and such but what can I say it is a far bigger parking space that will allow us to park two autos for the price of around 1.5! I will also bring my kayaks home from there storage rack on Granville island, which means we then save on those monthly mooring costs there! Who knows they may even get used once in a while if they are close to home :)

Yuppers the great beetle with no name (I am not sure why I haven’t named it, we have only had it for like 5-6 years) is rocking out with its proverbial cock out! :) It is summer and i had to move it and deal with it, so We insured it and fixed up some stuff on it like a even more new clutch…. GRRRrrrrr… (the long story short is that the new clutch and pressure plate which had maybe 1500 miles on it, broke! Yuppers that pressure plate physically broke!) $650 later the bug has a new clutch once again! :)

Sitting for two years was really hard on the poor guy, the areas that were rusted a little bit have turned into fairly bigger bits. Not to worry however for a $500 dollar order into Cip1.ca, a solid weeks worth of work, and a paint job, I think our green beetle with black interior can become a two tone Orange/White with an light white or oatmeal interior.
Kinda like this

Not my photo I robbed it from the internet!

So good news is that the seat repair is fully on track! I simply need a welder for 15 min to fix this…

Yuppers no more spare tire to hold up the seat needed :) Which I really like because the spare tire is supposed to be looking pretty in the front dammit! :) I swapped the passenger & driver seats last night so I can drive it with out cuddling with both the steering wheel and the floor, and now the beetle is like a Mexican cab :)

I hosed down and wiped the whole inside with a disinfectant cleaner to take care of any mold issues that may have erupted in the last 4 months. With the seats fully out I was also able to clean up the floor and inspect the seat tracks which are in need of some love but other wise look solid and awesome.

All of the inside carpet is gone and the floor is cleared out awaiting some new, paint, sound dampening pads, carpet, and lastly some heavy duty rubber floor mats. All in all we are in great shape to fix up any issues that we have with out a lot of work or money which is exactly what I like to hear :)

OK going for a drive now :)

I have been busy so here is what I would have blogged if I wasn’t to busy to actually blog.

Roof meat

Cruise ships

Photo Wandering

Commodore for Bloc Party

Hot Hot Heat wouldn’t get of stage

I was sick for days

Didn’t get to see The Weakerthans but I had two tries :(
thats it thats all.

I r drunk and i can try to explain things to you folks but i figure that i would let random Stephanie napkin drawings expleian the evening becasue i could drunkin blog & try to explsinf this shart! but intead i am dleaning to this nspkin.

but the tifger is loaded nd he is loaded as well

Just a collection of some photos for the gas meter file!

Having photographed a large collection of gas meter in my time, the only conclusion that I can come to is that I am utterly amazed that more houses don’t randomly explode from gas leaks. :)

Taking Miranda to her morning cult meeting and then I am spending a couple of uninterrupted hours playing guitar in the park :)  Then it is a busy day filled with multiple photo shoots. If i am not exhausted at 8pm tonight I will blog photos from the day but i doubt that that will happen!

here is  few more shots from random Powell River places

An old BcHydro building I think?

Did they happen to need Ambulance’s enough to warrant a proper pick up point?

So almost on the spur of the moment we decided to road trip  up the sunshine coast and stay at the genius campsite that we found last year.

I tossed a bunch of stuff together, we loaded up the xterra and off we went.

After a leisurely drive we found our campsite! (the exact same one that we had before) and I was a burly man and made fire.

This tug took at least 30 min to make it from one side of our view to the other.

there was a great many signs telling us to do things and not do other things.

an awesome view that we discovered on random deactivated forestry roads.

Awesome mail boxes that M wanted to steal.

random disused parking lots with many overgrown signs painted on the walls.

It was a super relaxing weekend.  we were only gone for around 24 hours but it honestly felt like almost a week! You must be in relaxtown when that happens :)