New West had a large assortment of awesome walls waiting to photographed here is a few of the more awesome :)

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.