We went to see a couple of films at VIFF this week. First we went to see Cuba. Great doc that was filled with interviews and the like with some of the people that were involved in the revolution. There was some footage from Castro and other things like that but the bulk of the footage was interviews with the everyday run of the mill people, people like the court stenographer during Castro’s trial and other people that had a small part that turned out to be history changing. The thing that I took from this film was that one person can change the course of history. One small seemingly insignificant decision is all it takes to change the destiny of a nation, and the entire world for that matter. An example was when Castro was caught after the failed attack on the military armory. He was being escorted to jail by a man (I don’t remember the man’s name) and they were stopped by a corrupt policeman that wanted to “escort” Castro to jail, meaning he wanted to kill him. While it was the norm for this to happen and most of the corrupt police would have gladly done so this man insisted that Castro was to stand trial and refused the corrupt man’s request. The single decision of one man changed the course of history. The film was filled with other examples of single acts that looking back changed the course of history but seemed small and insignificant at the time.

The second was a film (well three shorts actually) called Tokyo. Crazy and absurd movies of complete brilliance. I can not and will not even attempt to describe them. You must see it. If it isn’t playing at the fest again to try and rent it/watch it online/download it. Pure awesome.

I have been going out of my way the last 4 or 5 years to avoid all thing to do with indie film and the like. Mostly because I will get the itch and drop everything and make crazy films again. All good except crazy films don’t pay rent, and I just doubled my rent I hope that I can do something about that this year or next. It is all about the time and I have little of it.

Man O man it was hot yesterday. We went to Caibarién yesterday and we wandered around a bunch and took some photos but it was so stifling that we were back at the resort by supper time.

It has been really awesome to just drive around Cuba stopping at places and looking at stuff. I am so done with the resorts and the bus tours. I was done with them before I even got here! They are such a poor way to see stuff/people and an even poorer way to take photos of it.

We are just getting ready for the wedding I am also packing for the trip home. Time will be short in the next while for things like packing so I am getting as much done as possible. Josh has taken a much more relaxed approach to the leaving then me and I expect that I will be left waiting. :)

I am just bugging mostly there is lots of time to pack I am just always trying to be super prepared! We are doing our Trash session in the morning before we leave as I think I mentioned so hopefully I will be able to run in to the room change clothing and fire back out to the main lobby to check out.

We wil then hop a bus to the airport and fly out. I totally forgot that when we got her we got off the plane on the tarmac via the stairs, you know like in the old days it was the awesome!! I had fear & loathing quotes running though my head “There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. A high-powered mutant of some kind never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.” that sorta thing. Anyway off to return the rental car and for food!

…only not on scooters as planned and this is most likely for the best! The rental place only had two working scooters out of seven that are parked outside, and when he tried to fire them up only one of the two actually worked and I do use ‘worked’ in the loosest terms. I am nearly sure that they would have died somewhere along the 50km causeway leaving us stranded, so I think that another car rental is in order. :)

We are up to all this today because the wedding has been moved to Friday and our Trash Session is now going to be at sunrise at Saturday morning before we leave a little tight scheduling wise but should be no problem if planned correctly.  I am going to pack up as much as possible tonight so I am not rushing at it later. We will also dual shoot the session and then if I don’t have the time to properly back it up I can slit these between josh and I. 

It is hot out today I tell ya! I nearly died at breakfast from the heat! It was brutal hot all night even (we were out on the beach having flash wars in which I am sure I won) so today shouldn’t be much of a surprise.  I will be glad for the air-conditioning in the jeep.

So I would seem that the wedding may be postponed a day or so due to the party being quite ill, so once we have conformation of this we are going to go kayaking or snorkeling or both.  It may though a wrench into our plans to rent scooters and head into Caibarién for a photo wander of wanders on Thursday but we will see If the wedding is pushed till tomorrow then that will still be no problem, we will just have to back for the TTD session that evening. I hope we can get our money back for the Jeep Safari that we had booked for Friday, I am sure that they will be understanding because of the wedding change and everything.  We will find out at 1pm when the tour rep is in.    

Yup so I am up and at them getting ready for today’s wedding and such. It is a gloriously sunny day which is good and bad I suppose! That means it will be hot out but that hopefully also means that it won’t be monsooning out! (it does seem to do one or the other here) So on Monday we decided that we would rent scooters on Tuesday, all fine and good. We reserved them and everything, but when Tuesday rolls in it does so with soak you to the bone in 30 seconds type rain! As josh put it every whiny Vancouverite that complains about the rain we get should have to spend one afternoon in a Cuba style rain. They would never complain again :) This is the sorta rain that is not so conducive to scooting so we instead rented a car, well a jeep type thing. I say jeep type thing only because that is what they called it. It was a Suzuki Jimmy and it did have 4H and 4L but that is really where the similarities to a jeep stopped :) It was a brand new one as well and while it wasn’t an Xterra (which is a pretty high standard to live up to) it was required for some of the roads that we ended up taking! So we got the car and decided to drive somewhere cool like say Trinidad. So using nothing but the large overview maps that are in one of my Cuba books and the maps in the Cuban Yellow Pages, off we went!! The first part was easy as we simply followed along the road that we came in on the bus in back but when we got to the uncharted territory it got more interesting. After circling Santa Clara via the ring road twice we found our turning and off we went! It wasn’t the most direct route but it seemed the most entertaining one again all according to the phone book. We did fantastic at navigating to places the roads weren’t labeled or number on either the phone book maps or the roads, so we confirmed we were on track with the towns that we encountered along the way. Everything was fine until we got to Manicaragua. It would seem that it was there that we exited the town going the wrong way and ended up going the wrong way. Something that wasn’t confirmed until we hit the next town with a sign. I say with a sign because it wasn’t the first town that we came across it was 2 hours of ragged backroads later that we came across Santa Lucia a town with a name on it. It was then that we discovered that we were nowhere near Trinidad and instead near Cabaiguán It was all good really, Trinidad wasn’t really a set in stone destination more of a direction to drive towards. Getting lost gave us a glimpse of Cuba that we wouldn’t have gotten on a tour bus and that was exactly what we were looking for. Once we found our self on the map it was a simple drive back to Remedios and then back across the causeway till we got to the resort that we call home. The rental rep is going to be impressed with the sheer number of KM’s that we put on.

So we are back from an epic road trip that ended up in us being no where near where we wanted to be but it was cool none the less. We ended up on some crazy backroads in the middle of nowhere. Again my time is short so I wont go into detail but on the way to Trinidad we ended up somewhere entirely different.  I will talk all about it at less then 12 CUC and hour.maybe even with a few photos although i really didn’t take many. mostly because i was driving.  I did get josh to drive for a while but that was some what scary so I just resumed driving the rest of the way!!

Here is a speedtest from cuba for all your amusment

So due to epic rain we are abandoning the scooters and have instead rented a little jeep type thing.  We have eaten a hardy meal and we are off to see what there is to see! Don’t worry M We will be careful and all that! We are not really sure where we are going but we are sure to have fun and take lots of awesome photos.

I am sitting here drinking a Bucanro [Cuban beer) and blogging but my Internet is running out quickly so I will be brief that and my keyboard is spanish and i don’t have the rights to change it seems! I am again back in the wonderful land of Cuba! and I will be till the 31st.  I am having a blast and taking more photos. I will actually try to post some of them via flickr and what not when I hit the TO this Saturday! There is a lot of good times to be had here! We are renting scooters tomorrow and we are going to cross the 50km causeway that connects the island and the mainland together.  I some how managed to get epically sun-burnt yesterday so I thought it best to take it easy today! Fun fun

I have really big 80’s rock star hair! We are off to the ocean with goggles, snorkels, and under water cameras to see what we can see. I finally was able to garner some internet time and the like so I was able to let Miranda know via (something more than telling josh to update his facebook) that I have arrived. We were so wiped yesterday that we both managed to crash out around 4pm (Cuba Local Time) and sleep till 8. We have met our couple already and we are good to meet them to talk details and what not later today.

It was a tense moment when I found out just how much my flight back to Canada was going to be. I am referring to Ernesto and the 385CUC I need to slip him to garner passage to the great land of Canada. We didn’t take a lot of cash when we got here mostly because I wasn’t garnering having to fly M & I home for cash. I had a small panic when I realized that I didn’t have enough money for Ernesto and the car ride to the airport, as well as the 25cuc that you need to pay to leave the country! Free to get in but not so free to get out. :) So I wrestled up a spot of time this afternoon to run into Veradaro to pull some money off my credit card (for an 11% commission I might add) I got a taxi and off I went.

The bank looks like a health clinic does in Canada. It was cold and sterile with no sense of cheer anywhere. The door was opened by two security guards that stopped me with a raised hand.
“What are you here for!!!” said the security guard in reasonable good English.
“Um money I am here for money. Cash from a credit card???” I said meekly
“Do you have your passport?” Still in that good English and gruf voice. I nodded yes, “go sit and wait!”

So I sat and waited in a chair that had no bottom. Seriously it was like sitting on a toilet or probably more accurately like sitting in the broken driver’s seat of my beetle complete with the poky horse hair itch. (Volkswagen owners know what I am talking about) No one smiled, no one talked, and it was quiet enough that you wouldn’t have been able to sneak a fart without drawing the attention of everyone, including the scary security people. I sat & waited untill there was a teller open. The gruff voiced security guard pointed at me like I was being singled out as one of Castro’s would be assassins, (he had like 800 assassination attempts while he was in power!) and then he pointed at the teller. I go up and I smile say what I want to an equally gruff looking woman that demands passport and visa. She looks at the passport, looks at me, looks at the passport, looks at me, looks at the passport, looks at me, gruffly nods and looks at my visa looks at my passport, looks at my Visa, Looks at my passport, looks at my visa, looks at my passport, looks at me,. another gruff nod. Looks at the back of my visa and immediately stuffs it all back though he little hole. “Not signed” she says, “talk to him” she says with a wave of her hand referring to the aforementioned gruff security guard. For reasons that are still unclear to me he directed me to the bank down the street. The bank down the street was really no different similar gruff security guards and similar grumpy bank tellers. This bank didn’t really seem to care about the signature and they gave me my escape money with out issue! :) I was relieved! Part one of my clandestine escape from Cuba completed.

Man it is like 3:30 in the morning in Vancouver. I am getting ready for my first trash the dress session in a warm ocean. It should be a riot I think. Both couples have been fantastic all week. I am a little nervous about shooting these things alone. It is funny because I was always an alone shooter, and something like this would be no problem, but it would seem that I have come to depend on M to be there to have a smooth flowing shoot. It’s the downtime that it takes to set up certain shoots which is killing me. See some times you need to work out exposure and think about the shot for a moment. Usually M & I take turns at shooting so I have time to set up my shot while she is shooting hers & Vice Versa. That moment is an eternity when the clients are sitting there watching you set up your shots and work out exposure. I am sure that it will all be good today so watch the other blog to see some results. So today I go and talk to a man about a plane ticket home. It is like a old spy novel and I am trying to escape the foreign invasion force. I go and I meet a man name is Ernesto slip him some CUC cash and he will book me passage on the next flight out! It is all very clandestine and devious!

I am just getting ready to fire on down to the wedding today. I have just had an odd nap and could deal with a spot more napping. It was an odd Nap because as near as I can determine my very vivid dreams were in Spanish. Yup and I have absolutely no idea what it was all about. I am sure they are the result of watching random Spanish TV simply because it is absurd enough to keep me entertained with no understanding of the language. My second bride has changed her day around a little bit which is really good because now it allows for all the shoots that we had planned to get done. It would seem as it stands right now that I do not have a flight home. The signature vacations guys are checking for availability on the flight that I came on, but I am not so hopeful. I am going to go shoot the civil part of the wedding (signing of the papers etc) & I am going to check my email for a M update! I have to say all our friends kick ass! They all totally stepped up to help M even though I am not there. Rides, email updates, finding wheelchairs and crutches, you all really rock!!! You are the kindest people I know, despite the fact that I am generally a jerk! YOU ALL ROCK!!

Oddly enough Havana was not so dissimilar then walking around Gastown. About the same number of people would ask you for money and again it would seem that I even in another country am hobo resistant. Even though I was smiling and looking generally friendly they would often skip me and move on to the other tourists. It was also similar to Gastown in that I didn’t speak the language. Only here in Havana I can assume that they are making sense where as my experience with hobo speak is that it is generally undecipherable even to other hobos. From what I understand from the Spanish speaking contingent of out group is they have similar stories and random Cons to get your attention.

The Architecture was amazing. It was said by our inappropriate joke cracking tour guide that every building in Old Havana was required to be build differently than any other in Havana. So as he says there is no two buildings the same in all of Havana. I am inclined to believe him. It was an experience in contrast between the old and the new, There is a huge restoration of Old Havana going on so you will have a building that looks like it hasn’t been touched in 100 years sitting right beside one that was newly restored yesterday. It looks a lot like pre Olympic Vancouver with all the scaffolding and construction cranes around. The cars have that same old new contrast to them. New cars from Japan sitting beside an old 56 Chevy. There wasn’t a lot of the old cars around though. I sort of expected a lot more to be driving about and such but I saw more in Varadoro then in Havana. From what I understand the reason for the old cars is that an average Cuban isn’t allowed to own a car made post revolution. Some doctors and athletes are allowed to buy new cars but then they can’t sell them. Same is true with the homes your family was given a home at the end of the revolution and that was your home. You are not allowed to sell it or buy a new one only swap for somebody else’s home. The government will divvy out homes to the people for special reasons like yours was destroyed in a storm or you are moving to another location. The country side has its own unique beauty that was a cross between backwoods AB/BC and a really short jungle. With the exception of palm trees I didn’t see any really tall trees or plants. Very lush and green but just not very tall. I was on a tour bus so I watched brilliant photo opportunities pass me by while the bus took me to the tourist areas and cigar shops. I guess that is the price of taking a tour bus but I was on the job so it was what had to be done. It was actually a really cruel reminder of all that we will miss now that the trip has been cut short. It has been really hard to experience Cuba this week because I am on the clock shooting for everyday of it. The trip at the end of the month will be different. I am kind of anxious to get home and help out M who in addition to tearing here ligaments all to hell has also broken her tibia. That is my fault we were tiring to go to the room on foot via my crappy advice. So when it comes to matters of health and junk don’t listen to me.

Yup I am headed off to Havana with a bus load of clients to do an engagement shoot & such! I will shoot up a ton of other stuff while I am there! It is a tour so it will probably be moving us along at a faster pace. Great for seeing Havana horrible for an engagement session! :) I hope to come back with a ton of photos. I am making sure to take enough cards to shoot more than a stupid amount :)

So today is the day that we begin our epic 30 days of traveling.  I have to admit that I am kind of nervous about so many things! I am nervous that we are going to have random trouble getting into Cuba with all the camera gear! I am nervous that our cats are going to have some sort of catastrophic issue when we are gone.  I am nervous that they are going to be mad at me when I take the car in for the last time and that the Xterra Deal will hopelessly fall though.  I haven’t been this nervous since we moved out to BC a few years back.  Well if that whole experience taught me anything it is that we will survive and we will have fun!

As mentioned in a few I am going to take off to the north shore and deliver them the versa.  They will keep it and when we get back the Xterra will be waiting for us in all its yellow shiny glory!! I am so giddy about the Xterra that I am not sure what I am more excited about Cuba or the Local Traveling Adventure that we will have when we get back! But if all goes to plan this should be a traveling year for The Jerk!

So who knew that leaving your home and your business for an entire month would be so hard! This is not the first time the jerk has gone traveling but most of his traveling was done in places that have abundant internet, and cell service! When we travel it is basically seamless to all of our clients and such. However, Cuba is going to be a bit of a challenge that way due to the lack of both internet and Cell Service! The jerk has also never left home base for an entire month! I am sure that it will fly by for us but it is still a long time to be incommunicado.

So what to do when you are a blogger!? Well I have two choices ahead of me!

• Blog sporadically with little content and less photos from internet cafés and resorts, with the intention of blogging a big post that never gets done and leave my Cuba trip like so many other trips and large portions of my life! unblogged.
• I can blog daily offline on my laptop for the month and then spend the 7 hours that I have at the Toronto airport uploading them all!

Well because I love you all so much the latter is what I shall do! This means that I will probably not be here again for well, about 30days! So i guess we will see you then!

To start we got a new camera! Well it isn’t really new, but it is new to us! Yuppers in preparation for the Cuba Trip we decided that we should have a bit of a better backup camera. This thought was compounded by the fact that the 5D suddenly and arbitrarily kicked it during our Tofino trip. Without warning or cause it simply failed to turn on. (for those not in the know this was purchased at the end September of 2007 so only 4 to 5 months ago) So after a quick look at KEH.com we found this Canon 1D mark II labled as EX condition for a mere 1700 bux! After a quick phone call to found out all the info we could we went ahead and bought it. Now KEH Rates there used gear on a scale as follows…

We have purchased things in the past that were labelled as being BGN or UG and they have arrived looking brand new! But this was always with crazy old school medium format cameras that would survive a nuclear holocaust looking shinny and new! I expected to get a camera in a plastic bag with out any accessories or chargers and the like. What I did get however was a complete camera kit right down to the multiple language manual in its original box and everything. Not only was there the battery charger, and DC adapter, but there was all the USB cables, Firewire Cables and, and even the silly little VGA out cable so you can see things on the TV You know the one that no one ever actually uses :) All of which in its original plastic and such, all of which isn’t supposed to be included according to their quality scale.

WOW!

So now let’s look at the camera! This camera Looks Brand New!! Seriously I was half expecting to have to peal protective plastic off the LCD screen! I was amazed I assumed that this was a hardly used camera that someone sold right away. So I took a look at the EXIF Data off one of the photos and according to this data it had shot 266,000 photos! WHAT!!!??? Our 1D mark II had shot 266,000 photos and well it looks like it has shot about 266,000 photos. This camera I would have a hard time believing it had shot 50,000 let alone 260,000. So I have made some comparison gifs to show the differences between our existing mark II and the new mark II that apparently has the same number of shutter actuations

I mean I always knew that we were hard on our gear! But this is crazy!

We also bought a new lens. We got the new Canon EF 50mm f/1.2L USM

1.2 is so super crazy I mean its so shallow I can focus on an eye and have the eyelash fall into the bokeh It is also seems that colours pop way more then the cheaper 1.4 version of the 50mm. I will do a direct comparison some time in the future to see the differences! We also grabbed a new backpack to haul stuff around with! The Crumpler The Karachi Outpost

It is a super huge version of the one that I have currently (The Whickey And Cox) and it should be able to haul everything we need to haul to Cuba!