Yesterday morning I went to drop of some redscale sprocket pinhole film that I took to the lab. Gearing up for World Pinhole day this weekend I needed to fire a test roll to perfect my pinhole camera. Of course on route I took photos.
I make no apologies for liking the Black & White so much as of late.
I am off to run some errands in a few moments one of which is collecting said film from the lab. Excited I am! :)
Today was a crazy crazy busy day! I think our home should just officially apply for a liqueur license and we should become some sort of awesome networking/party/gallery type venue. With the brief exception of Chris M I was officially the only guy in a room full of 45-50 woman. I know right :) Tonight was the first #vansassybiz gathering that my darling wife set up, complete with wine, tea, & oh so much food. Watch the BOP blog for a post awesome post.
This time management thing is working out well for me. The simple act of paying attention to what i am doing every second is kept me from dicking about on the internet or reading magazines when I am supposed to be working :) I have accomplished more on my list of things to do in the last 30ish hours then most of last week.
Ok enough talking about stuff, on with the photos. Ok these three photos were taken in the middle of the night during last weekends walk back from Cambie and Broadway.
All were shot handheld with the canon 5d mark II and the 50mm f/1.2 using in camera Black & White contrasty profiles. I heart night photos.
That is all
So I may have been rocking the black & white a bit much the last few days. So I think we should brighten things up a bit with some colour.
These are part of a 35 minute photo walk that I did about main street while M was over with the awesome folks at East Vanity Palour getting some more awesome up in the hair department. :) Some days I can wander all day and hardly come home with 5 photos that i am happy with and other days when everything is just perfect and the stars are in some sort of arty alignment I can come home with 25+ awesome photos in less them 35 minutes. Just how it goes I guess.
New West had a large assortment of awesome walls waiting to photographed here is a few of the more awesome :)
I was up and at them really early this morning so i thought that me, a digital camera or two, and a random assortment of film cameras, should go hang out in the dark fog for a bit. 
Coal Harbour marina near the rowing club. This is as shot there was no fancy photoshop work to make the left black, it was just really dark there.
A point on the sea wall in Stanley Park. This was super hard to focus on because it was so dark. It was to far away for me to focus on my laser pointer like I normally do, so in the end I took a few at higher apertures and then I basically focus bracketed about ten photos to make sure that I had it. You can tell that this one is a higher aperture shot because of the lack of vignetting
This is the lighthouse at Brockton Point. These silly seagulls kept trying over and over to land on the top of the lighthouse, but it was really slippery and they would just end up sliding off. Super humorous to say the least, and again as shot here.
This was a raven hanging on some beach art at English Bay. I love how the fog turns the background bokah into nothing. I hope to run about again tomorrow morning as well because this fog is sheduled to take off in a day or two.
Today I had some out and about errands to run, so as always I took my camera along with me. For all those that are not in the know about me, I actually almost* always have a camera with me, especially when venturing out into the world. And I don’t mean ‘well my iPhone has a camera built in it so I always have one‘ sort of always have one, I mean I am carrying around some sort of SLR and at least two lenses with me at all times. I wasn’t out walking for very long today, perhaps two hours or so including the half hour that I waited at the post office and the other random errands that I ran, but that is all the time one really needs. Photo wandering for me is my camera and some awesome music and that is really all that I need to relax and unwind. I would recommend it to anyone. The other thing that I would recommend is snowboarding! In fact, it is something that I plan on partaking in all day tomorrow. I am headed up to cypress so if anyone else is unemployed, self employed, feels the need to play hookie, or simply has the day off come join me.
So again I had about an hour to kill at VGH while M became a little bit less of a cripple, so I thought that I would spend some time wandering about taking photo glory. I was about forty five minuets in to wandering about, capturing photo gold at every turn, when a security guard who was walking by, said that I wasn’t allowed to take photos. What was funny is he was the fourth or possibly the fifth security guard that I had walked by and openly taken photos in front of and he was the first to say anything and he really didn’t seem to care at that. I said ok and then I asked him why? as I often do when told that I am not allowed to take photos (mostly cause by putting them on the spot you can learn whether or not there is actually a real policy in place or if they are just trying to look like they are doing their job) and I got what I think is the best made up on the spot answer ever. Umm… errrr.. patient confidentiality? I laughed a little inside and continued what I was doing and he continued on his way.
So yesterday after I dropped the shuttle people and M off in Devon, after the trailer was stashed in its home to while away the hours eagerly awaiting the return of the canoes, I ran over to Mikes and picked him up for a picture taking frenzy. We started of by going to a registry office so mike could renew his license, and stopping for a bite to eat but by 2 o’clock we were ready and willing to go hard at getting some good shots. We started of with the idea that we would go to the Muttart Conservatory, and spend the afternoon photographing flowers, exotic cacti, and other odd plants. So we get there and the folk fest that is next door has parking people that are there to stop people from parking in the wrong area’s, and well I think that the lady that we had the pleasure of speaking to didn’t believe us when we said that we were there for the Muttart. A long story short we had leave and try it again another day. So after a spot of driving we decided that we would wander around Whyte ave, but when i was driving to park on the back streets we saw that the doors to the underground tunnel near Keggans where open we dropped all ideas that we had of Whyte Ave fired our fat asses over to the tunnel.
Inside this tunnel is the most amazing graffiti that you will find in Edmonton I am sure. We waited for about five minutes for the train to go through the tunnel and we made the trek inwards. In side the walls are covered from about 6 to 8 feet off the ground in layers upon layers of graffiti.
There is a lot of tags and such but there is a unbelievable amount of great full fledged mural sized works here, including words, pictures, and a mix of both. As we were wondering deeper inwards we saw another fellow with a camera and a tripod coming from the other end.
It turns out that he is a NAIT student and he had a Canon D60 and speedlite and was doing the exact same thing as mike and I. So we chatted for a bit about cameras, technique, and other stuff and continued on in opposite directions. After about an hour or what not we were told to leave by a nice man that worked with the train shuttle, which we did because we aren’t Assholes or anything.
But there is a few shots that are to come and this is by far not even scratching the surface of what’s in there. We are going to have to make a return trip with flashlights and flash umbrellas to get some good shots of more works in there. We decided that we would spend some time at the University looking for good shots but that is another story that is soon to come.
