Great Blue Heron

By my count English Bay Vancouver is home to at least three Great Blue Herons with one of the two younger ones pictured on the left. These solitary birds are patient hunters who will remain perfectly still in ankle deep water waiting for their dinner of minnows or frogs to swim or hop close enough to grab.

I'm slowly working my way closer and closer to the one pictured here and while my distance limit to date is 5 meters or so I'm hopeful I can get close enough for a near full frame shot at a focal length of 50 to 80 mm. The ideal setting for nature shots. This young heron is naturally quite timid but I expect patience will pay off in the long run and I'll get the chance to snap that perfect photo. The bird comes first though and if it finds my presence too disturbing I'll stick to telephoto shots at 100 mm+.

The older of the three (a 4 foot, 130+ cm tall giant) seems to prefer the north edge of English Bay Beach and is often too far out in the water to approach. One day though the tide will be perfect, the sun just so and the heron's temperament tending towards trusting. And no, I havn't given them names .... yet. :)

Boys & Their Toys

While it freaks out the cats to the point that they hide underneath the bed ... me personally there is nothing cooler than the sound of a hovercraft either coming or going. Especially one that's powered by engines you'd normally find on a 10 passenger aircraft.

Today, while cruising to and from Second Beach here in Vancouver I caught a moment of the Canadian Coastguard's hovercraft trainer putting the peddle to the metal and letting the craft soar. For half an hour I'd watched the hovercraft perform very basic training maneuvers and when the moment to rock arrived I was so glad I had my dual still/video camera ready.

Apologies for the jerky motion in the video. Give the tech a few years and the smarts in today's basic $1,500 Hi-Definition video camera, in particular the motion stablization smarts, will be wrapped into your basic $199 point and shoot for free.

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Snowcapped Sunshine

The weather has returned to predictable here in paradise with 4 days of low cloud and rain trading places with 3 days of gentle sunshine. And, after just over 7 weeks of diet and exercise, I'm into a nice state of acceptance with the weather. Rain or shine - 6 or 7 days per week - I'm out there burning off the fat (9 lbs so far).

I haven't felt this good physically in 10 years and can't wait to hit my next weight target and spoil myself with one of those new nifty comfy bikes. Walking 7 km (4 miles) per day is great but I'm looking forward to spring and the variety that I expect biking 2 or 3 days out of 7 will bring.

The interesting thing that I've discovered about dieting in particular and personal behavioral modification in general is that as time goes on you can't remember why you didn't make the change in the first place. Yes there are major bumps and minor bumps along the road but they seem to get smaller as the new behavior takes over and dominates the old.

Communing With God

Do cats have souls?

This is one of those metaphysical questions the opposite of which I consider self-evident. None the less it is also one that I love to mentally dissect as often as it pops into my mind.

Of course animals in general and cats in particular have souls. Why would you think otherwise?

I have held Cirrus (pictured on the right) in my arms while she's been sound asleep and have felt her dreaming. The twitch of her paws, her quick sharp breaths, the momentary flair of her nostrils.

OK, so maybe dreaming is not evidence of spirituality. Fine. That's cool.

I've worked on tough, stubborn software problems (I work at home mostly) and while on the outside I've been as cool as ice on the inside I've been royaly pissed. Grrrr. This is a simple problem made twisted and convoluted by another programmer's laziness and I'm supposed to get inside his head and fix it!? .... Then Cirrus appears and mews what I'm feeling and drags me out to the living room to give her a brush.

She's so smart.

And so empathic.

How could she wrap her emotions with mine like that without a soul?

So, like a reluctant hero defending an ancient perspective on spirituality I try, as best as I can, to defend the idea of me and my kind as the only life forms in the universe close enough to God to share a bit of Him.

Then I look into Cirrus's eyes as she gazes off into the unknown while wrapped in fresh crackling laundry and I kiss the futility of such a belief goodbye. Someday I will again touch the souls of the many wonderful animals whom I've loved and been loved by.

English Bay Sunshine

Forget Paris in the spring time - Vancouver's where it's at.

These days it feels like the calm before a Vernal explosion and, as a photo-nut, I'm subconciously urging Mother Nature to "go-go-go!!". Stanley Park, Kitsilano, the North Shore mountains, Cypress Falls Park, the numerous gardens, ... sigh ... maybe I should pick up another high-speed high-density 4 GByte SD card for my digital camera.

Mmmmm .... Color .... What a warm concept. :)

Watching the Waves

Sunshine has returned to Vancouver and you can almost hear the creaking and popping sounds of spring preparing to burst out all over. During the next 6 weeks the city will go through that wonderful switch from a palette of dark moist greens to one that's mostly eye popping pinks and blues. I can't wait. This winter proved to be a nutty one with more meteorological violence than I've seen during my previous 15 west coast winters.

The past few days I've been messing around with some old school neutral density filters and new school digital manipulation and while this photo is as close to reality as a Big Mac is to a healthy meal it's still one that wound up in my CoolPics2007 folder.

Hindsight is always 20/20 and "had I all it to do over again" I should have used a bit of fill flash to punch up even higher the contemplative tourist on the right side. The reality of the shot though was that the whole thing transpired over the course of 45 seconds and Mr. Tourist did not spend 10 minutes gazing out over English Bay. Don't command the moment. Surf it.

Yaletown Vancouver

Vancouver has seen some dramatic changes over the past 20 years with perhaps the most stunning being the transformation of the gigantic empty lot that was the site of Expo '86 into what has become known as Yaletown.

Yaletown is a pretty nifty corner of downtown Vancouver filling the area east of Burrard Street and south to False Creek. It has retained much of that area's older heritage with many of the 50 and 100 year old heritage buildings being converted into studio sized work and living spaces. The area reminds me of the old town quarter of Montreal with the same urban planning ideas at work here in Vancouver. Keep the form of the old (the exteriors) but make the buildings functional given the needs of the 21st century. Form complimenting function rather than struggling with it.

The area is also wonderfully post-modern (aka post 20th century) in that it's home to thousands of Vancouverites who can easily walk or bike to work either downtown or just across False Creek to the south. Such a great way to lower anyone's carbon footprint and, by turning the morning commute into pure pleasure, lower anyone's stress level.

The photo in this post was taken on the south side of False Creek looking north into Yaletown the morning of November 1st 2006. I really like the ripple effect of the buildings in the water as well as the brilliant splash of fall red compliments of the trees on the far eastern edge of Granville Island. The red was pumped somewhat using Capture NX and the extra boost adds a nice centering spot in the photograph to anchor the viewers initial attention. Once you're drawn to the rich red your eyes then simultaneously take in both the top and bottom of the photograph (the buildings and their reflections) providing a nice marriage of elements - art in motion - form and function - technology and nature.

A great shot and one that I'm ->.<- this close to getting enlarged and professionally framed. "Time for some new wall art." as my friend JB used to say.

How I Rate the Movies I Watch

I'm a big fan of movies and, big surprise, focus mostly on the guy-flic genres - action, sci-fi, horror, crude comedy, animation, anime, etc. I don't often rent musicals, chic-flics, movies about guys watching chic-flicks or movies about guys watching chic-flics in hopes of convincing chics that they prefer those sorts of movies over flics involving action, sci-fi, horror, crude comedy, animation or anime.

To the right you'll find a list of movies I've recently viewed with convenient links to their Internet Movie Database (IMDB) entries. To the left of each title you'll find my totally opinionated opinion about the movie using my patented one to five rating scale.

Here's how I rate movies.

1/5 ~ I was unable to get past the first fifteen minutes of this piece of trash and might have been unable to get past even its opening DvD menu. Rather than waste 90 minutes of my life watching this cinematographic fur-ball I opted instead to spend the time in quiet reflection crying over the senseless waste of good DvD plastic that was this movie's creation.

2/5 ~ I watched the movie all the way to the end but, in order to make it that far, I had to dig deep into my soul and use the determination and courage I employ when I get a filling from the dentist without any anaesthetic. More than likely I'd reached the mid point of the movie and, being a stubborn moron, refused to put those just spent 45 minutes of my life to waste by not watching to the end the entire piece of crap that is this movie.

3/5 ~ I watched the movie all the way to the end, only checked the clock a few times and rather liked it. However it proved to be mostly entertainment with little in the way of substance, directorial creativity or cinematographic excellence. I will watch the movie again once it's the last one left in the rental store. If given this movie as a gift by a loved one it will not be too difficult to simulate sincere appreciation at such a thoughtful gift. "Gosh!! I've already seen it but it's been so long I can't wait to see it again. Thanks!!"

4/5 ~ I really liked this movie and, if it touched my heart, I had a good cry watching it. In fact I liked it so much that I watched most of the bonus materials that were included with the DvD. I thought about the movie for days after and did some research on IMDB searching for previous works by the same director or cinematographer. I will certainly watch this one several times over. This movie has further convinced me that the movies of Steven Segal do not, as previously theorized, represent the pinnacle of Hollywood substance and meaning. If I can see several movies this good during a month then I'm a happy camper.

5/5 ~ This one's a keeper and there's a greater than 50% chance that the day after watching the movie I popped into Amazon.ca and bought a copy of the DvD. I've decided to name my next World of Warcraft character after the director of the movie. In celebration of such a great viewing experience, I happily burn half my collection of ever dwindling Steven Segal DvDs. In a great year I might be fortunate enough to see five or six movies of this caliber.

(HD) ~ This means I watched the movie in it's High Definition format (HD-DVD). I make mention of this for (a) the cool geek factor but also (b) the fact that the high definition format punches up the content so much my rating might be scewed just a bit.

Burrary Street Bridge - Vancouver

The Burrard Street Bridge connects downtown Vancouver with the quite fashionable and ever trendy micro burb of Kistsilano. On July 1st 2002 it quietly celebrated it's 70th birthday having faithfully supported the ever increasing automotive, bicycle and pedestrian traffic since 1932. During it's peak period, the morning rush, 9,000+ Vancouverites and assorted tourists toddle across it's art deco funkiness.

To the right is a photo of this nifty piece of concrete and iron art deco taken at night last January 26th around 7:15 PM. The bridge is enough of a landmark to have been featured in each of the past 3 releases of Microsoft Flight Simulator's scenery for Vancouver and, with a large enough telescope mounted on the Space Shuttle, can be seen from space.

You can find some pretty nifty info on the bridge via this Wikipedia article -> The Burrard Street Bridge.

I really like this shot for several reason.

First, the color rendition is quite close to the natural palette as I remember it. I used a relatively short exposure of 1.5 seconds and an f-stop of 4.5 with an ISO setting of 400. Going for a short exposure prevented the creep to orange that longer exposure photos tend to become.

My second reason for liking this shot is I adjusted it (very slightly) via my nacient skills using what I've a hunch will become my main stream photo processing program - Nikon's Capture NX. After just a few hours with the program I'm quickly converting from a card carrying member of the digital photo purest camp to the poster boy for digital manipulation goodness.

The most impressive thing so far about Capture NX is that it is smart enough to effectively create it's own masks of what sections in a photo should or should not be adjusted. I've been intimidated with both the sophistication and the layer managment in Photoshop to the point that I've never got to the "Oh my God this is too cool!" moment with it. With Capture NX on the other hand by page 11 of the manual I'd learned more than enough to be dangerous and had half a dozen "Oh my God this rocks!" moments with half a dozen shots from the past few months. Even the grey wet Vancouver winter photos seemed to be reborn after 10 minutes with Capture NX.

Expect some pretty cool photos over the next few days.

Jack and Alfie Dig a Big Hole

Since October of last year the City of Vancouver engineers have been tunnelling a new sewer main from Sunset Beach in the West End to Vanier Park on the eastern edge of Kitsilano.

The new pipe (roughly one meter in diamter) will cross under False Creak and supplements one built just before WWII in 1939. You can find all the nifty details in the June 2006 False Creek Crossing Fact Sheet

What does all this have to do with Jack and Alfie? Good question and I'm glad you asked.


My nephews and niece have been fans of Thomas the Train Engine and His Friends for a good number of years now. However, there is no greater a fan of Thomas and His Friends than the budding YouTube director and nephew extrodinaire known simply as camtaz2.

Back in January the Greater Vancouver Regional District began digging the western edge of the sewer extension and I recorded the initial dig as a timelapse over the course of 8 hours. It was a great day for video with constant sunshine, crawling shadows from the leaf bare trees in Vanier Park and then the perfectly timed arrival of bay fog as the winter sun set.

Two of Thomas's friends are Jack and Alfie - a pair of diggers who love moving mounds of dirt from one spot to another and, from the unique perspective of timelapse, signed on to help with Vancouver's sewage system upgrade.

Here then is my latest video. Jack and Alfie Dig a Big Hole.

You can access the high resolution Stage6 (DivX) link by clicking here -> Jack and Alfie Dig a Big Hole. I'd recommend downloading the video and then playing it for smoother performance. You may also need to install the DivX viewer which is a pretty painless and computer safe process and one that will open up tons of nifty video viewing posibilities.

The You Tube link can be found here -> Jack and Alfie Dig A Big Hole. It's a lower resolution version of the same video.

The simplese route though is to click twice on the image below to view this latest video.

Cover Shots

Virgin Spring

Spring is in the air here in Vancouver and for those east of the Rocky Mountains here's a hint of things to come.

It was 11' C today which made for a great walk this afternoon. The sun arrived by the time I got home and I switched from the new kid on the block, the 5 Mpixel Canon to the workhorse Nikon.

I've been quite impressed with the versatility of the point and shoot digital but .... well ... once you go Nikon you really can't go back.

The pics to follow I'd hoped would be as crisp and clean as the originals but , sigh, Blogspot.com tends to process the uploaded images to save space and download time (a good thing) and in doing so makes them .... fuzzy (a bad thing). Maybe it's time I followed my brother's lead and switched to Flikr.





22" LCD Wallpaper

I re-sized this image from my Nikon D80's native 3872 x 2592 resolution to something that, in theory, should fit better with a 22" LCD monitor running at it's native resolution of 1680 x 1050. It's the start of my daily Seawall walk and the point I look left and right for any high speed cyclists that may or may not be oblivious to us pedestrians.

In theory, if you click on this image you will be presented with a larger version that, if you choose to do so, you can then set as your Windows wallpaper. In theory.


24" LCD Wallpaper

And, for those at the leading edge here's another view of spring in it's infant days sized for the native resolution of a 24" LCD monitor - 1980 x 1200.

Tomorrow I'm taking the day off and plan to hike to the edge of the Stanley Park destruction. I'll be bringing the full compliment of gear (digital video, digital still and a real tripod) so the posts this weekend should be pretty cool. I'll upload the video to both YouTube and Stage 6 with links posted here.

Digital Single Lense Reflex (SLR) vs Consumer Point & Shoot Cameras

Beach Art

Scattered along Sunset beach and English Bay Beach in Vancouver is a funky and eclectic mix of metal sculpture. Each work adds a nice moment of incongruity for new visitors to the Seawall. To old fans like me though, over time, they've become cooler and cooler.

Funny how that works. With inanimate objects familiarity breeds affection. Tune in for details as well as photos of the various scupltures along the path.

And, while the weather here has returned to its winter norm (rain) we have not had "The Big One" (earthquake wise) and have not descended into nose hair freezing temperatures of -40 'C like the rest of Canada. Brrrr. There's something about being so low on the thermometer scale that Fahrenheit and Celsius match that just chills my spine. No pun intended.


Pink Sunset

On my walk a few days ago I brought along my video camera and mono-pod to capture some vibration free stock footage of the Seawall. I was quite happy with the results and for those not familiar with a mono-pod it's basically a device that serves the same purpose as a tripod only with one leg rather than three. It might seem like a useless concept but given that you can use your two legs as the second and third pods you and the mono-pod, in effect, can get nearly all of the benefits of a tripod.

The big advantage is that there's no cumbersome set-up involved with a mono pod. You park yourself, plant the mono pod and take a picture or film a slice of video.

This setup worked great with the video filming and most of the shots were solid as a rock. The more I upload to DivX's Stage6 or YouTube the fussier I'm getting with my video. Even though the digital video camera I use has tons of electronic smarts engineered to reduce the effects of vibration it's not good enough for me or the viewers. My 10,000+ viewed videos are rock solid. My shakey pictures of waterfalls get 200 hits. Do the math.

Anyway, ... I've digressed myself.

The video was great (rock solid) and the stills from a few days earlier with my Nikon were also great. However I've realized that I was starting to turn my daily exercise routine into a video or still photo shoot. Vancouver is such a cute city, rain or shine, that I hate walking past a great photo moment and thinking "Ack!! A great photo moment and I can't capture it!" Same with the great video moments. However slick feeder material for cool blog content is not the number one reason I go for a daily power walk. Burning 300 calories and eventually loosing this gut fat is.


Welcome to Vancouver

So, in a flash of brilliance as well as techno-rationalization, I was able to convince myself that it was time to take the plunge and pick up a cool little consumer point and shoot digital camera. A pocket friendly something that would take decent resolution photos, decent video and would not kill my budget. Something that, unlike my current Digital Video camcorder and hi resolution still camera, I'd have no problem taking on walks rain or shine.

What you see in this blog entry are the results of going from a nicely configured Nikon D80 10.2 Mpixel camera to a tiny little Canon PowerShot A530 camera. The Nikon can't do video (the Canon can) and while my digital video camera can shoot stills the 2 Mpixel images it produces just won't cut it. The 5 Mpixel images from the Canon however will, half the time, do just fine.

This might sound like ego talking but it's not the tool it's the brain behind it that really counts.

Today, as the rain trickled down, I had few concerns in exposing the Canon to the elements to snap a few choice shots. It was small and light enough to be there when I needed it but not THERE (so to put it).

Uh Oh

B.C. braces for possible earthquake

Judith Lavoie, CanWest News Service; Victoria Times Colonist
Published: Saturday, February 03, 2007

VICTORIA - Check the emergency supplies, first aid kits and flashlights, there is an increased probability of a major earthquake hitting B.C.'s south coast during the next week.

Seismologists at the Geological Survey of Canada, based at the Pacific Geoscience Centre in Sidney, B.C., are tracking a series of tremors that started in Puget Sound along the U.S. West Coast three days ago and are working their way up Vancouver Island.

The low-level shaking, which can be picked up only by sensitive equipment installed up the coast by U.S. and Canadian governments, rumbled through southern Vancouver Island Thursday, said seismologist Garry Rogers.

"It's like a giant tear that moves 15 to 20 kilometres a day," he said.

Yuck.

It's not the main wave of an earthquake that I hate it's the precursor or P-wave that bugs me the most. 5 seconds or so before "the big one" hits there is this gentle precursor wave that makes you feel like you're about to throw up. It's like your inner ear suddenly looses it and, naturally, you think "What's wrong with me?".

Then the big one hits and it's cool but terrifying. How long will it last and will it get big enough to be ... ... ack ... the big one.

Hide your kittens.

Close Encounter of the Kitten Kind

Believe it or not I actually do have two cats. I know, I know, "Impossible." you say. "All we've seen on this blog is a never-ending series of cute pictures of Sirrus."

Photos of Sirrus, the most quirky cat I've had the pleasure of sharing space with not to mention a cat that was blessed with a great natural color palette (black and white), dominate my cute cat-pic folder.

Poor Sheba. As I learned with my previous generation of cats (two awesome male Bombay's Alfie & Owen) pure black cats, especially long haired ones, are very tough to photograph spontaneously. More often than not all I'll get is a picture of two dreamy green cat eyes staring at me from a fuzzy mass of black fur.

Here's a photo taken during the first hour spent with Sheba. She's 8 weeks old or so at this point and was confused enough and well lit enough to provide a nice composition. She's just as cute 5 years later (if not more) but remains a perpetual challenge to photograph. I think I'll make it a mini-goal of mine this year - get a good picture of Sheba.


The Georgian Bay Fog Monster

This winter has been the foggiest on record for Vancouver and, as you've seen if you've slid down to some of my earlier postings, has created no shortage of impressionistic photo moments.

This was an early morning shot (8:30 AM) last Thursday taken from my living room window with the long shadows of several of the West End Vancouver hi-rises caught as shadows in the bay fog. There's even a nice splash of sunrise pink in the upper left corner.

The rain returned today which will limit the photo opportunities for the next week or so. However I expect many cool pictures lie ahead and today I pushed my Seawall walk up to the edge of the devastation in Stanley Park. It's not a pretty sight and I plan to push my way deeper and deeper around the Sea Wall over the next few months to photograph the park's recovery. Naturally this blog will be ground zero for the photos and stories to come.

It's been a great week of blogging but it's time to shift gears for a bit and get editing some of the video that's been simmering in my DV camera for a month now.

As always comments and feedback about this blog and its content are very welcome and if you would like to see a larger view of any of the pictures just double click on it.

Gaining Perspective

I feel great these days and I owe much of it to my daily power walk along Vancouver's Seawall. The official Seawall walk is a 9 km (5.4 mi) 0% grade pedestrian and cycle path around Vancouver's beautiful Stanley Park. Over time though the city has extended the walk and mandated that the new developments in False Creak include extensions to the Seawall. As such, start to finish, the walk is now nearly twice it's original length.

It's a wonderful way to experience nature in the heart of a large city. Five years or so ago the walk was expanded to allow separate paths for pedestrians and cyclists making it a stress free adventure for both modes of transportation.

Unfortunately the storms of this winter left $5 million in damage to Stanley Park alone including our much loved Seawall. It will be months for the walk to recover and years for the park itself.


The past week we've been under this much needed high pressure cell and have been treated to pure sunshine intermixed with the occasional attack by our resident Straight of Georgia fog monster.

Having become recently addicted to daily 45 minute - 5 km power walks I'm happy to hit the Seawall rain or shine. Actually if given the choice I'd take a rainy day over a sun filled one. Getting drenched and not having to manoeuvre around the more casual walkers is quite liberating.

Sorting Laundry With Cats

One of the perception expanding realizations I've had over my many years spent with cats is that if you put aside your ego for even a few minutes cats can teach you as much as they can learn from you.

For example, cats love a big pile of pipping hot laundry. It's what they do.

Fresh out of the dryer and still crackling with just a touch of static electricity cats will gravitate to your freshly cleaned cloths nearly as fast as a they will to big pile of cat nip. Almost.

Here's Sirrus half buried in a pile of my fresh laundry claiming all that surrounds her as hers. If I was a cat owner I would have taught her and her sister never to do this and this photo-op never would have occurred. As a cat companion on the other hand I've long since learned that the moment by moment with cats is best spent intertwined and shared. Sirrus and Sheba, my two current cats, and those that came before them taught me this and it's worked out quite well for the past 26 years.

In fact sorting laundry with several fully clawed cats turns something pretty mundane into a game for all three of us. If I pull a sock from the pile and she's not distracted her paw will instantly grabbed it. No problem. Flip a fleece vest onto her head as a distracting manoeuvre then grab another sock. Eventually I'll win and all of the laundry will be neatly tucked away. Occasionally I'll loose a bit of blood if I don't think strategically enough to decide which of the pile to grab next. All's fair in love, war and laundry sorting with cats.

It's a great game and one that has taught me much about patience, strategy and how much of the kitten never leaves the cat.



Misty Marina

Ack! More orange. Jack Bauer's gonna kill me!!

The fog this January and February here in and around English Bay Vancouver has been spectacular. To the left is our resident fog beast slipping across the western edge of the False Creek marina. Lots of orange in the image thanks to the long exposure time (9s at f/5.6, ISO 100) which I'm sure I could PhotoShop from orange to white . However I'll save that bit of post processing for the time when I create my "Great Phogs!! of Vancouver!!" coffee-table photo book. An over priced 36" x 24" monster that I expect will be a big seller with the phog phanatic crowd. :)

Today I did a long (8 hours plus) time lapse of the bay fog at first retreating from then reclaiming English Bay. This time I went for a very long time lapse interval (4 seconds between video frames). Two hours of real time for this run will equal 1 minute of video.

So far I have just over 4 minutes (8 hours) recorded and the fog beast today could not have behaved better. After lurking outside of English Bay in the Straight of Georgia all day the beast made it's move a few hours before sunset and drifted in. The resulting video should be quite spectacular given the location I'm shooting from. At 32 floors above English Bay the view is blue sky above and fog below. Sort of like being in an airplane at 35,000 feet only you're sitting in your living room.

I'll process the video this weekend and should have it up on YouTube and Stage6 Saturday or Sunday. Tune in for it. I've got a pretty cute "This is a cat friendly video." bite at the end thanks to a purring Sirrus nuzzling the camera.

Too Much of a Good Thing?

Here's Sirrus on a sunny mid-winter's afternoon drinking in the wholesome wonderfulness of being sun drenched while surrounded by a dozen of her favorite toys. Cat nirvana I'm guessing.

Her and her sister Sheba, since they were kittens, have been fans of movable things in general and cat toys in particular. What excites a cat though is often something as simple as a piece of torn cardboard (check out the sliver of stuff just to the left and down a bit from Sirrus's head) or, best of all, rolled up tinfoil.

The store bought variety of toy though, in particular the soft and cat-nip filled ones, have been a top of the hit list with both of my cats. Popular enough that I'm now well trained and when shopping for food, cat litter and cat grass, I'll remember their advice just before leaving. "Bring back some new toyz or don'ts come back at all."

Who's trained who I wonder. :)


A Magical Moment

This was a totally unplanned shot but one that I was quite happy with. No digital manipulation was performed to create it. Photoshop was not involved but a bit of mirror trickery was.

The setup that produced the image was a bit complicated so bear with me.

I've been experimenting with solar power for a year now and while the results are pretty depressing (3 days of summer sun equals two hours of lap top computer power) it's been quite educational. Mounted at the base of my living room window is a an 18 watt solar panel which I use, via a small regulator, to charge a 400 watt hour sealed battery backup unit.

Several weeks ago, as the day neared the end, the clouds parted and the sun at last arrived. It's image was reflected from the solar panel onto the living room window in front of it then up into my eyes. Looking down from my living room window on a normal day I have a great view of the Burrard Street bridge as well as the Sunset Beach dock of the Granville Island Ferry company . Merge a reflected sunset with a ferry in motion and, poof like magic, a surreal moment is born.

Techno Gremlins

blogger.com's being a bit fussy today and is not letting me upload images. Perhaps my excessive use of the entire orange color spectrum in yesterday's photos put me on some sort of "no-photo-no-fly watch list". Right now, deep in some hidden bunker outside of Arlington VA a blogger.com operative who looks alot like Chloe O'Brien from the TV show 24 is looking at yesterday's photos for the upteenth time. No doubt she's mumbling things like "Jack's not gonna like this guys fixation with orange. Bet he shoots him in the leg."

I've got to admit that after posting those two pics I realized they are more on the art side of things than reality. The orange glow that oozes out of the photos like yesterday's maple syrup is an artifact of the long time exposure times (5 to 10 seconds) and is not actually how the Vancouver skyline looks like at night. Over the next few days, hopefully, I'll upload some of the more natural light pictures I took. I've a pretty cool one of the Burrard Street bridge itself that I'm quite proud of.

Anyway, it's a big no-go on new photos for today and that's a shame. I have a cute one of one of my cats overdosed on cat toys and a very dreamy image taken by bouncing and merging two images between two panes of glass. In theory I could claim the second image is some politcal statement on how it's possible to create cool photos without Photoshop but in reality I don't understand Photoshop well enough to do pretty much anything with it. I think it's because I have a PC wired brain and Photoshop is written for Mac heads.

The City That Never Sleeps

Well, actually it does sleep. From 3:00 AM to 4:00 AM during week and about 4:30 AM to 5:30 or so on weekends. I can tell because during those two intervals, if I'm awake, a certain stillness comes over the downtown core and the usual rumble of the traffic coming and going across the Burrard Street Bridge subsides to a soft whisper. How a city can get by on just an hour of sleep a night is beyond me. What's even more interesting than a sleep deprived city is that even though the downtown core of Vancouver has seen explosive growth the past 15 years (thousands and thousands more urbanites) this nightly pause in the to'ing and fro'ing has not changed.

The Close Encounters of the Third Kind lights in the top left corner of this image are actually from the Cypress Mountain ski area. One of the three ski hills within 45 minutes or so of downtown Vancouver. Yeah, it's tough living in paradise. :)

The photo above is of Sunset Beach which follows Beach Avenue down to English Bay Beach. The storms of November and December have not been kind to these beaches with several 150 year old trees that once fronted onto the bay now just tangled heaps of wood. If you have not yet seen An Inconvenient Truth do yourself a favour - rent it and watch it. While not without it's bias and occasional distortions it's a message you will never forget and might be just the nudge you'll need to lower your carbon footprint. Going green is a series of small steps and is not as tough as you might expect.


These two shots were taken around 7:30 in the evening last week from one of the four balconies on the Burrard Street bridge. I've gradually become used to the orange cast the mercury halogen street lights produce but I do pine, somewhat, for the old energy wasteful days of white streetlights.

If someone wanted to make a bazillion dollars they should invent a pair of night vision goggles that turned the Dawn of the Dead color palette of a city at night into something ... well less orange for starters. :) ... OK, maybe not a bazillion dollars but I'd buy a pair.

This second shot is looking up Thurlow Street with the Vancouver Aquatic center at the bottom of the hill. At the top you'll find Davie St. that unlike a good chunk of Robson St. (furthur downtown) still has much of it's old style west-end Vancouver charm not too mention some rather awesome restaurants.

'Post A Day' Week!!

I've taken so many cool photos this month. The fog has been awesome. The days sunny. The dark ends of the cool winter nights filled with moonlight.

I've also made some pretty impressive progress on the first diet of my life. Six pounds baby!! I'm a long way from my ultimate goal (30 pounds lighter than today) but I'm in no rush and have found a nice balanced groove. Exercise - calorie counting and attitude. I'm not dieting so much as I'm relearning how to eat.

As a funny side effect of being so anal with something so invisible as eating I'm finding that this "just do-it" mantra has spilled over into other aspects of my life. As such this will be the week of one post per day. The images I've seen through the view finder of my D80 have been awesome and for the next seven days it will be one killer pic per day. Rain or shine.

First off Vancouver's planetarium, also know as the H.R. Macmillan Space Center nestled in bay-fog at sunrise: Temporal Coordinates -> Jan.27.2007.08.37.am.

Winter Water Fall
Shannon Falls
Dec.28.2006

After 3 or so years of talking about the idea my brother and I finally took his two children to see the Brackendale eagles. Each year between 3,000 and 4,000 bald and golden eagles spend the winter months feeding on the salmon that run up the Squamish River just 45 minutes or so north of Vancouver. That many birds together, especially given their position on the food chain (at the top) is anything but a flock. A tribe of eagles seems more fitting.

Walking through a forest sprinkled all around with eagles is pretty spectacular and contrary to popular belief these beautiful raptors are anything but solitary. As you'll quickly discover during chilly winter days they love to snuggle up beside each other and chat. The sound of eagles chirping about how freakin' cold it is!! is a pretty unique experience.

However, as awesome as that moment in time is it's not the subject of this blog.

I was hoping that the stills and video footage of the eagles would be blog-worthy but, sigh, such was not the case. We did see loads of eagles but in picking the touristy spot rather than my secret spot of years past it was all, ... well, .... sort of touristy.

In a few years the kids will be savvy enough to handle a bit of hiking. Until then I'll deffer to safety and will happily settle for touristy.

On the way back from Brackendale we took a quick detour just south of Squamish to show the kids Shannon Falls. Shannon Falls is the third highest water fall in British Columbia and for 365 days per year is equally as spectacular as the eagles. During the summer months, if you ignore the various "You have got to be out of your mind!!1" warning signs you can hike to the base of the falls itself. The photo opportunities at the ground zero of a 335 meter / 1,100 foot water are, needless to say, pretty incredible. However it's a hike best attempted during the summer. During the spring the occasional 20 meter long log will drop down onto the base and during the winter it's just too damn cold and slippery for city dwellers such as myself to attempt.

Access to the falls is wheel chair friendly and the provincial government (thinking ahead to the winter Olympics in 2010) is improving this particular slice of perfection with some serious upgrades.

My advice for the best view is to see the falls in the early afternoon during the summer. At that point the sun will be perfectly positioned to better accentuate the beauty of the water worn rock and, if you have the guts, you can hike closer than you should.

As an added bonus the Shannon Falls park also acts as a nice on-ramp to the Squamish Chiefs trail system. This year for sure. Me, the first Squamish Chief peak, digital camera, ... paradise.

For those who need "more" than the artistic splash of stills here's some video candy. Scoot to the end for the link to Stage6 and the better resolution 720p semi-Hi-Def DivX version.

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Weird Weather or Alien Invasion?
Vancouver, English Bay
Dec.18.2006

Me I was hoping this weird weather effect was the initial thrust of an alien invasion. I mean ... well ... an invasion from outer space would be pretty cool considering it would answer the "Are we alone?" and "Do aliens look like Milla Jovovich from the movie The Fifth Element?" questions once and for all.

But, as optimistic regarding the abnormal as I am I'm not really a big believer in the whole "aliens stole my baby" conspiracy. I've reviewed even the most optimistic math and, as with most of the space based urban myths, if you don't have a comfortable understanding of infinity you'll get wrapped in the riddle and start to believe that ET is living next door.

The bottom line, mathematically, is that in our galaxy, which is pretty darn huge, there are, right now (maybe) between 5 to 10 planets that have intelligent life capable of communicating across the vastness of space. We are one of those 10.

The other civilizations are no doubt as busy as we are trying to create a unified civilization and have little time to "reach out and touch someone". Even if they could the basic laws of physics say the best that you can do is communicate at the speed of light.

That might sound fast and such but when you need to communicate across upwards of 100,000 light years (the width of our galaxy and as such the worse case distance between two of the 10 sentient civilizations) you have a huge time lag to take into account.

A lag large enough to make the whole "We come in peace." argument pretty much implausible.

Considering that we discovered the number zero less than 10,000 years ago as a species the idea of keeping one goal active, talking to an interstellar species in this case, for 20 times that is kinda funny once you do the math. I hate to burst anyones bubble but if a species is smart enough to plow the cruel vacuum between the stars the last thing they are going to do is visit Bart Simpson.

Consider us the sole owners of this entire galaxy then. A concept I consider even more powerful than the existence of extra-terrestrials.

What these photos actually show is a common weather phenomena magnified by being beside a gigantic body of water called the Pacific Ocean.

Micro climates.

We get a lot of those here on the west coast and these photos nicely capture the micro-climate effect embedded in the low clouds above English Bay here in Vancouver.

Fresh weather. Mist on your face that's come from something that was just born from the warm aqua-green of the Pacific Ocean and is still uncertain as to what it will do next.

The little pockets of inversion that produced the cloud dimples in these shots will, if they are strong enough, eventually merge with the master pressure system and head east. If they decide to stay though they'll often dump their energy as rain or hail on Surrey. Huggles. :)

Sigh. No aliens though or, argh, no Milla.

Brrr.

The weather here is still nutty with yet another 80km/hr to 100km/hr windy night incoming as I type this. That's 5 wind storms in the past 2 or so weeks.

Its been a series of weather patterns that has reminded me of a story I read back in the 1980's. It was one of those "End of the World Because of the Weather" sorts of stories that, back then, was a thrill to read since it was so impossible. But, ... well a few weeks short of 2007 AD it's not so thrilling anymore.

The least thrilling part of the story for me was that when the weather finally goes nutty it does not do so over the course of decades but over the course of months. In scientific and mathematical terms it's referred to as the point of inflection. Basically things just go from getting bad in a slow linear sort of way to sucking in an exponential way.

Things get bad faster than we can adapt is the basic jist of it.

How Clouds Are Born
October.20.2006
The Sunshine Coast, BC Canada

The weather on the north west coast of North America has been crazy this fall. Mix together a mild El Nino in the south Pacific ocean, the regular and ever tempermental 12 year solar sunspot cycle and a healthy dose of global warming and the net effect has been a never ending series of weather systems seemingly on magic mushrooms.

"Is it just me Chester or do these clouds not look like a bowl of the most excellent and twisted Cheesy Puffs?"

"They do Eugene... they do."

The video below was created one lazy October afternoon as a high pressure system, pumped by El Nino, transited north along the western coast. In my opinion the best parts of my latest include the sweet vocals of France's Alizee, the forests of coastal mountain pine drying out and birthing clouds and the roll-up effect the time lapse reveals on the mid-level clouds. This is something that only the distorted timescape of silky smooth time lapse can deliver.



YouTube is all well and good but if you would like a much better view of this latest video click here -> http://stage6.divx.com/members/146191/videos/1059038.

Nephews Rock!!

Given the incredible success of this blog I've decided to expand and have drafted the services of a graphics artist who's career I have been following since he was knee high to a grasshopper.

Thanks to Colin for patiently responding in the positive to my eleventy-ba-zillion tweak requests. The new header graphic looks great.

The Fantasy of Black & White Film

As a photographer once and awhile I'll bump into the perfect shoot. The lighting is right. My mood and patience is one with the moment. And everything lumped into the technical is 5 by 5. Such was the day I shot my first roll of Infra Red Black & White film. It was mid August 1996 (or so) and the world of digital photography was still reserved for newspapers whilling to cough up $15,000 for a one mega-pixel camera.

I've yet to have such a moment as that in the world of digital but I'm certain it will come.

If Ya Wanna Cat Toy Youze Gonna Have Ta Get Past Me
November 2006

Cats rock. In particular when you let their own personality unfold without imposing too much of your own.

That's not to say there's no place for basic discipline. Sometimes Sirrus, pictured in the photo to the right (while guarding her stash of cat toys and looking 4 feet tall thanks to the fish-eye lens effect) will .... loose it.

She's always been a very quirky and infinitely interesting cat and every once and awhile she will find a way to remind me that what rattles around inside her head is significantly different from what bounces around inside my own.

Last evening, just before heading off to bed, she decided that he sister of the past 5 years was threatening enough to warrant "the poofy tail". It was hilarious. Her normally sleek streamlined short-hair cat tail puffed up to three times it size and she slowly stalked her way over to her sister Sheba. Walking half sideways, back arched in that classic Halloween cat pose with this big gigantic tail trailing behind her.

Why? I've no reason. Sheba in fact was half asleep during all this. Snuggled into the spot she always occupies when I'm watching DvDs. With one eye open she watched her sister approach basically indifferent even to 'the Poofy tail!!'. echo echo echo.

It was a pure Sirrus the cat moment. The delightful strangeness of it all.

I once remarked to my cat sitter Odette that one of the charms of felines is just such moments as these. Little peculiar reality bits that are totally unexpected, fascinating and remove the day to day of the boring. Without Sirrus and Sheba my life would be half the fun it is. No question.


Budding Photo-Nut
December 3 2006

One of the great things about digital photography is that you can instantly review the picture you've just captured. In theory the idea is to use this moment of review to refine the shot and, if all hope is lost, delete a junk image. In reality though I tend to keep everything. One of my photos for this year's Christmas card for example was a somewhat out of focus shot that had I been worried about storage space I would have deleted.

A moment of light, flight and motion captured but then lost forever in order to save a few megabytes on a gigabyte sized flash storage card.

Given that external computer disc storage hit the 1 gigabyte per dollar mark a year ago and is now down to the 50 cents per gigabyte mark why delete anything? Toss in the gigantic storage capacity of DvDs (6.4 gigabytes) along with the speed with which you can backup old photos there is really only one reason to delete what, at the moment of capture, you might consider junk - the signal to noise / forest-for-the-trees phenomena.

This is something that the next generation of photographers or media types in general will find even more pressing. Given that we are approaching what is for all practical purposes just about infinite storage where once you would take 1 image the temptation now is to take 100.

This is all good though given that it's this process of framing and reframing the same image that is at the heart of professional beyond-point-and-click photography. One stellar photo out of 1,000 (0.1%) is a goal I'm quite happy with. Given that I'll take upwards of 10,000 photos in a year this works out to 10 or more really cool photos.

The downside though is that you then start to drown in the thousand images that lead up to the one good one. The signal (a good photo) to noise (the 'crap' photos) ratio goes down and all you can see is the forest (the thousand photos) blurred into this one big morass of images. Finding that one cool tree (the good photos), even with photo archive management software, becomes a headache inducing process.

That cool image I mentioned earlier, the one I used for one of this year's Christmas cards, is a good example of this effect. I can't for the life of me find the original. I remember shooting loads of images of a flock of seagulls buzzing the trees on Sunset Beach one lazy fall afternoon in 2005 but try as I might I can't find even one of them. Fortunately I did move the winning image into my 'CoolPics' folder but, sigh, it's a copy, it's re-sized from the original, it's a bit too processed, etc.

Argh.

Here's a hint for all you digital photo-nuts. When you see a great picture copy it to a separate folder on your computer in its raw format immediatly. Copy it again in your Cool Pics folder and rename the copy to something meaningful. Keep the good stuff separated from the wanna-bees.

Each month I now shoot between 6 and 10 giga-bytes of photos (600 to 1,000) and given that I'll be doing this for decades if I'm not careful I'll wind up creating this big meaningless forest of photos.

The Perfect Postcard

Vancouver has gone through considerable and at times very dramatic changes over the past 25 years. Ask any of the old timers and they will peg Expo 86 as the seminal moment in our history that moved Vancouver onto the world stage and let slip the winds of change.

Perhaps the most dramatic change has been to the architectural look and feel of the city itself. Slowly Vancouver has morphed a unique skyline that it can claim as its own. What was once frumpy and pretentious pre-post-modern '60s shtick has, thankfully, been updated into one of the most stunning profiles in Canadiana.

I arrived in Vancouver 5 years after the close of Expo and already the downtown skyline had begun a radical transformation. The change has been most dramatic in what was once the grounds of Expo itself. For most of the decade following Expo the area on the north east corner of False Creek (an inlet in the south east corner of the city) was nothing more than a huge empty lot. 20 years after Expo however this region has been almost completely transformed and now includes one of the coolest mixes of 21st century urban architecture on the planet. Cool enough in fact that Vancouver and what has become known as Yaletown often acts as a stand-in for movie studios looking for a backdrop that gives a nice near-future look to their films.

Given the architectural splendor all around me I'm needless to say searching for the perfect postcard shot of my home town. And, being a bit of slacker, I've decided to replicate what worked in the past before I branch out and do something new.

After all, 'derivative' takes less work right?

Well, not always. As it's turning out even though I have the image I want to replicate finding the angle where it was shot from has turned out to be bit of a struggle.

Here's the image that, as close as I can guess, was taken a few years following Expo-86. My hunch is that it was taken during the spring of 1988 or 1989. My goal then is to find this location and replicate the shot as it is today.

I had this image in my mind's eye four weeks back when I drove over to the middle south part of False Creek. My goal then was to find the matching angle and get the image needed to do one of those funky That Was Then This Is Now comparisons for this blog.

However, after a few hours of roaming the west and mid south shore of False Creek and finding some great and non-derivative angles of downtown Vancouver I had gathered loads of postcard material but not the exact image I had charged myself with finding.

My quest has just begun then and once the weather gets back to it's "regular programming (read civilized) I'm taking a hard copy of this picture and heading out to what I'm pretty sure is the spot it was taken from. The south east corner of False Creek is my guess.

Stay tuned. My guess is the Before and After images are going to be just this side of Night and Day.

Global Warming?

For the past two weeks Vancouver has been treated to some of the most extreme weather the city has seen in years. First it was the November winds and rains that at their peak turned much of the North Shore mountains into muck.

Newton was right in that muck tends to travel downhill.

A gravitationally unfortunate scenario for 900,000 Vancouverites - myself included. What was 'downhill' in this case was our main water shed. What was normally crystal clear and sparkling mountain fed tap water turned into a brown murky soup that came bundled with a boil water advisory that lasted a week and a half. To be honest I've used bottled water since the day I moved into the West-End but the cats prefer the tap water (cats, go figure) and forget having a warm comforting bath when the water looks like someone decided to .... well, you get the idea. Yellow - mellow. Brown - flush it down. Shudder.

Last Sunday, the day before the boil water advisory was finally lifted (Woot! Welcome back to the first world!), the south west coast of British Columbia experienced a "Perfect Storm". Frozen air from the Arctic that had been creeping down the valleys of the BC interior for several days met up with what we affectionately call the Pineapple Express. The two systems had a nice meteorological group hug and blanketed 2,5 million in snow. The Pineapple Express is this torrent of moist, warm southerly air that roars in off the Pacific and gives Vancouver and Seattle much of our winter rain. By itself the Pineapple is a weather phenomena that's all well and good. In particular it's the source of the majority of our drinking water. ... Which is a good thing. ... All that it asks is that you get used to 4 months or so of a near constant drizzle.

When the Pineapple Express bumps into an air mass that's 10' C below zero however ....

Always the optimist I've naturally found the photo opportunities the past few days many and varied.

The first photo in this post is one taken of nearly the identical spot used in the second photo included in my last blog entry. The only difference between then and now being the radical shift from a hazy and lazy fall climate to one that I travelled far and long to get away from.

To the right is one of my favorite apartment window angles and was one that created a shot I took just under two years ago that I've since used for one of my Christmas cards this year. This recent image was a 25 second exposure of the same angle with the orange lights of the city at night giving the composition a nice warm/cold "what the hell's wrong with this picture?" dichotomy.

Brrrr .... Making things even more exciting for us wet coast - winter wimps has been the arrival of sub-zero temperatures and enough of a wind to create a -15'C to -20'C wind chill, ... during the day.

Undaunted by suddenly finding myself flashing back to living in an Ontario winter I ventured out to the Burrard St. bridge this morning to capture some down-town Vancouver images. Here's a post card view of Sunset Beach, the West-End skyline and the North Shore mountains snuggled in the frozen water particulate that most Canadians refer to as snow. We however usually, and laughingly to be honest, refer to it as someone else's problem. :)

As always if you'd like to see a larger view of the image just click on it.

From the forecast ahead it sounds like I'll have at least another week of winter photo ops which, as ironic as it might sound, is actually a very good thing for British Columbia.

A critical problem that global warming has caused for us here in BC is that for the past decade our winters have been mild enough to let the indigenous pine beetle survive the winter chill. Normally the freezing cold winters would kill enough of the beetle larvae (over-wintering in the skin of pine trees) to keep them in check. However, the warm winters of the past decade have let these pests run rampant and as a result an area the size of Prince Edward Island has been decimated. It's a monumental tragedy made all the more apocalyptic if you fly across the coastal mountains. Seeing large swaths of dead forest from 25,000 feet up makes hordes of locusts almost seem like a good idea. Hopefully this Arctic freeze will kill enough of the pests to make a difference in their advance next spring.