Here's a photo in Infra Red light of Sunset Beach in downtown Vancouver. This was taken right at the cusp of the transition between our winter and spring and during the 2010 Winter Olympics. As luck would have it most of the thousands upon thousands of vistors to Vancouver for the games skipped exploring the West End.
The mists during the Olympic ski jumping preliminaries were pretty spectacular. Occasionally the sun would attempt to burn some of the fog off but never succeeded.
I love this shot on several levels. First off the stairs look deadly and I think walking to the top should be an Olympic event all by itself. Second I love the grouping of the crowd near the entrance to the stairway. They are not queuing up to walk up the stairs (to get to the cool seats maybe?) but it's hard to think otherwise looking at the shot.
Ever wonder how TV networks get those impossibly cool vantage points for their wide-field shots? Balloons. :)
Cool dudes in loose moods getting ready for the pre-qualification run of the 2010 Winter Olympic ski jumping up at the Whistler Olympic Park in beautiful British Columbia Canada.
The 'launch platforms' for the two ski jumping runs at the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics Park at Whistler BC. This photo was taken during the preliminary qualification runs on Feb 12 2010. A fantastic day.
The 2010 Winter Olympics Vectorial Elevation light sculpture in action. Located at the entrance to False Creek in downtown Vancouver the sculpture is programmed, in 12 second configurations, by thousands from around the world. All you need is an Internet connection ( www.vectorialvancouver.net/home.html ) and a 3D creative edge and you can paint the night sky of Vancouver.
As of the moment in time I uploaded this photo the Vectorial Elevation web site had nearly received its 10 million'th hit and to date over 8,000 user submitted designs had been displayed. And we're still a day away from the opening of the 2010 Winter Olypmics. :)
Here's a portrait-wide-angle shot that nicely shows the height that the sculpture can achieve.
Here's a wider angle shot taken during the initial testing of the Vectorial Elevation light sculpture at the entrance to False Creek in Vancouver Canada. The event will go live in 60 minutes or so (Feb 04 2010 at 18:00 Pacific) and I expect a billion or so pictures will soon flood Flickr of the display. Thus my last hour to be 'original'. :)
For more information on this unique sculpture and event point the browser of your choice at www.vectorialvancouver.net/home.html . On this site you can get live web-cam views of the display in action (dawn to dusk) as well as register and create your own 10s to 15s display.
Very cool.
Tonight the Olympic Lighting Elves tested out their False Creek spot light setup. There was much well deserved oooh'ing and awh'ing. I think we should make them permanent.
Winter sunsets in Vancouver, while short lived, have this rich orange color missing from summer sunsets and, thanks to ever-present rain clouds, a good chance of including 'God-Light' - those spiritually motivating beams of light cascading from the heavens.
Here's a shot looking due west from downtown Vancouver taken later afternoon January 28 2010. In the foreground is the University of BC and a large jet on its final approach into Vancouver's international airport. In the background is Galliano Island. One of the many long-but-thin rocky islands sprinkled along the Strait of Georgia that separates the BC mainland from Vancouver Island.
Here's a pair of Canadian Forces CF-18 fighter jets zipping over English Bay Vancouver 2 weeks prior to the 2010 Winter games.
To paraphrase Al Pacino's character on the movie "Scarface" - "Say hallo to my two leetle friends!"
Here's a shot of one of the 20 massive projectors sprinkled along either side of the entrance to False Creek in Vancouver. Without seeing them in action it's hard to tell if they are spot lights or projectpr lights. I'm guessing projectors.
They are pretty massive with the spot/projector shown in this photo being about 2 meters tall. Bring on the games!! I can't wait to see these puppies in action.
Over the past few days the Olympic Construction Elves ('ookees' as we call 'em) have been carefully placing large blue box structures on both sides of the entrance into False Creek here in Vancouver. The boxes themselves are interconnected via underground cabling which you can see in the photo as a nice slash in the otherwise clean green of the lawn at Sunset Beach.
My guess? Spot light stands with the long trough connecting the boxes being the high voltage AC the lights will need. Oh ... Joy.
On the flip side though, once they fire those puppies up night will become day around here and us Vancouverites can start to party like it's 1999. :)
Here's a shot of the skating rink at the corner of Thurlow and Robson in the Law Courts plaza. It's been domed to protect the skaters from the 2 meters of snow we all know VanOc has on order for arrival a day before the Olympics start. :)
16 days, 4 hours, 12 minutes and 6 seconds till the party begins. Now all we gotta do is truck in about 10 million kilos of snow from Alberta and we're ready to rock.
And, as any Vancouverite knows, last week was the start of our spring. The trees are budding, the days are getting longer, the eagles are flying south to eat American salmon rather than BC's best and throngs of tourists have begun to croud out the locals.
As my grandmother used to say "Guests are like fish (salmon in this case). After two days they start to smell. How are we going to manage for 2 weeks? :)
Here's the final image from the Essent ISU World Championships held back in March of 2009. A fantastic warm up for the 2010 Olympics.
I like this shot in that it really captured the smooth aerodynamic form that is the speed skater. If I let my eyes blur for a bit the skater becomes almost robotic in her determined pose and sculpted form.
The Richmond Olympic Speed Skating oval itself is a thing of architectural and wooden beauty both inside and out. It's shape is nothing but smooth flowing contours that perfectly match the smooth flowing grace that is skating in general and Olympic speed skating in particular.
From Architectural Innovations.com "In total, the roof system uses about one million board feet of Douglas-fir lam-stock lumber in the glulam beams, another one million board feet of 2x4 spruce-pine-fir commodity dimension lumber – primarily lumber affected by the mountain pine beetle infestation in B.C.’s Interior – and about 19,000 sheets of four-foot-by-eight-foot Douglas-fir plywood in the roof panels. The roof is believed to be the largest surface ever-covered in beetle-affected wood – showing that the wood remains structurally sound and attractive."
Understatement of the year. The building is drop-dead gorgeous.
With just under three weeks to go till the start of the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games here in Vancouver the excitement is certainly building. As various side streets close and become covered with temporary buildings and rows of spectactor seats the feeling of living within a fortress becomes nearly everpresent.
Over the next few days I'll be posting photos that were taken inside the Richmond Olympic Speed Skating oval during the March 2009 Essent ISU World Single Distances Speed Skating Championships. After an afternoon of fast shooting hoping for the perfect shot I now have great respect for not only sports photographers and the big $15,000 lenses that they use but also how sexy women look skating away at high speed dressed in tight latex. Speed skaters have to be one of the hardest photo subjects in existence. :)
Sometimes with High Dynamic Range photography "less is more". Here's a composite of 9 images of the Burrard Street Bridge that crosses False Creek into downtown Vancouver. This photo was taken on a very rainy west coast winter Monday afternoon around 2:30PM. The forecast called for 100 to 200 mm of rain for Howe Sound which is north of Vancouver on the way to Whistler. Ground zero for the 2010 Winter Olympics in 32 days and the spot where my brother and I will watch the Olympic Ski Jumping in just over a month from now.
In this shot I wanted to capture the nice pocket of warm color from the lights on the north bridge span nestled in the grey brooding nature of winter on the west coast represented by the bridge itself. Thanks to the magic of High Dynamic Range photography I think I captured it.
During winter on the 'wet coast' less is more.
(With apologies to Albert Camus) - In the depth of a west coast winter, I finally learned that within me and my digital SLR there lay an invincible High Dynamic Range summer - or at least a soggy spring.
Queen Elizabeth Park Vancouver Canada in Infra Red.
The park is so thick with carefully tended foliage that it pretty much explodes visually when photographed in Infra Red light.
My favorite part of this shot are the two wheel barrows in the bottom right corner. Sort of a his and hers thing. :)
Work is now complete on linking my personal web site name (DouglasFarmerPhotography.com) to this blog. The old link ( http://temporaldistortions.blogspot.com ) will still work so nothing needs to change at your end.
Happy New Years everyone!
I've bought the link 'DouglasFarmerPhotography.com' and will be switching this blog to that link. What this means for those who visit my Google Blogger site (where you are now) is that you now have two ways to access this blog. That's it. Everything is pretty much the same only I'll now be able to make the transition to a more commercial slant on the site. It will also make all those business cards with a www.douglasfarmerphotography.com link actually work. :) I expect the transition will take 3 days to filter across the Interwebs.
At the transition from 2009 to 2010 and what for most is a fresh new decade my best wishes to you and yours for a safe, happy and productive new year. I have lots of photographic plans for the coming year and hope you'll be part of that journey. If you would like to receive e-mail updates to changes in this site's content feel free to e-mail me at djfarmer@telus.net.
F/8, 1/60s and go!
This is my favorite capture from 2009. Thanks to the focusing complexities of digital infra red photography (manufacturers tune the focus of cameras for visible light) I learned a lot about hyper focal focusing this year.
This shot in particular is taken at one of my favorite composition spots in Vancouver - Lost Lagoon in Stanley Park look east towards downtown Vancouver. There are so many cool things about Vancouver but one of the best has to be the glorious park on the western limb of the downtown core.
The High Dynamic Range software I use (Photomatix) can create some rather interesting results even within a series of images that do not differ that much in terms of dynamic range and color.
Here's a lazy hazy summer sunset over English Bay in Vancouver in HDR.
This is a view of Beach Avenue in downtown Vancouver taken from the Burrard Street Bridge looking north. On the right are the high rise towers that run along Beach. To the left, nestled in the trees glowing white in the infra red light, is the Vancouver Aquatic Center and then off in the distance is English Bay itself.
Here's the second High Dynamic Range photo from a trip this year up to Cypress Falls Provincial Park in West Vancouver. If you let your eyes relax a bit you might see the skeleton like face appear - eye socket top left and mouth middle bottom.
Here's a scan of a photo from thirty years ago touched up with Capture NX/2. Getting the old photos in the 'digital domain' is turning out to be a very enjoyable spin off of the digital darkrooms available to us 21st century photographers.
The subject in the photograph is of the sweetest dog I ever had the fortune to get to know - Lucky. :)
Water Lily - Beaver Lake - Stanley Park Vancouver
What I liked the most about taking this photo was that I was able to 'see' it after the considerable amount of post processing that I was setting myself up for. The original was taken in the middle of August on a warm humid day. By this time of year the water mites (tiny little black insects) were in full flourish and speckled everything with their presence. In a word - yuck.
However I was able to see past that and knew that given a few hours of patient retouching in Capture NX/2 the image above would emerge. A pond Lilly in a world without insects. :)
In the background is the arboretum at the Queen Elizabeth Park. Very spacey.
In the foreground, bottom right, are 3 confused tourists wondering how they wound up 11.7 light years from Earth. :)
Here is a cool nearly cartoon-like rendition of the buildings you'd see as you drive into downtown Vancouver over the Burrard Street Bridge. The shot was taken from Sunset Beach and is an HDR composite of 7 images.
HDR cameras are beginning to emerge but I expect that while they will dramatically expand the dynamic range you can capture there will still be the need for the artistic touch that comes during the tone mapping phase of the composition process.
English Bay gets some fantastic sunsets and this one is no exception. This is looking due north from downtown Vancouver towards the tail end of Cypress Mountain and the mountains surrounding Howe Sound.
Here's one of my favorite shots taken during a trip to Bryce Canyon Utah this June with my brother Mike. The color shots are great but for some reason I'm really drawn to the black and white infra red photos I took.
This one is at pretty much the ground zero view point in Bryce looking away from the canyon and towards the forests that lead up to it. Off in the distance you can see an approaching rain storm. In the foreground are the high alpine trees hanging on for dear life at the edge of a 5,000 foot drop.
Bryce owes it's fantastic geological formations to the regular rain storms that hit the region and just 10 minutes prior to taking this shot Mike and I were treated to a stunning and heavy sudden downpour. A bit creepy to have happen with expensive digital cameras hanging around your neck and slippery slopes just a few feet away.
Vancouver is thick with blossoming trees during the spring so much so that there is a web site available that people use to alert others to where the best blossom 'events' are. This photo was taken at one of my favorite spots - the courtyard in behind the Vancouver planetarium.
Here is a section of the famous Vancouver Seawall walk as it meanders beside Sunset Beach. In background you can see a bit of the north end of the Burrard Street bridge. In the foreground are two happy shoppers who've just returned from a productive trip to Granville Island.
Located an hour's drive north of Vancouver along the Sea to Sky highway is Shannon Falls. The falls have a vertical drop of 335 meters making it the third tallest in BC. Thanks to the construction boom of the 2010 Olympics the parking and visitors area near the falls has recently received an extensive and well deserved make over.
I've visited the falls in all four seasons with my favorite, as a photographer, being summer. During a sunny west coast summer afternoon the sun will track across the falls providing numerous lighting options. During the winter it makes a great stop off on the way to or returning from Brackendale - the wintering grounds of nearly 4,000 American Bald eagles.
One of the many hidden photo-gems in Vancouver is Cypress Falls Park. It's located in West Vancouver and straddles Cypress Creek which, as the name suggests, is one of the major run-off creeks for Cypress Mountain.
It's a very spiritual place for me and has been a frequent stop when I'm in the mood for doing slow exposure water fall scenes. The spiritual angle comes from the many faces that you'll find in the various rocks and cliff faces that surround Cypress Creek. This shot being no exception.
This year when I visited the park I shot nothing but High Dynamic Range. Initially I found the results a bit too visually 'sweet' for my tastes however months later I reviewed the series a second time and really liked what I saw. I'll post a second photo from the series on December 22.
This photo I think perfectly captures the Eden like pre-civilization feel that the thick and brooding old growth arboreal forests in BC really project.
Mike the photo-guy in the magic light that lives in the infra red spectrum. This was taken on our first day in Bryce Canyon Utah during June.
For anyone who loves taking outdoor/nature photographs you've got to visit this part of North America. It's a very accessible location with numerous photographic opportunities. The awesome vistas are even, for the most part, very accessible for the disabled.
I really like the composition as well as the dreamy pseudo colors that shooting in Infra Red sometimes produces. The trees and pine needles are black and white but the sky and ground a bit purple and Mike's cargo shots a bit teal.
Located four blocks west of my apartment building is the Kensington. A gorgeous heritage building that rents for between $3,000 (1,600 sq ft unfurnished) and $5,000 (furnished) per month. A bit out of my league but a building that nonetheless always delivers stunning High Dynamic Range photo-ops.
This is a view from the Burrard Street bridge in Vancouver. A heritage bridge (built 1930 to 1932) that connects the Kitsilano area to the downtown core. The shot was from the English Bay side of the bridge looking towards the downtown core. The building I live in is just to the left of the shot's field of view.
I love the colors in this shot as well as the 'old' versus nearly 'science-fiction new' dichotomy that Vancouver's architectural mix delivers. Given that the city burned to the ground on the 13th of June 1886 (during what was aptly named "The Great Vancouver Fire") Vancouver thrives on being a city caught in perpetual renewal. The 1986 Expo kick started the city into becoming a global metropolis and with the 2010 Olympics about to get rolling a similar effect will reoccur but be even stronger I expect.
The best part of downtown Vancouver though has got to be City Hall's perpetual dislike of the automobile. I live and work in downtown Vancouver so I love it but I'm certain there are thousands of daily commuters (I see them idling on this very bridge for many minutes during the morning rush) who hate it. In fact over the past 5 years the city has worked hard to make driving into and out of the downtown core even more frustrating. I love such an in-your-face green attitude. Heck - someone's got to take a stand against Henry Ford.
Vancouver transportation factoid: The city, during the 1980's, decided not to have a 10 line highway plow through its downtown core. As a result the downtown is mostly residential unlike most cities the size of Vancouver and up. I love this city. :)
Here's a pair of budding rock stars at the summit of Whistler Mountain in BC. I love the depth of field that vistas like this provide.
This image was converted from a color one and slightly tweaked using Nikon's Capture NX/2 software. A piece of computer wizardry that I consider the best piece of post-production software for us Nikon aficionados.
Here is another High Dynamic Range composite of a cool misty December sunset with Pt. Grey and Jericho Beach in the foreground.
English Bay produces spectacular sunsets year round but during December the twilight is so short it's like nature needs to pack an hour of spectacular colors into just 5 minutes. Conversely during the summer the sunsets are very typical in their westcoastness - slow and mellow.
For those new to High Dynamic Range photography (HDR) the technique while not without its pitfalls I honestly believe will be the normal way to take photographs 5 years from now. This image for example was created from 7 digital exposures with 1 image exposed at settings the camera's computer felt was optimal and then 3 shots underexposed at various settings and 3 overexposed. This series of photographs is then merged into a composite image that greatly expands the dynamic range of the picture. In effect it creates an image closer to how you see it rather than how the camera, with its limited dynamic range in a single picture, can 'see' it. Once I've created the 7 exposures I then use software (Photomatix Pro in my case) to create the HDR image.
If you have a camera that lets you adjust the shutter speed while keeping the aperture fixed (aka aperture priority) then you're half way to creating HDR images. Be warned though. Once you've create a few 'omg that is so cool' images you'll be hooked.
This is such a fun shot taken in one of Vancouver's hidden photographic gems - Queen Elizabeth Park. It was taken with my Infra Red modified Nikon D100 on what turned out to be a great day for IR photography.
Something about the two grounds keepers surveying their work had me thinking about futuristic bio-dome guardians working in some alien conservatory for the rest of the day. :)
If you catch a hibiscus at bloom using the High Dynamic Range (HDR) technique you can get something that sits on the border between the sensual and the erotic. Not that I'm into 'plant porn' (does such exist?) but there's something about this photograph nonetheless.
For me one of the best parts of Vancouver during the summer is the annual Festival Of Light fireworks competition. Four nights of the best fire works the world has to offer smack dab in the middle of the city.
Here's a shot of the 'teaser firework' launched 15 minutes before the official start of the show.
A fantastic pair of sun dogs complete with halo over English Bay Vancouver on July 4 2009. Thanks to the magic of High Dynamic Range photography the image that resulted was even better than my eyes could see.
The prelude to the Battle of Mortimer's Cross in Herefordshire, England in 1461 is supposed to have involved the appearance of a complete parhelion (like the one shown here) with three "suns". The Yorkist commander, later Edward IV, convinced his initially frightened troops that the apparition represented the Holy Trinity (Father, Son and Holy Ghost) and Edward's troops then went off to win a decisive victory.
Five minutes after arriving home with my two current cats (Sheba and her sister Sirrus) I snapped this moment. Here's Sheba just as curious about me and my camera as I am about her.
What makes this a Best of the Best 2009 photo is that this is my first pass at removing defects in the photo. In particular I removed a good amount of condensation stain on the black vinyl at the bottom of the photo. Thanks in no small way to my brother Mike's nudging about how a great photo can be made even better with the right amount of post-production cleanup 2009 for me was the year I finally 'got it'.
Thanks Mike! :)
This image while still not perfect is leagues ahead of what it was before several hours of careful clean-up in Capture NX/2.
To close out 2009 and get some traction on the thousands of cool photographs to come in 2010 here is the first of my 'Best of the Best" for 2009. Key to my photographic workflow for many years are the various "CoolPic" folders I create to hold what I consider to be the best of my photographs. Near year end when it comes time to create my Christmas calendar or cards that year's Cool Pic folder is the first and most often last stop I'll make.
This photograph is a High Dynamic Range composite created from 7 images of English Bay just past sunset on December 3 2009. What I liked the most about the series, even before post-processing the captures into the HDR composite, was the wispy tendrils of rain cascading from the approaching cloud bank.
Here's the Lucky - the wonderful wonder-dog giving me his classic look during the spring of 1978.
Here's a delicate rainbow suspended over Stanley Park in downtown Vancouver's west end. During the winter it does rain quite a bit in Vancouver but these flashes of sunlit beauty more than make up for the gloom.
This shot is an High Dynamic Range composite of 5 hand-held images. On the right side is the outer wall of my apartement building 32 floors up.
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