False Creek Magic Light
Oct 23 2006

One of the first things I discovered when I embraced photography as a hobby was that taking a picture is, in essence, painting with light. I don't expect that I'm the first photographer to realize this but when that particular realization struck me it radically changed how I looked through the camera's view finder.

Don't get me wrong, I still love to point and shoot whatever the moment brings but as a nature/landscape photographer when I get serious and spend the time to first embrace, then frame and then finally configure a photograph it's all about light.

I was pretty thrilled then when a week ago, as happens two or three times a year, a local film crew setup their lighting gear on Sunset Beach to shoot some exteriors on the other side of False Creek. Night became day and I had a front row seat on thousands of bucks worth of magic light.

This time I opted for high vantage point shots rather than venturing down to the beach for some close ups. The light and the compositional opportunities were pretty endless from 32 floors up and I spent a third of the 104 shots doing that cheesy but fun expose & zoom trick. Having already subjected this blog to the results of this technique I'll skip including any of them with this entry. .... Must ... resist ... must ... :)

Anyway, with a 10 mega-pixel camera I now shoot at a resolution of 3,872 by 2,592 pixels. This is roughly the number of pixels you would find on seven and half 19" LCD monitors running at their native resolution of 1280 by 1024.

JPG images take up roughly 4 MBytes and Nikon's native RAW format (what they call NEF) produces an image that comes in between 9 and 11 MBytes. Thank goodness for 2 Gbyte memory cards. Being able to shoot at such a super high resolution however is a two edge sword. When an image is displayed at it's native resolution I can instantly pick up even the slightest of blurry imperfections. Grumble.

What I've discovered is that when taking long exposure high resolution shots, even when the camera's mounted on a nice solid tripod with a locked down ball style mount, 10 seconds or more of settling time is needed before I should press the shutter on the cable attached remote shutter release. The shot above was taken at an aperture of F5.6 and exposed for 3 seconds with an auto-ISO setting of 400. It was also taken about 30 seconds after I'd taken the first shot in this sequence which turned out to be blurry enough to be pretty much useless. Patience grasshopper. Compose, take 2 deep breaths then click the shutter release cable.

All part of the never-ending learning curve that is any cool hobby. :)

Winter?!?! Oh Nooooo!!!

Just kidding. While the monsoon and fog season has begun here in Vancouver our climate is so temperate that a snow storm is defined as an inch or more of snow that stays longer than 24 hours.

Winter is quite mellow and laid back when he visits Vancouver and prefers to chill on the beach and dust a few mountains if the spirit so moves him. When he visits this slice of paradise he's got anything but a hate-on Nothing like the one he seems to have by the time he reaches the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains and passes over Calgary. Who could blame him actually. :)

So, while it's anything but winter here on the wet-coast it is coming up to the time to start thinking a few months ahead. This year I'm going to try Future Shop's photo services for my Christmas cards.

I've selected three images for the the 36 or so cards I plan to ship (family, friends, work associates and clients). As luck would have it we had a nice winter blast nearly two years ago and I was able to capture quite a few of it's angles on digital film.

The one to the left is my favorite followed very closely by the darker image above. The dark image might seem beyond surreal initially. As a hint it's a high altitude shot from my apartment of the small ferry dock down below. On the right is the gangway out to the dock itself. At the bottom is part of the Sea Wall walk-way including a few intrepid and no doubt chilled walkers.

If you'd like a Christmas card from yours truly leave a comment with your postal address mentioning which one to send and I'll be more than happy to do so.

As allways I'm looking forward to that magic day, perhaps a month or so away, when the clouds will part after a few days of rain to reveal the North Shore mountains sprinkled in snow. I'm already planning where I'll take photos from when that happens and should have a test picture up in the next few days ... assuming the sun shows it's face.

English Bay Fog
Friday.September.29.2006

A week or so back a soft, gentle fog rolled into English Bay in Vancouver. It was very much a kiss from the ocean. Smelling of salt and the end of tide it was a crisp hint of the winter to come tempered with the promise of only a few days of snow. Three days of winter or, at worst, perhaps a week of what would be, in hindsight, simple fun.

How can you not love a part of the world that Mother Nature also loves? It's as though she saves her best weather for this particular ground zero. The planet's sweet spot.

Fortunately only a few lucky fools have found this particular slice of paradise. If everyone knew how great a place to live Vancouver was the parking would be horrid.

Here's a few hours of the fog that visits English Bay.

Summer Sun Time Lapse
August 2006

Here's the first in what will be a never ending series of time lapse flicks from yours truly. This one was taken during mid-August from 4:30 PM to an hour or so to after sunset (9:40 PM). I was quite happy with the results but couldn't find the particular piece of music I wanted to include to accompany it. I had this classical track rattling around in my head for a month after creating the video but couldn't' for the life of me recall the artist or the piece.



It's funny how synchronicity works but last week I digitized one my of my favorite classical albums and uncovered the exact piece I was searching for. On the B side of a collection of Pachelbel's works, including his famous Canon in D major, was the allegro movement from Johann Friedrich Fasch's Symphony for Strings in A major. The piece I think has a nice circular rhythm to it that I felt would be the perfect compliment to the spinning of the clock and the relentless motion of the shadows as they skate across my living room's floor.

The clock itself came from the Bombay Company and each hour of real-time was compressed into 15 seconds of wide screen, 16:9 video. Seeing Sirrus and Sheba pop in on-and off during the filming was a total and unexpected bonus.

Next up, 3 hours of fog rolling into and out of English Bay. I just gotta find this rift of music that will compliment the flow of the fog. I'm thinking The Moldau by Bedrich Smetana. Now to find it ...

One Month Anniversary Entry!
Stratos - Vancouver
Sunday.Oct.02.2006

Congrats me!! One month of blogging under my belt and I'm more charged about the medium then I was when I first started.

Here's a shot of me looking out onto a west coast sunset with one of those pensive "If they discover I'm an advanced scout for an alien invasion armada I'm doomed." sorts of looks. I'd better call the mothership.

"May you live in interesting times".

A fortune or a curse?

Personally I consider that phrase a fortune and, having given the subject considerable thought over the years I would consider it a fortune to be witness to the earth being hit with one of those monstrous, Manhattan sized cometary fragments. Yes, such an event would kick us back several epochs prior to the stone-age (and then some) but being part of a one in a 20 million year event, for a species that is barely 10,000 years into civilized, I would consider to be rather cool. Cool in a way that makes James Dean's "live fast, die young and leave a good looking corpse" motto come out pretty thin.

Anyway, time for some fun with this new media.

I expect that few peope (if any save me) have this net location added to their web browser favorites. But, being the perpetual optimistic, I've long since realized that having an audience for the content is secondary to the experience of creating it.


21st Century Audio System
Monday.Oct.02.2006

Alot has changed since I bought my first stereo system in the summer of 1974. Back then a month's wages for a teenager working a summer job bought the basic of the basics which, funny now that I think of it, was a Sony system.

Shown here is my final analogue system which goes beyond the audio-phile standards of even a decade ago by several generations. Shown in the photo is a digital surround sound processing amplifier, 200 CD changer (the gizmo on the bottom), a super VHS VCR, a dual Dolby NR cassette deck, belt drive turntable (on the top), USB 2.0 integrated analoge to digital audio conversion hardware, USB 2.0 analoge, composite and S-VHS interconnect hardware and just over 1,000 GBytes of USB 2.0 wired disk storage. Not shown is the PC the system connects to.

This is my evolutionary system in that I'm fairly certain that my audio listening needs, as they have been for the past 4 years or so, will be fully satisfied via computers in various sizes for the rest of my life. So long analogue ... well, sort of.

I love my iPod just as much as I love my media PC. Having thousands of hours of CD quality audio just a few clicks and shuffles away boggles the mind of even this gray haired geek.

So many changes in so short a space of time. So many changes so fast that, naturally, I'm still a part of the 2 TV channel world and miss the snap, crackle 'n pop of my vinyl records.

When the CD revolution errupted in the 1980's I was one of the first to embrace the new media. I can still remember the first time I listened to the album Brothers In Arms by the Dire Straits on my first generation portable, ... Sony (again), ... CD player. It was a sunny Friday afternoon and I was sitting on my first couch, headphones on, listening to the first track. The sound was beyond anything I'd experienced in the world of vinyl and I was hooked. Hooked to the point of switching 100% of my music purchases to CDs and eventauly loosing touch with my vinyl. A respectable 200+ album collection by then.

The platters were gone but they were anything but forgotten.

For several years now I've been on an Analog to Digital Mission From God and this year I have finally cracked the digital equivalent of the Da Vinci Code!!

Yes brothers and sisters!! There is a way to bring back from the dead those musical memories of old!!

This month, in a series of what I think will be pretty cool blog entries, I'll detail the technical, personal and philosophical details, start to finish, in moving your favorite LP to your favorite MP3 player. It's not as tough as you might think (technically) but it is a process that will set you back $200 or so for the necessary hardware and cables. The price tag will be less if you want to go cheap. More if you want to make the tortuous journey to digital nerd-vana.

Anyway, thanks to all of you who have popped in every once and awhile to read this blog. It's a fun media to express yourself via and one I'd highly recommend trying out. All you have to loose is a bit of time and while time is precious so is sharing with the rest of the world who you are and what turns your crank.

Bay Fog Arrives

Sept.29.2006

It's proven to be yet another hazy and lazy fall day here in Vancouver made all the more beautiful by the arrival of the first blankets of Bay Fog (Hoar Fog for you purists) of the fall. I was able to get some nice stills while taking my car in for a tune-up at my regular dealership just south of the Granville Island market.

Once I'd dropped off the car and got back to start the work day I recorded some cool time lapse as the fog bank rolled in and out of English Bay. Hopefully I'll digest the post-production of the videos into something less daunting and get today's treat up on YouTube sooner rather than later.

Fog? We Don't Have No Stinkin' Fog!

Nov.2002

During the winter, from November to February, we'll get persistent banks of bay fog that often shroud the city for an entire week. By that point in the winter while we're pretty much used to perpetual moisture the fog itself is often a nice break from the unrelenting rain. Living high above English Bay has an advantage during this period in that the fog will often be low enough to let winter sunshine pour into my apartment. A cool damp atmospheric blanket that muffles the smells and sounds of the city.

YouTube Test - Free Hugs

YouTube is a new net-phenomena that hit critical mass during the later part of 2005. It's a pretty nifty site that lets anyone upload videos which are then presented to the masses. People can view the videos, comment on them, add the producer/director of the video to their list of favorites, become a director, etc. and etc. It's one of those "flash of brilliance" sorts of ideas that while not quite, yet, to the scale of Google is something that I expect will, over time, become larger than searching the net.

The core reason for this blog is to publish photos and pictures that distort time. Temporal Distortion, in it's simplest, means to distort the temporal, aka time, axis of our reality through various means.

I love time lapse. Compressing hours of time into minutes of video shows a side of nature reserved for 300 year old Douglas Fur trees.

I love altering the presentation of time just as much via the world of still photography. Compress 500 milliseconds of the life of a waterfall into a single still image and you get the shot on the left.

Water becomes almost milk and what were basic highlights of color and sun sparkle become almost primordial pools of infinity.

In fact photographers call this effect "milky water" and, as with any cool photo, all you need is a bit of knowledge, a good sense of composition and the ability to see multi-seconds of reality blurred into a single moment. Easy right? :)

Tech specs wise this photograph was taken at f/18 using a non-digital Nikkor AF 70-210 f/5.6 lens at 70 mm with an exposure time of 1/2 second. No post production was done on the image. What you see is what me and the camera got. The pretty subject itself is of one of three drippy pools of photo-delight on the north shore of Vancouver where Crypress Mountain runs-off into the pacific via Cypress Creak. I've been there more than once but not yet with the new Nikon. Sometime this week or next though for sure.

Anyway, I digress.

Here's my first test of linking my blog to YouTube. This will be an embedded link to a video I found today that made me feel really good inside. Who can pass up a free hug? Many it seems but once the word spreads it's a hug-o-rama.

To view the video click on the link below. If you are new to the net you may be asked to install Adobe's Flash Player in your browser. Doing this is a good thing in that lots of cool web sites, including YouTube, use the Flash Player.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vr3x_RRJdd4

If you have the Flash Player already installed the embedded link below should work and there's no need for you to go to YouTube to watch the video. All ya gotta do is click twice on the image below and sit back and enjoy.

Macro vs Micro

Trust the big guys to try and change the world, one idea at a time. Nikon does not produce macro lenses they produce micro lenses. These micro lenses perform the exact same function as macro lenses (extreme closeups with tight depths of field) but that's not the point. The point is .... erm .... I've no idea what the points is. Some marketing flash of brilliance (aka more money) that just escapes my simple mind at the moment.

Nikon produces some of the best lenses on the planet (their Nikkor line) and whether it's a macro or a micro lense I really could care less. What I want is a lense that will let me get 10 cm away from my subject and take a nice crisp photo with a super-model thin depth of field.

Wood Eye? You Bet I Would!!

Ack, bad pun aside for some reason this macro ... erm ... "micro" shot of a weathered wooden plank, part of the actual wall on the Vancouver Seawall walk in the West End, reminds me of an owls eye.

Macro photography is a brand new tanget on my photographic journey and in upgrading to the very new Nikon D80 digital (the coolest camera I've yet owned) I decided to go one step furthur and snagged the Nikkor AF 60 mm, F/2.8D Micro lens.

Macro photography will take a good amount of practice and even in my early "oh my god this is just too cool" infatuation phase a bit of pragmatism is sneaking in. Given that at f/8 your depth of field is measured in just a few centimeters (that's an inch or so for my American brothers & sisters) macro photography just begs to be done on a tripod. While shooting this pic today I noticed that even with continuous focus running after the first focus the image would start to magically blur as my center of gravity shifted a few cm. Slap me if, after a few beers, I announce now is the time for some point-and-shoot-micro photography. Yeah .... right.

English Bay Beach - Sept 26 2006

As you can see there's no snow on the mountains yet. In fact that particular part of Vancouver's beauty is still two months or so away. Still loads of time to get down to the beach for some serious tanning four days before the start of October and the arrival of our annual 6 month monsoon season.

With this shot I'm using a macro lense to do the work of a wide angle or zoom telephoto. The photo looks good. The image is nice and crisp and even unprocessed the white balance on the shot is a respectable 6 out of 10 on my overly fussy wb scale. I don't expect the new lense will take over for my 18-200 mm zoom DX VR (vibration reduction) Nikkor but in a pince the result's no too bad.

Free Cat Treats?!?!?

I love cats.

• When I left home to start my graduate degree in chemistry in Ottawa back in September 1980 I did two things right off.
• * Rented a 17 inch color TV for my bedroom.
  * Started looking for a kitten.

By October I'd found Jennifer, my first cat who patiently trained me in the ways of the feline and brokered the idyllic life of those of her kind who came after her. Since Jennifer I've proudly shared space with numerous cats 4 of whom I'd consider soul mates. The over-the-top-cute cat in this photo is Sirrus. Your basic domestic short hair, five years old and 16 pounds of fur that has more personality than half the humans I know.

In the previous post the second photo is of her sister Sheba. A long haired, high maintenance cat that defines the word timid. Timid yet her trust of me is so total it's sometimes exasperating. What would posses any creature to hop into a chair this big human is just about to sit on?

These days the phrase "pet owner" has evolved into "guardian" and/or "companion". Politically correct terms which are all well and good but for me a better descriptor of the human/cat relationship is "soul mate". Feeling the twitch and wiggle of a cat's paws as it sleeps and dreams in your lap makes it tough to think these creatures lack a soul.

You Did 'What?' To The Blog?!?

Ok, Ok, so sue me.

Sheesh.

I saw a button that says "Upgrade Your Blog" and guess what flashes through my mind?

Yup. Words like 'Bigger', 'Better', 'Faster', 'Stronger' and with a much better page editor to boot!.

Sigh. I'm such a sucker for marketing.

So far I've found some nifty new templates but no matter how friendly Google makes their blog software (and it's extremely friendly by the way) to get that crisp awe inspiring professional look for my blog site I need to add some crisp awe inspiring professional HTML not to mention design. By hand. The old school way. Ugh. The improved spell checker though is rather killer.

You Through Yet!?!?

Ahhh, nope. Not really.

I mean come on. This is an organic evolutionary thing that will, over time, morph into the penultimate site for not only cool photos of Vancouver and British Columbia but ... well links to cool videos as well.

It's going to be awesome!! Just as soon as I develop the patience and aptitude to edit some 50 hours of time lapsed video, much of it totally cool, into something worth posting on http://www.youtube.com/.

The idea of publishing my videos online kind of terrifies me. Once posted the videos are exposed to the rabid comments of the millions of YouTube visitors who have no qualms in either trying to direct you to their 'killer' video or comparing your video to that wierd goo that snails leave being. I've done several searches for 'Time Lapse' videos on YouTube and based on what I've found (20 seconds of fast moving but none the less boring clouds) I've a hunch some of my better ones will gain some quick attention.

Ok. Wake Me Up When It's Over Then

I am looking forward to getting the videos up in a "scary, feelings of doom and gloom" sort of way. This blog has been fun to update and apart from my grumblings over the pathetic HTML editor I can't beat the price - $0.

Gotta love those Google guys.

One final note. All of the photos, apart from the 1985 shots in New York, were taken using a Nikon D100 6.1 MPixel digital camera. The photos were marginally processed using ThumbsPlus Pro and resized from their original 3008x2000 24 bit Nikon RAW/NEF format down to 752x500 25 bit RGP JPG renditions. The reason I bring that up is that come tomorrow I'll be upgrading to the Nikon D80s 10 MPixel digital camera. It feels like the night before Christmas. :) Funny how going from a 4 year old D100 to a 1 month old D80s is an 'upgrade'. So much for numbering schemes.

Gull In Motion
Fall, 2005

Is photography an art form? It depends I guess on what you define as art. A question I've been asking myself since my first finger painting in pre-school. "Look mom!! Brown streaky finger printy art of a cow!!" ... "That's very nice Dougie."

Over the years I've accepted two things about art. First, everyone has their own definition of what it is and while it's great when two people agree on a common definition such agreement is not the norm. Second, for me art is the artist capturing an emotional moment and being able to share that emotion with me through his or her medium. Whether it's a digital or analogue photograph, a painting, an addictive tune by the French pop star Alizee or the CBC Radio Orchestra giving a stellar rendition of the second movement of Beethoven's 6th symphony to me it's all art. All of those media can capture the artist's emotion and act as a conduit to share it with me its consumer.

Here's a seagull in full glide-mode over the rich and varied orange hues of Sunset Beach Park, downtown Vancouver, bathed in the warm glow of a fall westcoast sunset. The cool thing about this shot is that apart from the regular digital cleanup and slight sharpening that I do to all my digital photographs no other manipulations were employed. What you see in the photo is pretty much what I saw through the view finder of my Nikon D100. The question is can you feel what I did when I took the shot?

Is it art in other words?

For me, the artist, the answer is an easy yes. Each time I look at this photo I can feel the gull skipping on the end day thermals as she glides across pure golden warmth. I can feel the sun on my face and almost hear the sound of her wing on the wind.

And I worked hard to get the shot. I could feel the moment was perfect, the light was just right and the gulls were having enough fun swooping and climbing to give me enough time, light and their varied antics to get at least one good shot. I pulled out all the technical stops and eventually captured just the moment I wanted - this one.

Art - plain and simple.

Sunset-o-Rama
Spanish Banks, Kitsilano
Mar 26 2006 6:21 PM

I love sunsets and when a particularily good one arrives it feels like I'm watching God as a painter. The day's nearly come to an end, at least for this pilgrim, and God whips out the paint brushes, a billion shades of red and organge and goes nuts.

What photos never capture though is the flashes of brilliance this painter often displays in the blink of an eye. A zodiacle flair will suddenly appear and then just as quickly fade away. At times I wonder if I've been the only one to see such beauty.


Gulf Island Orange
June 2005

Burrard St. Bridge, Vancouver
August 28 2006 8:38 PM

Here's a 25 second exposure taken just past sunset. During the last 10 seconds I performed a slow manual inward zoom to give the photo a nifty sense of time and motion. It's a cheezy sort of shot in that nearly every one I take with this technique looks pretty cool yet the image is more effect than substance.

Cheezy but yummy. Sort of the junk food of the "Oh cool" genre of night time shots.

The Stuff of Tears
Gone But Not Forgotten


The 5th anniversary of 9/11 is just around the corner. An anniversary I never want to forget but at times prefer not to remember.

Such senseless horror that, for better or for worse, removed in my mind any illusion that all the world in general and the Muslim community in particular needed was a good hug.

The wide-eyed naive liberal in me died that day and I cried till the end of the week. Lost in bottles of wine, cases of beer and CNN 24/7.

I loved New York and still do.

A city that has an organic almost corporeal feel to it 24 hours per day.

As a fan of architecture I fell in love with the Twin Towers to the point that on that day I felt the loss for the buildings first and for the thousands second.

I'd been there.

I'd stood on the observation deck and looked into the heart of Manhattan and then turned 90's west to gaze at a New Jersey caught in the lazy haze of summer.

So here were are, 5 years past that rude awakening and what have we learned?

We've re-learned what we already knew and been shocked to get confirmed what we had once only feared.

Take anything to the extreme, in particular religion, and you'll find paranoid fascism.

We've learned that the world is not all peaches and cream and that assimilation is perhaps the lesser of two evils when compared to the supposed noble purity of multiculturalism.

We've learned that others hate simply because they can't stomach the thought of being more alike than different.

We've learned that one parasitic and cancerous slice of our world will only be happy when we role our ethics and beliefs back to the time of Mohammed.

Holy cow!! Two blog entries in one day? What's next? Three?

China
(July 29 2006 10:16 PM)

During the final week of July and the first week of August Vancouver plays host to the Celebration of Light fireworks competition. (Web Site Link) It's a pretty spectacular affair with four different countries competing and simultaneously amazing upwards of 400,000 fans lining the beaches of downtown Vancouver. This year the festival played host to:

Italy
China
Czech Republic
Mexico

Mexico won the festival but personally I think China, shown on the left, delivered the better show. I mean come on. They invented fireworks rights? On top of that, having watched all but one of the shows since 1991 I feel eminently qualified to judge.

Afer years of frustration with taking pictures of fireworks I've finally figured out how to get some pretty spiffy images. As with most things learned via the school of hard knocks in the end the tricks are simple & straightforward:

• Go digital. If you haven't your missing out.
• You'll need a camera that can be set to full manual. This is where you control both the shutter speed and aperture setting. When you are shooting fireworks you'll be adjusting both settings, reviewing the images, adjusting some more, etc. If you've never gone manual with your camera or can't then trying to photograph something like fireworks will be more frustrating than it's worth.
• The camera has to be mounted on a tripod and you'll need to connect a shutter release cable to take the picture without shaking the camera.
• Volume, volume, volume. With today's digital cameras and large capacity media cards you can shot hundreds of photos during a 25 minutes show. This year during China's performance for example I shot just under 170 images or roughly 7 shots per minute. Out of those 170 I liked 30 or so and out of those 30 I really liked 6.
• Remember, when you are taking pictures of fireworks you're painting with light. Use the LCD on your digital to review what you just took and prepare for the next image.
• Try as many different ways of taking pictures as you like. Increase the length of the exposure, fiddle with the aperture, etc. Eventually you'll find the groove and if you are lucky you'll find that groove before the fireworks end.

Welcome to the Temporal Distortions blog site!

I've been an avid still and video photographer for many years now and the ability to use photography to distort time has allways intrigued me. Whether it's a 30 second still photo of a waterfall or a day in the life of my living room compressed into 3 minutes of widescreen video the results never cease to amaze me. I'll use http://www.youtube.com to host part of my collection of time lapse videos but to keep things simple and being a blog-noob I'll start simple and post some of the cooler still photos from my CoolPics archive.

Sunset Beach - Lowtide Rock Seagull
(Taken: Feb 17 2006 - 1:17 pm PT)

Surrounding the downtown core of Vancouver, aka the West End, is the Seawall. A 15 km pedestrian and bicycle walkway that now almost completly encircles what has allways been, in my opinion, one of the coolest places to live in Canada. On the western edge of the downtown core you'll find a series of named beaches running from the Burrard St. bridge (cool photo to come) to deep into Stanley Park. This photo is of the very start of the very first named beaches - Sunset Beach at low tide. A cool rock formation artfully crafted by the city engineers into the shape of a seagull in flight.

What's equally interesting is that during the summer months, usually a half hour either side of sunset, flock after flock of seagulls will head north along the beach towards the North Shore of Vancouver. The food must be better in West Vancouver or something.