Cow Hair via ongoing January 4th, 2009 at 09:00
Being two photographs of cow hair. Live and on the cow I mean.
Really.
These are at the in-laws’ farm in eastern Saskatchewan just before
Christmas; they are
Highland cattle and
have been photographed here before. But at -31ºC or so and with a dusting of
snow, I thought they looked compelling....
Vancouver’s weather has been sufficiently bad this winter to have made the
national news a few times, and if you follow any local online voices, you may
be growing tired of our whining about the weather. Well, I’m going to
publish a few pictures of the carnage anyhow.
The problem is that the city isn’t really set up for snow, particularly
multiple feet of snow that stays on the ground for weeks, particularly where
it’s on narrow local streets with nowhere for snowplows (if we had any) to put
it. So there are cars that have been buried since sometime in the middle of
December.
Of course, people are out shoveling, day after day after day.
Some people have special snow-shoveling issues.
And today on January fourth, as the dusk settled, the situation was not
improving.
The...
Our son is attending Grade Four in a specialized program that includes a
compulsory String Instruments class, thus he’s been struggling to master
a screechy little violin since September. It’s a public school; by some
budgetary jiggery-pokery they manage to retain the services of a
nearly-full-time Strings teacher.
Last Thursday night was the Christmas Concert
featuring the fourth and fifth graders, and we had no idea what to expect.
Madness, madness, madness; the “intermediate” fifth-grade orchestra, the
“beginners” fourth-grade orchestra, and the Advanced Seventh-Grade “Irish” and
“Christmas” ensembles. This is a lot of kids sawing away in a not-very-big
school gym.
The first surprise was that the gym, packed that densely, wasn’t bad
acoustically; you could...
Walking down to the shops at the corner in the damp Pacific Northwest
dimness, a hold-out rose caught my eye. It’s beat up and soaking wet, but
this time of year you take the flowers you can get.
It’s some sort of rose.
In case it’s not obvious, I don’t feel like writing about what I’m working
on. Thus, this space gets pictures and geometrical speculation....
Being an illustrated ramble through the last three days, which I spent in
Manhattan talking about money. Some of the photos are the most painfully
obvious clichés and to make it worse fuzzy and blurry too.
Those adjectives might apply at least in part to the money business too.
First off, thanks to my friends and colleagues at Sun for setting this up
(I seriously enjoy listening to customers), and I apologize to some other New
York friends whom I’d have loved a beer or a coffee with but this particular
schedule got very jammed very quickly.
The Biz
New York’s all about money, more and more so the further south you go in
Manhattan. Just off Wall Street, something was reflecting light onto a
building.
The bankers I was talking to were mostly those who aren’t feeling...
There’s been lots of interesting forward motion in the photo-products space
recently. I thought I’d summarize for the fairly-small set of readers who
care about cameras and such, but aren’t obsessive enough to follow the
daily news
themselves. Also, I’ve tossed in some pretty winterdusk studies. Well,
darkly pretty.
The pictures are from a last-day-of-November walk around the block with my
2½-year-old daughter; her divagations and peregrinations leave lots of time
for shooting. This was about 4:30PM, which at 50ºN latitude in November, means
sunset is in progress.
Opening Shots
Want some pure lens porn?
Here ya
go.
There’s quite a bit of buzz these days about
HDR
photography, which combines multiple images to produce often-startling
results. I mostly hate the HDR shots...
There won’t be any more
Cottage Life pieces
till next year, because we spent American Thanksgiving, when you can’t get
anything done anyhow, closing the place up. We found out why they call all
those great
big trees a “rain forest”.
Mind you, we arrived towards sunset (which means 4:30PM at 50ºN this time
of year) and the mountains across the way were putting on a show.
Closing the place down isn’t a whole lot of work; the hardest part was
cleaning out the evestroughs. The trees are evergreens, but in a big blast of
wind (which you’re always going to get come autumn) they drop lots of little
bits ’n’ pieces that clog up the downpipes just as effectively as those
autumn
leaves.
Side-Trip: Being Centred
This excursion involved a warm glow of cultural immersion.
On the...
Eggplants via ongoing November 26th, 2008 at 09:00
I actually don’t like hardly anything made with eggplant, but I’m glad
other people do so that there are baskets of them at the market to take
pictures of.
This is at the Granville Island Market a month or two back.
And now the United States checks out for the rest of the week to give
thanks. Generally I’m in favor, but it means Canadian employees of US
companies are pretty paralyzed. So we’re heading off for a couple of days to
close down the cottage for winter, sans Internet. See you on the other......
Recently, the factor most limiting the quality of the pictures I take has
been focus. When you shoot a few hundred pictures, a few will always
constitute focus failures, but my fail ratio has been too high
recently. I’ve thought about it and there are a few things wrong with my
approach, but I thought I’d reassure myself that my camera and lenses were
playing nice with each other.
The nice folks over at the
Pentax-Discuss Mailing List recommended
focustestchart.com which has Nikon in
its title but the product works fine with any old camera. The idea is, you
print out their PDF, you lay out the chart page really flat, you line your
camera up, point it down 45º at the chart, and adjust your focus.
I have three everyday working prime lenses; the
40mm and
21mm “pancakes”
from...
Not unexpectedly, A&B Sound
has
gone out of business. This one hits me pretty hard. Does music-on-disc
have a future?
For a while there in the Nineties, Vancouver was more or less the world
headquarters of decent cheap music retailing, and A&B was the big dog.
I didn’t go in that often, but just about every time I did I’d drop a couple
hundred dollars, which went a long way at an average price of around
$12. The selection was fantastic, two big floors pretty well packed with
bins.
Then there was the time in 1997 that our house was broken into, and the
bad guy made off with 225 disks. The way it worked was, the insurance company
issued me a credit at A&B for any 225 CDs of my choice. This was
apparently a frequent-enough event that they had a special “insurance desk”
upstairs,...
The mixture of green and autumnal yellow produces the
illusion of a springlike colour, but in fact this is pure November.
A closer look gives a truer picture I think.
What happened was, after two or three weeks of dim dark wet days, we got
brilliant sunshine and high winds. These trees are laggards; most of ’em are
getting pretty......
That Word via ongoing November 2nd, 2008 at 09:00
Our son, now aged nine, still enjoys a bedtime story, and I enjoy reading
them. He’s perfectly literate but his reading-for-pleasure repertoire is
along the lines of Harry Potter, Asterix, and Garfield. So I aim higher:
Tolkien, Homer, Le Guin. Recently we started on
Huckleberry Finn.
Before we dove in, I spent a few minutes
on a capsule history of the slave trade, the Civil War, the Jim Crow years,
the civil rights movement, and so on. He seemed to get it; as evidence,
he picked right up on it when I pointed out that some of these storylines
extend forward to right now, as in the Obama/McCain that’s on every TV these days.
I also explained that “nigger”, which appears in every other
sentence of Huck Finn, is super-ultra-rude and just isn’t used
any more. I haven’t...
In which I once again ignore the conventional photographic
wisdom holding that shade is your friend and sunlight your enemy.
This time of year drags anyone with a camera irresistibly down
Cliché Avenue. Oh well.
Lightroom weenies: Those two yellow shots are the first time I’ve ever
found myself pulling the Clarity control in a negative direction. I
don’t have words to describe the visual effect produced by a value of -33
aside from “more like what I remember seeing”.
And hey,
that little Ricoh was having a good day,
wasn’t it?...
Of the Lost
Souls I mean. It was so much fun it shouldn’t be legal. This post is
here so I can post a funny picture of myself and meditate, once again, on
the profusion of digital recordings of, well, everything.
Here’s your host:
Photo credit: Sue, one of my band-mates.
You can also get the flavor of the event with a
Flickr
Search; I recommend following that link, some of the pix are fantastic.
And there’s
video
too—on one of the fire-show sequences, you can hear the band.
I found
one that
shows our band in action.
I’ve come to expect that everything public and quite a bit of what’s
private too is subject to capture and posting. Last night it got on my nerves
a bit, for the first time. What happened was, after the parade part and the
accompany-the-fire-show part, the...
I mean
Parade
of the Lost Souls, which happens next Saturday October 25th on Commercial
Drive here in Vancouver.
I’ve
paraded before; once
again I’ll be part of
Russell Shumsky’s West-African drum
ensemble, layin’ down the dance beats.
Assuming the weather co-operates, it’s a blast; come on out and......
On a recent weekend we took the
Seabus over to
Lonsdale Quay. The
Seabus is both romantic and reliable, a rare enough combination in this
world. On the way back, I took a photo of the big container-handling
cranes.
I don’t know what proportion of Canada’s import/export business these
things wrangle but the numbers are big; this is the busiest port in Canada (and
also on the whole West Coast of North America) measured by tonnage.
William Gibson fans: the closing scenes of Spook Country are
set right around......
London via ongoing October 14th, 2008 at 10:00
I spent four days there last week and enjoyed it. Herewith words and
pictures.
I stayed at the
London Bridge Hotel, a
perfectly decent place just at the south end of that bridge. Since
my visit last May, they’ve
upgraded the WiFi and made it free; good on ’em; plus the breakfast is
excellent.
The City
Mornings, I walked northward across the river and considered The City,
which is the part of the city at the north end of the bridge. It’s under
construction.
Well, for the moment anyhow. Times are troubled, obviously; the newspaper
headlines scream crisis and panic every morning and afternoon. I spent time
talking to finance people, Sun customers, worried people but not the names you’re
seeing in those panicky headlines.
London is about money and it’s been about money for a...
Shells via ongoing October 12th, 2008 at 10:00
Being a photo of some jetsam on Vancouver’s Point Grey foreshore.
This morning the boy was snuffly and under the weather but the sun was out,
a gift that in mid-October should not be disrespected. So I bundled the little
girl into something warm and we visited the beach, she to splash (in gumboots)
and climb, I to soak it in and take a few......
There are still a lot of green leaves left, but we’re definitely in
early-autumn mode. Check out these many shades of yellow.
These are the little Ricoh at work. Because it was in my pocket when I
walked by the leaves. Hard to refute that......
I’ve got a touch o’ them old autumnal-financial-meltdown blues, so I’ll
post a couple of garden shots as therapy.
Our September was mostly bright and pleasing, but the rain’s teeth are now
firmly set into the first week of October. The leaves are losing
their green; dusk has arrived by the kids’ bedtime and is marching
back the clock alarmingly fast.
And as the evenings darken, the wolves of financial doom are
howling closer and closer around our circle of firelight. My personal guess
is that the downturn is less shattering but lasts longer than most people
think; still, a whole lot of us are in for some tough times, no doubt
about it.
So let’s look at some sunny pictures.
Real photographers regard sunlight, with its brutally harsh
contrasts and risks of blowout or haze,...
by Werner Patels Canadians are inching towards the big election day on October 14, although most voters in this country are glued to their TV sets watching the terrible financial debacle in the United States unfold. One newspaper columnist has suggested that the Canadian election should be suspended until it can generate as much momentum and interest as the race south of the border. This is missing the point entirely, because the Canadian landscape is about to be altered in a very big way for a long time to come. The U.S. race for the White House is of...
Canon’s much-ballyhooed but
not
universally welcomed 5D Mark II also (and this is a new thing for SLRs)
operates as a high-def videocam. There are two videos linked from
The
Online Photographer and they are mind-bogglingly, jaw-droppingly
beautiful. But it won’t work for you. The pictures you take with this camera
will almost certainly look great with little effort, while your videos will
require huge effort and probably still end up lousy.
Skill
The first reason they’ll look lousy is because there’s a whole lot of skill
and practice that goes into making good video, and most of us don’t have it.
You can get it, sure, and who knows, you might even turn out to have some
talent, but count on months of work to get your chops down. Still, that’s not
the real problem.
Tools
A...
It's been a long time since truer words have been spoken by a Canadian politician. Stephen Harper said, speaking of his arts cuts and his tougher crime measures, that it is ordinary Canadians who matter, and not those who populate ivory towers. Criminologists who say that tougher sentences for violent young offenders, and publishing their names, won't do anything to fight crime are downright insane. Well, those criminologists are (a) lefties and (b) have no clue about reality. Those "scholars" are a waste of space, as is all of their research. It is partisan, biased rubbish. Hey, how about...
Driving via ongoing September 19th, 2008 at 10:00
Like most people on the left half of the New World, driving has informed
and constrained and enriched my adult life. I’ve enjoyed it. Indications are
that mine will be one of the last drive-everywhere generations. The shape the
tribe settles into may be more pleasing, and strengthening local
culture is a fine thing, but the loss of the
time-behind-the-wheel, with the music playing, going places, well, it’s
sad.
One time years ago I even wrote a terribly long (pages and pages) poem
about driving; here’s the beginning:
To walk is best of course. And I
would rather drive than fly. Would turn
Earth's curve beneath my tires. Would burn
Earth's blackened past in engine fires;
burn time that space is measured by
from edge of map to edge of sky.
Now? Now, we’re looking at $100...
It’s on
Main Street
near 14th Ave. They make a damn fine chicken
Shawarma.
The place is a little odd inside; apparently once a French bistro,
the shift to Middle Eastern cuisine seems not to have involved a redesign.
But it’s cheery and comfy and lets you be part of the Main Street scene.
Hey, while writing this, I learned that the dude who makes the awesome
lunches is “Mori” Momenzadeh Tameh and
is little political issue all by
himeself.
Anyhow, you can’t beat it for a quick tasty nutritious bite on that part of
Main; which is saying something given the number of nearby......
The Horror via ongoing September 13th, 2008 at 10:00
Being a photo of a wasps’ nest.
The wasps are dead.
I have a visceral horror of bugs, extending to a dislike of most
arthropods; I don’t really like crab or lobster I suspect partly because of
the mental effort in not being revolted by their appearance on the
table-top.
We have an old (1919) wooden house with lots of big botanicals; most
summers we’ve had to take out a nest or two, because the wasps are a major
irritant when you’re trying to eat on the porch. These days
extermination is easy and hands-off; you wait till dusk when they go to
bed, squirt the poison in the entrance, and the wasps never wake up.
A few years ago we were renovating a bathroom.
I remember like yesterday when Jack, the towering
burly gentle Polish plumber/carpenter, came shooting out, face pale with...
Being three photographs of a lonely old rose.
In June of 2004 I said
I’ll try again next
year, and I did too but this is an elusive target; follow that link
to read why. This year, what with the cool spring, it
didn’t bloom till September.
I have to say, the
GX100 is a wonderful
little macro box, but even in the clouds this little guy’s hyperintense
off-pinks overloaded it some, and I had to resort to fairly intense
Lightrooming to make the
picture look like what I......
Being a photo of a sunlit salad at the
restaurant in the
Teahouse in Vancouver’s
Stanley Park.
It was a fairly standard tomato-mozz salad, and not bad at all if not quite
up to the presentation. The same could be said of the whole meal but then the
presentation, on the plate and especially out the windows at sunset, is beyond
fantastic, so that’s very weak......