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......
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?...
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,...
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......
Being another photograph of
that same sunset, once
again without benefit of clouds, this time with the help of an aluminium
shed.
I confess to having taken the exposure down quite a bit in shameless
pursuit of extra......
Being a photo of a cluster of small white flowers against a leafy
backdrop.
I’ve started cropping a lot of pictures into a 1:1, i.e. square, shape.
It’s probably just a phase I’m going......
Treeset via ongoing September 6th, 2008 at 10:00
Being a photo of the sun approaching the horizon with no clouds
to serve as a canvas for its setting rays. But there’s a little tree.
I went out to take pictures of the sunset and it just doesn’t work right
without clouds. Still, I got any number of ridiculously-dramatic shots of the
ripe prairie grasses in sideways light. I’ll run one or......
Horizon via ongoing September 5th, 2008 at 10:00
Being a photograph of a Saskatchewan hayfield and a cloudy sky.
This taken within a couple of minutes of that shot of the
storm-beset barn. Damn,
it was......
Crossings via ongoing September 4th, 2008 at 10:00
Being a photo of a nice modern construction site on Vancouver’s
Main
Street.
When I say “nice” and “modern” above, that’s because it stands out.
I’ve written before about Main Street’s lovable funky grubbiness standing in
the inevitable path of gentrification. As the old and mostly never-were-very-good
buildings wear down and out, they are being replaced ad-hoc.
I don’t know what this one’s going to be, but the quality of the
concrete-and-steel building process is remarkable.
I have cranked the colour saturation a little but only a little, to bring
back the rather striking blue tinge of whatever finish is on the steel......
Being a photo of the sun’s rays spilling over the mountains onto
Howe Sound, taken from a
boat pulling out of
Horseshoe Bay.
There seem to be a lot of random pretty-decent nature shots in the August
folder; I’ll run ’em till I run out, because the Internet can’t have too......
Turning via ongoing August 31st, 2008 at 10:00
We left summery August Vancouver for a week on the prairies, where
blazing heat and lashing storms alternated, thunder often in
the distance.
Here are two photos of a small barn illustrating the heat blazing and
the storm lashing.
We came home to driving rain and an August night so chilly
we turned on the furnace. The sun’s come back, but right now, as
September shuffles in, we’re going around a corner and you can’t not feel it.
The
light, especially in the earlier-and-earlier evenings, has turned; the smells
have turned; the wind has turned. The leaves? No, they haven’t yet, but
they’re getting ready to; with all the other changes my eye’s startled every
time it looks up and sees green, green,......
I’ve always had a weakness for cowboy fashion, and when we visit
Saskatchewan, we always drop by the big
Cowtown store in Regina to do our
bit for the
Prairie economy, not that it needs it what with grains and potash and
petroleum all booming.
The store is pretty big, but it’s the smallest of the buildings clustered
around the
Masterfeeds parking lot.
Masterfeeds actually owns & operates Cowtown, and downstairs there’s
more animal food than anything else, along with a weird assortment of exotic
pets; you can pick up a tarantula or chameleon along with your horse chow.
Upstairs though, it’s Western Wear.
I like denim and checks and plaids and, and I’ve never understood why you’d
want buttons on a shirt when you can have pearl- or black-fronted snaps.
Jeans
There’s a rule...
That’s what it says on the Saskatchewan license plates: Land of Living
Skies. We spent a few days out there earlier this month and the
plates pretty well have it. if you’re a photographer, you’ll find yourself
pointing the camera up quite a bit of the time.
I went out for a walk in the fields with a boy and a dog. Initially it
looked a bit threatening, but then I realized that depends which way you look
and anyhow changes every few seconds.
4:51:09 PM.
4:51:32 PM.
4:59:54 PM.
5:01:15 PM.
5:02:14 PM.
The farm is near
Stockholm,
Saskatchewan. My apologies for the
ongoing-standard 1024-pixel-wide “full-size”
presentation you get when you click on them, I should really arrange that to
be larger for pictures which reward......
My son is an avid soccer player, has been in an organized league for four
years now. Vancouver has a team, the
Whitecaps, in the
USL, one down from
MLS. As a promotion, the boy’s team was
invited to a match, some of them to march out with the players, some to play
a mini-game at half-time. I went along and took the camera.
The Whitecaps draw four or five thousand to
Swangard Stadium;
there are stands only on one side; the other has trees, very pleasing to
the eye.
Here’s a shot from the kids’ game at half-time.
I’d actually rather take pictures of the people in the stands than the
players; which meant shooting across the field.
Still, the players’ faces are interesting too.
And I have to say, the game was damn entertaining. The visitors took two
leads and Vancouver...
Most of these Cottage Life posts are going to be on the cynical side; with
luck, good for a laugh or two. But there is a reason we do this, and here it
is. With a furniture recommendation.
They say “peace and quiet” but you can have a whole lot of peace even with
background noise. What with the waves, and the big trees speaking the wind,
no oceanfront is never really silent. And we are after all less than an hour
from Vancouver; the body of water we face on is best seen in the map at the
bottom of the
water taxi schedule;
there is never a daytime moment when the view is boat-free; and on a busy
holiday weekend, it can be noisier than our central-Vancouver
neighborhood.
But still, the noise is mostly natural and mostly pleasant to the
ear, and does not have the urban...
July was an excellent month, almost all sunshine. My flower-photo mojo had
pretty well run dry, but then out walking after a shower, there were all these
droplet-laden blossoms and there I was shooting away.
First, wilting roses, hydrangeas behind.
Now the hydrangeas take the stage. They come mostly in pink and
blue; the
colour used to depend, on hears, on soil chemistry, but now the breeders have
done their work and you can get a bush of whatever colour.
The red blurs in the background are crocosmia blossoms; in the wet
foreground are its leaves.
Finally, a pale rose blossom.
I enjoyed the rain; but the weekend will be dry, they say. Glad of that......
Screwdrivers are important. Really; you just can’t do anything without
them. And it turns out that lots are lots better than just a few. This is
about that. Illustrated.
We’re not home-improvement fanatics but we’re up to quite a few of the
basics, and any time you’re going to fix anything, screwing is involved.
After a decade of marriage and home ownership, we had three or four different
multi-bit screwdrivers. Then, not too long ago, I was trying to fix something
complicatedly three-dimensional, and the blue clouds of profanity were
starting to threaten the children’s moral development. Not too long after,
Lauren brought this home:
Let me tell you, this is a big win. A multi-bit screwdriver is damn
versatile, but at the end of the day, it’s just not a good...
We bought our house in 1997 and were expecting our first child in
mid-1999. This caused us to launch a pretty major Home Improvement project,
which was painful but successful; herewith a small
photo-essay.
The house needed work but was basically OK. The back yard was a problem;
mostly occupied by a horrible tumbledown garage that you couldn’t park in
because it had big metal spikes coming up out of the floor.
The first picture is looking in from the
back alley, the second from
the inside.
These were taken with my first-ever 640x480 digicam.
The problem was, we were only a year or so way from having a toddler, and
this was no place to toddle. So, we Solved The Problem.
Boy, that was quite an event; all the neighbors came out and hung around to
watch the garage’s demise. It...
Herewith some illustrated take-aways from
OSCON 2008;
I enjoyed it (and, I think, benefited from it) as much as any conference in
recent years.
MySQL
I was unfortunately traveling and overcommitted during the Sun-MySQL
integration process, so didn’t get to play much, and in fact hadn’t met a lot
of the people. The Wednesday-morning keynote session had a three-way
conversation, Tim O’Reilly hosting MySQL’s
Monty Widenius and
Brian Aker.
Brian Aker, Monty Widenius, Tim O’Reilly.
I had a long talk with Brian, still really haven’t gotten to know Monty. I
get the feeling that the Sun deal has liberated a few core MySQL engineering
impulses that were not expressible in the context of an IPO-bound startup.
The Drizzle project is a no-brainer for a bunch of reasons, not all of...
There’s nothing wrong with kids having some weeks of flat time in summer
with an empty schedule; they’ll look back on those days fondly. There’s also
nothing wrong with the odd soccer or basketball camp. I rather enjoy dropping
the boy off at these and watching the other parents, who
appear, pre-9-AM on a weekday, in a remarkable variety of apparel and
presentations. I caught one of my recent faves for this summer day’s photo.
This woman was dressed for work and I thought her shoes extremely superior;
she was fearless striking off across the soft grass in them, too. It seemed
poetic justice somehow that she got caught up in shoe......
We spend a lot of time on our back porch this time of year. Unfortunately,
the beautiful plum tree that kept the setting sun from boiling our eyeballs
died, and until the replacement gets big enough, we’ve been hoisting bedsheets
on the west end of the porch roof at suppertime. Which can make for some interesting
shadowplay, as in the Summer Picture for today.
Actually, just this afternoon Lauren ran out of patience and put up a nice
thick patterned curtain on real actual......
Today’s summer picture is of some of the fireworks after the
ball game featured
yesterday. They weren’t big-league, but it isn’t a big-league park, so
you get to sit pretty close to them.
Before the game I went looking for advice on photographing fireworks and
it seems that it’s all a matter of taste, except for one thing: use a tripod.
For what it’s worth, these are with the ordinary 40mm prime lens at f8
and using the “B” setting to keep the shutter open for quite a while. Next
time I’ll try shooting with a
wider-angle......