Look where you want to go, not where you are

Finally... a new post!
 
My longest interlude by far - sorry for the lack of posts. I had been almost completely lacking in motivation and inspiration for the past couple of months. I was almost beginning to wonder if I'd ever get it back. I suppose I shouldn't get too far ahead of myself though - after all, I've only just had the one day today - but it felt good to be out with the camera again shooting something different and challenging.

I spent much of the day out at the Greg Moore Raceway in Chilliwack, where I'd been invited by this guy (his name is Sam Pat - a colleague from work). I had no idea there was so much variety to "mini-bike" racing - there are all sorts of classes (and vehicles). I heard any number of racers today talk about how if you go down (wipe out) it's no big deal and doesn't really hurt. Given the number of crashes and the fact that everyone seemed to have walked away from them I suppose they were telling the truth, but it did seem to me that they were in fact going pretty fast nevertheless.

To be fair, many of the crashes seemed to be rain-related (it rained a fair bit for a while) even though the experienced guys talked about how, after the heavy downpour the wet track (as opposed to damp) would actually be safer and have better traction.

I'll probably post a couple of more pictures from today over the next week or so. Then I hope to be shooting real motorbike (as opposed to mini) racing on Canada Day, and I've also got 6 weeks of holidays coming up and hope to get back into the swing of things then.

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Brick/Red

Thought I'd post something a little different. There's a guy in Toronto who often posts shots like this, and generally I enjoy them. I've tried taking similar shots myself, but I'm usually disappointed with the result.

This is a little better than usual for me. I needed to do a bit of post-processing clean-up, but otherwise things came out pretty much as I'd hoped when I took the shot.

In case you're wondering, it's the back of a couple of buildings out at Steveston. The brick building on the left is kind of a rarety for the greater Vancouver area, brick just isn't used much for buildings around here, so when I saw it (and it was accessible) I knew I had to take a picture. Then I noticed the contrasting painted building beside it and decided it had to be in the picture too.

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Finally, a New Post!

Sorry for the extra long interval between posts. Ya, I know that I'm not that regular with the posts in the first place, but this time my computer was dead for almost 3 weeks so I couldn't process anything. I'd put off fixing it for most of that time as I was anticipating having to do a full Windows re-install and rebuild and that was just much more of a job than I wanted to tackle. I finally tried a boot-repair, and that seems to have solved most of the problems and took only one night. In the end I lost one of my six hard drives, but it was quite old and had nothing critical on it; I guess things could have been worse.

Anyway, last weekend I went up to Squamish with Dennis, a friend and fellow photographer from work whom I had been bugging to go out to shoot with for a very long time. We had a great day, spent the morning at the train museum and then in the afternoon we finally found "The Spit" were the kite surfers hang out (quite literally, as it turns out). I still haven't started working on any of the kite surfing shots yet, but have had a go at the best-of of the train museum pics. This shot was one of the first of the day, and I'm quite happy with it. Let me know what you think of it.

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300

No, this is not Sparta... This is, in fact, my 300th post since I started this blog. Not the 300th picture mind you, since some of my posts have had more that one picture (and only one, to my recollection, didn't have a picture). Anyway, I apologize for the long lag between posts but I was hoping to have something more unique for the occasion but that just hasn't come together yet. It's a great idea, and I'm sure it'll show up here eventually but I've decided in the meantime not to hold things up anymore. Which means that maybe I'll get back to posting a little more often now.

As for this shot, I'm pretty happy with the final result. I think is something to do with the textures on the side of the barge, or the colours or heck, I don't know, maybe there's some symbolism in the hand/foot holds going up the side... whatever it is, it works for me. Does it work for you?

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Red/Light

I didn't shoot anything new this past weekend, though I did drive around for a while looking for inspiration. I finally gave up and decided to try again on Tuesday, being a day off work and all. Tuesday rolled around and it was more lousy weather... or was it? I'd decided to go back to the Point Atkinson Light House, something I'd been meaning to do for quite a while. On the drive there going over the Granville bridge the downtown area was all shrouded with low lying rain clouds - the type that're more mist than rain - and looking very atmospheric. It was almost tempting enough to stop the car on the bridge to get a shot, but no, that wouldn't have been a good idea so I continued on my way to Lighthouse Park in West Vancouver with the hope that I'd find the same conditions there.

Of course by the time I got there the low clouds had lifted and changed to a more solid rain so that I had neither the interesting misty backdrop/surroundings nor the lighter precipitation to deal with. The first shots were a bit of a challenge, trying to keep the camera dry while lining up the shot from a bit of rock sticking out into the water to the east of the lighthouse. This is not one of those pictures. I finally gave up trying to get anything worthwhile from that vantage point and re-packed my equipment so that I could work my way up back up the hill to get try some shots from the north. While better, they were still not very interesting, but at least the rain was beginning to let up. Then I climbed the last little hill to get to the top viewing point, which is where I took this shot.

It's not a particularly great shot either; I'm sure it could benefit from some additional processing, but for the life of me I just can't think of what else to do with it and I don't have anthing else that's any better so it's what we're stuck with.

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Berries, Moss, and Lichen

I haven't shot anything new in the past week, so I'm going to have to pull out a few more from Nanaimo.

This one came out better than I'd expected - the composition just seems to work for me, though I can think of no reason to justify why this is so.

Maybe it's just the red berries...

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Red Ford

It's been weeks since my last post... again. Sorry about that. Between uninspiring weather and exhaustion from work I haven't been out much with the camera. I did manage a bit of a walk when it brightened up a little on Sunday evening, when I came across this old beauty. Though how they can afford to drive it is a mystery, with an old gas-guzzling V8.
In the background you can see the cost of gas - and that's the lower "evening" price. Earlier in the day it was over $1.30/liter. Yep, the gas company's response to the nationwide news story about how much they're gouging people for gas (Vancouver came out on top at 27 cents/liter of gouge) was to raise the price by another 5 cents!

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