Wreck in Fog #2

This is an alternative shot of the wreck on the Fraser: this time it was a longer exposure and flash was used to light up the fog rather than allowing it to be cancelled out by the long exposure. The vignetting was added in post-production.

This isn't the type of shot I have typically liked in that past - a year ago I wouldn't have considered posting it at all. I do, however, like it, so I guess you can chalk it up to changing tastes as I develop as a photographer.

Oh, and if you're wondering about the change to this blog, please see my previous post for a bit more information.

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Wreck in Fog

Quite some time ago I started looking at new templates for this blog. I wanted something clean and neat, something to feature the photography and clean out a lot of the other stuff on my site. Not that I didn't like the features provided by some of that stuff, but I did find much of it pretty distracting. And man, was I tired of the blue colours!

Welcome to my new blog design.

It took quite a while to get some parts of it to work properly on my test site, in fact I gave up on it twice. But now things are looking better so I decided it was time to port it over. I will probably still tweak it a bit, certainly the colours aren't quite right yet, but most of the extra clutter is probably gone for good. Hope you like the change.

As for this photo

It was taken on Christmas evening, in the very last of the day's light, when it was really foggy. It's the same wreck that I posted back in the summer, just different conditions. I didn't actually think I'd gotten anything that I liked from this mini shoot so I didn't get around to downloading the pictures from my camera until the other day. Turns out there were two shots that I liked - they're quite different - and, due to a lack of any other new material, the other shot just might get posted as well.

As regards the complete absence of any new material for such a phenomenally long time, all I can say is sometimes you hit a dry spell... Now that I've finally updated the blog layout and cleaned the old pictures off the camera maybe I'll get out a little bit more and get back to posting more regularly. Or not. We'll have to see how it goes. My timing sucks a bit since I have to work this coming weekend, so renewed motivation won't be much of a factor, but we can all hope.

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Halloween Moon

A little earlier in the evening there was a bit of cloud about, making the view of the moon particularly appropriate for Halloween. In fact, it was surrounded/partially obscured by cloud up to about 2 minutes before I had the camera set up to shoot... then not a cloud in the sky (or at least nowhere near the moon).

Still, It's not a bad shot, though I'll admit that it took quite a few tries to get this result.

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Post-Sunset Sunday

One of the great things about the Canon 5D (and it's successor, the 5D mark II) is the phenomenally low ISO available - 50. Not perhaps the setting most people would think of when taking a night shot, but it's what I used for this one nevertheless. Absolutely incredibly smooth image with fantastic detail - and no detectable grain whatsoever.

Most people tend to be impatient and want their shot done as quickly as possible. But once you've set up on the tripod for a long exposure, why not make the most of it and use the lowest ISO available?...

Well, the longer the exposure, the more you have to worry about some rogue wind puffing by, or in this case, a wave hitting the pier, or some stranger deciding to walk out on the pier while in the middle of the exposure. Any of these would have created vibrations on the pier, which would have been transfered through the tripod to the camera, which would leave everything looking at best, unsharp, and at worst an unrecognizable blur.

This is a 25 second exposure, which came out remarkably well considering in addition to the aforementioned problems I had another guy standing beside me, a fellow photographer with no gear who just stopped to chat, and we both basically had to hold our breaths and stand completely still until the shutter had closed.

Oh. This is the Knight St. bridge, of course, looking west. The bright line along the top of the bridge is from the headlights of cars driving at 80Kmph across it. I have no idea what the two dark spots are in the foreground of the image.

I've posted a larger version (click on the picture) than usual so that you can get a bit better of an idea of how clear the full-size image is.

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Steveston Boardwalk

I seem to have been somewhat distracted the past week or so, even though there were other pictures, like this one, from Steveston that are worth posting.

Actually, I only started working on this one tonight. After a little playing around with it I thought I'd try a monochrome treatment and voilá, perfect. Then I did the necessary things to create a web-ready version and it lost something in the fine detail in the darker areas down near the front. What started out to be a 'quickie' edit turned into a protracted attempt to get it to look the same in sRGB as it did in AdobeRGB, something I didn't think would be that hard since it's black and white. I mean, how different can these two 'colour' spaces be when there's no colour?

In the end, no luck. You'll have to take my word for it that although fairly subtle, the differences make this version something less than it should be. Oh well, more to learn. In the meantime, I still think it makes for an interesting black and white image.

Oh. I should mention that this was taken at about 5:45 in the evening and although it wasn't really all that cold out, it was virtually deserted. I don't know how the merchants/restaurants survive.

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Steveston after Sunset

Just a quick post - thought I better get something up after having had a 4-day long weekend. Back to work in the morning and actually looking forward to it, I need the rest.

This was taken last evening at Steveston. I'm not sure just how it'll look on other monitors as my configuration has changed at home and I've spent most of my time the last couple of days trying to get things re-calibrated (a real up-hill battle). It didn't occur to me that changing my video card would mean so much work, fiddling, and on-line research for help.

Anyway, about this picture... it has been colour-corrected to remove the awful yellow from the bright sodium lights around the pier, with some extra work required on the posts in the foreground. Not sure about the 'truth' of the resulting colour, but true or not, I kind of like it (again, assuming that I've managed to get my monitor reasonably calibrated and what I'm seeing here is what others will see on their monitors...). I haven't tried to print anything yet - kind of afraid that my calibration will be off and prints will be horrible again.

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Vancouver's West End, By Night

When I was down at Vanier Park on Sunday I ended up staying somewhat longer than I'd first intended then let it drag on a little longer and longer...

Then the cold got to me - very nippy down by the water - and I packed it in for the day, specially as I hadn't really dressed for it and 4 hours out in the damp chill was enough. But I did stay long enough for night to fully develop, and got this shot (114 seconds, f/16, ISO 50, EF 17-40@18mm) from almost the same vantage point as this shot posted a little over a year ago. I don't normally mention the technical specs as I usually can't be bothered to add them in manually, and blogger doesn't do it automatically - in fact it appears to strip the exif info from pictures at upload. Anyway, I thought I'd include them with this shot, just in case anyone was wondering what settings I'd used.

I remember when I posted that other shot that it got very favorable comments, but to me at least, it pales when compared to this (I've just done a side-by-side of them). Better gear, a lot more knowledge, and more processing skill (though to be honest, this one required very little compared to the earlier shot) are all starting to come together.

As a special treat, the larger version you get when you click on a picture is the full 1600 pixels wide that Blogger allows.

As always, I invite comments. Not just from Raechel and Alison (my faithful comment contributors!), everyone is welcome to leave a comment, good or bad, as long as it's about the picture.

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Christmas Morning #2

Continuing on from yesterday...

As I headed back south on the bridge I discovered that, near the center of the bridge on the east side, there is a stairwell that leads down to the south bank of False Creek, where I came across this nearly perfect reflection.

On a technical note, both this shot and yesterday's have been colour-corrected to remove the orange-red glow that is a result of the sodium-vapour lamps used to light this (and almost every other) city. I have a feeling that some of the effort this required will have been wasted, as many computer monitors just won't be able to display the subtleties of colour and contrast. Oh well. Looks good on my monitor!

Following this shot, I worked my way back to my car, arriving about a minute before the return of the rain. My time away from the car had been about an hour, with only a drop of two of rain throughout. Perfect! The next hour would not be so great...

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Christmas Morning #1

I spent a significant portion of Christmas day - starting very early (5:00 a.m.) in the morning - out and about looking for things to shoot. All in all not a great success, but I've a few images that I'll be sharing here.

I'd intended to start out with some wanderings downtown but when I got there I was totally uninspired; there were far too many people around considering the time and day, and it was raining quite a bit to boot. After a bit of a circuit through the business area, Chinatown/East Side and along the south-east side of False Creek, I ended up at the south end of the Cambie bridge.

It had conveniently stopped raining at this point so I finally parked the car and set out across the bridge on foot with my gear. I was, of course, on the wrong side of the bridge to capture this image, so I had to walk all the way across to the downtown end in order to get to the east side of the bridge and the proper vantage point for this shot.

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Dingy and Dock

Thought I'd try to get some last-light-of-the-day pictures down at Vanier Park this evening. Unfortunately, due to traffic and failing to allow for the correct time of sunset, I didn't get there on time. It was also partly due to the low cloud over Georgia Straight which blocked out the best of the last part of the sun.
As I had nothing better planned for the evening I hung around and practiced my night-shooting. It was the first time I'd done any (reasonably) long exposures, something I'd been meaning to try out for a while. This one was 109 seconds, and while the sky is a little brighter than I'd prefer, I'm fairly happy with it for a number of reasons:
• It captures the light on the dock and small boats in the foreground very nicely,
• Almost everything is in focus and clear. The main exception is the large boat (the Sea Lion), which moved somewhat over the almost two minutes,
• I like the balance of the composition with the dock and boats in the foreground and the West End in the background.

Oh, and Corwin, if you look really closely at the stern of the dingy, you can just make out a blurry "something" standing on the transom. It's yet another Heron... And no, I'm not going to buy those double-headed sharpies so that you can draw this one :)

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