Robson Street (Again With the Light)

Vancouver is a crazy beautiful town when the sun is shining.  Was in need of air at the end of the day and so shuffled off from my hotel down to Robson Street.  Interesting mix of people.  Even more interesting mix of light.  Late afternoon, hard, all sorts of contrast.

Love it.

Just walked, looked, on occasion waited, and shot.  

Flight Risk

All you have to do is look.

After you shoot for a while light can quickly become an obsession.  The completely mundane can look amazing when the light is just so.  Sitting on the plane this morning yielded one such opportunity.

We had unfortunately been called back to the gate for a reported "security issue" in the airport.  As we sat and waited I looked over at my neighbor and then scrambled for my iPhone.  Trying to be as discrete as possible I grabbed this, then processed on my phone using Snapseed.

Backlight guarantees drama, but you need to use care.  Left on its own the iPhone, and most cameras for that matter, can attempt to overexpose this image and render those blacks as gray.  We don't want that.  The contrast is the drama.  Expose for the highlight, let the rest fall to shadow.  For an iPhone that means locking the exposure by pressing and holding on the desired part of the image (in this case the window).  

In an age where HDR (high dynamic range) photography is so popular in an effort to extract every bit of detail from the shadows the drama in this type of image is completely gone.  Then it's just some guy working his smartphone.

Wheels On the Bus

This is just for fun.

Last week… actually a week to this day… actually a week to right about now… we were concluding our stay at the beautiful Westin Playa Conchal in Costa Rica and steeling ourselves for the pending bus ride to the airport in Liberia.  The drive through the towns and country was beautiful and at some point it dawned on me that I should be taking pictures.  I pulled the camera and employed the following Drive By Shooting Technique…

1. Boost the ISO and set the aperture wide open to keep my shutter speed up and hopefully freeze the scenes outdoors as we sped by,
2. Press the lens tight against the window to not only stabilize the camera but, more importantly, eliminate reflections,
3. Focus and leave it there,
4. Shoot bursts in anticipation of approaching interest (after a few I got the hang of the timing),
5. Hope that the photos may ultimately be useful to the local Policia as they try and piece together the remains of the crash as, in typical Costa Rican fashion, the driver freely ignored solid lines and approaching hills on the highway. 

Here is the approximate route we took, at least according to Google Maps…

View Larger Map

Surprisingly I ended up with a fair number of frames that I liked which evoked a photojournalism, National Geographic feel.  Hence the film-style processing.  Note the importance of that fast shutter speed - all of these are taken while on the move, some at highway speeds.  

I'm working in reverse on the chronology here but these are done.  Below is the gallery - hopefully they offer a flavour of this area of Costa Rica.  Pura Vida!

2,292

Two-thousand, two-hundred and ninety-two.

The number of photographs I sifted through yesterday following our return from beautiful Costa Rica.  Less than I expected, more than is probably reasonable.  Without the concern for developing film I don't need to worry about a cost-per-click other than incremental time spent editing.  Doesn't mean I shouldn't exercise more discipline - will have to figure that out when I inevitably "upgrade" to a newer, higher megapixel camera.  There are lots of brackets and "safety shots" in that pile, and a quarter of them have since been flushed.

That said I ended up with a bunch of shots I'm pretty happy with and will be occupying my time with post-vacay photobook creation, printing, and blogging.  Take for example this from an early morning venture onto Playa Tamarindo.  And by "venture" I mean "walk outside our hotel door onto beach".

Stay tuned.

What a Hoar

Inspired by Scott Campbell's iPhone photo of winter trees I captured this earlier today. Trees all hoar-frosty in the early morning, and the sun poked out and lit them up. Goes to show, however, that it's not the camera that makes the image. Scott's photograph kicks the s**t out of this, yet was taken with "only" an iPhone vs. a pro-level full frame DSLR that clocks in at over $2K.

Shadows in the Snow

It's a cool, crisp, clear morning here on the prairies.  Low light and burms of snow make for interesting shape and texture.  Conveniently located out of my window.

Fire & Ice

In between periods shooting at the rink yesterday this caught my eye.  Cold winter afternoon in only a moderately warmer rural arena.  Metal door frosted up.  And a nice "in case of fire" pull right beside it. If that thing actually started a fire I would have been very tempted.  Regardless, I liked the contrast and irony.