March 2020

March is a bit of a weird month for us.  Normally we go to Asia for Spring break to visit family.  With the Corona virus outbreak we had to cancel our trip and come up with new plans for the month of March.  Some months I take nearly no photos in Vancouver in March so this year is an outlier.

I've always like Lighthouse park - short walk to see a lighthouse and nice beach access.  The only downside is that the parking lot can fill up and parking becomes a challenge.

I work in a tower downtown and I recently discovered that we have roof access after hours. It was a nice day so I brought my tripod and camera and took a time lapse during sunset.  This particular sequence (667 frames) started at 5:31pm and ended at 7:00pm.  Sunset was at 6:05pm.

 

Taking a timelapse of sunset has a challenges, a few of which I got wrong. My biggest two mistakes were allowing the tripod to shift mid sequence and allowing the aperture to get too large causing vignetting in the corners.  A few things went well here.  I started with the exposure compensation set to -2 steps so that I didn't blow out the sky.  I took photos every 8 seconds, and made sure that the shutter time didn't hit 8 seconds.  I took enough photos.

What I didn't realize is that we only had a week left of working in the office before they closed the studio and sent us all home work.

The kids have been doing Taekwondo for about a year and have progressed up to yellow belt.  Today they did their testing for orange belt.  They had to demonstrate two "Poomse" - forms that demonstrate a number of blocks and response in order.

Both kids passed to orange belt!

The bird sanctuary can be a good way to make both me and the kids happy - they enjoy feeding the birds I like to take photos.  We hit kind of a weird window - the winter owls have left but the spring babies have yet to arrive.   When you buy your bird food at the gate they ask if you want Chickadee food or duck food.  We reliably go through two bags of duck food per kid, but this time we also picked up a bag of chickadee food.  Once we walked into the park it was clear that the Redwing blackbirds were hungry because they were very close to people.  They would easily comes to kids hands and eat half a dozen seeds before flying off.
 

It wasn't warm so the cut the day short and headed into town for lunch.  They closed the Reifel bird Sanctuary a few days later to help reduce the spread of COVID19.

I tried a sunset Timelapse a week ago (just before the daylight savings change) and it had some problems.  I wanted to try again and do better.

I didn't anticipate how windy it was going to be.  It was cold, but the surprise was how much the anchored sailboats were blowing around in the wind.  The false creek ferries and aquabus's made this timelapse more interesting.   Both of the ferry companies closed a day or two later to help combat COVID 19.

For the first week of spring break we got unseasonably good weather - a whole week of clear skies instead of the usual month of rain clouds.  On a Thursday night I decided to try and take a timelapse of the airport.

The best places would be the Arthur Laing bridge.  Unfortunately, there is no sidewalk and a sign that says no pedestrians.  You couldn't even take the photos with a bike - there is a no stopping sign.  The best I could was the Oak Street Bridge, one bridge back.  This video had challenges too.  Turns out there are a lot of birds flying through this area and birds don't work well with timelapse - the look like flickering noise.  I had to blend 465 frames to make something reasonable.

It was a nice morning and I figured birding in a park still passed the social distancing rule.