January 2009
Slowly going stir crazy
Graffiti
While doing the East Side Cultural crawl last
year, I
popped out of a door at 1000 parker place and noticed the building was
covered in graffiti. The type of graffiti where the artist has
lots of time and paint - not just a single line tag, but whole
scenes. I put it on my list of things to come back to.
Being bored, I decided to come back today and take a photo:
A few things impress me. The number of colours involved is large
(>2). The areas painted are larger (generally more than a
meter high and two meters long). There are generally several
techniques at play at it appears tools are used (edging for
instance). Overall - I'm impressed.
One thing that really surprised me was how strong the moss was growing
on the walls. Perhaps this graffiti is years old (doubt it), but
the most is aggressively overgrowing the paint. I thought this
"slowly ruined" look was cool. This also gives you an idea how
important it is to have eaves to protect brick buildings.
Stanley Park
I've
lived in Vancouver for a number of years now
(actually more than any place I've lived in) so I've been to most of
the best places in the city. (I'm still looking for cool places
though!). Helen asked - once you seen all of the A list things,
and the B list things, do you go onto the C List (don't bother)
list? In my case, I decided to go back to the A list and revisit
Stanley
Park.
It's snowy out - I didn't think I would get to
see
much. I was wrong. The snow seems to have concentrated life
around the few bits of open water. The birds seemed calmer to
humans being around and were definitely looking for hand outs.
Surprisingly, I even saw a coyote walk over the snow bank and head
toward the childrens park. There is a reasons that Stanley park
is a star attraction in Vancouver.
I don't really have a "birding" lens - the big 300, 400, 500 millimeter
lenses. With wildlife this tame, I didn't need it.
VanDusen Light Show
A couple of years ago, Helen and I went to the
light
show at VanDusen. It was perhaps two weeks before
Christmas. Our seasons passes got us a lousy dollar off the
admission and the place was crowded. For much of the park you
shuffled along, person in front of you, person behind. Lots of
"Christmas" songs and themes, but the crowds and commercial sales
detracted from the Christmas Magic.
This year was a really heavy snow year (honest - some years Vancouver
get no snow at all!) and a lot of Vancouver was thin on people because
the roads were so bad. It was the last day of the light show (a few
days after New Years) with lots of snow on the ground so hoping the
crowds would be thin, I decided to take another walk around.
The only downside was that lots of lights weren't on. I suspect
that with the connections buried in snow for so long, there were
electrical issues and they couldn't find the connections to fix it.
Making Miniatures
Late in the fall, one of my coworkers did a
show of
his work and showed a photo using to tilt shift lens to get that
"miniature" effect. I happen to have a tilt shift lens, but I had
never heard of the effect. A little search on the internet and I
discovered it's actually a fairly common trick, often emulated in
software. One morning I decided to take my camera with me into
work and shot some photos in the same style.
Foggy Vancouver
It's been pretty foggy here for the last few
days so I
decided to try and make the most of it and walk around looking for
shots to highlight the fog. My first shoot was downtown.
Fog is an atmospheric effect so to be effective you really want
distance between you and your subject. Finding that kind of
composition downtown turns out to be quite hard. My best results
were from the gastown area.
Reifel
Bird Sanctuary
If you want a reliable place in Vancouver to feed ducks, go to the
Reigel Bird Sanctuary. You are assured to be swarmed by orange
footed mallards thrilled to take your corn from you. With only a
little bit of luck, you can see other species of ducks in the ponds.
If you are birding geek, you are probably here to see the
sandhill cranes. They are big birds (dwarfing the common Great
Blue Herons) and not very common. They are apparently quite
grouchy as well - you don't want to get very close.
It was a nice foggy day so I went for a walk around the perimter of the
Sanctuary. The fog gives the place a gloomy look and certainly
prevents any long distance identification. I was really hoping to
spot an owl, but I have yet to learn that skill.
I'm not generally a fan of the small birds (I'm not fast enough to
catch them), but there were so many chickadees swarming me that I
decided I should at least to capture a few snaps. These birds can
be quite photogenic (they think nothing of hanging upside down in
trees), but they do move very fast so get ready to focus and then move.
Finn Slough
Tags: bird(17), Reifel Bird Sanctuary(13), lights(13), snow(10), Vancouver(10), VanDusen(9)
From: John Harvey Photo > January 2009
From: John Harvey Photo > Blogs for 2024 to 2005 > January 2009
The photo of the bird flying out of frame to the left should be called "Exit Stage Right" since that is his right side.
phil
Saturday, October 24th, 2009 at 11:11:12
Last Modified Saturday, January 21st, 2023 at 23:47:22 Edit
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