This photo might not be the most interesting or best technical etc, but I thought it would be neat to show people how the Venetian, in Las Vegas, has a canal that winds its way through it. You can even take a Gondola ride, which I am sure can be a romantic thing to do. Granted, the Venice canals would be more spectacular. It is amazing how much detail these hotels on the Vegas Strip tend to have. If you have never been to Vegas, you need to go at least once in your life time. If you have been to Vegas, where did you stay and what was your favourite part of your trip?

I haven’t done a stitch in a while, but I wanted to post something on the sunny side of things. The weather here in Vancouver is a bit wet (when isn’t it?) so I thought perhaps a sunny scene might help brighten up your day!

The above photo is approximately 10 photos shot from left to right and then stitched together in AutoStitch and then processed in Lightroom. It isn’t perfect (hand-held) and perhaps I should have stitched together portrait orientated shots as opposed to landscape shots, but I like how it turned out.

So behind me (the camera) is the Bellagio (the fountains in front). To the left is the Flamingo, then followed by Bally’s and Paris. Then to the right is Planet Hollywood.

With all of that in mind, the weather here in Vancouver has been interesting. In fact, it has been snowing a lot on our North Shore Mountains, which has allowed places such as Cypress Mountain to open earlier than any other year in its history. As for life in White Rock, the weather systems that come off the ocean and through the San Juan islands is pretty cool. I love being able to look out our living room window and seeing the following:

Pretty cool eh?

Of course, there is always our neighbour’s pool. Even though it has been about 10 degrees out, the pool still looks inviting. Too bad our neighbour doesn’t keep the pool heated during the winter. I would love to go for a swim as the sun sets in the west.

On The Blog Front

I am behind on some posts (when am I not?), and hopefully I can find time to add a bit more something something for you to read.

There is also the Whistler/Blackcomb tweetup happening November 26th, which I will be heading out to attend. I attended the first one and met some awesome people! Though, due to school last year and the date they picked, I missed the second one. I will be there through for the 3rd Annual Tweetup at the Garibaldi Lift Co. (GLC) as it is on a Saturday! If I get there early enough, I’ll definitely wander around the village with my camera, not sure if I’ll head up the mountain though, opening day will be 2 days before.

Since Robyn is in New York with one of her best friends, she has my main SDHC memory card. I had to hunt around to see if I had any other memory cards for my Canon XSi. Luckily, I still have my 1 GB SD card that came with my little point and shoot (the camera Robyn is using on her trip). Now typically my 16GB SDHC card can take like 500 photos on my XSi, a 1GB card can take about 50. So I had to be a bit less, shutter happy.

Yesterday, I had to fix my home server. It crashed horribly so I rebuilt it from pieces of another computer. It ended up being a dual-core AMD Athlon64, with 2GB of RAM, 1TB hard drive etc etc. My plans are to re-create a file server to store music and photos. Anyway, since I’ve been hardcore coding and stressing out, I thought I should get away from the computer and do something that always seems to relax me; a photo walk.

Actually, as I was walking along the beach, I heard the familiar call of a Loon. Unfortunately, Loons still seem to evade me and I have yet to get close enough to take a some-what decent photo of one. It’s my next bird to capture with my camera though! I’ll be excited the day I can get close enough to take a decent photo of one.

Of course, I had to try an HDR of the pier. No photowalk for me is complete unless I’ve tried to do a hand-held multiple-exposure HDR.

As I was walking back home, I noticed there was a bald eagle on the beach. This guy wasn’t as friendly as others and flew away before I could get close enough to try and photograph him.

It was an enjoyable little walk. I wish I didn’t have to get back to doing school work. I want to just have 1 day of not doing any school-based things.

Even though the Celebration of Lights was last night, I was one Vancouverite (can I still call myself one?) that did not want to go see them. Instead, I headed straight to VanDusen Gardens after work as I waited for Robyn to finish her shift.

I brought a nice little dinner with me and sat on a bench underneath a weeping willow tree. Pretty relaxing actually. After I was done with my sandwich I started my walk around the garden itself. If you have never been to VanDusen I do recommend going, even if it’s once. There are a variety of things to see as you walk around the grounds. There is even a waterfall (pictured above) located towards the west side of the grounds too. I even got to watch a couple of hawks fly from tree to tree in search of squirrels.

Technical Aspects of the Photo

For those who are curious about the photo itself, well it’s not too difficult, but it’s not perfect either, or at least not as good as I would like it.

There are a couple benches in front of the waterfall and since I did not have my tripod with me, I used the back railing to best steady my camera. At first I just did a couple of single long-shutter exposures. Then I got to thinking, why not try some HDR shots. I tried to steady the camera on the rail as best as I could and do a 5-exposure HDR. That didn’t turn out so well as I couldn’t keep the camera steady enough for a 3sec+ shot (-1,-1,0,+1,+2). I settled for doing a regular 3-exposure HDR (above photo) (-2,0,+2) and it didn’t turn out too bad. I definitely want to bring  tripod with me next.

When I try and do waterfall shots, I try and keep the aperture as large as I can (also keep ISO low) so that it lets in less light in order to get a much slower shutter speed (in the seconds sometimes). This helps produce that cottony-silk water effect that make the waterfall photos look so much better. Of course when you go down below 1/50th for a shutter speed, you’ll want to use a tripod. Yes, some people can hand-hold slower speeds, but it’s easier to just bring a tripod.

Yesterday (July 267th, 2011) the Canadian Airforce Snowbirds put on a nice demonstration out in White Rock, BC. This annual event is put on for the Children with Intestinal and Liver Disorders Foundation (C.H.I.L.D) and thousands of people flock to the beach to watch the spectacular display.

Instead of braving the mass of people down on the beach of White Rock, we stayed on the balcony, had some good BBQ food and were entertained by the aerobatic aircraft.  As per usual, it was a good show.

The weather hasn’t been the nicest here in the Metro Vancouver area. If you were a tourist visiting our little city, you wouldn’t think you were visiting us during the Summer season. The above photos were taken this past Sunday out along the White Rock Pier. A couple of seagulls were pestering the eagle but it seems eagles don’t really care for the smaller birds as I have seen attack and kill them.

One thing I noticed about living out in White Rock is the amount of Bald Eagles that seemt to call the area home. They don’t seem to care for the human presence either as I have now been able to get relatively close to a couple of them (within 10 feet). One one particular walk a few weeks ago, Robyn and I watched two eagles flying around close to the shoreline. I have heard that Boundary Bay is also a good place to check out a variety of different birds such as bald eagles, variety of water fowl and other little raptors like hawks.  Hopefully one day soon we’ll have some time off togethe and we can go explore more of the area.

The event was held July 15th, 16th and 17th which would be the Friday, Saturday and Sunday. With being at work on Friday, and busy on Saturday I managed to only catch a glimpse of it on Sunday during the Peace Arch News Road Race. At least the weather tried to play nice on Sunday leaving the roads dry.

Here are a few photos from the race on Sunday. All taken with my Canon XSi and the EF 75-300mm f4-5.6 USM III lens.

If you have ever been to White Rock, you’ll know how difficult this bike race can be. The inclines (hills) are insane! It’a amazing that these atheletes can ride up and down and all around them actually. I would think some crazy endurance would be needed for this race (and leg strength).

One thing I like looking at are statistics of my photography. I know some people out there also like to see what sort of numbers can be obtained when looking at information regarding theirs and other people’s photography as well.

One neat thing about Adobe Lightroom, is that you can run filters against your catalogues. If you’re like me and create a catalogue for each year (it’s the way I do it anyway) you can filter the display based on the embedded meta data within the photos. In this particular case, I filtered based on camera body and lens type. I would like to make mention, I am no way of graphic genius so my little graphic above is quite… simple looking.

So there you have it, I took just a little over 2000 photos in the 2010 year. This lower number can probably be attributed to me being in school full-time. You can also tell that I must have sold my Canon 7D earlier in the year as my Canon XSi ended up taking more photos. It was a sad day to sell my Canon 7D, but it had to be done.

Yes, the numbers above don’t totally match up either but you get the general idea.

Predictions for 2011

I can already tell you that my numbers will be different than what you see above. Only because I no longer own the Canon 7D nor do I own the two L-Series lenses, EF 70-200mm f2.8L IS USM and EF 17-40mm f4.0L USM. It will be interesting to see the final count at the end of the year. Hopefully I will remember to look again earlier next year and report back on my numbers.

Do you ever check out your stats in either Adobe Lightroom or Apple’s Aperture? Are you surprised at what sort of numbers you see?

Now, I know not everyone wil appreciate the two photos above, but it was nice seeing a rainbow over Richmond on my way in to work on the bus this morning. I had to use Camera+’s Clairty and Vibrance filters to bring out the rainbow so it was a bit more visible. Clarity added a bit of noise/grain to the photos (more than I prefer) and of course, shooting from within a bus isn’t the most optimal place. It was actually a full rainbow too, you could see both ends.

Hopefully this means my day will go smoothly!