Recently in Photography Category

A dying man can wish for many things, but one of them might be to have a party with many family and friends: like a funeral, memorial, or wake, but actually being able to be there, before he dies. That's exactly what my wife Air put together for me a couple of nights ago, on March 3. We had a "living wake" at the newly-renovated Waldorf Hotel in East Vancouver, with a couple of hundred of the people in our lives joining us for a great Lebanese buffet, lots of mingling and chatting, and some fine live rock-n-roll music from my old bandmates and me, as well as my friends in Vancouver's legendary group Odds.

We couldn't throw the invitations wide open because fire regulations restricted how many people were allowed in the grand tiki-themed room in the Waldorf's basement—and we wanted to make sure that the people who came really were those I knew, and didn't get crowded out. After all, it was a wake, not just a party. Luckily, we didn't have very many uninvited door-crashers (and a few guests missed out because of flu and other illness), so we stayed within the limit, and it all worked out.

A dress-up crowd

Amazingly, in fact, few people I wished I could have invited if I'd had contact info, and others I never expected to make it, showed up anyway. Some I hadn't seen in many years, or came from very far away, so that was a nice bonus too. There were family members I've known my whole life, and friends I've had for 10, 20, even close to 30 years. I think I had a chance to say hi to almost everyone. My apologies to the few of you I missed.

Most of them had their pictures taken in the photo booth set up by the awesome Miranda and Reilly of Blue Olive Photography. There are other pictures appearing on Flickr, YouTube, and elsewhere (such as blog posts) with the tag penmachine, with more to come (if you have any from the event, please use that tag yourself). You can also tag pictures and videos with my name on Facebook. We had this slideshow projected on the wall all night too:

I was shocked at how well I survived the evening. I did plan carefully: I took the right combination of medications at the right times, napped in the afternoon, avoided eating too much during the day, and simply ran on endorphins until almost the very end of the evening. During dinner I went upstairs and ate in the hotel room we booked, lying on the bed, to recover some energy. Then, after far more stints on the drums than I thought I'd be able to tolerate, I finally burned out and announced to everyone that I needed to lie down, then disappeared to let them wind things down. I paid for it afterwards, and all the next day, but it was entirely worth it.

Speaking of that announcement, yes, I still had (and have) complete laryngitis. Through the PA system, I rasped out a very few words, sounding like Christian Bale's Batman in The Dark Knight. Out on the loudness of the floor, I was completely inaudible unless I whispered directly into people's ears. I sometimes resorted to typing stuff out on my iPhone for them to read. It was bizarre and frustrating, but somehow appropriate—it was like being a speechless ghost, drifting in the semi-background at my own wake. It also kept anyone from trying to monopolize my time, since I couldn't engage in any serious conversation.

The thank-you brigade

Others made up for it. My wife Air coordinated the evening (and avoided crying, somehow), the guys in the band cracked the usual jokes, and there were four extremely short and touching speeches from those close to me: my friends Tara, Dennis, and Johan, and my (pregnant!) cousin Tarya (MP3 files, between 1 and 4 minutes each). We had tremendous help from my parents Hilkka and Karl (he made the slideshow too), our friend Steven, current and former members of The Neurotics and other bands I've been in, Pat and Craig and Doug from the Odds, the staff at the Waldorf, and our kids Marina and Lolo, who couldn't come because of B.C.'s stupid liquor laws, but who kept themselves and another friend's daughter entertained at home until we got back late.

My biggest thanks, of course, go to Air. It was all her idea, and her work that made my living wake happen. She has kept our family going through my four-plus years of cancer, through surgeries and fear and chemotherapy and a prognosis of death. She made this party happen now, while I could enjoy it and join my friends and family, instead of after I die when I can't. We've been married more than 15 years, and I've said before: that is not nearly enough.

Thank you, too, to all of you guests who could come. I'll remember it my whole life. I hope the rest of you will remember it even longer.

All I can say is wow. And no, it's not Photoshopped:

The light in the water is bioluminescence.

More than five years ago, I posted a photo showing the huge change in the downtown Vancouver skyline between 1978 and 2003:

Here's an even more startling one (via Greg)—Shanghai in 1990 and 2010:

As Vivian Lau reported on Twitter: "My grandma went back last year and was like 'WHERE THE F#%! AM I?'"

Years ago, on Apple's defunct iCards site, I found a photo that remains my favourite image for Christmas Eve:

I don't know who took it, but I hope that tonight you are as warm and cozy as that picture feels. Christmas Eve is the night that my family has always held our big dinner and celebration, European style, and that will be the case again this evening.

There is also a sad component. Three years ago, on Christmas Eve, my friend Martin died suddenly in his sleep at age 39, so I think of it also as Martin's Eve.

Finally, chances are that tonight will be my last Christmas Eve: in December 2011, my family will gather again for Christmas. But by then, most likely, I'll be dead. I don't want tonight to become a maudlin event because of that, but it is the truth—and at least we all know that now. It's something I've wondered about for three Christmas eves now, and I feel a little relieved that it's become less of a mystery.

Christmas isn't a religious event for me, but a family one. Whatever it is for you, I hope yours is comfortable and happy, like the photo.

It's been a while since I added to my Camera Works series, an ongoing batch of blog posts explaining why still cameras operate as they do. The idea of the series is to provide background on how film and digital cameras function, so you can use that knowledge to make better pictures.

My only qualifications are that I've been an enthusiastic amateur photographer most of my life, some people like the photos I take, and often enough they ask me questions about the subject. Today's topic comes from a Facebook question, which was:

What is the best method/lens/settings to capture fast moving sports action without any blurring of the subject?

While some artistic blurring may occasionally be useful, that is the goal of most sports and action photography: capturing a sharp image of the subject, without blur. And to do that, you really need a digital SLR (DSLR), not a point-and-shoot pocket camera. Whether you're talking a kids' soccer match, a professional basketball game, or an airshow, a DSLR (with a long lens) gives you the best chance of good photos. Manufacturers and sales reps may claim otherwise, but they're wrong.

Why you need a DSLR—even a cheap one

Today's pocket camera models are incredibly small and convenient, and can take very good video as well as beautiful still shots in many circumstances where their subjects aren't moving much. However, for action, even a top-of-the-line point-and-shoot—like the Canon G12 or Panasonic LX5—can't compete well with the cheapest DSLRs—like the Nikon D3100, Canon XS, Pentax K-x, or Sony A390. Point-and-shoot big-lens "zuperzooms" don't do much better either, even though they're almost the same size and weight as an SLR.

Moreover, today's low-end DSLRs cost about the same (in the $500–600 range, with lens) as high-end pocket cameras. DSLRs generally offer faster and more accurate autofocus, a much wider range of lens choices, better LCD screens, proper optical viewfinders, higher shutter speeds, better low-light performance, faster shot-to-shot burst modes, better battery life, and more accessories. The main advantage of point-and-shoot cameras is that they're smaller and lighter, so you're more likely to carry them with you all the time, and they're better at taking high-quality video more easily (something no DSLRs did at all until a couple of years ago).

If you're planning to take photos of a sporting event, it's best if you plan to bring a bigger and heavier camera along, so go for the DSLR. Almost any DSLR. If your budget is really limited, a used DSLR like an older Nikon D40 or Canon Rebel XT via eBay, Craigslist, or your local camera shop's used department will still probably work better than a new cheaper point-and-shoot. You could even try for a used professional sports DSLR from earlier last decade, which would have cost thousands new but which will have depreciated drastically now, though the cost-benefit tradeoff gets trickier there.

Choose a long lens—nearly any long lens

Especially when working on relatively close-up sports, such as basketball, professional sports photographers tend to use a fast (and expensive) zoom like a Canon or Nikon 70-200 mm f/2.8. For other sports where the action is farther away, they'll choose even more expensive fast-aperture super-telephotos like 300, 400, or 500 mm f/4 lenses, or insanely pricey multi-thousand-dollar 300 or 400 mm f/2.8 glass, often with teleconverters to extend the focal length of the lens further. With those big lenses, a monopod (not a tripod) becomes essential for vertical stability and to take the weight off your shoulders, while still giving you enough flexibility to move around.

However, if you're a normal person and can't afford those, in bright light, particularly outdoors, regular telephotos and zooms that extend to 200 or 300 mm or more (even inexpensive ones) can do great. Nikon's 55-200 mm kit zoom is cheap as dirt and works great, for instance, though you'll be at f/5.6 at the telephoto end of that. I have a similar plastic-bodied 80-200 mm lens. Newer lenses with an "ultrasonic" or "silent wave" autofocus motor inside the lens are generally a bit faster to focus than older AF lenses (which may include a louder, more traditional motor or use a screw-drive motor in the camera body), but that's not always true. A monopod is still good no matter which telephoto or zoom you choose.

Fast shutter speed at almost any cost

The key thing in any action photography is to run in shutter-priority ("S" or "T") mode and to keep your shutter speed as fast as you can manage it. The old rule of thumb is 1/[focal length], i.e. at 300 mm you need 1/300th of a second or faster, but even that is for still subjects. You need faster for sports: if you can run at 1/1000th of a second or faster, and make sure you pan along with the action, you'll have the best chance of good shots.

Consumer-focused DSLRs usually include a Sports preset (with a little "running man" icon) that tries to do that for you. Relatively slow sports like curling, tennis, soccer, football, baseball, or even track and field, will do fine with those settings, whether you use Sports mode or set shutter priority fairly fast. If you're getting into horse racing, motor sports, or airshows or something, high shutter speed is even more critical.

You may have to boost your camera's ISO/light sensitivity to make that happen in any sport, since it's better to have a sharp shot and some high-ISO grain than a blurry shot with less grain. (Your camera's Auto ISO setting will do that automatically in shutter-priority or Program mode, I think, but you may need to tweak the settings to get it to do what you want.)

Also make sure to use your motor drive/burst mode at its fastest setting, and set your autofocus to Continuous, so that it will follow your subject as best it can. Fire off lots of shots. Some of them will be good and in focus, some won't, but you should get some you can work with. Be prepared to crop them later too if that will get you better framing.

Working with your camera

Full-time sports pros spend tens of thousands of dollars on lenses and thousands more on pro DSLR bodies like the Nikon D3s or Canon EOS 1D Mark IV: those are expensive, huge, heavy high-speed SLRs optimized for low-light performance, blistering autofocus and burst-mode speeds, and resilience to getting bumped around and rained on. But Nikon, Canon, Sony, Pentax, and others now make prosumer cameras that are also pretty close to the pro models in performance, while pro-grade features from a few years ago have trickled down to entry-level DSLRs today.

No matter what camera you have, you can adjust settings to get the best results possible within its limitations. If you have an older DSLR, its high-ISO and Auto ISO, burst speed, and autofocus performance might not be as good as some newer models (even some cheaper newer models!). If you don't have an SLR but instead a point-and-shoot, you might be yet more limited in how far the lens can zoom, how fast the shutter can fire, how quickly you can get a burst of shots, and how well the sensor performs when its ISO is boosted.

No matter what, though, if you buy a monopod, go as telephoto and wide-aperture as you can afford, set high speeds in shutter priority and burst mode, track your subject by panning with it as it moves, and keep the autofocus in continuous-tracking mode, you'll get the best results you can with your camera. With those things in mind, your main task is to be there with your finger on the shutter release when the magic moments occur, to capture them before they're gone.

Previously in my Camera Works series

1. Introduction: learn how your camera works
2. Focal length, wide angle, and telephoto
3. An aperture teaser and a full article about f-stops and depth of focus
4. Crop factors and "full frame"
5. Shutters, flashes, and sync speed
6. Intermediate f-stops
7. Why "digital" lenses are cheaper
8. Image stabilization, vibration reduction, and anti-shake
9. Pictures that tell a story
10. Get better with your modern camera by going back to 1978
11. Fireworks and other night photography without a tripod

Speaking of wedding photos, here they are:

I think Tim Bray is right about what makes the new generation of tablet computers, led by the iPad from Apple, actually useful:

A tablet is, crucially, a more shareable computer. A laptop, with its fragile hinge-ware and space-gobbling keyboard, is just not comfy to share. A tablet is easier to bring to the café, easier to hand across the table or along the sofa, easier to seize in the heat of the moment, easier to hold up in triumph, easier to set aside when you need to meet someone's eyes.

Here's how that played out for me this week, somewhat unexpectedly. I was the official photographer for my cousin's wedding last weekend. That morning, I was preparing myself to take hundreds of pictures with both my film and digital SLR cameras. But, having just picked up the digital camera kit for my iPad earlier in the week, I thought it might be useful to bring the iPad along as a quick backup device onto which I could dump the digital files from time to time during the day. (Sometimes I'm a little paranoid about backups.)

After the ceremony itself, as everyone was settled in for the buffet brunch, but before speeches began, I plugged in the adapter and my camera's SD card and got most of the photos imported onto the iPad. (The process was a little flaky: after the first few hundred, the Photos app kept quitting, and though it remembered what it had imported, it would only do a few more pictures at a time before crashing again.) I didn't get everything backed up right then, but it was enough, especially since pictures of the ceremony itself were safe.

Then, as I flipped through the photographs to check them out, I realized something: I could pass the iPad around. My cousin and her family and friends could see pictures of the wedding, in a beautiful large picture-frame style that was easy and intuitive to flick through, before the event was even half over. They loved it.

Later that evening, I'd had a chance to get home, change clothes, and import the rest of the pictures before heading over to my aunt and uncle's house for the wedding after-party. There, more people, including the groom and his mom (who was visiting from Toronto), were able to see all the pictures on the iPad, the same day I'd taken them. A few of the group portraits included the groom's extended family—who, it turns out, had never all been in a photo together before, ever. He and his mom both got teary-eyed looking at them.

A few months ago I might have brought my laptop to import photos onto during the wedding. More likely, I wouldn't have bothered. And I certainly wouldn't have passed it around, since it's more awkward, fragile, and complicated to use when viewing pictures—particularly standing around in a crowded room of people who've had a few drinks.

I'm in the process of putting the best pictures from the wedding online, and I'll give everything to my cousin and her husband on DVD too, but the immediacy and poignancy of being able to display the pictures right there, during the events of the wedding day, made the iPad well worth what my wife paid for it in June.

These two handsome folks got married today after ten years together:

Tarya, the one on the right, is my cousin—some of you may spot our resemblance, though she's much prettier than me. Her husband TJ is on the left. The picture is by my lovely wife Air. Since I was the official photographer at the wedding, I have a ton of other photos (more than 700!), but they need a bit of prep before I put some online.

It was a remarkable day, and I managed to avoid crying all over my cameras. Just barely.

Since our local Save-On-Foods outlet shut down its photo lab last year, I've been taking my rolls of film to the Costco down the hill, which will process them, make prints, and scan at high resolution to CD for a very reasonable price (about $9 Cdn per roll, taxes included). They do a great job in an hour or so, giving me the benefits of both film and digital photography.

Alas, they are now scheduled to stop handling 35 mm film in mid-September too. There's just not enough demand. (Apparently, they are the only Costco outlet in Western Canada still processing photo film.) So after that, I'll have to pay a higher price at one of the photo specialty stores in the area. Good thing Costco is still doing the work right now, though: I'm taking both digital and film photos of my cousin's wedding tomorrow, so I'll have a big batch of pictures to run through the service next week.

It's a pity. Film photography is not going away, and people seem to like when I use it, but the days of truly cheap developing may be over.

A few weeks ago, while we were in Disneyland, I saw this sign in the Downtown Disney shopping area:

Yeah, it's obviously supposed to be a play on "Strawberry Fields Forever," but did no one notice the conflict in the message?

After yesterday's big bummer post, let's go back to something lighter and more fun. During our flight home from L.A. on Monday, I took a couple of videos using my Nikon D90 SLR, one on takeoff and one on landing. Now I've combined them and sped them up eight times:

The apparent speed of the plane in the video (our WestJet Boeing 737-700) is more than 1000 mph, which is why the landing seems a little rough. The sounds are sped up too, so the squeaky noises on takeoff comprise the flight attendant's announcements. Both parts of the flight are looking north from row 5.

Taking pictures of fireworks or light shows or night cityscapes without a tripod is a fool's game. But sometimes I'm foolish, and try it—and sometimes it works. But you need to know a few things, so I'll give you some suggestions if you find yourself in a nighttime photography situation without a normal camera support.

These days, cameras (especially digital SLRs) are remarkably capable and smart. In most situations you can put them in Program or Full Auto mode, compose your shot, and press the button to get a good result. When I'm snapping family pictures, that's usually what I do. But when it gets really dark, the camera's smarts usually fail, even if today's amazing digital sensors can still pull good images out of the murk. But you need to figure out the proper settings in your camera's Manual mode. So I find having a few decades of photographic experience and nerdery under my belt helps me know what to do.

A sandbag substitute

Here, for example, is a shot of the World of Color water-and-light show displayed each night at Disney's California Adventure park in Anaheim this summer:

For a scene like that to come out well, I needed to use my Nikon D90 camera's lowest sensitivity (ISO 200) to avoid nasty grain and noise, but that meant I also needed to use a fairly long shutter speed (half a second) and a small aperture (f/8) to keep details in focus.

Normally that would result in a blurry picture without a tripod, because a half-second exposure reveals all sorts of camera shake from unavoidably unsteady human hands. We just can't hold still enough. Here's how I sidestepped that problem:

1. I was sitting down on a bench, with my Crumpler shoulder bag and one of my daughters' sweaters on my lap. I could set my camera down on them (as some photographers do with sandbags) and adjust the bag and sweater to keep it level and aimed in the right direction. Voilà—tripod substitute.
2. The zoom lens I was using includes vibration reduction, which helps reduce camera shake electromechanically. I also zoomed out as far as the lens could go (18 mm focal length) so any visible blurring was reduced by the wide field of view.
3. I took lots of photos, one after the other, and only kept the good ones. Some shake is still unavoidable, but since it's random, a few pictures come out sharp anyway. I could have used my wireless remote shutter release and self-timer delay to minimize shake further, but that was more work than I wanted to do.

Hold your breath

Okay, how about a picture of some fireworks from the next night?

In this case, there was nowhere to sit down, so my family and I were standing among the throng at the north end of Main Street U.S.A. in Disneyland. Ideally, there would have been some object (a rock, the edge of a lamppost, a fence support) that I could have propped the camera on or against, but no luck. Photographing fireworks without a tripod, standing up, and without any nearby supports is especially difficult, because not only are there shaky hands to deal with, but there's a shaky torso and legs too.

Fireworks require a slow shutter speed (at least one second, as here, preferably more) to record the pretty trails and bursts rather than freeze them as mere dots, and in this situation I used an f/8 aperture again most of the time, and ISO 200. What did I do to get reasonably sharp results?

1. It was the same lens with vibration reduction, which probably helped a little, and I once again zoomed out a fair bit but not all the way (to 26 mm focal length this time), since the fireworks were a tad farther away than the water show the previous night.
2. I stood with my legs a little more than shoulder width apart, feet flat, to be as steady as possible. Rather than keeping the camera up at eye level looking through the viewfinder, or worse, holding it in front of me to look at the LCD screen, instead I held it tight against my chest, once more for maximum steadiness, and pointed my lens in roughly the proper direction. Not looking through the finder also let me enjoy the show while watching it with my own eyes, instead of through a lens as might happen otherwise.
3. Once more, I took lots of photos hoping for a few keepers by luck of the draw. For each picture, I squeezed the shutter release as gently as I could while keeping my other hand firmly pressing the camera body against my sternum, and I held my breath both before and during the exposure—something I've heard snipers do too, to steady their weapons. Thus it was inhale, hold breath, squeeze, wait for shutter, breathe out, inhale, hold breath, squeeze...and so on.
4. Every once in a while, but not for every shot, I looked at the LCD screen to see if I needed to adjust anything, in case things were over- or underexposed. I tried sequences of pictures with different shutter speeds and apertures to see if they produced better images.

There were a lot of rejects, but a decent number of nice photos too. I was surprised how well the breath-holding method worked. But it sure would have been better with a tripod, when exposures as long as 8 or 10 seconds or more are feasible, yielding still prettier pictures.

When you have to crank the ISO

My last challenge came at the end of our flight home on Monday, as we passed over Washington and the B.C. Lower Mainland after the sun had set. I always enjoy photographing our local volcanoes, and this time we got great views of Mt. Adams, Mt. Rainier, and Mt. Baker, as well as the gleaming lights of Vancouver and its suburbs as we came in for a landing:

Unfortunately, even a tripod would do no good in this situation (not to mention the awkwardness of setting it up on an airplane seat). By this time it was very, very dark: I could see the city lights, but could only barely make out the silhouettes of the mountains in the background. It looked a fair bit darker than the photo shows, in fact. And camera shake was not really an issue: the key problem was that the plane was moving at several hundred kilometres per hour. Long shutter speeds were out of the question.

This is when the drastically improved low-light sensitivity of modern cameras comes in handy. I guessed that the slowest shutter speed I could get away with was about 1/30 of a second, though even that was pushing it:

1. I propped the front of the lens against the window and shaded it with my hand to prevent any reflections from the cabin lights.
2. At a zoom of 50 mm to get the framing I wanted, the best aperture the camera could provide was f/5, which meant boosting the ISO (sensitivity) to 3200. (The D90 has an ISO 6400, but that's so noisy I never use it.) I set all that manually, and even then the picture was significantly underexposed as I shot it.
3. Finally, because of the underexposure, I boosted the levels even more on my computer after I'd downloaded the photo from my camera. With that fiddling, the orange sky and water reflection emerged from the gloom, and the lights became starlike points rather than dull spots.

There are a lot of digital artifacts in the final result, particularly in the sky, but it's still quite pretty and I was happy to post it.

I've now posted a complete set of photos from our trip to Southern California last week:

In addition to pictures from Disneyland, the San Diego Zoo, and elsewhere in the vicinity, I got some nice shots yesterday from the plane home.

The Internet connection at our hotel near Disneyland is fairly slow and flaky, so I haven't uploaded any pictures to Flickr yet because the full-size photos would take forever to get there. I'm going to wait until we get back to Vancouver to try them.

However, smaller photos posted to Facebook work fine, so if you want to see what we've been up to, you can check out our pics from Orange County and San Diego. The weather has been just about perfect (mid to high 20°s Celsius and mostly sunny), and even my health has been cooperating most of the time. You can see it in the images.

They say that dogs and their owners come to resemble one another:

I don't know. I'm not sure I see it.

"What we can't seem to accept," says Roger Ebert, "is that the oil is leaking and we can't stop it."

My friend Kris Krug and web acquaintance Duncan Davidson are two great photographers who recently traveled to the Gulf of Mexico to see what's going on. Some of their results:

I have a degree in marine biology, granted to me at UBC 20 years ago. In the back of my mind, I often think these days of what the oil is doing to the physiologies of the animals, plants, and microorganisms in the Gulf. (And what oil is doing elsewhere to organisms in the waters of Nigeria, Venezuela, northern Alberta, the Persian Gulf, and elsewhere.)

There's irony. Petroleum is a natural product: millions of years ago, in an ancient ocean, microscopic algae absorbed sunlight and used the energy to build their tiny cells from carbon dioxide dissolved in water from the air. Similarly tiny zooplankton ate some of the algae. Then they all died, and were buried, and with heat and pressure and eons of time their remains turned into goopy sludge buried in layers of sedimentary rock.

There were titanic numbers of those microorganisms, so there's a lot of sludge in our planet's crust, trapped here and there. We extract it, process it, and burn it. The CO₂ returns to the atmosphere, eventually to our detriment. Oil power is an extremely awkward, inefficient, roundabout, and time-delayed form of solar power.

And the oil gushing out from a hole we drilled into the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico? The organisms now living in that sea are being poisoned by the remains of their remote ancestors. It's as if the cities of western North America were being inundated by a spewing geyser of fossil dinosaur bones, unleashed from the Badlands east of the Rockies, burying us in the petrified skeletons of our distant relatives.

A few more from my photo collection, once again all of the Pacific Ocean.

More about it...

The other day I said I'd post my black-and-white film photos (taken with my new/old Nikon FE) from the May Vancouver photowalk when they were ready. Here they are:

I'd also like to re-post something I wrote as a comment on another blog, since it seems appropriate. Kimli recalled her experience loving Vancouver even more after having lived away from B.C. for several years.

I was born and raised here, and so were my mom, my wife, and my kids. But you don't need to move away to know how lucky we've got it. I traveled a fair bit when I was younger, and saw all sorts of places, from Moscow and (then) Leningrad to London, Rome and Florence and Milan, New York and Chicago and Denver and San Diego, Melbourne and Honolulu, Toronto and Ottawa and Saskatoon, Edmonton and Calgary. And (as a traveling musician) most of the B.C. Interior and Vancouver Island.

I could probably manage living in San Diego or Melbourne. Maybe Portland or Seattle, because they share similar climates and topography. But they're still not Vancouver. We've lived on the north side of the Metrotown hill in Burnaby most of my life, and we're way too used to the unbelievable view from our front window. But every once in awhile, there's a big snowfall followed by a sunny morning, and we get this (and that's just part of what we can see):

My jaw still drops when that happens—merely from the what-it-looks like part. Sure, we're not as culturally vibrant as Austin or London or Montreal; not as hopping as Tokyo or NYC; not has historic as Berlin or Quebec City or New Orleans or Buenos Aires; not as architecturally interesting as Prague or Paris; still a bit prissy about when and where you can drink and party. Sure we haven't sorted out our problems with poverty and addiction and such.

But we're shiny and new and polyglot, and you can buy cheap great sushi everywhere, and eagles fly by my window and I can walk 20 minutes from my house and see a real live wild beaver lodge, and my kids like going to both the Aquarium and the Pride Parade, and I have good friends and all my family here.

When you visit a tourism website or see a brochure, or when the Olympics coverage features sweeping helicopter beauty shots of the city and mountains, you can say, "Wow. Yeah, it really is like that a lot of the time."

I wouldn't move if I had any choice, and if I had to, I'd want to come back as soon as it was feasible. That's my black and white. Sorry, rest of the world.

If you watched the Olympics in February, and if you don't actually live in Vancouver, you probably wondered whether this place really is as pretty as all those sweeping helicopter shots made it out to be. The answer is yes:

Last night, a few of us took a photowalk along the south shore of False Creek just as the sun was going down. We enjoyed the boats going by, saw a seal and a great blue heron, observed a cormorant catch and eat a crab (my photos of that are coming), and watched the lights of the City of Glass wink on as it got dark.

Jon and Brennan, two of the participants, brought substantial photo rigs, with multiple digital SLR bodies, lenses, and tripods in backpacks. I learned a couple of summers ago that doing so isn't a wise move for me: after hauling my full pack o' gear up Whistler Mountain, I ended up using only my camera and the one lens I'd first mounted on it—the rest was just uncomfortable wasted weight.

So this time I tried to be more minimalist. Despite bringing two camera bodies (my digital Nikon D90 and my recently-purchased vintage Nikon FE film camera), I took along only three lenses, all relatively compact non-zoom primes: a 24 mm wide-angle, a 50 mm normal low-light, and a 135 mm telephoto for the FE. Despite also bringing a monopod for when it got darker, I didn't need a camera bag at all, just my pockets and my usual green Crumpler man purse.

Here are the pictures I took with the D90 (thanks to Brennan for lending me his wacky Tokina 11–16 mm zoom lens for a few shots):

The black-and-whites will have to wait till I process the film (UPDATE: Here they are, with commentary). And my health held out: I managed the whole almost-three-hour expedition without any side-effect meltdowns, at least until I got home. Plus I grabbed some McDonald's afterwards. Mmm, Filet O'Fish.