Pixel Darkroom Photography

One of the things I’ve learned while working on this project is that it’s not always simple to create simple things, but there is something that rings true in “less is more” and people like simple things. I like simple things. I’m not going to explain how I made this, not because it’s a secret but because I don’t think it matters. Enjoy Day 319. Thanks for coming.

You see something and wonder if you can catch the details. I had to put a flash behind this leaf, and all you see here is the leaf lit from behind. Entirely. Some things can only be seen with the naked eye though. I like the image, and wish I had a lady bug to put on top or something, but I still like the way it looks. It’s like seeing the veins of a plant. Here’s Day 318. Tomorrow I have to fillet the salmons.

This is one of the days when the government regulations allowed fishing the sockeye salmon in British Columbia. It is the first year in many years when they allowed it, and people got really into it. You can see here how crowded the banks of the Fraser River are, just north of Chilliwack, BC. It was so crowded that I couldn’t believe there are so many fishermen on the planet. Lines got tangled. Many times. But, people caught lots of fish. I caught only a big one, but only because I didn’t have a very long line, don’t get me wrong. Otherwise I would have had more in the bag.
It was actually very fun and the kids loved pulling out the fish. Every once in a while (quite often actually) a fisherman would ask a kid if he caught something; if he didn’t he then would let the kids wrestle with the fish to pull it out. Fun. fun. fun.

We had a wonderful visit today. Our dear friend Naoki came to visit us. We met Naoki a few years ago when we lived in Boise, ID. He went back to Japan for a year and is back in North America to work on his Doctorate of Musical Arts. It was very fun to see him after almost three years. Our son was very little and does not remember him very well. Our daughter, on the other hand, who was only a few months old, became good friends with him very quickly and she calls him Pinocchi which we found very funny. Being a Japanese and after having lived in North America for quite some time, he got used having his name mispronounced (just like I did) and on occasion he was even called Steve. (!?)
We definitely are excited to have Naoki on Canadian soil and hope to be in touch more often.

I got home and our good friends had stopped by, ready to go on a date. They asked me if I could snap a quick picture of them so I went inside and got a portrait lens. I had them for a few minutes and got a few great images. This is one of them, posted here with their permission.

The old Portman Bridge, still in use today and shown below, will be taken down after the completion of the New Portman Bridge, still under construction. I cross this bridge over Fraser River at least once a week, when traveling from Coquitlam to Surrey on Trans Canada Highway 1.
I would love to shoot more (mega?) construction photography, and when I got into photography, this was one of my dreams. I’d love to shoot oil rigs, construction of dams, bridges, mines, cranes and other (mighty) machines, you names it.

At 20:59:50 every night, a buzzer and a flashing red light announce the ten seconds remaining until the nine o’clock cannon blast goes off in Stanley Park. Today, in the 21st Century the cannon is fired electrically and is heard at Hastings and Granville five seconds later, in Marpole thirty seconds after that, in New Westminster an entire minute after the blast and in Mission (1h16 minutes and 74.2 km or 46 miles according to Google Maps), where it has been heard every once in a while, more than three minutes passed nine o’clock. The gun has been firing for the passed 107 years, even though it has been on occasion hit by lighting, short-circuited, plugged with rocks and even briefly stolen. An inscription on the gun itself says it was made by H&C King in 1816 (one year after the Waterloo battle, to put it in historical context) and it’s numbered DCLVII, what I assume is the serial number (657) inscribed on it. It is a twelve pound muzzle loader, made at Woolwich, England.

In 1856 the British Government gave 16 cannons to the “provinces of Canada” and it’s been known that at least three of those had made it to the Pacific coast. Two of them were flanking the legislative buildings entrance in Victoria, now the capital of the British Columbia Province, and were melted down in 1940, in an effort to support the World War II – they weighed 1,500 pounds after all.

The third one is the one you see firing here on day 313 of my project, and if you are in Vancouver you can hear it at the times mentioned above at various distances from the blast.

The reasons for firing at 9 o’clock every night are believed to be replacing a dynamite blast set off at the same time in the past “as an aid to navigation” but that is a bit hard to understand how a big blast might be of any navigational help. Some variations to the idea behind this precise blast mention salmon fishing curfew initially set for 6 o’clock. An account from a 1939 interview that city archivist, Major J.S. Matthews had with pioneer Herbert McDonald implies the replacement of four daily fire alarm signals, used for indicating time, and sometimes confused with actual fire alarms, with the 9 pm cannon blast. Apparently, Victoria already had a cannon blast at noon to help ship captains check their times and they apparently asked for a canon blast in Vancouver as well.

You can find more information on the History of Vancouver website.

Time. An interesting idea. Did we invent time or did we only discover it? Is time really the way we divide our days and years, hours and minutes? Our age? I believe time on the Moon is the same as on the Earth, since we are so close, but is it the same on a different planet? Is it based on our division of, well… time? Or does it have to be different because of the other planet’s rotation speed? Is time really subjective the way Einstein said, or did he also not know what time is? If someone travels “at the speed of light”, they will indeed experience more things that would normally take more “time”, but isn’t that only because of the actual speed? Isn’t the person still taking the same concept of time and the same unique humanly way of experiencing time with himself or herself on their trip with the speed of light? Aren’t we humans the only ones actually talking about time? It must then only apply to all the things that we can relate to in the particular manner in which we relate to the division and measurement of this very interesting and particular dimension of our lives.

I shot this at the highest possible ISO, to see what the noise would be. I did not attempt to reduce the noise at all. The only things I did was layered the texture, of a different shot (w/ same settings) and worked on the color in Lr just a bit. Shot with available (lamp – tungsten) light, auto white balance, this image is basically a test. I created another one like it a couple of days ago, where I used a different camera and obviously different ISO, and it turned out only a little bit different.

blue bike

This is the Fraser River, just north of Chilliwack, BC. I went there early this morning with a good friend and did some sockeye salmon fishing. This is the best weather we’ve had, the one you see right here. The rest was rainy and grainy. We caught lots of good information about catching sockeye salmon.

I shot this barn from the car (while my wife was driving) and I am surprised how well it turned out. The light was just great and after a few small adjustments, here it is. Day 309.

I’ve always said that you never know what you come across when you shoot a 365 project. Sometimes you leave the camera at home, or think that for a quick minute, you can just leave it parked in the car, but the truth is, the best camera is the one you have with you, and for taking good images you just need a camera ready. I know I could have probably gotten back to this at some point, but I know, that if I hadn’t had the camera with me, I probably would have shot something else today. I like the simplicity of this image, I like the pattern. I love it how the image shows the endurance and maybe even the struggle of the flower, to overcome the cheaply, faded by time and tastelessly painted fence. I like the aesthetic contrast.

A bit of fresh fruit dramatically lit on my dinning room table. For this one I had an assistant, my friend Ugur, who held the light straight on top of the nectarine. We used a coroplast snoot to restrain the light from spilling too much on the table. Since the light was so close to the fruit, it was set to 128th power and we knocked down the ambient light by shooting at the highest synch speed available for radio triggers, in this case and for this particular camera 1/160 of a second. The light was an old Canon 580 EX flash. I warmed up the light in Lightroom. Here’s Day 307.

I had imagined this shot a few months ago but haven’t gotten to do it. My son actually went out all by himself and helped his little sister press the crosswalk button. I thought it would be a great idea for a shoot and I only got to do this today because it was the first cloudy day in a long time and I wanted to shoot this in a good soft light.

A big boat passed by today. I shot many beautiful images, but I still liked the big boat the most. Just another day out with the camera. Sixty days left. See you around.

The closer I get to the end of this project, the more I wonder: then what?

No I’m not.
Yes I am.
Nope. I’m not. Actually, I know exactly what’s next.
But I can’t tell you. If I tell you I’ll have to,… I’m sorry but I really can’t tell you.

Shot with a 580 EX at 1/128th power above camera via Pocket Wizards.

We’ve spent a good part of a very hot day outside. Not a good idea. This is part of the 2010 Abbotsford Airshow with a bit of post processing as described below. It was so hot, that the kids got cranky, my wife got cranky and even I was a bit cranky. I always liked airplanes and listening to their roaring noises was a lot of fun. I always like the thunderbirds, which took off just as we were preparing to leave. It was noisy and lots of smoke and aerobatics. It must be a fun job to fly around upside down, low enough to frighten kids and scare adults. Here’s a shot of a couple of older airplanes that were part of the US Navy long time ago. Day 303 of 365.

I added a texture (created by “princes-of-shadows”, as her nickname says) which I downloaded from here) for this image in Ps. The original included an F16, which I cropped out in order to give the image a more vintage feel.

This is Nicolae, the bread maker we found in Steveston a few days ago when I posted this earlier post. He came from Romania and started this bakery where he only bakes one kind of bread. The bread is delicious, baked in a stone oven, in fire. He is a really nice guy and I will go back and document some more of how he gets his daily bread.

“As the deer pants for streams of water,
so my soul pants for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When can I go and meet with God?”

“Wie der Hirsch schreit nach frischem Wasser, so schreit meine Seele, Gott, zu dir.
Meine Seele dürstet nach Gott, nach dem lebendigen Gott. Wann werde ich dahin kommen, daß ich Gottes Angesicht schaue?”

“Comme un cerf qui soupire après l’eau des ruisseaux,
de même je soupire après toi, ô mon Dieu.
J’ai soif de Dieu, du Dieu vivant!
Quand pourrai-je venir et me présenter devant Dieu?”

“Cum doreşte un cerb izvoarele de apă, aşa Te doreşte sufletul meu pe Tine, Dumnezeule!
Sufletul meu însetează după Dumnezeu, după Dumnezeul cel viu; cînd mă voi duce şi mă voi arăta înaintea lui Dumnezeu?”

مِثْلَمَا تَشْتَاقُ الْغِزْلاَنُ إِلَى جَدَاوِلِ الْمِيَاهِ، هَكَذَا تَشْتَاقُ نَفْسِي إِلَيْكَ يَااَللهُ .
نَفْسِي عَطْشَى إِلَى اللهِ الإِلَهِ الْحَيِّ، فَمَتَى أَجِيءُ وَأَمْثُلُ أَمَامَ اللهِ؟

神 啊 ， 我 的 心 切 慕 你 ， 如 鹿 切 慕 溪 水 。

我 的 心 渴 想 　 神 ， 就 是 永 生 神 ； 我 几 时 得 朝 见 　 神 呢

“Come la cerva anela ai rivi delle acque, cosí l’anima mia anela a te o DIO.
L’anima mia è assetata di DIO, del Dio vivente. Quando verrò e comparirò davanti a DIO?”

Yup, I’ve been doing this for 300 days. That’s almost a year. Almost. I wanted to get a shot like this because I don’t think I have many photographs of my daughter and I, especially standing. I know she’ll grow and I won’t remember how little she was, or how big I was compared to her. Here’s Day 300. God bless you.

As I am posting this it’s already Day 300 (passed midnight) but i’m only dealing with “yesterday’s” post, which is still for Day 299. Just like the rest of the world, I do not know what tomorrow (today, that is) will bring. Confused already? Here’s a bit of fun I’ve had with negative space and with filling it.