Pixel Darkroom Photography

This image is almost the same as I saw it up in the sky a couple of hours ago. It wasn’t going to be the image for today, but just like many others in the past, I ended up liking it the most. I was planning to go outside and shoot something with available light, something, anything. I drove around for a few minutes and stopped on the side of the road. I hadn’t even seen the sky. As I turned though, I saw the color of the sun through the smoky clouds. It’s been cloudy and rainy the entire day. There was no hope of even remembering that there is a star called Sun behind all the clouds. Yet for a brief moment, the sun shone through a thinning of the clouds and I shot this image. I went on with my walk and drive and ended up with nothing that I liked.

I decided to head home. It was already dark and I didn’t know what I had “in the can”. I thought I’d look around and see if I find something to edit to my liking and planned on going out again if I needed to. I liked the first image quite a bit and I’m bringing it to you here.

When I was a child, I liked imagining what the clouds were looking like. What do they look like to you?

Come on, be a child again…

The pumpkin season is back. It reminds me of my other pumpkin from the beginning of the project. This one will not rot though because it’s made out of wires and beads. I put a full CTO (color temperature orange) gel on the flash to bring the color of the light (the temperature) to the same one as the candles. The rest was just balancing the two sources of light using aperture and shutter speed.
I hope you had a great Thanksgiving, those of you who have already celebrated it this year. The rest of you, early Happy Thanksgiving.

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.