YYC Night Skyline

Oh, Hello Calgary. I almost didn't recognize you, with all the pretty skyline colours and that interesting looking bridge. These shots were taken a few minutes apart, underneath the pedestrian bridge connecting East Village with St. Patrick's Island. It's the bridge that mysteriously cracked this summer, prompting a closure after only being in use for 4 years. It's also the same bridge we run over during our workday runs. Hmmm... perhaps we should rethink our route.

Anyways, the light of the setting sun quickly faded to twilight blue hour, hence the slight shifts in colour in the sky between the 3 photos.


If one didn't know better, one could be fooled into believing the Bow is a mighty flowing river. Looks can be deceiving.







For those that are actually interested in the photo-nerdery: these were taken with a 12mm f/2.0 Rokinon lens on a Fuji X-T1 body. No HDR processing, just single 30 second long exposures, with a 'Velvia' VSCO preset adjustment slapped on in Lightroom for some added oomph to the colours.

Beautiful BC

Back from a short trip to Vancouver for Vania and Sean's wedding. I haven't had a chance to sort through the shots from their big event yet, but did catch a decent blue hour shot of the Vancouver Skyline (4 overlapping exposures, stitched in CS5). Taken from the Totem Poles area of Stanley Park, about an hour after sunset. Click to view it large and see more details.



More photos from our trip soon. Time for an ice cold shower to beat this heat.

-G

Fireworks over the Calgary Skyline (sort of)...

This is supposed to be a shot of beautiful fireworks cascading forth from above the Calgary skyline. So where are the fireworks? Great question. Due to an unfortunate set of circumstances, this is simply 'a shot of beautiful fireworks cascading forth from above the Calgary skyline', minus the beautiful fireworks part.

What circumstances, you might inquire, lead to the interference of said fireworks from appearing in this photo? Well, let's see:

1) Apparently, every other Calgarian had the same idea to view the fireworks from the vantage point of the Crescent Heights area, so finding parking was an issue.
2) Apparently, if you are going to photograph fireworks, you should arrive before they are mostly finished.
3) Apparently, I lack skills in the unforgiving arenas of both planning and execution of photographing an event...
4) Apparently, fireworks don't reach nearly as high into the sky as I would've thought, so even if points 1), 2), and 3) hadn't been factors in this event, this photo still would've only been titled 'fireworks making a pathetic attempt to barely crest above the Calgary Skyline'

But regardless, I did manage to snap off a series of long exposures of the skyline, and stitched them together in CS5. Use your imagination for the fireworks. Click to view the larger version.

Wasted Days and Calgary By Night

I managed to accomplish exactly ZERO tasks on my day off today. I actually felt like I was wasting the precious oxygen supply of all mankind. Seriously, it was one of those 'Holy crap, you are a useless human being' type of days. But then, Anita came home and asked me to drive her to Japanese class, so I actually changed out of my pj's, grabbed a camera, tripod, and fired the shutter a few times to make my life seem less pointless.

And on an unrelated note, we've bought a house. Our days of travel at will and frivolous spending are behind us... sigh.

Missing the big Picture

A shot of the Calgary Skyline at night - 15 second exposure, zoomed out during the last 5 seconds. I'm taking the intro photography course at SAIT right now (it's a prerequisite to any of the advanced courses), and they aren't teaching anything you can't learn on your own. So instead, I've been doing more people watching than paying attention. You can always pick out the Engineer in a room - in my class, he's the guy with the Nikon D700 ($3000 body only) that didn't know what a sensor was, and couldn't understand how going from 1/60sec to 1/125sec was a halving of the amount of light. "60 into 125 ISN'T a half!!!" I'm thinking that he's, pardon my pun, missing the big picture?