Snails are some of my daughter’s most favorite animals these days. Coming home from work/daycare today, we found these two guys in front of our front door. The rock on which they were sitting was too low to comfortably photograph them from a tripod, so I shot them hand-held, setting the ISO to “Auto” and letting it go into stratosphere. Thankfully, the noise is easily managed in post-processing.
Feeding seals: timing the shot
Yesterday, we spent a warm and sunny Sunday morning playing at the Willows Beach and feeding seals at the Oak Bay marina. Our daughter has just recovered from a nasty virus that struck half of the children in her daycare group, and my wife and I were just coming down with the same virus – the vicious pattern familiar to many parents of young kids. The weather was beautiful, though, and we really enjoyed the unrushed time together.
At the marina, there are always 3-5 harbor seals waiting for tourists to feed them frozen fish, which can be bought at the souvenir shop for $2.50 per small plastic bag. According to the source that cannot be revealed (Snowden, eat your heart out!), this is, by far, the most popular item at the gift shop. The seals are wild, but they are well-trained in various ways of extorting the treats from people. For example, they appear to know the schedule of the tour buses, they can splash their fins on the surface to attract the crowd’s attention, and they always gather around the dock when a small child appears (as it was in our case).
While the little one was having fun throwing fish to the seals (the closest one got most of it) and my wife was keeping her from joining them in the water, I tried to bait the seals to grab the fish from the side of the dock, while pre-focusing my camera on the fish. I used a Canon EF 35mm f/1.4L USM lens
Canada Day long weekend
For the first time in the last several years we are at home in Victoria for the Canada Day. We thought about going to the downtown with our daughter to see the festivities as a practice for the upcoming trip to Paris, but ended up going for a relaxing walk on the beach near Mt. Doug.
Chinque Terre: persistent vacation
Browsing through photographs from Italy taken in the summer of 2009, I realized that photos prom Chinque Terre still make me feel as if I was standing at the cliff overlooking Vernazza only yesterday. This is surprising, because usually it takes only a few days after returning home for the “vacation mode” to give way to the daily routine.
During the first couple of days after coming back from our first trip to Europe, it became obvious that my being “off-line” for a few weeks did not result in any particular disasters neither at work nor at home. On the contrary, I felt re-calibrated in terms of my personal and research interests and priorities, so I made a resolution to maintain this “vacation” mindset in daily life. Well, it didn’t work. Instead of being simpler, life became progressively busier.
There is a joke, told to me by a colleague, which describes this situation very well. To paraphrase it: I would like to be a bus driver, because there would be no loads of undriven buses waiting for me after a vacation.
In this sense, an academic job is nothing like bus driving…
However, a glimpse of that Zen post-vacation state can evidently be triggered by a visual image. In this particular case, I was looking for a picture for a photo contest on Flickr and opened a Lightroom library with thousands of photos from our 2009 trip to Czech Republic and Italy. It is always pleasant to browse through old photographs, but the ones from Chinque Terre had a particularly strong effect. These five colorful seaside towns that cling to the cliffs are strikingly beautiful, and the whole region has a romantic atmosphere, which makes it one of the most popular tourist destinations. Visually, I had no reference point for the Liguria landscapes in my prior experience – they are truly unique and seem to be frozen in time centuries ago. Seeing these images, even on a computer screen, even several years later, instantly forced my brain to disengage from the daily “treadmill mode”. This is an example of a picture that is worth a thousand words – there is a tremendous amount and depth of information, including the underlying emotional content, that can be transmitted visually.
At the moment, we are planning a trip to Côte d’Azur, often referred to as the French Riviera, later this summer. It will be our second European trip with Anna. She is 18-months-old now, so she will not remember any of it in a conventional sense, but I wonder if looking at our photographs a few years later would stir up some memories or feelings. I am packing the photo gear just in case.
Dog years: beauty of old age
My 14-months-old daughter is fascinated with dogs – small and large, puppies and old ones. We met this 16-years-old west highland white terrier while walking at the Willows Beach yesterday. I was carrying a 300 mm f4 lens with a 1.4x extender and took a few shots of him. I realized what makes old dogs so photogenic – they don’t move around too fast!
Zip lining with a GoPro HD Hero 2
In the end of July, I went on a zip line tour in Whistler, while Svetlana and Anna took the grandparents up the mountaintop in the gondola.
I never done zip lining before, so I had to consider which photo gear to take with me. I definitely wanted to take my GoPro HERO
Our group of six people (a couple from Vancouver, a father with twin girls from Cobble Hill, and me) assembled in the foyer of a building in the Lower Village, filled out the forms stating that we subscribed to the impending dangers and general foolishness willingly, and went to receive our harnesses and helmets from the Ziptrek hut near the Blackcomb gondola. I requested a “GoPro helmet”, which had a plate for the camera mount
I also brought a chest mount, as I thought that the video from the helmet mount would be too shaky. The chest mount proved to be completely useless, though, because the harness would block the entire field of view of the camera. I did try it on the first line ( the entire tour consists of several lines, each with a different length, speed,and views), after which I moved the camera to the helmet. The footage was not as shaky as I expected, so a helmet mount is definitely the way to go for shooting zip lining videos.
Another thing to consider is the battery life. The entire tour lasted about three hours, but I turned the camera off between the actual rides, so it was running for about one hour. In the end, the battery was nearly drained. I did carry a spare, fully-charged battery, and although I did not have to use it, I would have had to, if the tour had been a little longer. It is easy to underestimate how power-hungry a GoPro camera is, especially with an LCD BacPac
The result of my zip lining adventure is this video, which I edited down to about four minutes.
Back in Dublin after two years
When I was leaving Dublin two years ago after staying there on sabbatical for three months, I didn’t think that I would return to this city soon. Actually, I already new about the conference planned for the summer of 2012, so I did know that I would be back. This time, we came together with my wife and our 9 months-old daughter. It was our first big trip with her (you can read about the actual travel in this post).Walking around the city brought back a distinct feeling of deja vu. During my sabbatical stay, I developed a personal sense of the city that is different from a typical tourist’s impression that I have after visit a city for a few days. In Dublin, I remembered which shortcuts to take while walking under the rain with my view obstructed by the sea of umbrellas, the best shops to buy bread, my favourite pubs and restaurants… It really felt like I lived there for some substantial period of time. I felt that it was “my Dublin”.
This was a surprising feeling. Two years ago, I did not think that Dublin was one of my favourite cities, but now it certainly feels this way.
Helicopter ride over Niagara Falls
The Niagara Falls is one of the most photographed tourist attractions. This means that taking pictures of the Falls is very easy, but finding a somewhat unique perspective is quite challenging. On both the Canadian and the US side of The Niagara river downstream of the Horseshoe Falls are multiple viewpoints that would yield a descent photo provided that the Sun is not shining directly into the lens and that the photographer can find a break in an endless stream of tourists taking their own photos in front of the backdrop of the Falls. From the standpoint of commercial or creative photography, the problem is that this photo would be nearly identical to thousands of other images taken by the tourists from the very same viewpoint.
In the Sun Tzu’s spirit of turning a challenge into an advantage, the issue of uniqueness can be side-stepped by including the tourists in the frame and making them an integral, if not the main, feature of the photo. This adds a human element and can also add quite a bit of commercial value for a travel photo, particularly if the subjects are fit and of middle-to-advanced age (apparently, this is age group is the main target segment for the publishers of travel brochures).
In this image, I liked how the girl in a rainbow-colored dress and the actual rainbow could be captured in the same frame.
Ultimately, to take a unique, or at least not a cliché, photo of an iconic sight, one needs an uncommon vantage point. In the case of the Niagara Falls, one option is to take a helicopter tour, which provides an opportunity for some aerial photography. A company called Niagara Helicopters operates from a small airfield located approximately 15 minute by taxi from the Rainbow Bridge. A 15-minute ride over the falls costs about $115, including a discount offered through a hotel’s concierge.
During the tour, I took photos, including the one at the top of this post, with a 24-105 mm lens mounted on a Canon 5D Mark II. I also strapped a GoPro camera to my head and let it run continuously throughout the ride. The result is this movie:
Clouds over Russia
After a week of brutal heat wave, when the temperature almost never dropped below 30 degrees Celsius, rain storms suddenly came over the Central European Russia. Svetlana and I shot this time lapse of the brooding clouds while taking our daughter for a walk during our trip to Voronezh. I attached the GoPro HD Hero 2 camera to a fence and set it to take 5 MP photos every 10 sec over approximately 30 minutes.
Victoria to Dublin in three minutes
Travelling with our 8-months old daughter from the West Coast of Canada to Ireland turned out to be much easier than we expected. I think that from the title one’s standpoint, the day turned out great, because she was held by her mother or me most of the time. From our side, we were lucky that when the cabin pressure changed during takeoff and landing, she wanted to eat, and swallowing probably helped her equalize the pressure on the eardrums. Overall, she handled the trip beautifully.
Along the way, we shot little bits of video using an iPhone 4 and a GoPro HD Hero 2, which we attached to the stroller during our flight connection in Toronto.
Here is a 3-minute clip that starts with our daughter trying on her earmuffs at home and ends with us waiting for dinner at Bewley’s cafe on Grafton Street in Dublin: