Category: Canada

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West Coast

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French Beach is a special place for me. When we first moved to Vancouver Island, we drove there to explore our new surroundings, and this is where I was really struck by the beauty of the local nature. It is very much tamed by the park setting, but it doesn’t detract much from the impression. To me, French Beach has all the essential West Coast elements – waves, tall trees, large pebbles and driftwood on the beach.

It all typically comes with West Coast weather too – rain, fog, wind. Last year, just after Christmas, we decided to go for a drive along the coast of the island despite the gloomy weather forecast.

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We thought that we would explore the Sheringham Point Lighthouse, which we have never seen before. It is hidden among the private lands, and the access point from the main road is not obvious. The lighthouse was a bit underwhelming, but still a nice find, considering how long we have lived here without being aware of it’s existence.

The weather that day, was a real gift, though. An almost clear sky without any wind. I was just a single fine day in a row of cold and gloomy ones – perfect for getting out to the coast. Being able to look out of the window, grab a camera bag and some sandwiches and be out by the ocean at one of the most beautiful spots I know – this is what I like about living here.

I am also conscious that I cannot take for granted how easygoing our six-year-old daughter is. The fact that she can cheerfully switch from her Playmobil figurines to the idea of going to a picnic is impressive to me. Flexibility. It is yet another thing I am learning from her.

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Sketching at the museum

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We discovered that our daughter loved drawing in museums when we are on sabbatical in Milan last year. We would bling her sketchbook and pencils wherever we’d go, and she would stop in front of every sculpture to draw it.

Today, we went to the Royal BC Museum in Victoria to see the wildlife photography exhibit, and there were some interactive setups aimed, I suppose, to teach kids the “rule of thirds” of composition. One could look at an animal figure through a frame with some wire grid and sketch it on a piece of paper.

Our daughter was happy to draw the animals, and she thought that the frame was cool, but as far as I could tell, she did not use any composition rules. I am glad that she she feels in her element drawing in public. And I miss our Italian museum trips, where my daughter and I sat side by side, sketching something. We should start drawing together again, while she still wants to do it.

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Running with my daughter

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Today, my daughter and I went for a bike ride/run to a nearby ocean-side park. I ran and she biked. I remember that the first time we did this was last Spring in Milan, where we were on a six-months sabbatical. We would run/bike along Naviglio Martesana. She could handle about 15 minutes of non-stop pedalling on her bike, which we borrowed from my colleague. In that time, we could get to a playground, where she would play for about half-an-hour, spending most of that time hanging on monkey bars. We would eat an apple and some pretzels, which was her go-to snack over there, much like “fishy crackers” are consistent favourites here in Canada, and head back home. It was hot. We strategically chose the path to stay in the shade, as we ran/biked along the canal.

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Today, it was cold (by Victoria standard anyway – about 0 degrees C) and windy. My daughter is stronger now and she has a bigger bike, so she can ride 30 minutes non-stop. Still, I ran at a pace, where we could talk without breathing hard. It was fun to run with her, but it was no question about playing when we got to a playground at the local park. It was so cold, that even stopping was uncomfortable. This is the thing about Victoria: the running trails around our home are some of the best I’ve tried anywhere in the world. The air is unbelievably fresh – I was really missing it in Milan. The nature is spectacular. The people are friendly and polite. Yet, it is just not quite warm enough to be truly enjoyable.

To be fair, though, I would need to compare apples to apples, or rather, winter to winter. The very first time I ran in Milan was in the winter, in the cold, in the dark, along a busy Via Melchiorre Gioia to Piazza Game Aulenti, which was the closest place to our apartment (that I knew of), where some stores were open late at night. I wanted to buy a thermos for my daughter to bring hot chocolate in to her ice-skating lesson the next morning (the irony of the fact that she came to Italy from Canada to learn skating is not lost on me, by the way), so I decided to make a running workout of the shopping trip. It was slippery with ice, windy, dark, noisy and generally quite unpleasant to run that night. But at that time, when we were without a car for the first time in many years, simply bing able to cove some distance on foot and explore the new city was liberating.

Today also, the simple fact that my daughter and I could on the whim put on the runners, jump on a bike and be in a forest, by the ocean in less than 15 minutes, chatting all the way there, was definitely a gift, cold weather or not.

Night view of the Unicredit tower in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.
Night view of the Unicredit tower in Piazza Gae Aulenti. Milan. Italy.

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Ramen

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In Japan, rituals are important. For example, the proper way of eating food, the order in which it should be eaten, etc. can be very intricate. But the neat thing is that these rules often originate from practical considerations.

With ramen, for example, it’s good to take a few sips of the broth first, before eating the noodles. There are at least two reasons for this:

First, the broth is what makes a ramen bowl distinct. It usually takes hours to make and there are various kinds of it. My favourite, at Kuma Noodles in Victoria, BC, is the miso flavour. Besides the broth, what makes ramen unique to a particular region and to a particular chef is the level of saltiness, the type of noodles and the toppings.

Second, the noodles are still cooking while you are tasting the broth. By the way, it is considered polite to slurp the noodles, and there is a practical reason for this too: slurping actually cools the noodles, which are very hot. Also, because ramen is best eaten while it is hot, it is polite not to talk while eating it and to eat it quickly.

Having said all this about table manners, I was told once by a Japanese friend that the best way to show respect to the chef is to relax, enjoy the food and not be concerned about the rules. …Of course, it might have been just a polite way of making us, the gaijin, not over-think reigi too much. As with many Japanese things, I will never know…

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California dreaming

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Too much of a good stuff could be not so good, if it is monotonous. We have been having a stretch of incredible warm summer weather in the Pacific North-West, and I overheard one local man saying to another: “I hope it won’t turn into California.”

Granted, these people were both runners, and training outdoors is much more comfortable in cooler weather. Still, I think that this attitude shows that it is important to have variety in whatever we experience, even if things seem to be pretty good at the moment. At the very least, variation would make us appreciate the “ups” more and help cope with future “downs” by putting them into perspective.

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Panoramas

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Panoramic landscape photos, the ones that are composed of several individual shots that are stitched together by a software, are fun because they offer a view that cannot be achieved by naked eye. By the way, I think this is one of the main criteria for “interestingness” of a photo – it should show something that I viewer would not normally see by him/herself, e.g. an extreme close-up, a frozen motion, a unique point of view or colour combination, etc.

For panoramas, I find that composing the final image is a challenge, because at the time of shooting, my brain picks the focal points of the individual sectors, not that of the final image. As a result, panoramas often either don’t have a compositional focus or have multiple competing elements (e.g. a mountain, a cloud formation, a rock in the foreground, etc.) Because it is difficult to visualize the end result at the time of shooting, I like using my iPhone camera for panoramas. It allows me to see the result right away instead of waiting until I stitch the individual images on a computer. Of course, the technical quality is inferior, compared to an image produced by a DSLR, but I think the main appeal of panoramas is their initial impact (the panoramic nature of the scene being the main element of the composition), so the instant feedback offered by the phone camera is worth the penalty in noise, banding and other defects. As one prominent photographer, who’s name escapes me, said about excessive noise in particular, “if people a concerned about noise in your photo, you have a boring image!”

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Christmas lights: unplugging from routine

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Breaking away from the daily working routine at the beginning of the holiday season has not been easy. For me, it requires a conscious effort to stop checking and responding to emails that keep appearing in my inbox. Still, both my wife and I are doing our best to unplug after a marathon of dealing with academic matters at the end of the term.

Today, we spent the entire day in the downtown with our friends, looking at Christmas trees at the Empress Hotel, having a leisurely lunch and walking along the inner harbour under rain. Breaking the routine takes me out of a comfort zone, but I know that this is necessary for avoiding burnout. For example, it is the lack of everyday comforts that makes travelling so effective in making us experience the World in a new light. The same effect can be obtained by simply walking in our home town, without any particular goal, looking at the place with the eyes of a tourist.

The term flâneur, which emerged in Paris at the end of the 19th century as a reference to urban exploring through strolling and observing the city life, is based on the same principle. Modern street photography is the extension of this urban observing. Having no particular goal for the stroll and the photo shoot enables one to be present and responsive to the experience of the city life. This exploration mode is similar, in some respect, to the “beginner’s mind”, a state that is tremendously conductive to personal development in zen buddhism and Eastern martial arts, such as kendo.

I think that being in the company of two three-year-olds, who exemplify the beginner’s mind by definition, is particularly amazing. Naturally, my photos today were mostly of them – enjoying Christmas lights and colourful window displays of the local shops.

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Snails: action has been slow today




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.

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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 on a Canon EOS-1D X camera body. High framing rate allowed me to get several shots each time a seal would come out to snatch the fish. The depth of field at f1.4 was so shallow that only the seal’s nose came out sharp. The image in this post is at f4.0. In the end, everyone was quite pleased, including the seals (I think).

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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.