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People and Their Neighborhood

When I was last here in Vancouver I walked around Gastown at night and this is the first shot I got. It’s a random shot of the people and their neighborhood. I have vivid impressions of this part of town; mostly that it’s a cool place to hang out. There are bistros and bars galore and you can find anything you might be looking for. I also remember being amazed at how many people were smoking weed in the open, not just here but all over Vancouver. That’s a little like Amsterdam I suppose, not so unusual when compared to other progressive cities.

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People and Their Neighborhood
People and Their Neighborhood – a picture of Gastown in Vancouver BC

Street photography, especially at night, is a window on the soul of a neighborhood. I find that from random shots come insights into the character of a place. When walking around we observe a place but when we look at an image we study it. It’s not easy to study something when you are in it. Maybe that’s the attraction to street photography, it allows for a character study of the people and a place.

There is a symbiotic relationship between our neighborhood and us. When we talk we say; she is from this or that part of the city, as though it conveys some sense of character identity. Ever notice that?

more street photos

I’ve learned to appreciate street photography almost by accident. The more I do it the more I learn. In the end, it’s people and their relationship to their surroundings that comes through. You can see into it anything you want but for me it’s vignettes of life that I can study and learn from.

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Harbour Master Tower

Last week we stopped in the Bahamas on a weekend cruise from Miami. The harbor master tower is the first thing you see at dock. I think it was built before the ships got so big. I took this from a lower deck but you could look down on it from the upper decks and our ship was one of the smaller in port that day.

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Harbour Master Tower
Harbour Master Tower in Nassau Bahamas

This continues on a theme of minimalism. Actually I’ve been on this theme for a while but I don’t always publish the images. I do little studies, with lampposts, trees and buildings, shooting up to simplify the composition. Simplification is the gateway to minimalism; it also accentuates unique qualities of a thing or place.

This image creates an illusion of height, yet the building is no more than a few stories high and there are rooftops just below the frame. But because of how this is composed we imagine it much higher. Minimalism evokes imagination, which in-turn transcends realism.

Since I’m always on the lookout for these I’ll likely put together a book at some point. I get ideas from looking at works of other photographers. One whom I follow on Instagram is Sebastian Weiss. Check him out at the link here https://www.instagram.com/le_blanc/

architecture photography in the gallery

This kind of view is way of looking at the world that is focused on the isolation of something unique. I think we see beauty when we notice uniqueness. It’s all around and all we need to do is narrow our view until we recognize it; at least that my current theory.

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Amsterdam in the Early Morning Hours

Here’s another image I took while walking around central Amsterdam in the early morning hours. I was only here for a week so I made the decision to stay on North American time. That meant I was still wide awake very late which works well for night photography. I could capture the lights reflecting on the still waters of the canals to my heart’s content.

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Amsterdam in the Early Morning Hours
Amsterdam in the early morning hours along the canals

A couple of times I left my tripod back at the hotel. To get these long exposures without shaking the camera I would make due by balancing it on a bike seat. All of the little bridges have bikes leaning against the railings. All I had to do was pick one with a relatively wide seat and gingerly set the camera down. I used a wireless trigger so that I didn’t need to touch the camera to activate the shutter.

That little system worked quite well and to be honest, it’s a technique I’ve used in many other places as well. I don’t always want to bring a tripod especially when shooting street scenes at night. For that I’m grateful for the high ISO performance of Sony cameras, it allows me to do things that were unheard of just a few years ago. For street photography you want to travel light and be able to react quickly.

Yet when I’m out walking around I’ll invariably see something like this scene and I wish I had a tripod. Then it becomes a little game of figuring out what I can use to stabilize the camera. I use all manner of things like balancing on a fence railing, stabilizing the lens with the camera strap, even placing the camera on the ground and shooting up.

night photography gallery

As a result I’m hard on camera bodies. They get scratched quite a bit. But for me the scratches on my camera body are like notches on a belt. It’s funny but a scratched up camera feels to me like a comfortable set of well worn shows; we’ve seen a lot together.

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Urban Scene at Sea

When I visit big cities I like to take pictures of buildings. Repeating patterns are like puzzles for our brains because we automatically look for slight differences. Maybe that’s related to an evolutionary survival trait like looking for predators in the tall grasses of the African savanna. However this is neither Africa nor a big city. This is an urban scene at sea, aka a cruise ship docked in the Bahamas.

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Urban Scene at Sea
Urban Scene at Sea – An RCCL Cruise Ship

This is Royal Caribbean’s Harmony of the Seas. If I’m not mistaken it’s the largest cruise ship in the world right now.

I was on a small ferry traversing the port as we passed this behemoth docked at the terminal. It is about twenty stories high and as long as an air strip. This is just one small section of one side. These mega ships are more akin to cities than boats.

This last weekend I was on cruise ship several times smaller than this, and even that was still quite big. Big enough to have several pools, a rock climbing wall, a casino, clubs, bars and restaurants. So take all that and multiply it by three or four.

urban scenes in the gallery

A few years back I was on the Aurora of the Seas, which at the time was the world’s largest. To be honest, it took me a week to figure out where everything was. It’s a little like visiting Disney World, it takes a while to get your bearings. Since that time we’ve cruised on much smaller ships, like the one this last weekend. And even then there were places on the ship I never saw.

If they make these ships any bigger they might just become indistinguishable from big cities.

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Hotel Europe in Vancouver’s Gastown

This is Hotel Europe in Vancouver’s Gastown. Gastown is a once-rundown-but-now-trendy section of the city. The last time I was in this area I walked around in the evening.

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Hotel Europe in Vancouver's Gastown
Hotel Europe in Vancouver’s Gastown

There is no end of things to see especially if you like photography. In fact, several years ago I was here with my wife when she booked a photowalk with Susanne at Vancouver Photowalks. I highly recommend it if you’re so inclined. She knows the city and you’re guaranteed to come home with some epic shots.

This is a heritage building built in 1909. There are a lot of restored buildings that give the area its character. The streets are made of bricks and there is an ancient clock operated by steam. You could eat in a different restaurant every night and do an epicurean tour of the world. Each time I come back this section of town just keeps getting better.

Normally I take a tripod with me at night but this time I was just out for a stroll, not really intending to take a lot of pictures. I ended up wishing for a tripod, but made due with a high ISO instead. This was taken handheld using ISO 5000. Even though I’ve had this Sony camera for a couple of years I’m still amazed at what it can do. Maybe one day tripods will become obsolete as well.

vancouver gallery

Anyway, if you’re in Vancouver and you want to see something a little different go to Gastown. Even better, arrange to go with Susanne from Vancouver Photowalks.

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Cityscape Panorama Across Sarasota Bay

This is a cityscape panorama across Sarasota Bay. To create this I took three vertical images using a 55 mm lens and then stitched them together in Autopano Giga. The reason I did that rather than use a wide angle lens is it creates a realistic view of the scene whereas wide angle lenses tend to distort the sky. Each method has its use.

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Cityscape Panorama Across Sarasota Bay
This is a cityscape panorama across Sarasota Bay.

My guess is that these sailboats are in a mooring field. There is another mooring field on the other side of that bridge just out of sight. That one is busy but this one seems to be long term as I’ve seen the same sailboats sit here for years.

The day was a little hazy but the clouds added an extra dimension to the sky. These types of scenes, urban panoramas across the water, represent a technique I find appealing. Sky and water frame a cityscape and create a different perspective. It’s a little like looking down from an airplane only in this case we’re looking across. I have a coffee table book I’m working on called Sea and Sky; it has a few images like this.

Another thing I like about these stitched-together panoramas is that the image is very high resolution. That’s good for two reasons; it allows the viewer to zoom in and explore the details and, it can be used to create large prints. This resolution of this image can produce a print that is six feet across without losing detail. That makes it suited for large spaces like offices or hallways.

more panoramas

In a few years camera sensors will capture more detail than they do today. Actually these already exist but are specialized for surveillance and mapping. However soon even landscape photographers like myself will have them. And when that happens we’ll be able to pass the time just exploring the details of a scene like this on someone’s large wall.

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Atop a Cliff Overlooking the Pacific

As the name implies, the Cliff House restaurant is atop a cliff overlooking the pacific. This is a long exposure I did a few months ago. I came back about a month later and each time I was lucky enough to see a good sunset. As a result I have a tonne of pictures from every angle and many of them like this taken long after the sun went down.

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Atop a Cliff Overlooking the Pacific
Atop a cliff overlooking the pacific – Cliff House in San Francisco

I used to shoot film and photos like this were impossible. You might get close but it was trial and error and required precise measurements, settings and calculations of exposure length. Now in the age of digital I can have images like this in a matter of minutes and know exactly how it turns out. So it’s no wonder people like me love shooting in low light. It’s a relatively new phenomenon in the age of photography.

Speaking of cameras and the age of photography, that giant camera at the edge is a Camera obscura. The idea was first used in the 1600’s as a painting aid. It’s an ancient device that employs the same principal as a pinhole camera by projecting a reflected image on a wall or table. Here is a reference to it on wikipedia.

I wonder if cameras will become obsolete in some future timeline of ours. They have come so far in a few hundred years and things are not slowing down. Maybe our eyes will get replaced with hi-definition sensors and view screens and then we can choose to save images or share with others in a virtual reality universe.

california images

Would the people that invented the Camera obscure recognize the cameras of today? In that same vein then I will not recognize cameras a hundred years from now. Given where we are headed with sensor tech and VR, perhaps my idea is not so far fetched.

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All Roads Lead to Sarasota

When it comes to taking photos, this is my favorite section of Sarasota. On the left is the fishing pier, which I’m standing on and on the right is the Ringling Bridge that leads to the center of town. I take so many pictures from here that I’m at risk of running out of views. Not this time because it’s a perspective I haven’t yet captured. It reminds me of the saying about Rome, only in this case all roads lead to Sarasota. That could be a metaphor for something else.

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All Roads Lead to Sarasota
All Roads Lead to Sarasota

It’s silly but I have an ongoing fear that I’ll run out of things to take pictures of. Nothing could be further from reality because the possibilities are infinite. Yet each time I go out I feel that fear. Maybe it’s just part of the process, a propellant for creativity. I compartmentalize it so it doesn’t take control of me but it’s always there. I can acknowledge it without letting it change my agenda. It’s a reminder that art and creativity are tangible and as such there is resistance to succeeding.

I think about these things a lot. That’s because I take the time to write about my images. That in turn causes me to explore my thoughts, motivations and ideas around images. Any time you do that it invariably leads to these questions; what is art, where does it come from, where does it lead? And in the end the answer is always the same, all roads lead to self discovery.

Sarasota Images

So perhaps the new perspective that I found for this area can be an allegory for self awareness. That’s my two cents on the matter.

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Light, Reflection and Color

This is a long exposure I took while walking under a bridge in Central Amsterdam. The hanging vertical lights and their reflections created an eerie effect. It’s a public space that’s transformed into a surreal display of light, reflection and color by night. Just one of many surprises I found while walking around the city of Amsterdam.

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Light, Reflection and Color
Light, Reflection and Color under a bridge in Amsterdam

I spent a lot of time along the canals at night. It seemed perfectly safe, save for the odd solicitations in a certain quarter not to be mentioned; but that’s another story for another day. No matter where I turned there were lights reflected on the water. If you’ve followed me you know that’s too much for me to resists; the lights that is.

I stood at this spot for a while taking pictures. Every now and then this space was filled with the rumble of trains passing overhead. I passed this same spot in a canal boat tour earlier in the day and it didn’t look anything like this. I would never have guessed it could be transformed like this at night.

European gallery

The reason I came to Amsterdam is that I had some photos being shown in a Museum in Harderwijk at an event sponsored by BTP and Rinus Bakker. My plan is to come back for the next showing and spend a little more time exploring places like this. Until then I’ll have to be content with my memories and photos.

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The New Bridge

Each time I travel to San Francisco I pass over the Bay Bridge. This new section was recently completed after a monumental construction project. Now they’ve started deconstructing the old one which sits adjacent to this. Finally after many months it’s getting so you can take a picture of the new bridge without it being crowded by the old one.

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The New Bridge
The New Bridge in San Francisco

I took this from Treasure Island which is halfway between San Francisco and Oakland. Fortunately it was calm that night so as to produce the colorful reflections on the water.

I take pictures of bridges because I find them fascinating and especially enjoy images at night. That’s because bridges form leading lines for our eyes to follow. They also have repeating elements to provide a sense of scale and direction. The link below is a collection of bridge pictures from places I’ve been.

bridges in the gallery

I grew up near San Francisco so I’ve been over the old bridge countless times. Maybe in a hundred years we’ll all fly drone cars and won’t need bridges. Until such time they’ll keep building new ones and i’ll keep taking pictures of them at night.