We had a bright sunny day here in Metro Vancouver. What a change from the cool, rainy spring we’ve had. It wasn’t that warm, but I got by with a singe fleece jacket, as long as I stayed out of the wind.

I drove along the Fraser on river road looking for signs of spring. About all I found was this gas storage facility, with some grass greening up in a field in front of it. Most of the trees still had tight buds, albeit the alder catkins were out.

I carried on toward the road to the Delta Airport coming off Ladner Trunk Road. I saw a bunch of cars pulled off at the gate to a park, but above them I noticed this young eagle rise from a branch and take off. As I pulled off to the side of the road to see what he was up to, he came sweeping back in to land on the branch again. He seemed interested in all the people coming out of the park and standing around to see him. Too bad I didn’t have my 400mm Sigma lens with me. As good as it is, I couldn’t fill the frame with the bird using my Nikon 70-300. Anyway, this shot is hand held, looking up the tree from the road. I tried a 1.4 teleconverter in an attempt to get closer, but when I use that, the VR on the lens stops working. Too much shake when I try to get a shot when fully extended at 300mm.

All in all it was a good afternoon. Warm, sunny, and the first signs of a real spring beginning to show. That means more and more trips out to take pictures around this lovely city of ours.

It seems MarsEdit needs some help in placing pictures on the page. You have to add some code to set up your margins or else the text will be plumb with the photo.

This will test some code I’ve just found in another post using Ecto. With any luck it will put a 10px margin around the edges. It looks right in the preview, but you never know until you try it for real, right?

So, lesee what happens with this picture above.

And let’s see what happens with this second picture. For this one, I inserted the code via an edit to a copy of the macro for the align left choice in MarsEdit and added some margin.

Well, whadayaknow. looks good in the editor preview, so let’s see what it looks like online.

murmer murmer. I really shouldn’t have to be doing this in the 21st Century.

update: note to self. You really need more space between the photos to let them align properly.

One of my colleagues at work plays with the band Circle of Friends in his spare time. They play a mix of music from the 60's through 80's that's guaranteed to get you up dancing (when there is room). I've seen them live a couple of times now and they can really get a place with the right crowd hoppin'.

They were playing at the Fireside Cafe in Whalley last Saturday night and my colleague asked if I could take some pictures. I did.

The cafe was small, and the lights were low. I didn't want to ruin the ambience all night with flashes, so for the most part I just jacked up the ISO and took my chances.

For my first shoot in a nightclub/cafe, I'm reasonably pleased with the outcome. My ISO ranged from 640 for a couple of shots I took with flash, up to 3200 for available light. The spotlights were changing colours every few minutes, so it was hard to keep the colour balance in check. It was also a trick to get the whole band in focus. Most of the time the f-stop was pretty wide open, resulting in quite a shallow depth of field. Still, a couple of tweaks in Lightroom gave me some acceptable results. More time in Photoshop will also help with some noise.

I was able to take a variety of shots over the evening, and my colleague seemed happy with the results.

Add one more thing to take pictures of on a dreary day on the wet coast. Heh, head inside and see what you can do in there.

I started formatting a WD My Book external drive last Sunday at about 3pm. By Saturday morning it had reached 45%. Enough.  I cancelled the formatting, shut my computer down and moved the drive to my laptop.

On the laptop, I started formatting at about noon, and was finished by 10pm. Slow, but soooo much better than waiting for my desktop to do it.

A Mac is starting to look pretty good right about now.

Anyway, now I have an operational 1TB drive and I’m looking for a way to (economically) retrieve the data from my old 500GB drive. It still powers up, but it doesn’t communicate – not with the desktop or the laptop.

I see in the WD FAQ section, that you can use the drives as internal drives, but doing so will void your warranty. Well, any warranty on that old 500GB drive was up long ago, so I need to figure out how to open it up and try the drive directly on my computer.

Any ideas out there?

Sunday afternoon through Wednesday pm – 27% and counting…

The old, external backup drive crashed over Xmas. I have some redundancy, so I don’t think I lost much. But it meant it was time for a trip to the tech store.

I purchased one of those new fangled one terabyte, USB 2.0 My Books. Reading through the user guide pdf, I noticed it was supplied with a Fat32 file system.  There was a recommendation to reformat to an NTFS file system for better performance, if it was to be used solely on a Windows Vista system.

When I plugged it in, I noticed that all the USB ports on the back of my computer were USB 1.1. Imagine advertising USB 2 all over your computer package and only providing 2 out of 6 USB 2.0 ports…. Sigh.

The drive is backward compatible, right? Yep.

Fine. The instructions were 4 steps – go to computer management, delete the partition, re-initialized the drive, and choose to format the drive and follow the wizard.  Oh, and they note it might take some time (heh).

Done. On Sunday around 3:00pm.

Nothing much seemed to happen immediately, so I let things run for a while. When I went to bed around 10:30, it was reading 1% and formatting.

Now it’s Wednesday, and it’s getting exciting. This evening it’s reading 26%, and I’m sure by the time I hit the sack it will be 27%. Sheesh, I hope you caught the sarcasm.

Something’s up, but I don’t know what, and I really don’t want to start again – just in case it works. I’m just hoping that it won’t get to something like 75% or 80% and then announce that it can’t complete. I’ll really be pissed at that point.

Keep ya posted…

Yes, I ran into a bump in the road. A week ago last Friday, I ran into a medical problem that put me out of commission for a week or so. I've caught up a bit since, and things seem to be back to normal now, so here's hop'in.

  I think the last thing I was thinking about here was how to make the best of cloudy or rainy days for photos. I couldn't get out for pictures in our recent  fog, but this was an interesting sky back in December I couldn't resist.

This isn't a great photo, but it's a place to start thinking about making the best of those dreary days.

We've had some serious snow around Vancouver this year, and it's stuck around – that's unusual for the wet coast.  The weather usually warms up and melts it within a day or so. But this year, a high pressure ridge in the interior kept pumping the cold air out our way.

This day, I was out exploring in the snow with my G10 and saw the clouds rolling in for another dump. It's not often we see clouds like this. It was almost like they were bunching up as they collided with something (likely that cold high pressure ridge). I liked the dramatic patterns, the textures and the black and white effect produced as they rolled in, so I stopped quickly to snap a picture or two.

Lesson learned: Patterns, lighting, and texture are things we can take advantage of on cloudy days. They can be interesting. We just need to  be receptive and have a camera ready to experiment when we see them. So often I just pass by scenes like this, but I'm learning.

The West Coast is often affectionately called the wet coast,well, because it’s wet.

For example, according to the news tonight, Hope, just 100 miles to the east of Vancouver, gets an average of about 100 mm of rain in January. Over the last 24 hours, they’ve already had that 100mm of rain, and it is still raining.

Apparently Port Alberni, to the west of us, has had over 200 mm of rain, and that number is still climbing. The City of Surrey had close to 70mm, well above our usual.

Ok, so this is an unusual year. Still, we do get a lot of rain around here, and that can have an effect on the kind of photography we can do. Especially when we’re constrained to weekend shooting.

Looking through Flickr, I see tons of great pictures.  Bright, sunny, colourful pictures. I get jealous. Winter on the wet coast means sunless days, grey clouds, browns, and faded yellows. We have a lot of evergreens, so there are some dull greens too.

Much of the winter is grey and rainy. A sunny day is a glorious respite, and the activity of the city reflects that. I’m sure the number of pictures around Vancouver rises exponentially when the sun comes out.

But what does a budding photographer do when it rains.  If you can’t include great light and colour, what else sets photographs apart. What compositional tricks or other techniques can compensate for a dull, grey, wet day?

That’s what I’m going to explore this winter. I’m working on a short list of options to try, but your suggestions are welcome.

There must be lots of ways to take great photos in the rain. Whadayathink?

Derek over at Penmachine has a good post with pictures about the current state of Vancouver’s unseasonable snow.

Out in Surrey, things are much the same. The main streets are reasonably clear, but side roads are impossible. Mountains of snow are piled up and it’s near impossible to walk anywhere ’cause few of the sidewalks have been cleared. Where driveways open on to main streets, it’s often impossible to see past the snowbanks to suss out on-coming traffic. It’s dangerous out there.

As he says, in many ways the coming melt will be welcome. Unfortunately it sounds like it will be all at once, with a lot of rain.

Tonight Environment Canada just issued a warning calling for rising freezing levels, melting snow, and heavy rain. They say there could be 100-150mm of rain in the Fraser Valley and up to 100mm in Vancouver.

This, combined with the current snow pack and frozen soil below it,  could result in really serious flooding problems in Metro Vancouver and a dangerous rise in streamflow in local rivers.

If you know where a storm drain is on your street, help out your neighbours and clean it off so the deluge can flow away with minimal damage.

Ah, the wet coast.

Over at Urban Vancouver, Ray points to an interesting post by Nicholas Carr on Rough Type. The discussion is about the death of the blog, now that many blogs had morphed into media sites with multiple authors, targeted ads, various gadgets and multiple posts a day.

I’ve been thinking about this myself lately. I’ve come to the conclusion that I prefer blogs with a single author and those that provide full text feeds. I’d made the decision about full text RSS a while ago, and I’ve already pruned my feeds on that count. Now I find I’m spending less and less time reading blogs with multiple authors.

As Nicholas says:

“As blogs have become mainstream, they’ve lost much of their original personality.”

I don’t mind an occasional guest post on a blog, but I’m really there to learn what the individual blogger has to offer. It may be the personality of his/her writing, the knowledge they choose to share, or something about the interests they have. I find it much like getting to know someone and enjoying their company.

If they want me to meet their friends, they can link to those friend’s blogs, and if they sound interesting to me, I’ll visit. I may even add them to my list of feeds.

Sure, I still visit blogs like Lifehacker and pop in on Gizmodo once in a while, but that’s usually when I want a quick fix of a specific type of news. I may also jump over to CBC or other websites depending on the kind of news I’m after.

But for the most part, I stick with personal blogs. I get enough ‘media’ every day already. To me, a more personal blog is what blogging reading is all about.

This was the view on the way to Guildford this morning. We probably got 5-10 cm as predicted.

Now they're telling us we're going to get some rain. Lots of it. Sigh, first we're buried and then we drown.

Sure been a weird winter here on the wet coast. Only a few years like this on record, and I think I've seen at least 3 of them.