Whistler weekend day 1

A few weekends ago, Karen and Brent invited us to stay with them in Whistler for the weekend. We graciously accepted, and we all decided to go zip lining. Noa and i drove up sat around noonish, and got there pretty quickly. Not many people driving up at that time, most go up earlier to get a day of skiing in. We finally had some sunny weather out, and when we arrived decided to go for a walk with Brent’s dog, bailey. I tell you what, this 10 year young puppy dog has some spunk in him. He ran and romped like there was no tomorrow, but more pictures of that later.

So we decided to walk to this lake, called Green Lake, and it was really beautiful. it probably helped that we had nice weather, were out walking, and having a good time. This lake is cool, theres a nice sandbar that juts into the water, and i guess in the summer, the float planes land and take off there. Anyways, we were going on our walk. Here are Karen and Noa having fun in the wind.

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Here are Karen and Brent
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and the famous Bailey
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we saw lots of duckies. this is me “trying” to be a “birder”..
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Not sure karen was impressed
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and noa was telling me to take a picture of the layers of coloured rock/water on the other side, and i adamantly insisted i had the wrong lens on my camera for such and endeavour.
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We had some fun walking around

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your probably wondering where this wonderful lake is that i was talking so much about. yeah yeah, you can’t really see the lake. well guess what, lake pictures are boring. all you see is lake.
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here is a montage of the aforementioned romp by bailey

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eventually romped out, he decided to dig himself a resting hole while us humans talked
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i think one of my favourite things to see were tree’s felled by beavers. these were everywhere.
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i thought this skunk cabbage was a striking colour against the breaking winter
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and ill subject you to one last duck photo. i promise i won’t become a birder.
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and lastly, i got some nice shots of karen and brent on our walk. here are 2 of my favourites

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After the walk, we returned tired, and sat back, had a beer, and relaxed. i don’t think I’ve done such a thing in a long time. I’m usually at the shop, or got some crazy project on the go. it was really really nice.

more to follow, on our action packed weekend, specifically, the zip lining i spoke of….

Iona Beach

This weekend Mike, of eagle fame, and I went to Iona Beach to photograph the sunset. After the sunset I wanted to try to capture some night landings of airplanes, and well, things just got creative from there. My main goal was to get a nice sunset, and I HDR’ed them all, and well, those take time to process, so i won’t post those right now. But, i did get some nice of the sunset in other ways.

just as i got there, this couple was walking right thru the sun, and it struck me as an opportunity to get a great photo.
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then after all the HDR’s, i got this picture of the sunset
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and we started messing with long exposure and gradient filters, and i quite like how this turned out

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So then we set our sights on the airport, once the sun went down to far to get pictures of much else. this is a composite shot of an airplane landing.

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what i really wanted was the lights from airplanes taking off, but we were at a bad spot for that, and instead I switched to star trails with airplanes taking off in them
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so then we started getting bored/creative. this one is with me in it.
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and then as we were leaving, mike has the great idea to try light painting the equipment around us. so off we went. learned a lot about light painting. it took us a few tries, but i finally got a good one.
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there was a dozer too, so we got him.
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while all this was happening, there was a huge harvest moon behind us, so i tired to get a good picture, but i don’t have the lenses for it.
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and then things got silly with mike’s truck.
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we had a lot of fun, as you can see. go have a look at mike’s pictures too, theres one of me in there!

Reflection

My last photo challenge for the group was “Reflection”. instead of taking it literally, i wanted to try something different that i haven’t tried before. so, i set up a flash with a snoot, set the camera to “dramatic mode”, and had noa press the shutter.

I’m pretty happy with the results.
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