Park Royal Area

This was not a planned photo walk, my buddy texted me to see if I wanted to join for photos at Lions Gate Bridge at the end of the day, so I of course said to meet up. As you can notice in the first photo, that was taken at sunset beach, nowhere near lions gate bridge. I started my walk there, until my friend got there. I saw this graffiti on the bus stop glass, I really liked the shapes on it, so I tried to frame the people down below in the graffiti design. When I put my eye to the view finder, this girl started walking her bike up the road, so I waited until she also lined up between the lines, I thought that was a nice lucky midground for the photo. Sunset Beach is one of my favorite areas of downtown. You can chill by the big field, there is also a small spot for skateboarding, a hockey court, and it’s usually a bit less busy than English Bay.

These aren’t great photos, but I just love the look of this bike, it was sitting right next to the bus stop. Just a nice green on green photo.

My friend and I met up and headed to North Van, around the Park Royal mall area. When we got there, the sun was already on its way down, behind clouds. We walked around the mall but I couldn't find anything that interesting because of the lack of light, so we walked around back to the river that led to the beach. Right on the trail entrance there was this little path towards the river, a Heron was chilling on the rocks and enjoying the view. I thought it would be interesting to use the foreground plants as a frame for this photo, I tried including the bird and the background houses, maybe to show the contrast of nature and people? Who knows! I could try to be very poetic here, but it just looked nice ^_^

We kept walking along the seawall, it was super nice, we kinda forgot to take photos, so we kept walking until we saw this awesome Lincoln Continental at the parking lot. I was trying to get a photo of the back side of it, when the owner showed up, he asked if we wanted to take photos of the inside, he was super nice and let us take photos of his car. I got this photo from the interior, and it might be my favorite picture of the day, it was a very quick snapshot, but when I got home and started editing, I saw how much potential it had, initially I had the sunroof in the photo but I thought that distracted from the interior of the car because it was too bright and it led your eye in that direction, I wanted you to see the interior of the car, that was the whole point, so I ended up cropping that. When I lowered the highlights in the photo, I was very excited that I had all those cloud textures to work with. I tried grading the photo with a 70s look. I think I achieved exactly what I was looking for! I also like the second photo, of the front of the car, mainly because of how the sunset colors play with the car color, those warm shadows from the sun and the cool blue highlights from the sky.

And to end the night as we walked back towards the car, we went past this really interesting building with a lot of trees and foliage all around it. Blue hour had just started and with the warm glow of the apartments and the garage, I thought that gave a nice balanced contrast.

That was it for that day, I definitely want to walk around north Vancouver more, I don’t do that often enough. On the drive back I saw quite a few possible future photo opportunities, so i’ll definitely be heading back there soon.

Medley 1 - Britannia Beach/Porteau Cove/East Van/Deep Cove

This will be the first post on the Medley series. The series will be for images that don’t fit well with other photo day stories, or they were the only images taken that day.

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The first image was taken at Britannia Beach. That weekend had been very rainy, but the sky started opening up in the late afternoon, there was still a few hours left in the day, so my girlfriend and I decided to head there and try to get a photo of this spot that I had been wanting to get for a while. It’s a pretty easy spot to get to, you can park anywhere near the beach, you will see this abandoned hangar, and if you look around you will see all these old structures in the water near it. Just find your way to the beach and you are gold.

I chose this composition because I wanted to show the snowy mountains on the BG, the clouds and the structures on the FG. I had to find a way to lead your eye from the structure all the way to the mountains, I found this angle that had the main structure right in the FG, including its reflection on the water, and a second smaller structure to be the MG layer. From there the mountain lines all lead to the snowy area with the brightest part of the sun behind the clouds. The scene was beautiful in person, but it was tricky to get what I visualized in my head, in the camera. I decided I needed a 10 stop ND filer, to reduce the specular highlights on the water and to add motion to the clouds. I had to take a 3 min exposure to accomplish that.

I honestly don’t have much to say about this one, the image kind of speaks for itself. On our way back from Britannia Beach Trail, we stopped at Porteau Cove to see the last few minutes of sunset. It was absolutely stunning! I had to grab my camera to take this last photo, the way the mountain was silhouetted in front of those clouds was amazing. This was a 1min exposure to be able to capture the movement of the clouds. I didn’t have to do much on the color grading side of it, it’s just one of those images that you cant get twice.

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Let’s jump to another day. It was a rainy Saturday morning, I didn’t have much to do, girlfriend was still asleep, so I grabbed my stuff and the car and started driving around. I drove around the east van area, near Hastings street, I wanted to find some industrial looking buildings and things of that nature. Took a few photos, but nothing worth sharing. On this calm suburban street near PNE were these views towards the ocean and below and the industrial area. I chose this photo because of the way those buildings reflected the light around them, the chrome look really appealed to me, and with the clouds above it gave the scene a very gritty feel.

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To close off this medley, I have this photo I took the same day as the one above, but in a different location. After driving around for a bit, I decided to go to Deep Cove, it’s always super nice and quiet there when it rains, not that sunny days aren’t relaxing there, but the rain just helps dampen everything down.

I’ve been trying to get more into minimalist photography, I saw this boat far in the distance, it was all alone in the fog. I used my TAMRON ZOOM MACRO, it’s a really weird vintage lens, 70-150mm F3.5 with a macro range. I can’t say enough good things about this lens, the bokeh is from another world. I wanted a very calm feeling when you looked at this image. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to leave the cable lines in the photo or not, but I decided against removing them in post. For some reason I thought leaving them there added a very weird feeling of not knowing where they were coming from or how far the boat was from land and it added to that serene lonely feel.

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