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.
