Snow, fall colours and a few eagles...

Today I took a drive east, up the Fraser Valley with my friend Bill. My goal was to find some fall colours but it quickly became obvious that it was already too late in the year for that, so we decided to drive all the way out to the Eagle Festival near Harrison Mills. Well actually, in the end we drove all the way past Hope and up the Fraser Canyon a short way, hoping for some really snowy mountains, but alas we lost the light there pretty quickly. We just made it back along the Lougheed Highway, opposite Mt. Cheam, in time for the above photo with the last rays of daylight hitting the peak.

In search of fall colours?

My friend Bill and I decided to hike up the west side of Gold Creek in Golden Ears Park this last weekend. The east side has large areas of deciduous tress and bushes that were likely looking quite colourful. Sadly all we managed to find west of Gold Creek was moss...

Gallery: Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm f/1.8 Tests

This gallery contains my first quick tests of the new Olympus M.Zuiko Digital 45mm f/1.8 lens. I wandered around for a few minutes while on my lunch break and snapped these quick test photos...

Gallery: Olympus M.Zuiko 45mm f/1.8 Tests

Gallery: Fall colours at UBC...

On a beautiful (but cool) fall day today, I wandered around UBC for a few hours, taking in the colours of the changing leaves.

Gallery: UBC Fall Colours

Gallery: Maissanne Bellydance

A photo shoot I did for my friend Maissanne, a teacher by day and a bellydancer by night. Click on the above image for a gallery with 40 of my favourite photos I chose after quickly going through all the images from the shoot. She will be choosing photos from this session for a future update to her website.

An evening with the Nikon P7100

I finally had some time to shoot with the CoolPix P7100, other than time-lapse, and took it down to Granville Island in the evening to test its high ISO, its VR and is low-light focus. For a P&S, its high ISO shooting was quite impressive and I am happy to report that virtually all the issues I had with the original P7000 have been addressed. Not that the original P7000 had any issues in the image quality department, but it had a terrible AF mechanism that had a hard time locking on in low light or even in good light sometimes, if the contrast was low.

The P7100 nailed the focus time and time again. Although it slowed down a bit in really low light, it pretty much always seemed to lock focus... at least as well as any other high end P&S I've used.

Almost all of the UI sluggishness and quirkiness is gone and the shot-to-shot time for RAW shooting seems improved too. The new front mounted control wheel works nicely as well. Anyway, this is now a very worthy contender for the top high-end-raw-shooting-P&S title!

Image gallery: Nikon Coolpix P7100 at Granville Island

Time-lapse: Prince George to Maple Ridge

A time lapse movie shot from inside a rental minivan, coming back from a PPOC-BC trade show in Prince George. A Nikon P7100 was mounted to a passenger side hand-grip with a Gorillapod. The camera was set to time-lapse mode, taking one shot every 30 seconds and the resulting frames are played back at 10 fps in this video. Unfortunately the battery died before we got all the way back. However, still very impressive battery life! The camera was running for over 9 hours straight and took about 1100 frames.

Music is an excerpt from the song "Speedbumps" by Sounds from the Ground. (iTunes Link)

Random Post: Yes Watch

While going through some older images, in preparation for an Adobe Lightroom training seminar I'm teaching this weekend, I came across images of my Yes Watch that I bought some time ago. I had intended on doing some sort of a "review" of this watch but never got around to it. I likely won't be putting one up that is super detailed, but thought I'd post a quick note since this watch is a very interesting timepiece for the photographer or filmmaker.

Firstly, Yes watches are certainly not inexpensive, but they are uniquely functional and very well made. Mine, a slightly modified 'Inca' model, is made of solid titanium, case and band, and has a sapphire crystal with antireflection coatings. It is water resistant to 10 atmospheres (300 feet) as well. Check out the amazing kit you get (the above photo) when you buy one one of these. Not only does it come in a gorgeous, thickly lacquered wooden display box, but you get three watch bands (rubber, leather and titanium), spare link pins with a link removal tool, spare spring pins and a spring-pin pick tool. You can see I removed one link to make the watch fit my wrist better.

What makes it so interesting is the fact that it graphically shows the amount of daylight and darkness in the current 24 hour day, and with its single 24 hour hand, it shows precisely where in the day/night cycle one currently is. Of course this lets you read the sunrise and sunset times as well. It also shows the same data for the moon in a narrow ring surrounding the main day/night display. Their website, linked to above, has more detailed info if you want to know more about all the functions.

Germany: Föhr - the last day...

I am bouncing around a bit with these entries from my Germany trip. This evening I was preparing to email some images of her studio to my aunt on Föhr, and I just decided to post a gallery of images from the last day on the island instead. The first image of my 80 year old aunt Ruth was taken with the wickedly sharp Leica (Panasonic) 25mm f/1.4 lens again, at ISO 640 on my GH2... too sharp for a portrait really. I hope she doesn't mind too much! Most of the tighter shots in the gallery, such as the one above, were taken with the 25mm lens as well.

The last day on Föhr was relaxing. We spent a lot of time with my aunt, and I took some photos in her attic studio, which had a lot of her sculptures, many quite unusual, and her watercolour paintings on display. Click the image above to visit the gallery.

A New Look!

You might notice a slight change to the look of this blog! I want to be sure to direct people back to the main Beau Photo store blogs page, so I decided to change the banner and remove the Beau logo. That way hopefully people won't think they are on the official Beau blog for some reason.

I also added a "Looking for Beau Photo content?" section that will appear above the regular blog postings for the next month or so, helping to direct traffic destined for Beau Photo to the real Beau blogs.

Lastly, since I was making a new banner anyway, I also took the opportunity to widen the layout a tiny bit. Without going into technical details, this will make it way easier to post images that are optimally sized to fit the exact width of the blog entries. You'd think that Blogger would have some sort of "fit width" command for images, but no. I had to essentially manually edit the HTML for every post that contained a horizontal (landscape) format image! The Blogger image presets either made for an image that was way too small, or one that was just a little too big. What a pain! I also made sure to make the Beau Photo blogs wider from the get-go, to make it easier for people to post images.

Anyway, I hope you like the new banner and slightly wider content. This change will make it much easier to post a quick blog entry in the future too!