I haven’t really been out of town much this summer, and I certainly haven’t been camping. This past week I hatched a fairly hasty plan to solve both of those problems and boy did it turn out well.

Salt Spring Island is the largest of the southern gulf islands located between Vancouver and Vancouver Island. Accessible by ferry from either Victoria or Vancouver, its geographic area of about 183 km² is less than 10% the size of the Metro Vancouver area and its population fo 10,500 is less than 1% of Vancouver’s total and Ruckle Provincial Park on the island’s southern tip seemed like the perfect place to pitch a tent.

Oh yeah…I decided to do this all by bike. I’m all about the low carbon footprint these days, though I’m not sure how much lower I can get it.

Continue reading "Cycling to Salt Spring Island"

Seen on a walk around the seawall with my mother in July. Herons are relatively common in Vancouver, which hasn’t made me love them any less. More photos are in the galleries or on Flickr.

Yesterday started gloomily, and after attending the CBC’s free concert at noon and a swim I wound up at home working in the afternoon. As the sun broke through a layer of clouds in the early evening it seemed like a decent time for a short walk. Little did I know that I’d bump into a dude who was chillin’ like a villen.

I sat down on the bench beside him for a while and listened in on a fairly active conversation that was obviously happening in his head. Topics ranged from why teenagers would carry firearms to school to the conversations his mother had with his aunts Dolly & Glenna.

Sometimes, it’s perfectly reasonable to just walk around with your camera for a bit.

Somewhere in there I attended a good old fashioned rock and roll concert. Photos of Cotton Jones and the Parson Red Heads are on Guttersnipe.

Despite the fact that I’ve been shooting photos for well over 20 years at this point, I’ve never really used flash that much. There has, in fact, been extended periods of not even owning a flash in my life.

I’ve been shooting a lot of concerts and at the large ones there’s a pretty standard set of rules: first three songs only, no flash. This was true for Joanna Newsom and Robin Pecknold on Thursday night, so when I was asked to shoot a concert on Friday I left my flash at home. The shots turned out well, and everybody’s fairly happy but flash would have helped.

I picked up a Rogue Flashbender on Saturday, to give me more flexibility. It’s a versatile and flexible tool that’s easy to pack and carry.

The Waterfront Stage at the Under the Volcano Festival was completely unlit and the day was gloomy, so it gave me the perfect chance to play with the Flashbender. I was quite happy to see that it helped, turning what would have been a darkly lit almost impossible situation into some usable photos. All of the pairs below were shot with the same shutter speeds and aperture settings (you can see that the sunlit backgrounds are exposed similarly in them), the first one including a flash with the Flashbender in place and the second one with no flash.

Continue reading "On Flash (Not the Adobe Kind)"

I’m heading to the Under the Volcano festival today, so I checked out Cates Park on Google Maps to see what the walking distance is in North Vancouver from other destinations (most notably, Honey’s Doughnuts.) I was quite surprised to notice that while the waters of the Burrard Inlet are labeled correctly, the waters off of Cates Park—farther east, and surrounded on three sides by various areas of Vancouver—are not.

As it turns out, Google seems to think that North Vancouver might, in fact, be a part of Southeast Alaska.

There’s a shuttle running to the festival, and I think I’m going to take it over instead of cycling. It’ll make towing camera equipment around a whole lot easier.

The image is a composite of two Google Maps images. Click to see a larger view.

Paula Uteck passed away on Sunday, August 1, 2010 after a six year battle with breast cancer. This was the last time my mother and I saw her.

The complete set of photos is on Flickr.

Presented by the Shore 104 FM Shorefest showcases some of Vancouver’s best music as a prelude to the Celebration of Light Fireworks show in English Bay. Concerts are broadcast live on The Shore. Listening would, of course, require that turn my tuner dial to something other than CBC.

Tonight featured Kendel Carson, Jon and Roy and Dan Mangan. I swore I wasn’t going to go—the crowds on English Bay can be a bit much to deal with—but the prospect of a sunset show featuring Dan was too compelling for my camera.

The complete set of photos is on Flickr.

Naturally, by the time Dan took the stage the crowd was so dense I could hardly move. Travelling by bike? Great decision—next time I’m going to leave it with the Bike Valet and walk (although my shiny new kickstand was most useful in this case.)

I wrote daily wrap ups of the Vancouver Folk Music Festival for Beyond Robson (click to read Day One, Day Two and Day Three on the site) which kept me busy and up late during the festival itself, so I didn’t write much here. A week later, I’m finally getting around to it.

I have a full collection of photos on flickr to browse through. I’ll excerpt some of those here along with some thoughts. Read on.

Continue reading "Vancouver Folk Music Festival 2010"

Vancouver’s annual Illuminares Festival is one of the events that makes this city a truly special place. Traditionally held in the beautiful outdoor space of Trout Lake, this year’s festival was moved to the W2 Storyeum building on Cordova Street.

The move was interesting. The Storyeum space’s high ceilings certainly feel less enclosed than many alternatives, but something of the magic of the outdoor gathering was missing. The lanterns were beautiful but hourly processions that made their way outdoors into a Gastown alley fell a bit short of my memories of years past.

While I’d still happily attend the event next year if it’s in the same location, I’m hopeful that the city does something here to help the festival move back to Trout Lake, or find another outdoor space for it (perhaps Crab Park, though parking and transportation would be a nightmare.)

More photos are on flickr.

I’m taking a little break from the Vancouver Folk Festival to chill out a bit for the morning and have lunch at home before heading down. According to Twitter this means I’m missing some great morning performances, but the afternoon and evening should more than make up for it. My photos from Day One and Two are here on Flickr and I’ll organize a few of them and post them here tomorrow. Between getting them on Flickr and daily articles for Beyond Robson time is scarce.

I need to do a little bike maintenance: one of the pads on my rear brake fell out on the road last night. I may just take a different bike down to the fest today, but I feel compelled to note that it seems like a fundamental design flaw if a disc brake pad is even capable of falling out of its caliper. Changing disc brake pads is a pain, so I tend to delay the change as long as I can. Just a little advice for those of you who do this sort of thing: if your brake pads look like the ones above, it probably means you waited just a little bit too long.

The New Pornographers played two nights at Vancouver’s Vogue Theatre. Neko Case apparently missed her plane and didn’t make the first show, but was there in full force for the second one.

With the Vogue’s stage fill with nine of the finest musicians you’ll find, it’s hard to imagine a better band. Opening the show with the slow burn of Myriad Harbour (whose opening lyric I took a plane I took train / Who cares you always end up in the city seemed like a reference to Neko’s travel problems yesterday) the first song the band played from the brilliant new album Together was the pop masterpiece Crash Years. The show was a nice mix of new material (Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk, My Shepherd) songs and old (My Rights Versus Yours, All The Old Showstoppers) and the normally quiet Vogue crowd was on its feet for the entire time.

Continue reading "The New Pornographers at the Vogue Theatre"

“The role of the old west in the new world is to become the foundation of the modern world: nothing more and nothing less. But it’s a very important role. Do it well, and get used to it.”

It’s very telling how bad the doping problem has been in professional cycling that the New York Times is running its annual story on the topic, despite the fact that not a single cyclist has tested positive in this year’s Tour de France. (There is, of course, an implied Yet… at the end of that sentence.)

The notion that falling times on alpine climbs are as honest an indication of a reduction of doping as anything else is a good one. As the article points out it’s a remarkable event which produces remarkable performances, so any such measurements are a guideline only. If it helps avoid having this article appear again next year I say measure away.

Cyclists’ Alpine Times May Hint at Past Doping

“In and of itself, these racers are doing amazing, unbelievable things on a daily basis because they are already a tiny part of the population, a very small percentage of the world,” Lim said. “They are already different. It’s when a rider has no history of good performances, then has massive changes. Now that’s when you should raise a red flag.”

There have been some discussions among exercise physiologists of testing individual athletes’ peak performances to determine each one’s peak power output and use it as a baseline to determine possible doping. Any future performances above that output would raise a red flag.

But some say that would never work. The reasons behind amazing performances cannot necessarily be proved, they said. Sometimes, they just happen.

Lance Armstrong lost 12 minutes in a crash yesterday, knocking him out of contention in what he’s said is his final Tour de France. It’s a shame: it would have been nice to see Lance—who’s done more for cycling in North America than any other athlete—on the podium but this is how these things go. It’s a long race, with plenty of opportunities for problems and incidents.

No matter where he winds up and who wins this year’s race, there’s really only one thing to say about a remarkable ride of successes: Well played, Lance. Well played.

The 10th annual Tour de Delta runs all weekend, with the Ladner Criterium last night. I was personally disappointed that Team Jazz Apples wasn’t here again this year, but I suppose that’s the result of losing two out of four of the BC Superweek events that used to happen, including the Tour de Gastown which now seems certain to be gone for a while.

I will miss next week’s Tour de Whiterock, unfortunately, due to other commitments.

Headwater calls their blend of roots and folk music tractor jazz. It’s pretty hard not to love these guys. I met a group of people who happened to be taking the ferry one day when Headwater were on the boat. An impromptu practice session started up at the bow of the ferry, and pretty soon the stern was almost completely empty as a crowd gathered. That’s how you make fans.

Last night was the first in a series of weekly shows at Lynn Valley Library and Headwater played for about an hour and a half. It is, after all, their local library.

More photos are on flickr.

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