Variations on a Theme

I just published a new post on my See, Capture, Show blog that uses an iPhone picture of Ukee harbour to illustrate what different iOS apps can do to showcase an image.

 

For Love of the Frame

As a lifelong passionate photographer, it was natural that I tried to interest my kids in photography, just as my father had indeed done with me. I can say that it worked 2/3's of the time. That is, two of the three took to it, while my son Alex never seemed to have been bitten by the bug. Rachael is an accomplished artist who can produce a work of art in the sand with a few flourishes of a stick, and works with all manner of media, including creating the most intricate and beautiful food items. She's an omnivorous photographer, always ready to grab an image, even with her iPhone.

 

When I gave Cameron a camera, he took to it immediately and has a good eye for composition and balance. We've spent many hours out together, tramping the back roads and trails, and now beaches, quietly content in each others' company, searching out images to gather. Compared to his sister, Cam is more of a studied photographer who moves more methodically, planning his images and often working with a tripod.

 

 

While Cam was here this trip, we gave him Marcelle's old iPad, and I showed him how to download his SD card to it and use some of the apps for doing some post-processing on his images. Because it is so portable and generally as capable as a laptop or desktop, I find the iPad a perfect photographic companion. This blog, for example, is completely constructed on my iPad using an app called Blogsy.

 

 

It's a lot of fun having a hobby or interest you can share with kids, it makes it that much more special to be a mentor when asked, and then to see, with pride, the results that are achieved. And, of course, the satisfaction that you see in your child to be able to produce something, anything, that is from the heart.

 

 

 

Being a photographer is being in search of beauty, structure, colour, chaos and timing. All to fill that little frame we look through. A frame we choose to see our world through.

Just love that frame!

Family Outing

Well, the day I've been looking forward to for some time now has finally come... my kids, Rachael and Cameron, accompanied by our great friend Alexandra (fondly known as Ms. Alex to distinguish her from my other son Alex), arrived yesterday to spend a few days with us. It's doubly nice because neither Cameron nor Ms. Alex had visited us here before. It's fun to have the young people in the house, reminiscing about growing up, as I now get to hear details that would have curdled my blood if I'd known at the time. What fun it is being a parent!

 

We decided to do Wreck Beach, from the Willowbrae trailhead, and spent an enchanting few hours roaming along the sand. Not much interesting detritus there yesterday, but the kids loved the experience anyway and examined all and sundry articles and features, taking lots of photos.

 

 

It was a great sky day yesterday, something I delight in, and I always take my ultra-wide lens (18mm) for capturing the maximum amount of drama.

 

 

 

 

 

 

There were some lovely reflections available for the taking, so I helped myself.

 

 

While the kids forged onward to find a geocache farther up the beach, Marcelle and I wandered back slowly to await them at the trailhead. On the way back, just before the trailhead stairs, a tiny creek emerges from the green, a microcosm of life and beauty, a treat for the eye.

Life on the edge is even better with family and friends!

 

Wet Treasures

On a rainy morning, what better destination for a walk than the Rainforest Trail? With the rain dripping through the canopy overhead, the dense, lush forest beneath takes on a magical appearance. The water coating the leaves intensifies the colours and gives a sheen that enhances shapes.

 

The wet wood of the boardwalk and stumps glows in saturated colours in the diffuse light.

 

In a small, slow stream, the raindrops create a mesmerizing random pattern of concentric circles, coruscating on the water's surface. Each one fading to be replaced by another.

 

Felled giants lie mouldering on the forest floor, glistening wetly and rotting slowly as they provide a platform for new and future life.

 

A profusion of False Lily-of-theValley nestle in the lea of a fallen log, carpeting the ground with their distinctly-shaped leaves.

 

The trail leads me on, through this verdant paradise, past wonder after wonder. We need these treasures to remind us of what we can still lose to rampaging industry if we're not careful.

 

Life on the edge must not be taken for granted.

 

What's Cookin'?

As enthusiastic and fairly accomplished cooks, Marcelle and I often spend hours in the kitchen together, creating and cooking dishes that we both enjoy ourselves and serve to guests and friends. Depending on the dish, we take turns as head chef and sous chef, one preparing while the other cleans up etc. Generally, I do the actual final cooking just before a meal is served. Marcelle finds getting the timing of everything to be tedious, whereas I, being somewhat OCD, have it all down to the second. :)

Today, in an attempt to minimize the amount of canned goods we will have to pack for our upcoming move, we decided it was time to cook up a whack of spaghetti sauce. Over the years, we've been lucky enough to put together a really good collection of kitchen tools, such as a set excellent Heinkel knives and an electric sharpener. I started off this morning sharpening the set and then we dug in to do all the chopping etc.

 

 

This time around, it was our intention to prepare the sauce first without any meat, as we are expecting company that includes a vegetarian. This will allow us to package some of the sauce into Ziplok freezer bags that will be suitable for vegetarian use, after which we will then sauté up the hamburger and hot Italian sausage meat to add to the remaining sauce for the meat-eaters in the group.

 

There's nothing quite like being in the kitchen, with the redolent aromas of sweet onion, spicy red, green and jalapeño peppers and crisp celery sautéing in hot butter and garlic! We then add sliced carrots, zucchini, mushrooms and tons of tomatoes to the sauce mixture. We like lots of vegetables in our sauce.

 

Oregano, basil, rosemary and Italian seasoning are added for herbs, and then crushed red pepper flakes and black pepper combine with the jalapeños for heat. We virtually never add any salt when we cook, preferring to allow people to add it if they wish when it is served.

 

Dessert was also on the agenda today, and Marcelle baked a pie of fresh local blueberries with a "mystery" ingredient of almond extract, all nestled under a crumble topping!

 

Well, I'm starting to drool on my iPad screen now, so I should finish this post and go and sauté up the meat to add to the sauce. Work, work work!

 

Photographer's Notes: All images by iPhone 4S, processing on iPad using Snapseed and Painteresque.

Better Late Than Never

When I sit down to write a post here, I generally have a theme in mind, and then try to come up with an appropriate (and hopefully, snappy) title. And sometimes, like today, the title itself will lead me to other possibilities and areas of discussion. Thus it is that we begin on 'Better Late Than Never'.

 

The primary instance that suggested this theme occurred last night. I was watching World War Z again. What a great movie it is. I'm not generally into the whole Zombie craze, and most of the flics of the genre I've seen, other than the classic Shaun of the Dead, leave me uninspired. WWZ, on the other hand is stunning in its presentation, both scary as hell and wonderfully portrayed through CGI. Because it was a 'zombie movie' I hadn't bothered to see it for ages, but finally, my curiosity got the better of me, and I was really blown away. Better late than never!

 

Anyhow, as I was near the end, Marcelle appeared at the door to the room where we have the TV and told me that there was an amazing sunset in progress. I grabbed my cameras and we drove the short distance to our local Big Beach as I could see it fleeting already. By the time we got to the picnic table overlook it was virtually gone, but it managed to snap off the few images you see here. Better late then never!

While composing this post, I also reflected that with our upcoming move back to the city, and the subsequent radical downsizing we are having to do, that I am finding what I can only describe as a 'peacefulness' in shedding so much of the clutter and possessions that we have been dragging around with us for years. Over the past seventeen years, we have moved seven times, each time perhaps not so much downsizing as jettisoning possessions, and with our expected move going from 2600 to 600 square feet, we could say a brutal culling is called for. Yet once we had made the decision on going for such a small place, as I said, I realized that there is only a subset of what we have that is absolutely necessary for our practical usage and happiness. It's a good feeling. Better late than never!

 

Finally, in reflection, one of the things that we have been disappointed about in our year here in Ucluelet is that we have met almost no one. We tried attending some of the local events but found that for the most part, they were geared for the younger, family crowd with small kids. I tried several times to see if anyone was interested in the free photography workshop that I have presented to high schools and charities, but all of my overtures were ignored. We found that the community that we wanted to be a part of seemed to have other ideas. Perhaps we simply haven't given it enough time, but other factors have intervened to call us back to the mainland, hence the upcoming move.

Ironically, since we made our decision to return to the Vancouver area, we have indeed met a couple of people that have reaffirmed our expectations about this wonderful place. We met Vi Mundy when she commented on Facebook on some of my posting, and subsequently had a wonderful few hours of gabbing over coffee, learning some fascinating history of the area and of the First Nations peoples, a subject on which we had wanted to expand our knowledge.

Then yesterday, I noticed that someone had posted on the 'Used Ukee' Facebook page that they were looking for some materials for projects, and since, as part of our drastic downsizing, I had some candidates, we ended up spending an interesting hour with David Paul Crombie, a fellow photographer whose excellent work you, Dear Reader, should definitely check out. As both photographers and musicians and technofiles, we hit it off immediately, and we look forward to spending some more time together, both before the move, and hopefully afterward as well.

Better late than never!

 

Invasion Fleet

Late this afternoon, we went out for a walk on Wick Beach, and ran smack into an alien invasion! The attack of the Velella Velella, or By-the-Wind-Sailor was in full force, the beach littered with countless thousands of them, blown ashore and washed up into staggering tons of biomass for kilometers along the shoreline. We had seen evidence of their scouting expedition a few weeks ago, but now they had followed up with the entire armada.

 

These colourful little jellies float along the surface, propelled by the wind hitting their "sail", tentacles trailing in the water where they sting their prey, plankton. Their sting is relatively harmless to humans which is a good thing as kids were running back and forth through the piles and picking them up to throw at each other.

 

 

 

 

 

Luckily, the invasion fleet was ignored by most, and the surfers carried on undaunted!

 

On the way back to the car, I happened onto an amorphous blob about the size of a dinner plate. I imagine it is some sort of jelly, but it looked for all the world as if some large animal had barfed up a lung and perhaps a pancreas. Charming!

 

On a more genteel note, as we were leaving the house on our way to the beach, I spotted visitors in the yard. A doe and two fawns that suffered our intrusion as I went out to capture the moment. It's sights like this that we'll miss when we move back to the city.

As always, life on the edge is an adventure!