Gorgeous day today on the Duffy Lake Road loop. Burnaby > Whistler > Pemberton > Lillooet > Lytton > Hope > Burnaby.
I try to do this loop at least once every couple of years. You can do it fairly comfortably in a day, with several stops here and there along the way.
Duffy Lake
Seton Lake
Cool beetle near Cayoosh Creek
Spruce Sawyer, I’m told. That looks right.
Lots of big aquatic bugs in Cayoosh Creek
Google Maps has the trip at 580km and about 8 driving hours
Wow.
The Other Press student newspaper at Douglas College asked me if they could use one of my Nikkei Matsuri photos from my Flickr photo stream. I said sure, for a photo credit.
Tonight I started the process of copying my photos to my new Windows 8.1 computer. I have set up the Photos folder to automagically redirect to the D drive (second 2TB hard drive that I specified to be installed in the new system).
Instructions on how to redirect a folder here.
The new computer is now copying 154,596 files, for a total of 1.22TB from a NAS (network attached storage) backup system. Windows 8.1 estimates that this will take about 12 hours. Initially it thought 17 hours. OK, now 8.5 hours. Whatever. That’s why it’s great to have more than one computer when you rely on them for business and pleasure. I am writing this on my Mac Mini that I mostly use to fool around on.
I like having my photos on an internal HD. Faster access than on a NAS or external USB drive. I use NAS and USB for backup.
Yumi and I had a great time at the Nikkei Matsuri today, just up the hill from our place at Nikkei Place. Great music, displays, food, and culture, with a wonderful family-friendly crowd. It’s on tomorrow, too!
Here’s my Flickr set from today.
Several photographers were excited about this Green Heron, at Piper Spit at Burnaby Lake, in Burnaby, BC, today.
Wood ducks are gorgeous — males so flamboyant, females pretty, both sexes shy. Here’s one from Piper Spit at Burnaby Lake today. I had an errand to run in north Burnaby, so I brought the camera along for a stop at the lake on the way home.
Take Lots of Photos
Shoot shoot shoot. You learn by doing, so do.
Take photos from different angles, try different exposures, move closer up, move farther away. Experiment with faster and slower shutter speeds, and larger and smaller apertures. Try some at wide angle, try some at telephoto. Try some with flash, some without. Try fill-in flash.
If you don’t want to lug a DSLR around all the time, carry a pocket camera and take photos here, there, and everywhere. Practice gets you closer to perfect.
In the old days of film, every shot cost. Cost for film, cost for developing, cost for printing. The first two costs are now minimal, though you can still spend a lot on printing.
With digital, you can take thousands of photos for less than a penny to at most two or three cents per shot – and those pennies are reusable.
Examples of card prices taken from the NCIX website today:
32GB MicroSDHC Class 10 C$15.99
64GB MicroSDHC Class 10 C$28.99
On a 24-megapixel camera set to RAW + JPEG, 32GB gets you over 700 shots. So fire away, and then delete and edit later.
This is not to say that you should mindlessly bang away on your shutter button. You should still compose and expose each photo as best you can, just don’t be reticent about taking lots of different views with different settings.
I’m a bit leery about buying off-brand batteries. Sometimes they work well, sometimes they’re junk. But with a replacement Canon NB-9L battery running 74.99, yikes! That’s nearly half the price of buying a new mid-range Canon Elph camera!
So I think I’ll take my chances with a no-name equivalent battery for, get this, $7.83. For that price, it’s certainly worth trying.
I attended a one-day streamkeeper training course in North Vancouver hosted by the Pacific Streamkeepers Federation. We covered modules 2, 3, and 4 from the Streamkeepers Handbook.
I figured it was about time I had a refresher, since it must be around ten years ago that I originally took the training.
It was a lovely, sunny day, and a great group of people.
You can check out some photos I took in this Flickr album.
On a foray into Richmond, BC, to visit several Asian supermarkets, Yumi and I ran into a display of huge, animated bugs at the Aberdeen Centre. It was great fun, enchanting kids and parents alike.
We had to take our picture by these “kabuto mushi” as they are known in Japan. They are very popular “pets” there.
