A-Maze-Ing Laughter - Vancouver Biennale

At the corner of Davie and Denman Street in downtown Vancouver sits another set of statues that are part of the Vancouver Biennale and this one is entitled "A-MAZE-ING LAUGHTER" by artist Yue Minjun from China. It is comprised of 14 very large bronze statues each of which is over ten feet tall and bares the very recognizable face of the artist in various states of laughter. This art exhibits attracts tons of visitors, each trying to mimic the poses and gestures of Yue's creation while their friends take pictures of them. The first time I saw this exhibit was a few months ago on a dark rainy night and without any lights to illuminate the statues it actually looked pretty scary. Now there is a big spotlight that shines on it during the evening.

To capture the texture and colour of the statues I tried using HDR processing but actually I prefer using a combination of Photoshop and Lightroom to get a similar look. Only the first picture in this series below was actually made using Photomatix. The rest were done through a combination of filters and adjustments and the last two were converted to black and white in Lightroom.

Lenin in Richmond, BC

A very interesting sculpture has popped up recently in Richmond, BC and I stumbled upon it today by accident. It was attracting a lot of attention and lots of motorists stopped to take a look and many got out of their cars to take pictures as did I. The interesting thing about this sculpture is that it also has a figure of Chairman Mao atop of Lenin's head with a balance bar. So as can be imagined a lot of talk about what the artists are trying to say here with this piece is usually the topic of discussion amongst viewers. Upon further digging on the internet I found out this is part of the Vancouver Biennale and around the city there are various art instalments.

I found it just so surreal that I decided to post process some of my shots and give it a more other worldly look. I tried some HDR and then went really crazy and did some that give it almost a comic book feel. First day of the new year and already trying to be a bit more on the creative side, hahaha..

HDR - MacMillan Bloedel Conservatory

If you've ever been to Vancouver you know that one of the tourist destinations on almost every travel book is Queen Elizabeth Park and at the top of the park you will find the famous geodesic dome known as the MacMillan Bloedel Conservatory. This structure is now forty years old but somehow the strange shapes on the dome makes me think it's something from a science fiction movie set in the distant future. I'm sure everyone who visits this place ends up taking pictures in front of it but I wanted to get more of an abstract look and focus on the shapes. On this particular day the sun was starting to set and so I decided to experiment with some high dynamic range imagery. Below are some of my results.

More from Tofino

Here are more shots from Tofino. These were mostly taken nearby where we were staying at the Long Beach Lodge Resorts. The area is called Cox Bay and it was about a 10 minute walk outside of our room that opened up right onto the path to the beach.

HDR - Served up RAW

Last night for my Intermediate Photography class that I am taking at Vancouver Photo Workshops we had a field trip out to the Vancouver Art Gallery were we attempted to capture some shots to later process into HDR photos. It was mostly a cloud free evening so the skies weren't as dramatic as they could have been but we did our best. Tried several different shots and also did some long exposure night shots as well. All of the shots taken were shot in RAW and processing them afterwards was very time consuming and took a lot longer than when I had tried doing HDR with jpegs. I guess this was the result of huge file sizes and amount of information in each RAW file.

Sunset at Terra Nova

This past weekend was one of the nicest ones we have had weather wise for awhile in Vancouver. There is this great area called Terra Nova in a suburb of Vancouver called Richmond and in it there is an area that is right along the water with a walking and biking trail all along it and is a great place to watch the sunset. It's also right across from the YVR Airport so you can watch the planes take off and land too. Here are some shots I took tonight of the sunset. A few of them are tweaked as HDR photos which combine about five bracketed shots to create the final output. I shot in manual and used f/22 for all of these shots and varied the shutter speeds so that I would have shots at one full stop intervals beginning with a -2 all the way to +2 exposure readings off the camera's meter.

Panorama and HDR

I was playing around and took a few shots from the Stanley Park Seawall looking back across to downtown Vancouver. I took about six shots and combined them into a panorama and then also took some shots and combined them to form a HDR image. I usually don't like to do too much post processing if any at all but these are fun things to try out once in awhile.

Here is the panorama. You can click the picture for the full size photo.

Here is the HDR shot followed by a few of the seven shots that I used to combine together for the final output. You can click the first photo for the full HDR photo.

Chinatown on the wrong day

Well I got up early Sunday morning all ready to head down to Chinatown to catch the New Years parade and Dragon dances but found out once I got there that this was the wrong day and it would not be until next Sunday. I think I had read somewhere that they usually hold it the first Sunday before the actual New Years day which falls on a Thursday this year on the 7th of February. I knew something was wrong when I got there and it was completely quiet. But I made the best of it and since I had my camera with me I took some shots. Here are some pictures I took that include shots around Chinatown, the entry way of the Sun Yat Sen Garden and the False Creek area. I tried some shots with exposure bracketing and then merged them to create an HDR picture. I'm pretty pleased with the results because it was a very overcast during the entire time I was shooting and the brightness was a bit tricky to work with.