The first photos of 2006

I've done little photography at all since September, and these are about the only decent shots I've had, since I've literally only taken 25 shots in four months. Sad, sad, sad.

Anyhow, my computer's back on track, I have software for it again, and I'm stoked to get back into it. The river shots were all taken last weekend, so it's a recent thing that I'm bothering to snap anything at all, but this is coming up on my fave season for photos. Everything's ripe and new in the spring, and I get off on it, so. Stay tuned. There'll at least likely be a lot of photography on this site in the coming months. Writing, dubious... but photos, absolutely.

This one's just a little pond adjacent to the Fraser River, a mere walk from my home.



One thing about Vancouver is that we get a lot of similarities drawn with San Francisco, and there's a few weeks every year, particularly in the fall and winter, where the fog rolls in every afternoon -- just after it's finally burned off from the sun's heat. This is the mid-point of one such day, when the fog's just burned off enough to see some of the mountains in the background behind the West End. Not long after this, a bank of fog rolled over my home in the south of the city, bringing more haze to us.



I'm not too crazy about this shot, it looked better on my camera, but I think I'll try to catch a few more like this in the future and maybe it'll finally work the way I want it to. It was too late in the day, and the shadows too severe, and the light too low to shoot it fast enough to freeze the water droplets in the air, so there's blurring and too much darkness. But it's the wake of a tugboat towing log floats up the Fraser.


This one's the simplest of the shots, and oddly, my favourite. I just love driftwood, sand, and water. It never fails to amaze me, all these bits of dead trees washing up on the shore. You wouldn't believe how many times -- a dozen or two each year -- that the city of Vancouver sends tractors along the beaches to get rid of excess drift logs (we're talking 20, 30, 40-foot long logs) along the beaches. They groom the beaches for the citizens to frollick and play. The morning after, you always arrive at the beach to find long tracks of backhoe prints all over the sand. Looks neat, but it's odd, weird, and hardly natural looking at all. With scenery like ours, though, that's not too terrible a thing, anyhow.

These are just bits and pieces of all that, and the Fraser is the main thoroughfare for all the logs coming down from the Interior. I just love it. There's a beach on the Sunshine Coast, 40 minutes from the city, where you've got a 3-kilometre long stretch of just driftwood -- you can't even see the sand on the ground. Piles and piles of logs for as far as the eye can see, which tells you a bit about out forest industry. Nice that they cut all the trees down and lose so many in the offing. Weird world, this.

But I still love the look of wood debris on a shore, nonetheless.