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These were taken the winter before last. It turned out to be a really sunny day in the end. This is the same day that many of best photographs in the cityscapes gallery are from. I managed to get some pictures of the crab traps and boats when they were around. It's not as big a deal in Vancouver as spot prawn season, but it's still pretty cool.

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I was standing in the kitchen looking at picture of Cec when he was about twenty. In it a woman was holding jug of water and the men were all sitting in front of a heap of wheat drinking from tin cups. Cec identified the woman as his mother and said that she died a month after the photo was taken. I was caught off guard by off-hand nature of the remark, but I suppose it did happen over 70 years ago. He then looked my in the eye and said "I bet you've never threshed wheat, have you boy?" I had to admit that I hadn't.

Later I was sitting in the living room with Cec and his friend Bob who was about eighty. When I shook Bob's hand during our introduction it was not the shake of an eighty year old man. His hands where thick and calloused and had hydraulic power. We were sitting in silence in the darkness, curtains drawn to fight off the heat. Cec asked me "What do you think James?" I was unfamiliar with the rules of the conversation and mistakingly said "What do I think about what?" Cec, in a calm voice, but clearly irritated, said "James, if you don't have anything to talk about, you talk about the weather." Luckily I had been to Wayne's farm earlier and had overheard how the jet stream needed to come lower in the next week or all the wheat will burn from the heat. Bob slowly nodded his head in agreement.

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This is also my second try with my 50mm lens. The shots turned out for the most part, but I'm still having trouble understanding how to make this lens perform well. For some I also did one B&W and one colour because I think they each bring something different. Let me know if you prefer one over the other.

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I've attempted to build a narrative into the titling of the pictures, but feel free to view them however you want. I also tried a very different style of processing than I'm used to in an attempt to take advantage of the inherent grain that accompanies high ISO on my D80 and the low contrast light of the impending darkness.

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The children from these houses use the hills in a very different way than I did. My forts were hidden from view, covered with brush. Our wood was scavenged and cut by hand and carried up on our backs. At times we were forced to fashion pulley systems out of tree branches to move our supplies across gullies with names like Poison Valley. We used to follow the paths of animals that would walk down from the hills to drink at the river. The animals have caught on and now follow the paths of machines

The evidence of these forts I built with my friends was destroyed in a fire that swept through the hills a few years after I moved away. The mountain pine beetle has killed many of the trees that survived the fire. What is left is vibrant grass and fallen wood and new growth.

About two years ago the sky turned the craziest colour as the sun was setting. The entire sky was orange. It was freakish. The Celebration of Light was happening later that night and all the boats were in English Bay jostling for prime fireworks viewing position. People were making their way down to the Bay to find a spot as well, strolling in the rain and marvelling at the sky.

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I didn't really know what to do with the pictures. The orange is so uniform that it's hard not to pass off aspoor white balance or something. Initially I converted them to B&W to try and find the good shots and process them properly. That only made me realize that aside from the colour the photos aren't that great. In the end I left I decided to leave them unprocessed. They're just as shot. Hopefully you'll find some pleasure in the spectacle of it.

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

I tried to reproduce the other picture as closely as I could. This one was taken later in the day and the sun was a little sharper (no light clouds to filter the sun). The light is catching the flower a little more directly than the last photo. I used nearly the same post processing as I did before, but it required a little more tweaking.

The first thing you'll notice is the depth of field fo the focus. Almost the entire flower in in focus. My new lens is a 50mm lens that has an aperture of f1.8. A smaller number for the aperture means that the hole that lets light into the camera is bigger, which means more light gets in and the depth of field is shallower. At 50mm the best my kit lens could do was f4.5 meaning that more of the flower is in focus.

Another thing you'll notice is that the parts of the picture that are out of focus are sort of boring. The aesthetic quality of the part that's out of focus is called bokeh. Different lenses have different bokeh. The bokeh in my new lens has interesting shapes and lines and bubbles that my kit lens can't muster.

The other things like the quality of the colour and the richness of the photograph are harder to judge. I'll let you decide. On a side note it's neat to see how slightly the flower opened in one day.

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

I posted both the colour and the black and white because they each have their qualities. I'm pretty sure I could spend forever processing them. The lens handles contrast and colour much better than my kit lens. It's one of the few times I ever thought the colour was too overpowering. No sliders to 11 here. The B&W has this lovely whispy quality that I could probably bring more out if I spent more time with it. And obviously the depth of field is a little fun.

Hope you enjoy them.

For now I have something else to offer you. Between Christmas and New Years I managed to get together with some friends and record some music, which you can hear here.

That's right, it's just what you've been waiting for. A new album by Butch Hicks and the Busted Suck

I use the words record and music with some hesitation because they make this sound professional and organized. This is not. This is a bunch of friends getting together without a plan, drinking some wine, turning on the recorder and seeing what happens. This is the approach I take to most of my recording. They're not improvisations because that implies some virtuosity on our part. They're not inventions because that implies some kind of genius at work. This is spontaneous music.

That said, I'm very proud of it. I'm proud of how my friends and I have developed as musicians and how well we listen and play together. Each one of us contributes in a way that would make the song clearly incomplete if we were removed. I think the finest example of this is Serving My Time, which can be found in the player below,

or though this mp3 if that works better for you. Hope you enjoy it.

I've been making an effort to take more picture of people. I often get criticized for the lack of a human element in my pictures. It's not always apparent that people live in the places I visit. I'm quite careful when I compose photos and people have a tendency to ruin that by moving and doing what they want. That whole pesky free will thing. This may be why real photographers pay people to stay still for them. Those I did capture though have that journalistic feel. Which is a pretentious way of saying that they're people being people.

I'm pretty happy with the series overall. I have to restructure my galleries so for now I'll orphan the Montreal gallery. I have to change the navigation in the site to make it clear that there are many galleries and that it's moving between them is fairly easy. It's sort of cryptic now. What used to be appealingly minimalist about my site is now just user unfriendly.

I really tried to capture this feeling. In doing so I dramatically changed my processing style. My sliders still go to 11, I'm just more subtle about which ones.

I've taken quite a few photos in Kamloops over the past year, but these are the only ones I've got around to working on. I'm storing them in the countryside gallery for now, but I might open up a dedicated Kamloops gallery.

It sounds foreboding to begin with. The helicopters and crows hover and caw. Then a cheer washes over Vancouver.

I tried to remain quiet, journalistic, but I let out single clap of excitement as we scored. I may have said something too. Goal scored! Or maybe that was the guy who lives above me, or his TV, or the guy who lives across the alley. We're all so close together.

If you're using IE or have java turned off or you just want a copy, here is the mp3.