Photo fun and duels

The Snowbirds aerobatic group above Edmonton

Lines, colour, the rule of thirds - all sorts of design choices when trying to frame a good looking photo and all combining into making me take a different slant on looking at things. Instead of seeing three planes in the sky, why not something out of a trailer for Wolverine?

Dave and I have had a balcony snowman duel ongoing for the last week after New York got hit with a major snowstorm - enough to fill his balcony with the fixings for a decent snowman and their first in New York. Unfortunately the weather here didn't cooperate until just last weekend when we finally got a little more snow. I dragged Col into making a snowman and we had a whole lot of fun despite the non-constructive qualities of dry powdery Alberta snow. Still you can judge for yourself the results.


The balcony snowman duel entrant

There are some more photos up on my Flickr stream as well, testing out the new capabilities of our latest addition to the electronic family - a Canon Powershot A620

Depth of Field

I have to admit I thought I took reasonably good photos before going on this photography course. Good colour, capturing the moment sort of stuff and most of them reasonably straight to the horizon etc etc... Little did I know all the cool things that you could do to the picture just by tweaking a few settings and letting in a little more light more slowly or letting it all in very quickly. You can get downright artistic. The craziest stuff is the depth of field photos that you take where the subject is the only thing in focus and everything else is various degrees of blurred.


Boomerang.

This camera is so accurate when the aperture is wide open that I focused 1cm too far back and got his backpack in focus and nothing else. Now that's depth of field. It can really enhance a photo to draw the eye to what you want instead of having the whole picture in focus. Especially if there's a visually busy background.


Statue for police killed in the line of duty

I know this is all pretty obvious for people who have any modicum of experience with cameras, but since it's new to me and I find it interesting, well I get to write about it. The other cool thing that you get to do when trying to complete these photography assignments is think of new ways to take a similar picture. This one is a favourite, not only because the shisa has a personal resonance, but also because when you change your angle of attack, you can come up with something that is really quite striking.


Shisa from Okinawa

Photography course

With a buggered knee and no chance of any more snowboarding or tele skiing this season, thoughts turn to what to do with myself to keep the winter from turning me into a complete madman. I still love the snow and welcome it when it falls, but there's not quite as much enthusiasm as before even if it does mean good things for the farmers and wildlife come spring when it all starts to melt.

A photography course was high on my list of things to do when I first got to Edmonton, but also one of those things that takes up a fair bit of time and was easy to put off until "next time they offer the course". Now that I can't do yoga on Thursdays I've finally got around to signing up for a Fundamentals of Photography course at the local continuing education centre. So there may be lots of interesting photos coming up on Flickr in the near future as I learn all sorts of interesting things about depth of field, shutter speed, composition and just how cool the old 35mm manual cameras still are compared to the new auto-everything ones. Luckily I've got access to one of each so can use whichever one is more appropriate at the time.

Sometimes the sunset is just that little bit better than you could imagine

It will also give me a lot more to think about when deciding on what sort of digital camera to get to replace the current Sony which seems to be on the fritz at the moment and unable to recognise its own memory sticks. Frontrunners now will be ones that allow me to control most of the more technical aspects of the photo (shutter speed, aperture or both) as well as having decent automatic settings and a good zoom. AA batteries would be a bonus too - having had far too many low battery issues with the current camera, especially in really cold conditions.

Triple J Hottest 100

I just can't see why the whole world doesn't have Triple J. It's brilliant and I cannot get enough of it. Alternative independent music and interesting DJ personalities is a recipe for radio success that just doesn't seem to have translated out of Australia yet. Australia Day is always a big day for Triple J though with the Hottest 100 playing throughout the day and has become a touchstone for the holiday for a lot of people (including me). Awesomely this year they've posted recordings of the Australia Day countdown so I can listen to them and get my Australia fix to my heart's content!

Songs I've loved so far and am probably going to track down while the homesickness lasts so that I can spread the Triple J love in Edmonton.

• 100 Party Started - The Cat Empire


• 92 Messages - Xavier Rudd


• 91 Heartstopper - Emiliana Torrini


• 99 Like Eating Glass - Bloc Party


• 87 We Can't Hear You - The Herd


• 85 Tightrope Walker - Epicure


• 74 The Sound of White - Missy Higgins


• 73 Better Together - Jack Johnson


• 65 Always Worth It - Sarah Blasko


• 63 Divorcee at 23 - Clare Bowditch & The Feeding Set


• 56 It's 5! - Architecture in Helsinki


• 51 Be Yourself - Audioslave


• 48 An Honest Mistake - The Bravery


• 47 Stuff & Nonsense - Missy Higgins


• 44 Sunny Road - Emiliana Torrini


• 43 Autumn Flow - Lior


• 38 Sly - The Cat Empire


• 31 The Special Two - Missy Higgins


• 19 Middle of The Hill - Josh Pyke


• 18 I Was Only 19 - The Herd


• 15 Flame Treees - Sarah Blasko


• 14 Songbird - Bernard Fanning


• 13 Gold Digger - Kanye West


• 11 Fig Jam - Butterfingers


• 2 Catch My Disease - Ben Lee


• 1 Wish You Well - Bernard Fanning

So 26 standouts from 100 is pretty good for a first listen through. Interesting new artists that I hadn't heard of include Lior, Josh Pyke, Sarah Blasko and The Herd (of course Bernard Fanning is also new as a solo artist but I've always liked Powderfinger). Funnily enough, even though they got 6 songs into the top 100 I wasn't really into Wolfmother at all, I must need a bit more overexposure to the album or maybe it's just not my cup of tea, even though it seems to be for the majority of Triple J voters. To be fair there is a lot of acoustic stuff over-represented in the songs that I liked immediately and this is a list made from one listen through so take it with a grain of salt. So now all I have to do is scrape up $26.00, head off to the iTunes music store and see if I can patch together my own little Travelling Steve's Triple J Hottest 100 mix.

Things to do in New York City

In no particular order, some of the awesome things that we got to do in New York over the course of a week or so:

eat great burgers in a really cool cafe after waiting in a lineup for 45 minutes.

go up the Empire State Building early on the most perfect day all week for long distance views. This was two days before seeing Peter Jackson's King Kong so it was pretty apropos

take a photo of a couple who's camera had run out of batteries just as we got to the Statue of Liberty on the boat tour

order takeout from a Mexican place that arrived so quickly we barely had time to get the table cleared to sit down and eat (and it was good too!). Who would ever cook for themselves with that sort of service?

try vainly to get cupcakes from Magnolia (featured in the internet meme video The Chronic-What-Cles of Narnia!), despite several attempts

buy some very cool boots and shoes

traipse through Central Park taking silly photos

eat pastrami on rye at Katz's deli (think Sally's orgasm scene in When Harry Met Sally)

stare in delight at the wonderfulness that was Wicked: The Musical

spend heaps of time chilling out with our favourite New Yorkers Dave & Sarah (transplanted) and Jill & Brett (native)

triple overtime basketball action between the Knicks and the Suns (& our favourite Canadian Steve Nash)

mange on divine coal fired oven baked pizza at Grimaldi's in Brooklyn

play lots of cards with Dave & Sarah, including at the Brooklyn Brewery cellardoor!

generally have a wicked time

The only bad thing was that we had to leave eventually as there is still so much more to see and do. Untold adventures await us on our next trip into the Big Apple I'm sure. I know, I know, this is a pretty lame breakdown of multiple extended stories that could be told about our trip, but that will all have to come either later on or has already been told in person and it's getting late and really I just want to get this up on the net and be done with it. So here it is!
Remember, photos to accompany some of this are up at my Flickr site

Christmas and New York City

So this post was supposed to go up at the beginning of January when we'd just returned from NYC and I got all of our awesome happy snaps up on Flickr and I got to pick out my faves and tell a few stories of the shenanigans that we got up to in the City That Never Sleeps. However somehow I managed to screw up getting the photos into Flickr and since there's a monthly throttle on how many you can upload I totally blew that out trying to get things sorted out. And so now that it's February I'm finally able to put up some more photos and get this post finished up.

Firstly Christmas down in Oregon was brilliant. We had godawful luck with our flights all over the US so I'm not going to rehash that debacle and will concentrate on the more exciting things like outdoor store shopping with the boyz, pulling pressies out of our stockings on Christmas Day, pulling pressies out of the stocking overflow annex on Christmas Day!, Col getting to Target multiple times, us buying heaps of cool new clothes, spending lots of time with the extended Oregon family and most importantly of all: insanely good Mexican food! I have never had so many delicious burritos, taqueros, tacos and chimichangas in my entire life. So good.

Then more crappy flights and waiting around forever in terminals until we ended up in Newark, reunited with Dave and jumped into a New Jersey taxi (they're white and not yellow like the NYC ones) and cruised into Manhattan. After settling into Dave & Sarah's lovely apartment near Central Park we headed straight for Times Square. That place is the epitomy of big city flash and craziness, including stretch Hummers (grrr!) movie set trailers and paraphernalia and the local flavour, none more so than the street poet that bailed us up, entertained us handily and then after liberating us of a couple of dollars left us with our first indelible impression of New York City - Crazy Town!

Doesn't get more New York than this!

The set of photos is now finally up here on Flickr so feel free to have a browse of our favourite photos that we came back with. Remember if you want any of them (or any other photos that are there) at full resolution (you know to sprinkle on your desktop or whatnot) then email me and I can send them through to you. Part of the problem the first go around was trying to upload the full sized images and getting it totally wrong. sigh...