celebration of lighttttt

these're all from one of the celebration of light nights at english bay. despite getting there pretty late, we still got decent seats. also, it totally rained, which resulted in us buying an umbrella, and then stopped raining, which resulted in us selling it to a friend of a friend for $8 american.

EPIC STICK MAN. that is all i have to say. long lost son to epic beard man? probably.

i think i did pretty good for the pics of the actual fireworks considering they were handheld, 1.5-2 second long exposures. 

from http://s877.photobucket.com/albums/ab333/jaieger/073110/

george c reifel bird sanctuary

not much to say about this one, but i love it. uhm, abstracts are kewl?

and this one's sorta abstract, sorta not really. it's probably a combination of the wind blowing it around and it being out of focus and my hands being jerkier than a 12 year old watching his (or her) first porn vid, but i quite like how it turned out - kinda looks like anemone.anenenememnememone.

i love this picture for one reason, and one reason only - this duck looks like it's about to fuck something up. look into those deep, brown, murderous eyes, and see if you can honestly tell me otherwise.

blahblah more obligatory insect macrossss~

now these were the surprise highlights of this photowalk, there were signs everywhere telling us to watch out for some mystical birds called sandhill cranes, but i didn't see a thing all throughout the park. until, that is, these BAMFs showed up. everytime i look at this top pic here, it always reminds me of that scene in the first jurassic park movie, where the velociraptors are in the kitchen and they're yelling and shit and making that TOUGH (rhymes with dough. or, alternative, TOW, like towing a car. that sound. shit, im going to stop typing out phonetics, s'getting embarassing) sound. these cranes look like they're doing exactly that imo, except irl it was higher pitched and 50x freakier.

and this bottom pic here is the result of some guy having an app on his iphone that mimiced bird calls - probably shittily, like if martians had apps on their phones that made strangled redneck sounds or something (shit, i'd check that out if i hear dsomething making that kinda sound) - which brought the cranes over to us. the little kids then proceeded to handfeed them bird seeds. yknow, the birds with the 2-foot-long beak of mass destruction. but they didn't really do anything (one of the two spazzed at the kids' mom and they all ran screaming. it was kinda funny actually. except for the fact that they walked EXACTLY like fucking velociraptors.).

from http://s877.photobucket.com/albums/ab333/jaieger/073010/

burnaby lake

i took these at burnaby lake, and i got so many great shots, that i basically nerdgasmed after going through all of my pictures. and then i started swearing for the next week, cause both legs were covered in bug bites - at least a dozen per leg; i still have the scars.

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i. hate. this. fucking. thing. because, out of the aforementioned dozen bug bites per leg i got on the trip, at least 8 each were from photoing this goddamn thing - it was blowing around, which made it hard to get it in focus. i actually have 2 shots that're pretty good, this one here where the head's in focus, and another one where the body's in focus; when i learned how, i focus stacked them in photoshop. i apparently didn't upload that version and am wayyy too lazy to now, but basically, focus stacking is when you have 2 (or more - some people use over 10+ images for just one end picture) shots of something with different areas in focus, and then merge them in photoshop so that they're all in focus. like, if i had a head of something in focus in one shot and its body in another, if i stacked them then both the head and body would be in focus in the end result. pretty cool shite.

i love these 2 shots, mostly cause a) dragonflies are damn badass and b) i'd been wanting shots of them due to a), and these were my first ever, where they actually sat the fuck down long enough for me to even look at them twice. i have vague memories of seeing dragonflies have sex midair at a soccer camp when i was  a kid. good times.

i saw this thing and was waiting for it to land somewhere so i could get a shot of it. and what dyou know, it lands on my shorts.

from http://s877.photobucket.com/albums/ab333/jaieger/072410/

day two of macro-lens-owning

this is from day 2 of trying out my new macro lens, and i did improve a bit now that i knew what was up. cloudy day makes for such a warm, inviting background, no? and to your left there is another chunk of dust on the sensor.

i think this pic is awesome. it's from the same day as the top pic and is near the marine drive canada line stop/right by the bridge that the canada line goes over. yeah. pat myself on the back a few times for this one.

from http://s877.photobucket.com/albums/ab333/jaieger/072110/

some flowers and shites.

these two are from the first day i got my new macro lens, and realised that it was damn hard. i remember coming home and seeing like 1/10 shots being good - i later found out that since my macro lens was relatively longish (100mm - long in terms of how much it magnifies; it's physically not that long), every little hand twitch would be magnified even more. and being the genius that i am, i decided to head out at about sunset, which = low light which = longer shutter times which = harder to handhold a camera already. so yeah, most of my results were just blurred out or out of focus - at high magnifications, the depth of field is so low, so it's a real challenge to get everything you want in focus without a tripod.

Add caption

from http://s877.photobucket.com/albums/ab333/jaieger/072010/

some place near ladner. don't ask me where ladner is, i don't know.

  

this is another one of those pics where it seemed pretty cool when i shot + touched it up, and look back on it to find it to be eyebleedingly bad; it's so oversaturated and bright and happy. jesus. just looking at this, you'd think rainbows and puppies would burst out of your computer or something. or maybe it's cause im just repulsed to all things yellow. which works, given how whitewashed i am.

i think this is one of those shots that really got me looking towards macro -  being able to take closeups of tiny things and whatever is just awesome, and i think i ended up ordering a macro lens because of it (of course, if i wasn't all nerdhappy and just bought one, i could've done some research and saved myself (my mom) about 600 bucks - there's some pretty cheap macro techniques out there that'll get you a high magnification for less  than a hundred bucks. given my $20 a week pseudoallowance (my dad only gives me it when he feels like it/when he drives me to school), that would've been an easily manageable 5 weeks of not eating lunch. but it's not too bad, i still love the lens i got (it produces sexylooking pics, and is pretty sexylooking itself. it's also my birthday and christmas present. and probably a good chunk of my chinese new year's too), and it's nice have a longish lens with autofocus - i later bought another long lens, but manual-everything, for like $50. and as far as macro goes, i love it - give me, like, a log with cool plants/fungi/insects on it or something, and i'll spend hours photographing it. so i guess in the end it's not all wasteful.



this is a set of pics of northern harriers - as soon as we (my dad and i) saw them, i totally nerdgasmed and made my way out as close as i could to where the one in the first pic was perched. i sooo wish i had a longer lens for this, but oh well, it still totally made my day; as soon as i got home i opened up the dozen bird books i have from my embarassing phase of...well, let's not get into it at all, but anyways, went through my  books and found out that they were, in fact, northern harriers. cool shite. and if you look closely at the middle-upper-right of some of the pics, you'll see smudge-like marks on the pics - that's what  dust on the camera sensor looks like.

from http://s877.photobucket.com/albums/ab333/jaieger/071810/

more noobness

if i remember right, this was one of my first candids of just random strangers. and it's pretty fitting, cause this guy is damn awesome. just look at him on his...thing. what the shit are those things called?

i had a pretty cool idea when i took this shot. and then it failed miserably LOL. it looked kinda cool in my head though, with a bunch of junk metal behind that sign.

from http://s877.photobucket.com/albums/ab333/jaieger/071010/

beginnings

it's kinda cool looking back through my older files, from when i first(ish) got my camera, and laughing at how noob i was. like here, i totally overdid the postprocessing - the grass is stupidly saturated, and it's so easy to tell - the shadows underneath the bunny are unnaturally black. well it shows in the other pictures from this set anyways. 

for some reason, this picture always reminds me of chinese..ness. chinese stuff  or culture or whatever. i think it's cause the red is the same red that's on like, everything that's chinese ever. including those fat boys on the ramen noodle packages. 

from http://s877.photobucket.com/albums/ab333/jaieger/071610/