i'm not so sure about the coherence of that sentence, but that's okay.
anyways, so noob and i had been planning to do a roadtrip at some point to some place in the mission-ish area in some time during the winterbreak. we ended up going on new year's eve to golden ears park and pitt lake, which is more maple ridge, but close enough. almost had some bullshittery with who got the car, my sister or i, but that worked itself out after a little bit of struggling and yelling. anyways, to maple ridge we went, and it was quite the drive up there. actually not really, the gps (for the most part) was pretty good, and traffic was cooperative so we were there within an hour or so. as it turned out, the trails i wanted to hit up were closed due to hazardous road conditions so we ended up going to some relatively boring lake, which photographically speaking, was pretty meh cause it was more or less noon and the sun was high and it was too contrasty and harsh light.
pictured: boring lake. like, gosh, was this supposed to be epic or beautiful or something? wtf.
and yeah. and then we walked around the trail for a while... oh shit, wait, forgot.
gotta satisfy the noob's bench fetish.
also, finally shot my first macro in a while:
and attempted (and failed) to be awesome:
also, just saying, even though i've said it before, i love my 50mm lens. at f2, it produces nice bokeh and it is sharp as hell. much to the dismay of this person, it's sharp enough to pick apart every little skin crease, every minute hair, yeah...<3. LOLO
anyways, where was i? oh yes, trails. we walked around in trails. and there be shit like this:
this'll make a fun long-term project on cloning, esp when you factor in i've forgotten about it already.
ripping off this cool vertical panning thing i saw some other guy do
anyways, we saw not that much in the forest. and then we got kinda lost. and then we were like oh look a map! and then, well...
NOTICE THE LACK OF A FUCKING DOT THAT SAYS "YOU ARE HERE, ASSHOLE"
so confused as ever, we plundered on. that was not a sex joke. and then we saw another sign, which mildly improved:
it does have a dot this time, but it doesn't have a label. for all we knew, it could've been the site of their mass burials of all those who questioned the usefulness of their signs.
and all the while, it was cold enough to have frozen twigs. okay the streams were flowing, but that's besides the point.
anyways, so afterwards we (wow, i love how all my paragraphs start with so or anyways. this time i used both, cause i'm beast like that) drove to mike lake. it was a pretty cool place, and it satisfied my frozen lake fetish, and the ice wasn't even that thin either - bashed it a few times with my tripod and it didn't give way or crack at all.
i feel like i'm using the selective saturation/desaturation shit too much, but it's fun and a good answer to "the trees look weird and out of place. wtf do i do to cover up my ineptitude?"
i just went to take a shit, where was i? oh, right. so i wanted to try out using wireless flash outdoors, as fill light. usually, this is so you can expose for a significantly brighter background, and then bring the brightness of your subject up to match it. in this case, the background was dark so i didn't really need it...but don't tell anyone that. someone migh tbe mad that they sat around for a good 5 minutes in the ice and snow for nothing. :D
and if i was gonna use flash, prob should've done it from the other side so the shadows blend a bit better...meh.
so this didn't really work the way i'd thought of in my mind. though later i did get another shot, during the sunset...(that's called foreshadowing, kids.)
anyways, what with the closures and all in the upper (cool) half of the park, we decided to head over to the other park of the day, pitt lake. it was bloody glorious.
what this doesn't show though was the 1.8km of mud that slaughtered my poor, innocent jeans. wtf, outdoors?
my lesser-learned companion will tell you that the following shots were taken from an outhouse. i assure you we did not have a community shitting, but it was in fact a viewing tower.< 3 LMAO
yknow, i never noticed the corner of the roof of the tower sticking into the shot till i uploaded this. and even after that, it still surprises me to see it everytime i look at this.
and then we descended fro --COOLSTORYBRO -- (sorry i just felt an urge to, even if it's my own story.) m the watch tower and found a spot to sit and watch the sunset. i have the video but it's about a million mb of lag so not going to bother putting the 5 clips together; here're some stills from it though:
the sun is approximately 2.987897 degrees or Pi percent lower in this shot than the last one.
just like with sex, the sun gets tired from setting and has a bit of an afterglow even after it's finished:
i took a better-framed shot of this with the 50mm, but i was a noob and it was still on f14 and 1/4 sec from doing the sunbursts, so that one's all fucked by hand shake, unfortunately. this one is too, just less so.
and that was it for new year's eve's sunset, then. twas the last sunset of 2010, the first decade in the new millenium. you'd think it would've been more eventful but then again i wasn't in any drunken party so i wouldn't know. oh yes, and from before, here's my shot using fill flash and the sunset for backlighting. the sun was a bit low so i couldn't get it how i had imagined, and the flash was somewhat harsher than i would've liked cause i didn't bring any diffusers or sexdishes or whatnot, but here it is:
on the other hand, we've got the twinkle in the eye going on. so, that's cool.
anyways, i just looked at the video i recorded of the sunset and, wow, that was,....pretty uneventful. it kinda goes down a bit, then gets stronger a bit, then wilts some more, then gets stronger some more, and then slowly fades. it's like a really drawn out orgasm, but not in that awesome way, but more like if you only got 1% of the orgasm every few seconds. kind of a bummer for a year-closing sunset. and so began a hurried speedcrawl back to the parking lot so as to get home on time (we ended up having an extra hour).
and that was new year's eve. i'm honestly not that proud of the results, photographically speaking, except for maybe two or three, but on the other hand, it was a great day, so that's what matters in the end. probably. right? or are you not supposed to go for happiness. i'm not sure anymore.
as for new year's day....
i slept in. i woke up.
i tried to go back to sleep.
i couldn't.
it was 2:30.
i looked out and saw i had the car and had the bright idea of driving up to whytecliff park for the sunset. the last time i was there, i went at noon and it was rather bland and boring and overly contrasty/harsh for sextastic photography, so i didn't really get any good shots. not the case today. now i didn't wanna be a lonely soul, and the noob couldn't make it, so i had to call up the other noo -- okay fuck it, i'm using names. rosanne couldn't come, so i called up vincent out of nowhere and he was like lol sure. and then began a rather awkward sausage-filled hour drive through rush hour (? idk what hour is actual rush hour but let's say it was) and to whytecliff park.
the fucking gps made us miss the exit twice and we almost had to drive to squamish because of it.
i'm not mad.
cockshit.
anyways, we got there and weren't really that late, though the sunset was in progress already. here's where i kinda feel bad. i was mildly jizzing to the sunset and wanted to run up the island to get a good shot of it - i'd been there before and knew there was a tree at the end of it, which would look awesome juxtaposed with the sunset. the trouble was, vincent was still picking his way through the rocks, so i did what every bad friend does. ditch and run.
the island/rocks in question. i kinda half sprinted up the island after i got past the rocks and was out of breath after my 30 seconds of fitness expired.
so, yeah, i kinda felt bad. but then i got to the tree. and epicness ensued. ironically though, my least favourite (though I wouldn't say I dislike any of my shots from that evening) shots were those with the tree...
well, i did say epicness. it's amazing how quickly the colors change during a sunset without you realizing they did:
and a shot from the 50 to show the difference in perspective from the 15 (and a closer view at the sextastic clouds):
obligatory pano... i seem to be doing more of them lately (ie, some as opposed to none):
we were going to stick around and see if the stars would be visible and so i could try doing long exposure star trails. unfortunately, there were clouds so there went that. however, as it got really dark and the last colours were fading from the sky (the sun itself was already long gone), i did get to do some 30s exposures with the water/sun/fading light. it turned out quite well, i think:
one was at f11 and the other at f 7.1 or something like that.
luckily, new year's was less talk, more photos, as i'm feeling rather tired at the end of this longass post (that's what i get for putting this one off.) so much for writing abuot editing like i'd originally intended to tonight...eh, i'll do it tmrw. good thing i have school tomorrow again. wheeeeeeeeeeeeefuckme.
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