the month of february.

it has been tiring. it has been long. it started off pretty awesome, though. starting with the theeee eleventh!

started off that day doing odyssey group photos, the casual ones.


blahblabhlah 3 hours later, commenced hangout phase of the day with this noob:

if it were still the 11th, i'd probably write more about it. but as it is, blahblah shit happened we went places,

somethingsomethingfoundthisplaceduringa6hourshiftwiththeaquariumsomethinglunarfestsomething this was still daytime so we came back later at night. in between, pacific center antics ensued:

c-c-c-c-c-c-c-combo breakerrrrrrr:subject here has no vagina.

somethingsomething walk around, i'm really bad at writing about  shit i don't care about huh?

and, eventually, went back to the lunarfest tent, where i took this photo and entered it into the contest, and lost, but doesn't matter cause for one this is now quite the run on sentence and for another i like it:

also, this is what the noob looks like when bloated.

/runsaway.

SATURDAY, FEBRUARRRREEEEEEE the 12ieme.

went to downtown. again. this time with a new set of noobs:

the rager

the socially awkward, and the budding misogynist.

we ate sammiches.

budding misogynist got pwned back to back:

vancouver looked pretty:

i took and posted photos of people who were pissed to be pictured in their perplexed positions of puhpuhpuhPENIS. idk.

and then the following weekend was odyssey pics: formals. that was pretty fun and i liked the photos better this time. not going to bother with uploading them cause i feel lazy. after lunch and all that, we hung around for a few hours and then decided to head to the beach for some sunset pictures. since we're all fatties, we didn't actually get there intime for the sunset. my phone died on me somewhere along the way (though i did learn that my mom needed the remote i had in my bag so as to enable captions for the tv. sucked to her ass-mar.) pics commencing:

iso 100 on my k-x amazed me here. this is more or less straight out of camera. the DR is so great, that i can do this and get away with it:

also, my dish thing makes itself useful for once. in the above pic here (though quality has been bumraped by facebook), you can see that the shadows are pretty harsh and hard-edged.

not so (much) here. though even at 6 people this is probably pushing it - i'd say the usefulness of this thing is probably 4 or less people

this was cool - the flash froze them for the duration of the flash, but the silhouettes kept moving and were still recorded after the (really  short burst) flash

stand at the edge where the tide last was

book it and shitbrix when tide comes back in.

we all knew he was totes a rapist.

and he can't hide that, no matter how much lipstick he has on. LOLO

AND THEN: went to the marine mammal rescue center on the next day. cool shit, probably will volunteer here. i don't think my word-to-picture ratio has been so low in a long, long, time, if ever. that was a large amount of consecutive commas.

harbour seals, for which i have a soft spot after having swum with them a few times on dives:

also, the bamf of the place: stellar sea lion.

which brings me to this weekend. haven't done much - been photoshopping all day (minus about 4 hours in slacking) for school, also yesterday did modes assignment. which is 100% pointless imo - if you're the type of person to use them, you're familiar with them enough to not need an assignment to learn them (let alone in the middle of the year). and if you're like me, i never ever ever ever leave manual anyways soooo, there's really no point. however, i did come home with a photo (tthat i took after finishing modes) that i quite like:

so that was cool.

oh yes, i forgot. i also photo'd again on the 22nd at the aquarium, this time as an allout photographer. it was grrrrreat, esp since i had a flash this time, i loooooved the photos that i went home with. 

a pair of randoms i took during the month that i like:

"it's snowing!"

"office woes (japanese quince homage)"

i probably didn't do each thing i did this month justice in my power-blog thing this has been, but oh well. i am utterly exhausted by the month of february. i don't think i've ever had a month like this - the weekends were aamzingly fun, hanging out with mah various peopleses. but the weeks....i've never had consecutive (or even 1 full) weeks where it was go home---->study/hwk till 10 ----> sleep. and that was pretty much every day of february for me. and it still is, until 2nd term ends. and then after which i only have to stress and be anxious and on end day after day until i find out whether or not ubc accepts me. at which point i either collapse from prolonged emotional exhaustion or i jump off a cliff. 

i probably wanted to talk about a lot more over the course of the month than i did here, but i can't think right now, so whatever. GOODMONTHTOYOUALL.

i own a beach

whee first photowalk of the month :D was toooooo, drumroll, iona island. or iona beach, on iona island. somewhere thereabouts. apparently i'd been there with my dad before when i was really young, and i vaguely remember it, but again i went today. it was kind of eerie there in a way, not necessarily because of the place itself but because it was super cloudy out - thick, featureless clouds that was identical in every direction - and cause we were right next to the airport. how's that all creepy? we'd constantly hear and sometimes feel the airplanes taking off and landing, but almost never see a single one - esp cause we were somewhat lower on the ground, surrounded by rolling hills too. so, yeah, interesting mood to start it off.

and, in continuing the spirit of my last post, today i went with the trynamic trio - 15/4, 40/2.8, 100/2.8 - ie, all my modern lenses (excluding the kit lens), and it was pretty amazingly great, actually. the 15 and 40 are so tiny that whenever i had the 100 on the camera, i could have the 15 in one jean pocket and the 40 in the other. gotta love pentax.

anyways, this place was incredibly jizztastic. at first, i thought it was okaylah, and snapped a few shots as i walked around:

some nice pictures i guess, but nothing extremely inspired or unique (speaking of which, i'd been getting worried lately that all my photos were getting sortof cornered into the same genre - that dark, moody atmospheric thing. nice, but repetitive. then i realized what the fuck can i do about it - it's what vancouver weather gives me, so i guess i have to live with it. i'll post sunshine and bunnies when we actually get sunshine and bunnies, kthx.)

anyways, a few minutes after these, we saw something that made me go oh shit...

yes. we saw rusted shit ahead. and i was like ohgodohgodohgod MUSTPHOTOOOOOJIZZZzzzzzxzZXZXXxxzzzzz. if you know much about me, you know that i love that sorta urban-decay stuff - rusting old barns and that type of thing. we also saw some sign regarding something or other, i didn't pay it much attention though. cause, i mean, RUST!

but first, a lolsers photo:

and now that my lolsers quota has been filled: SHITBRIX.

hurhurhur im so punnneeeee.

so the first thing on the photo docket that really got me excited was a boat. a rusted boat. a rusted, barnacled boat. a rusted, barnacled boat with holes. jizztastic. i basically spent the better part of 20 minutes photomolesting its every curve. first half with the 40, second half with the 15.

(i realise these're a bit repetitive. while photomolesting i was a bit overeager so i wanted to make sure i got every angle of every mildly similar composition, so hence 50 near-identical images. or is it every composition of every mildly similar angle? same shits.)

and now with the 15. it's interesting how i took so many more flat-surface shots with an ultrawide than a normal lens. interesting. not really. here be they:

and that concludes today's session of photomolesting a boat. there was some other shit next to it but i didn't feel like photomolesting that too - it's a tiring thing, photomolestation. anyways....ONWARDS, WE FORGED! wow, that was incredibly nerdy.

i quite like these shots. and sin x  = 0, where these pictures are the initial arm, of these, was this old abandoned-ish metal trailer/container/thing. it was pretty awesome, and of course, it was rusted too. more jizzing ensued: 

and also a gas tank thing next to it? idkwhatitisexactlybuttherewasahosecomingoutofit:

and, this next photo might be slightly blasphemous...

yes. i took a picture of rust, and sucked all the orgasmic rust-y colours out of it. i'm a horrible person. i know.

and to punish me for being such a horrible person, the photo gods gave me rather meh photos for the next few minutes: 

and now, lastly, we went to the beachhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhowmanyhscanitypeeeeeeeeeeandnowit'seeeees

.

at this point, it's been a good 2-3 hours or so, and we more or less called it quits and started walking back. just before that, i took my last shot of the day:

which is eerily similar to the very first shot of the day, somewhere up there.

annndddd that was my first of the month - and i loved it. i think my very first photowalk of january was awesome too - the ones of the sunset at whytecliff. so i guess it bodes well for february, especially cause i'd been thinking it'd be a meh month for photos - apparently not! 

this photowalk was interesting, apart from the sexy subject matter, in that it was bloody difficult to edit to how i wanted it to look. often times there was so very low contrast in the overall image that basically "fill  light" or "recovery" weren't helpful at all - the entire picture's tonal range was so compressed both options affected the entire image, more or less, making it difficult to get a good contrasty image that i wanted, without having blown-out skies. and the flipside of that was in the beach images (except for the shell in the sand) - i wanted something super low contrast, so that there was a simple, minimalistic transition between the nuances of colour. aka, i had to turn DOWN contrast, instead of turn up. it certainly felt blasphemous, and i think i actually did try to go for a low-contrast image while turning up the contrast, so it only shows in the last shot with the ship. the 2 before it were contrasted cause im too pussy to go lowcontrast.

so, yeah. challenging to PP these shots, quite. but i think it turned out pretty awesome. still, they seem kinda underexposed to me still, among other things (and like i said fill light/recovery was no help for these images) so i think i'll be doing more work on them; i haven't seen the final copy of these just yet. 

overall, on a scale of one to jizz, it was a passmesometissuesplox