On my way to work, I had to stop and snap this photo because it really sums up Vancouver in so many ways.
Construction, traffic, beautiful skyline, and frosted mountains. The first two should get better over the coming months, and I’ll be glad to see it all go. The last two, on the other hand, I never get tired of.
I was contacted a few weeks ago about a photo that I posted on Flickr by a rep at Sennheiser Canada. It turns out that they saw my photo and wanted to use it in a press release regarding the new sound system they provided the equipment for at GM Place. Canucks fans might have heard about the new setup at the rink, and a lot of people that I’ve talked to have been really impressed by it, myself included.
When I was contacted and asked for my permission, I ensured that I would get credit in the release and gave my go ahead. I was told that they had numerous photos of their equipment, but they really liked the way my shot captured the system.
If you get a chance to make it down for a Canucks game, it will impress you. It sounds a lot clearer than previously, and your seat will rattle when they crank up the bass. Certainly gives you a different experience at GM Place than before.
BarCampVancouver 2008 seemed to come up on us all too quickly, and I would have to declare the event an overall success. From the party on Friday night to the all day affair on Saturday, Granville Island was a great campus this year. We completely lucked out on the weather as well, so you can’t ask much more than that.
WordCamp was also a really great event that I got to be apart of. I tried to help out with the planning alongside Duane and Rebecca, but there was a bit more to be done the day of than expected. After some quick ghetto engineering, the screen and projector worked out great, and the sessions were all really good. Hopefully my involvement in the genius Q&A portion of the day made sense for many of the attendees, and for a really great run down on the sessions, check out Rebecca’s post.
Photocamp was another point of enjoyment for myself. I mostly caught the last few sessions with Tris Hussey, Derek Miller, and John Biehler, but they were well worth the time to learn a bit more about photo sharing sites and various pieces of gear that I’m all too poor to spend money on.
The day concluded with a brief photowalk around Granville Island, so I’ll include a few shots or you can see the entire set on Flickr.
Good times, and I can’t wait to do it again next year.
This past Thursday night, Less Than Jake played the Commodore Ballroom on a double ticket with Reel Big Fish. It was like being taken back to 1998 all over again, but the show didn’t fail to deliver. RBF and LTJ can still rock it something fierce.
Even better, RadioZoom got an interview with Chris in the afternoon before the show, Rebecca being on the prowl with the recording gear. It’s a great interview explaining why they have gone the way of being an independent band on their own label as well as the type of witty banter that can only come from the front man for Less Than Jake.
The interview also gave us photo access for the show, so here are some of my favorite shots I took from the front of the stage.
It was a wicked show. Unfortunately I couldn’t take any shots of Reel Big Fish, but needless to say, they still put on a hell of a performance. I have forgotten how much fun ska/punk concerts are, mainly because of that damn corporate machine that says ska died about ten years ago. I think not.
You can see all of my photos from the night on the Flickr set.
Rebecca and I got back yesterday from a one week stay in Kansas City, MO. My mother grew up there, and it’s where my parents met and got married. The road that took our family to Iowa is a whole other tale, but there is still a large portion of extended family that lives in and around KCMO.
My grandmother turned a young 90 years old this past Wednesday, so that, of course, means one thing for a family with hefty Mexican roots. It’s a party, and I think I’m still recovering.
Otherwise, this trip was a chance to get away from the craziness in Vancouver, enjoy some family, and relax a little bit. I’ll let the pictures do most of the talking, and you can see more of them in the Flickr set.
Truly the “City of Fountains”.
I haven’t been able to find Mexican bread as good as this in Vancouver.
My mom and my aunt, but you can’t see the three pitchers of sangria that were absolutely amazing.
And the scene of the crime.
It was a really great week in Kansas City. Hot, but great to see all of my family. Hopefully a trip to Iowa can be the next leg when we go to visit, but now we’re anxious to show them some of the sites here. Pictures can’t do KC or Vancouver justice, both great in their own right.
Last weekend, Rebecca was contacted by the city of Surrey to come out and help cover the events of the Surrey Fusion Festival. The three days of food, live performances, vendors, and artist displays were brought together for the soul purpose of putting a variety of ethnic flavors that comprise the areas of the lower mainland into one place. And let me say, they did an amazing job of pulling it off.
Once again, I played photographer for the day, gathering shots for coverage on miss604.com. The organizers understand and recognize the reach that a hyperlocal blog like Rebecca’s has, so they wanted to make sure that they did everything they could to spread the world about the event, even if it’s after the fact.
Here’s a variety of shots that were my favorite of those three days.
This last photo is by far my favorite out of the whole bunch, and it’s not because of the photo quality or how the light hits the shot just right. It’s the fact that when we saw these prawn crackers, we more so thought about how it would taste. The spelling didn’t catch us until after the fact.
With hope, those “pawn crackers” helped to make you understand how great the Surrey Fusion Fest was this year, and I really hope that the momentum is there to do it again next year. The whole gathering was laid back and a great atmosphere that one has to experience to really enjoy.
If you would like to see more photos, please see the entire set on Flickr, and Rebecca has some great posts highlighting the festivities from day two and three. Our social media ninja in arms DaveO even made a guest post to give his perspective, and he was just as pleased with things as we were.
Rebecca was contacted by the fine folks at the city of Surrey to be a media co-sponsor for their Canada Day events in Cloverdale. July 1st saw nearly 40,000 people crowd onto the Cloverdale Millennium Amphitheater grounds to play games, see stilt walkers, get their faces painted, and see a jam packed line-up of musical acts on the main stage, including the likes of Rymes With Orange, The Payola$, and Loverboy.
Events like this tend to find me with media access for the both of us, and of course that means I have to take my camera along with. You can read all of Rebecca’s coverage of the event [Surrey Canada Day 2008: The Schedule, Morning Recap, The Music], but the following are some of my favorite shots that I took.
Will is a really amazing musician. See him live if you can because you must.
That’s Mr. Bob Rock[wiki], ladies and gentlemen, in the flesh.
You can see all 104 photos on Flickr. Shooting outdoor events can be a lot of fun, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s loud in the photo pit, not to mention the sweltering heat on that day. Sometimes I feel intimidated by being surrounded with folks that have larger and much more expensive photo equipment, but the pictures that come out from my endeavors tend to speak for themselves. It’s not what you got that matters. It’s how you use it, and I’m doing my damnedest to learn my camera and get better with every shot.
The folks at the Surrey Canada Day event were amazing in terms of getting us the media access and letting us know the low down on what was going on, where everything was located, and were just generally awesome people. By far, the best treatment I have ever experienced in terms of media access for new media folks.
About a week and a half ago, I had the extreme pleasure of joining Rebecca on a really cool experience of covering the Rio Tinto Alcan Dragon Boat Festival for the festivities of 2008.
People come from all over to compete in this event, not to mention watch and enjoy the festivities.
The Festival was created to show off Vancouver’s growing cultural diversity and to promote racial harmony among Canadians – new and old. Vancouverites were invited to the festival to experience spectacular food, entertainment, arts and children’s programming reflecting Vancouver’s cultural diversity. At the same time, interest in paddling was taking off and more and more teams formed and registered each year.
Twenty years later the Festival still fulfills its mandate to promote cultural harmony among Canadians. It has developed into one of Vancouver’s most anticipated summer family events. [dragonboatbc]
This was just a little bit more than the run of the mill walking around, shooting pictures, and seeing the sights. Thanks to Anita, we had media passes to the event.
Probably the best thing about the media access for this event was being able to ride in the media boat and follow the racers as they went from start to finish, paddling along until their bodies couldn’t give anymore.
With my trusty camera, I decided to try something a little different and shoot some video with it of an actual heat or two.
The Dragon Boat Festival is a real passion for some of these racers. There’s a community that comes from the numerous teams, and the action is just as intense. This is something that you don’t really get a sense of until you get away from all of the tents and vendors on dry land. When you get down to the water level, it’s a whole other experience that I’m really glad I had the opportunity to see.
Three days in Chilliwack, B.C. at Cultus Lake with Rebecca, John, and Duane. Lots and lots of sitting around the campfire, laughing a ton, good drink, good food, and the weather was… good.
The forecast in the days leading up to the trip just got worse and worse. Everyone we knew told us that we were nuts for going camping this weekend. It ended up being awful on Thursday night, Friday was actually really nice, and Saturday was off and on in terms of being cool from winds that would whip up from time to time. Other than that, everything went off great.
I even busted open my right shin a tiny bit when a piece of wood I was chopping got away and clocked me. That’s about par for the course, no other major injuries.
I can still smell the smoke, if not taste it. That’s only the real complaint of the trip, even if the coolness kept us all pretty close to the fire. Couldn’t even fathom jumping into the lake, no matter how inviting or calling it might have been. Fleece under a rain jacket was just right. Bone chilling lake water from ice run off from the mountains in the area, not so much.
Ah yes, we indeed called this drunkcamp02, complete with lanyards. It’s more of a statement of enjoying the time away from laptops and technology and becoming one with nature. Even though there are public washrooms within easy walk and Duane’s family brought us amazing food(perogies, cabbage rolls, and KFC), donuts from Tim Horton’s, and fire wood in three separate trips on Saturday, it’s tough country out there “in the Wack”.
You can see more of my pictures from the trip on Flickr.
Rebecca recently made a post about using the AddQuickTags plugin for WordPress to display captions on photos in her blog posts, I would elaborate on the CSS styling it takes to get this. The WordPress plugin makes this easier, but I thought it would be useful to share how you can do this with some simple CSS, especially if you don’t have WordPress at your disposal.
First, how do you get this…
to work?
To start with, you need your image and then link it to its origin or creator to attribute credit to. This is just good practice and makes the original author happy. We’ll have to peak at some quick HTML to get a sense of what’s going on here because we don’t like using visual editors. Code might be tough to work with for some, but it’s second nature to us.
<a href="http://website.com"><img src="http://photosharingsite.com/photo/image.jpg" /></a>
Your HTML might look different, but the premise should be the same. It’s a linked image, but how do you get the “Photo by:” tag underneath the image? Let’s start by adding some code to your CSS.
.captioncentered {
display: block;
text-align: center; /*centers text & image*/
margin: 10px auto; /*centers the whole div*/
padding-bottom: 1px; /*this depends of your design*/
font-size: 0.85em;
color: #ccc;
}
This will make like somewhat simple for you in the long run because this will set the design of your blog to work for all posts you use this styling for. So now what do you do with it?
You just setup a “class” to use in the “div” tag. It works like this.
<div class="captioncentered"><a href="http://website.com"><img src="http://photosharingsite.com/photo/image.jpg" /></a></div>
That centers the image, so now you need to add a little more HTML to this in order to get the credit where it deserves to be. This just requires some text and then linking the words you want linked. However, this extra text must be inside the div tags in order for this to work!
<div class="captioncentered"><a href="http://website.com"><img src="http://photosharingsite.com/photo/image.jpg" /></a>
<br />Photo by: <a href="http://website.com" />author</a> on PhotoSharingSite.com</div>
Once you have this, you are able to to display an image, such as a photo from Flickr, with proper attribution. Why? Because it’s the right thing to do, not to mention a legal way to not get yourself into trouble with the original author for taking their content.
The next thing you can do is edit your CSS to make some adjustment to the look of your text or perhaps the background. It really comes down to what you want to do. There might be a better way to do this, but this is how we get this function to work.
