A walk around Downtown - January 4th 2011

The kids were at Chinook center waiting in line to do a Lego thing. I was supposed to go and meet them by 6:30pm so after work I spent a little bit of time walking around downtown with my camera looking for something to capture before running off the meet them.

Walking up 9th Ave I came across some stairs that led up to the Plus-15 across the street from the Fairmont Palliser Hotel. I tried to get an interesting shot of the hotel and the street with my tilt shift lens by cranking the tilt. Unfortunately I didn't have my tripod with me so I ended up taking a lot of pictures trying to get one that wasn't blurry at 1/8th of a second. That might seem like a pretty short amount of time if your in a hurry but when your trying to hold your camera steady - it's an eternity.

I find I hold my breath on long shots like this. So when I`m done releasing the shutter I usually have a few seconds of heavy breathing to catch up. I need to pay attention to this cause I`m sure that if I was to breath out slowly when shooting I`d probably be a lot steadier and get better shots. Or I could just make sure I lug the tripod around with me.

I like the cool blue evening light against the warm incandescent lights of the windows and the doorway.

Later, I found myself at the c-train station near the Bay. I tried some long handheld exposures around half a second trying to get some interesting motions with the camera set on the wall of the building. The shot below I converted to black and white. I like how the people in the foreground really help to balance out this photo compositionally.

You can see other pictures that I shot on this day here including a couple with the kids at the Lego store. They got to build Lego polar bears after waiting in line for about two hours.

Thanks for looking.
brad.