Playing with the camera

I've been playing with my new digital SLR. Lots of fun.
This was way back in December or something. Dad wanted me to play with black and white photos.
This is yesterday on the ocean.
Today on Burnaby Lake
The same.
Ditto.
Maggie at Lighthouse Park on the weekend.
More black and white.
On the ocean.
Same thing. I played with Photoshop a bit on these two.
I'm trying to get better at wildlife photography before going to Yellowstone.

Bright Nights in Stanley Park!

For a date night, Remi and I were joined by a couple of friends for a holiday train ride around Stanley Park. They set up a bazillion lights and characters around the park for your viewing pleasure. It's really popular and you have to book in advance (so that Ticketmaster can hose you) and proceeds go to support firefighters. Dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory is als0 a part of it.

This is our train - it broke down within the first few seconds of our ride. We were stuck for about 20 minutes or so, until they could bring in a new engine. They swore that the train NEVER breaks down, but then had candy on deck to appease the riders... I think it may happen more often than they are willing to admit ;)


Ahhhh!!!! This bear was scary. And our train stopped right in front of him!!

Raccoons were wandering around all over the place. Cute, but deadly!!

Remi has been playing with the camera to make all these streaky pictures.

These guys really looked like they were skating on ice, although this wasn't frozen at all.

It was fun, even though it frequently felt like the train was going off the tracks ;)

Sarah

Christmas Day & Boxing Day

Remi and I spent a quiet Christmas day at home, well, after watching that video, you'll know how quiet it was ;) That was one of Maggie's toys.

Anyway, since I worked Christmas day during the day, Remi and I had our gift exchange that evening and then had dinner - stuffed chicken and salads. We also had a nice dinner on boxing day after heading out to Lighthouse park.

Here are a couple of Lighthouse park photos taken on the engagement SLR:

More Pictures

On Christmas eve, after dinner, Sarah and I decided to go for a night snowshoe on Seymour Mountain. Apparently everyone else in Vancouver was busy, so we had the whole area to ourselves, which was pretty neat.
As some of you must know by now, I recently purchased a DSLR camera, so I've been itching to go out and stretch its legs a little. I had some issues with the focus (auto-focus doesn't work well in the dark, but I still thing some of these pictures are neat.
I know it's blurry, I should have used the tripod, but I like the effect. Our new headlamps also work very well when there's snow.
I couldn't resist taking a moonlight picture. Haven't done one of these in years.
Sarah and I coth had to work on Christmas day, but as my day was quiet, I got to take some pictures. This is in Richmond, near the lab. It's a pretty ugly place in the full light of day, but now bad here.
It can be nice in the morning though, I don't know if you can see it, but Mount Baker is in the background. It's a large dead volcano in the States (3000m). We thought of climbing it, but the view from the top would be lousy (Vancouver and U.S. smog), and it's probably hard.
More early morning Richmond.
Ditto.
I got bored in the afternoon waiting for Sarah to come home, so I went to Maplewood Flats, in North Vancouver. It's a wildlife conservation area, and it's well known for its birds. Aside from some ducks and an eagle, I didn't see much. This was taken near a bird feeder.
These last few shots are from our recent snowshoe trip on Mt. Seymour. See the previous blog for more on that.
I photoshopped this one. Betcha can't tell where.
She looks happy, but she was complaining. Sarah is still hoping for a mountain that can be hiked without climbing.


Rémi

First snowshoe of the season!

There's been snow on the moutains since November, but we finally made it out yesterday to test the slope. Unfortunately, it wasn't the wonderful powder we like to snowshoe in (due to a thaw, followed by rain and a freeze), but it was still great to be outside for a few hours. We headed up Mount Seymour, one of the few remaining snowshoe sites open on the north shore. The Olympics have already started to bugger our lives up by closing a bunch of routes from December 1 to March 1 for "security reasons". How did they know we were planning to hike in and camp out for two months before the actual event??

Anyway, here are some photos from the day.

It was all clouds below us, so we couldn't see Vancouver at all. In fact, what started out as fog never burned off, so we were glad to be up in the sunny moutains.

Maggie enjoyed herself too. It was quite warm in the sunshine, so she wasn't at all cold and hardly cried at all when we stopped for lunch! This is a great picture of her :)

Remi's new "engagement SLR".

The climb up to our lunch spot. It's usually quite windy when we get to this point of the trail, but it wasn't yesterday, so we could be comfortable for a time up on the exposed hill. Look at that blue sky!

Mountains peaking through the rising clouds. We decided to leave before we became engulfed too!

Again, life above the clouds with Vancouver far below (okay, not too far - these are little-ish mountains).

We hope to get a lot more snowshoeing in this year than last year with our reduced course load - maybe we can actually enjoy the winter!!

Wishing everyone the happiest holidays from beautiful BC!

Sarah

Megan & Julien's Visit (Oct 2009)

Megan and Julien visited us out here in October. We took them to the usual outdoorsy places we take everyone who comes to visit ;) They also went on a few day trips by themselves to check out Vancouver. I was on my SPEP rotation and Remi had school, so we spent the evenings together.

This first photo is from Lynn Canyon (I think).

We also dragged them on a mountain hike up Black Mountain. It was short, but up up up!! Luckily it was a gorgeous day! In fact, M & J were very lucky while they were here visiting - it was an unusually dry October.



Remi took some time on the way down to ID some flowers ;)

We also took them to our favourite lower mainland park - Lighthouse Park (where we got engaged!)

Remi being a nerd, Megan pretending to be interested ;)


Julien made us promise to have a full Thanksgiving dinner or else they weren't coming, so we also did that. As usual my turkey was perfect ;)

As I've said a million times on this blog - WE LOVE VISITORS!! Free lodging in the beautiful city of Vancouver :)

Sarah