Posts in category "Photos"

Friends from France

Frédéric and Misun were briefly in Canada. They went on a short cruise with Misun’s par­ents and made a quick stop in Ottawa so nat­u­ral­ly I took the chance to see them. It was a love­ly evening for a bar­be­cue and eat­ing out in the sun.

It’s so inter­est­ing to hear about every­thing they’re doing with their lit­tle art gallery stu­dio, adding to my excite­ment of vis­it­ing them in a few months.

Greetings

Seeing the new baby. Mommy bare­ly looks like she was preg­nant, and Frédéric looks like he’s been eat­ing well in France.

watching Miric

Miric tests out the paper air­plane launch­er I bought the boys. It was one of the few non-vio­lent toys I could find in Toys R Us.

Continue read­ing “Friends from France”…

you got to hold on

I have all this stuff I mean to write but when it comes to typ­ing it out, it seems point­less. I don’t mind feel­ing this way any­more. I’d much rather come off as wit­ty or inter­est­ing, but I can set­tle for hon­est.

My pol­i­cy nowa­days is to act the way I feel. Instead of try­ing to cater to oth­er peo­ple or fit into social norms, I do what I want. It takes some trust in myself to believe that I’m gen­er­al­ly a good per­son, but every­thing seems to be work­ing in my favour.

bird

With anoth­er wed­ding booked next year, I was able to jus­ti­fy a new lens. The final one in my lens path: Canon’s 70–200mm f/2.8 IS II USM. It lets me take pic­tures like this.

I have some­thing major going on each month until December, at which point I’ll prob­a­bly her­ma­tize for three weeks until anoth­er round of hol­i­day crazi­ness.

I used to have Hold On by Tom Waits play­ing here.

The sum­mer has been warm and fuzzy, and it’s filled me with con­tent­ment. I don’t care about the future any­more. I’m liv­ing in this moment, and thank­ful it’s a nice one.

Collab

This is pret­ty much the most awe­some sit­u­a­tion I can think of. A jam ses­sion with Nic on beats and bass, Jesse rap­ping and on organ + glock­en­spiel, Audra on clar­inet, and me on ukulele. Figuring out what sounds best, mod­i­fy­ing arrange­ments, prac­tic­ing until it feels right.

The night was actu­al­ly a rehearsal for Jesse’s upcom­ing Canadian liv­ing room tour, the last stop of which is in Ottawa, at the same place I first met Jesse and Audra and Jacob.

Rehearsal

 

Because Jesse’s sis­ter is only avail­able on the east­ern tour dates, that left a spot for one instru­ment on the final tour date, which I’ll excit­ed­ly be fill­ing with my ukulele. It’s only for three songs (and singing one part of a three part har­mo­ny) but it’s going to be so much fun.

Here’s Jesse singing and rhyming and con­duct­ing us and play­ing the glock­en­spiel at the same time. It’s a new track off his upcom­ing album with an obvi­ous theme about video, except in this ver­sion he made an arrange­ment of Video Tape by Radiohead and VCR by The XX to book­end the vers­es. I’d nev­er heard VCR, so Jesse had to teach me the chords on the fly.

I record­ed this on my iPhone so I could prac­tice on my own; I won’t have a chance to see them for anoth­er rehearsal before they go on tour. I’d nev­er heard the song before, and it was our first time play­ing it through togeth­er but every­one knew when to stop. It felt com­plete­ly nat­ur­al. We were com­mu­ni­cat­ing with­out words, our instincts cul­mi­nat­ing in that won­der­ful­ly sol­id uni­son.

Even though I’m still rusty, it felt amaz­ing to be play­ing an instru­ment with oth­er peo­ple again. And this time with mate­r­i­al that’s fuck­ing genius, not the same old con­ser­va­to­ry pieces some teacher choos­es for you. At one point I was play­ing around on the ukulele when Jesse had to get the phone, and Nic start­ed putting beats to what I was doing and it made me want to steal Nic for all my prac­tic­ing.

See Jesse Dangerously in your town:

Friday, July 23rd — The Bird House in Halifax, NS — 6156 Duncan Street, 10:00 p.m.
Saturday, July 24th — The Galley in Fredericton, NB — 1–178 Westmorland Street, 7:00 p.m (with fem­i­nist/an­ti-cap­i­tal­ist gum­boot troupe Rebelles).
Sunday, July 25th — Gallerie Rye in Montreal, PQ — 1331a Rue Ste Catherine Est, 8:00 p.m (with the veg­an ukulele of Nicola IV).
Monday, July 26th — 160 Workshops in Ottawa, ON — 160 Primrose Avenue, 8:00 p.m. (with electronic/acoustic singer-song­writer Jacob Earl).

Visiting Pita

Pita is soon mov­ing to the west coast of Canada, so I went to vis­it him in Montreal on the week­end. We lived togeth­er in res­i­dence in uni­ver­si­ty and for two years in an apart­ment down­town, but had­n’t seen each oth­er in years. I’m prob­a­bly the only per­son to still think of him as Pita, the nick­name giv­en to him from the first week of res­i­dence. There were two pairs of room­mates named Jeff and Peter, so every­one decid­ed that one pair should have nick­names to make the dis­tinc­tion, and that end­ed up being us.

Pita's house

He’s mov­ing out in two days, so his house is a jum­ble of packed box­es and mis­cel­la­neous items.

Continue read­ing “Visiting Pita”…

Space Station

The International Space Station hap­pened to be pass­ing by when I was out doing some astropho­tog­ra­phy. It’s a very high-pro­file object because it’s a lot brighter than any stars (it’s light com­ing from the solar pan­els reflect­ing the sun at us), and it blazes across the sky at an amaz­ing speed. This last point is made obvi­ous by the fact that all the stars appear sta­tion­ary in the pho­to1, while the ISS made a bril­liant streak.

Also vis­i­ble near the bot­tom of the pic­ture are two low-fly­ing air­craft. The one in the bot­tom left cor­ner had blink­ing lights, which is why it appears as a series of dots in a line.

International Space Station

16mm focal length, f2.8 aper­ture, 13 sec­ond expo­sure, ISO1600.

I only had about two chances to take this shot at this shut­ter speed, not because the ISS dis­ap­pears behind the hori­zon, but because it even­tu­al­ly flies into the shad­ow of the Earth while it’s in the sky and is no longer illu­mi­nat­ed by the sun.

My astropho­tograhy teacher once showed me a pic­ture he got of the ISS where the fins of the solar pan­els were vis­i­ble. To put into per­spec­tive how dif­fi­cult this was, he explained it like this:

At it’s longest dimen­sion, the ISS is only about 109m wide, which is rough­ly the size of the nee­dle anten­na on top of the CN Tower. It’s also orbits about 400 kilo­me­tres above the earth, which is rough­ly the dis­tance from Ottawa to Toronto. So to cap­ture the ISS in a tele­scope at that mag­ni­fi­ca­tion is like being in Ottawa and point­ing a tele­scope at Toronto and see­ing the anten­na on the CN Tower…as it’s mov­ing at 8 kilo­me­tres per sec­ond. In American terms, this would be like stand­ing with a tele­scope in Las Vegas and resolv­ing the char­ac­ters of the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles if it was mov­ing at 17000mph.

  1. They do move, but at a wide focal length of 16mm the streak­ing is min­i­mized. [↩]