Rimouski Reflections

Last week I put up some photographs taken at sunset while My Lovely Assistant and I happened to be in Rimouski.  I was really happy with those photographs, but there was one other photograph that night that I liked as well.  This one was taken a little bit later that night.  We had decided to take a walk by the river and while heading back to the site of the jazz festival, I really liked the way  that the city lights were reflecting in the river.  I'd normally use a tripod to take such a photograph, but I didn't have one on me at the time.  I raised the ISO of my camera as high as it would go, set my aperture at f/16 in order to get a nice star effect on the lights, propped myself against the metal railings, held my breath and snapped away.  As you can imagine, many of the shots I took ended up quite blurry, but this one came out pretty well.  It was shot at f/16, 1/13sec, ISO 3200 at 75mm.  It's a good thing that this one worked out, because as soon as I had taken it, the wind began to pick up, and the once calm river was suddenly full of waves, killing the reflections that had been there moments before.  Sure, the sky is overly dark, but I still like this photograph because it's a shot that I really had no business getting, yet I managed to get it. 

Ready To Drop The Puck

A new season of NHL hockey is upon us, and in the continuing quest to get through my ever expanding archives, here are a couple of left-over photographs that I took back in January.  For those of you who don't remember, I ended up visiting the Bell Sports Complex in Brossard on Sunday morning when I had nothing else to do and work on some sports photography.  There was a what I suppose would be called a garage league game being played and the stands were empty to so I just walked in, grabbed a seat and and began to snap away.  Sure, the Bell Sports Complex on a Sunday morning is pretty far away from the Bell Center on a Saturday night, but you never know.  Stranger things have been known to happen, and in the meantime I still enjoy empty stands where I'm free to roam.  This blog may not be the pages of Sports Illustrated, but then again, I have a pretty good relationship with the editor-in-chief and he gives me free reign of the place.  The first photograph was taken at f/5.6, 1/250sec, ISO 1600 at 123mm and the second photograph was taken at f/5.6, 1/250sec, ISO 1600 at 160mm.  Let the games begin.

Sunday Action

It's Sunday afternoon and if you're living in North America, chances are pretty good that you associate this particular day of the week with football.  Last night I paid a visit to my old school of oh-so many years ago, CEGEP Champlain in Saint-Lambert, to watch their football team in action.  Much like last year, I was there mostly because one of my younger buddies, Mike, still plays for the team.  Watch out for #5 in blue, you might just see him in action during this update.  Unlike last year, the Cavaliers play their regular season games at night, making things a little more difficult from a photography stand point than the sunny afternoon game I attended last year.  It's a little more difficult to grab some photographs under the field lights than it is under a sunny October sky, but I still managed to get a couple.  Though the Cavaliers managed to win the game 44-2, I didn't walk home with any touchdown photographs.  I missed the first few as I arrived at the game in the middle of the second quarter and found myself on the wrong side of the field for a couple others.  Then a runner got free and was headed to the corner of the end zone where I happened to place myself at the beginning of the third quarter.  That's him who you can see running in the first photograph.  Just before he was about to get to the end zone, a coach who was returning to the sideline late after halftime walked right in front of me and blocked my view.  I couldn't believe it.  I still managed to get some good photographs of the action that took place in the game, but due to my needing to use a high ISO due to the lack of light, the shots are still a little grainy.  I lost of couple of good shots as well as I wasn't able to get a fast enough shutter speed to totally freeze the action.  The first photograph was taken at f/4.5, 1/250sec, ISO 3200 at 145mm.  The second photograph was taken at f/4.5, 1/160sec, ISO 3200 at 102mm and the third photograph was taken at f/4.5, 1/160sec, ISO 3200 at 200mm.  Here are a few more photographs that I took at the game.

f/3.5, 1/400sec, ISO 3200 at 88mm

f/4, 1/320sec, ISO 3200 at 200mm

f/4, 1/500sec, ISO 3200 at 168mm

The Cavaliers only have one more home game this season, and it will be played at night once again.  They're having a pretty good season though, so maybe they'll host a play-off game.  Maybe I'll get a chance to photograph a game under the sun just yet.

Rimouski Sunset

It has been about a month since the little summer road trip vacation I took with My Lovely Assistant to Percé.  As is the norm, none of the photographs that I took on vacation have seen the light of day.  What can I say, time goes by very quickly.  With that in mind, here are a couple of photographs that I took during out little stop in the city of Rimouski.  We were on the drive home from Percé and decided to take the long-way home.  We figured we'd drive until the town of Rimoski where we would stop as there was a Jazz Festival taking place that weekend.  We arrived in the early evening, found a motel to stay at and then hit downtown for the music.  As an added bonus, some of you may remember the photographs I managed to take while there of this cool little Dixie Band.  Before taking those photographs, we walked around the site a little bit just as the sun was beginning to set.  I didn't have a tripod with me since tripods and music festivals don't usually mix.  This provided a bit of a problem since I needed a slow shutter speed to properly photograph the sunset.  So, I got a little creative.  I rested my camera on the metal barrier that was separating the festival grounds from the main street, set my camera to burst mode and hoped to get lucky.  I tried to catch some of the passing cars in my shots, hoping to add some light streaks to the bottom of the image because I've always liked light streak.  The sunset though, is the real star.  It was somewhat cloudy and the setting sun turned the clouds in the sky into a cool textured red.  After getting a few shots with cars that were to my liking, I grabbed a few more of just the sunset over the St. Lawrence River with one of the islands in the middle of the river silhouetted.  The first photograph was taken at f/11, 1/13sec, ISO 400 at 70mm.  The second photograph was taken at f/11, 1/13sec, ISO 400 at 70mm and the third photograph was taken at f/2.8, 1/30sec, ISO 400 at 200mm.

f/2.8, 1/40sec, ISO 400 at 70mm 

The stop in Rimouski wasn't part of the original plan for our vacation.  It only came about because of an add we saw in a restaurant while in Percé.  Some good music and some nice photographs resulted from it.

Blood Moon Rising

I know, I know.  Pretty much everyone has been putting up photographs of the Supermoon lunar eclipse that happened last night.  I'm not different than everyone else.  Though I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, this kind of lunar eclipse doesn't happen every day, or even every year for that matter.  I wanted to get out and try to get some photographs of the event.  My first thought was to get myself up to the observation deck of Mount Royal as I thought it would give me a good view of the moon over the city.  Sadly, I wasn't the only one who had this idea.  As My Lovely Assistant and I drove up the mountain, we began to notice more and more cars parked, illegally I might add, along the side of the road.  Things only got worst a few minutes later as we arrived at the main parking lot only to find that not only was the lot full, but there were cars parked three deep along the side of the road.  I wasn't going to find a spot, and I really didn't want to find myself in the massive traffic jam in the making that was going to happen when everyone decided to leave, so I turned the car around and quickly drove back home, hoping to find a spot closer to where I live.  I headed to the train station in Saint-Lambert, and found that not only was it completely empty, but the moon was right above my car, just looking down at me.  I quickly got out my gear and started snapping away.  I know that my Supermoon photographs don't look all that 'super'.  Sadly, I don't have the Superbankaccount to go out and buy a Superlens that would do a better job of capturing the event, but I was happy with what I came home with.  I didn't really know what I was doing as I don't really spend lots of time photographing the moon, so I just played around with different apertures and ISO's.  I was a little disappointed when the clouds began to roll in, but I took a few more photographs anyway, and I kind of liked the final result.  The second photograph with the clouds just rolling in would have probably been a little better with a faster shutter speed as I think I left the camera open one of two seconds longer than I should have and there is a bit of streaking in the stars.  I also must admit that I played around a little bit with the third photograph, adding a bit of red to the highlights in Photoshop.  The first photograph was taken at f/2.8, 2sec, ISO 400 at 190mm.  The second photograph was taken at f/2.8, 8sec, ISO 100 at 200mm and the third photograph was taken at f/2.8, 6sec, ISO 100 at 200mm.  It was a rare natural event, and I'm glad that I had the chance to go out and play around with my camera trying to capture it

Local Protest

Coming home from the Day Job this afternoon I noticed an unmarked police car parked on my corner.  A smile came to my face as I thought that he was positioned there to possibly catch some of the people who keep driving past the school bus that drops little kids off from school just across the street.  It was only a few minutes later when I noticed there was a much larger police presence than usual in my neighbourhood.  It seems that there was a conference going on at CEGEP Champlain where the Quebec Liberal party was holding a forum on education in the 21st Century.  However, outside is where the action was happening.  Several teachers unions had gathered outside of the building to protest the fact that they weren't invited to the forum.  Since this was happening all just down the street, I figured I'd grab my camera and see if I could awaken my inner photojournalist and grab some interesting shots.  I tried to key in on the signs and the crowd, shooting the moments when the crowd was a little animated or if their flags or sign could be seen.  The first shot was taken at f/8, 1/200sec, ISO 100 at 165mm and the second photograph was taken at f/6.3, 1/320sec, ISO 100 at 100mm.  Here are a couple more photographs that I took while walking around.

f/9, 1/500sec, ISO 400 at 123mm

f/10,1/200sec, ISO 400 at 70mm

f/10, 1/640sec, ISO 1600 at 105mm

f/4, 1/1600sec, ISO 1600 at 200mm

f/8, 1/320sec, ISO 1600 at 145mm

After the speeches, things began to break up a little bit, so I continued to wander around until I was stopped by one of the aforementioned police officers who asked if I belonged to any media.  Figuring it was probably not a good idea to lie to the police, I simply said I was a local photographer who runs a blog and was just there to take some photographs for myself.  They took note of my name, and I took note of the fact that it probably meant that it was a good time to leave.  So, if you don't see any updates here for a while, please take up a collection to help cover my bail.

Pink Floyd Tribute

As Summer makes way to Fall, I had better get a move on with my photographs.  There were lots of photographs taken over the last few months, and as usual I didn't have the time to get them all up here on the blog.  One thing that I really enjoyed this summer was all of the opportunities I had to photograph some fun concerts.  The last of which happened a few weeks back on September 6th.  The event was the first ever Sommet des arts et de la musique de Longueuil and the big event was a tribute to Pink Floyd held by local musician Gregory Charles and his musicians along with guest vocalist Kim Richardson.  It was My Lovely Assistant who discovered an advertisement for the event in a local newspaper, and it seemed like a good way to spend a Sunday night.  We headed down to the concert site about an hour before the show, only to find that it was already rather full.  The location was kind of small to begin with, and many people had already arrived.  After looking over the crowd, I formed a quick plan.  I noticed a little point of entry near the stage, and a clear walking path down the center of the crowd where the electrical wires had been placed.  While everyone was looking behind them at a group of drummers who were the opening act, I made my move down the path and put myself right at the front of the group of people who were standing just behind everyone else who was seated.  Yeah, it was kind of underhanded and sneaky, but nobody complained and I ended up with a good spot.  Sadly, the lighting for the show was very dark and it made things a little difficult to get some good shots.  I decided to try and focus on playing with the lights, trying to shoot when the spotlights were pointed at me and creating some strange light effects.  My personal favourite is a shot of the guitarist where it kind of looks like he was just about to explode into a ball of light.  The show ended with a brief fireworks display over the stage, but I missed most of the good explosions because I was shooting with my telephoto lens rather than my wide-angle.  This is why most concert photographers shoot shows with two cameras around their necks.  Well, Christmas is coming soon, maybe Santa will decide that I've been particularly good this year.  The first photograph was taken at f/5.6, 1/80sec, ISO 3200 at 200mm.  The second photograph was taken at f/5.6, 1/100sec, ISO 3200 at 102mm and the third photograph was taken at f/4.5, 1/160sec, ISO 3200 at 95mm.  Here are a couple more photographs I took during the show.

f/4.5, 1/160sec, ISO 3200 at 142mm

f/4.5, 1/200sec, ISO 3200 at 123mm

f/4.5, 1/60sec, ISO 3200 at 105mm

f/3.5, 1/800sec, ISO 3200 at 200mm

f/5, 1/125sec, ISO 3200 at 70mm

f.5, 1/125sec, ISO 3200 at 70mm

f/5, 1/100sec, ISO 3200 at 70mm

It was a pretty cool summer of music.  Hopefully I'll be able to find my way to some more of these shows next year.  I'll be sure to have My Lovely Assistant keep scanning all of the papers.