Above/featured: Winter morning at Kitsilano Beach in Vancouver – 22 Dec 2020 (X70).
Frankly, I don’t know why I waited so long.
For the longest time, I thought photography wasn’t for me. But the curiosity of making images would soon win me over.
My late-entry to photography means I have some regrets not having any images when I lived in Toronto and in Germany. After I moved to Minneapolis, I asked friends and colleagues for some advice, and by 2015, I purchased a compact Canon point-and-shoot camera. I pushed the limits of that camera, and I realized very quickly the kinds of images I wanted to make were beyond what the camera could manufacture. I needed greater flexibility and capability to adjust aperture- and exposure-values, and within three years, I moved “up” to a Canon camera with a crop sensor (450D).
I learned quickly I wanted a broader range of focal lengths, which led me to acquiring a couple of extra lenses. I pushed the 450D very hard, including my year-long around-the-world (RTW) journey in 2012. The shutter died the next summer in Prague, and with my investment of glass within the Canon camera-system, I moved “up” to a Canon camera with a full-frame sensor (6D1) in early 2014. With a larger sensor providing greater sensitivity to low-light, I feel the camera has furnished great images under a variety of conditions. But the 6D1 camera and complement of lenses can be bulky and heavy to carry around for an entire day, and I was feeling “burned out” by the camera-and-lens combination’s larger footprint and weight.
In early 2018, I pondered the idea of a more portable camera, and I decided on a lightly-used Fujifilm X70 mirrorless camera. I brought the 6D1 and the X70 on trips to Europe and the U.S. Southwest to experiment with both cameras, and to understand which device was ideally suited for different environments in different places. The 6D1 still has its place for what I want to photograph, but I discovered a different level of fun and versatility with the X70 with its light weight and small compact size. The X70 isn’t perfect, but it’s a lot easier to carry the X70 into the streets than with the 6D1.
I don’t know what happens next, but there are lots of possibilities for further projects in locations near and far.
Above/featured: Vancouver, 22 December.
I look back at the 2020 year with the following images to address how different locations in both Seattle and Vancouver question the nature and ideas of displacement and belonging, home and travel.
Above/featured: “Auténtica Cuba, auténtica fun”.
I’ve remained within metro Vancouver during the CoVid19 pandemic, but I’m curious about how the city’s airport appears in this unusual holiday season.
With no-travel recommendations and other travel restrictions, all international airports are operating at a small fraction of the usual traffic. At YVR Vancouver international airport, about 100-thousand passengers (pax) pass through the airport every day around Christmas. But numbers are way down; there are few daily international flights among the scatter of domestic departures throughout the B.C. province and other parts of Canada.
With these photographs, I present a view of both domestic and international terminals at the airport on Tuesday afternoon, 3 days before Christmas. Walking the empty and quiet concourse is surreal; I wonder if there are more airport staff than travellers at any given moment. (Completing my time at the airport, I stayed to the ground by hopping on rapid transit, shopped for some food, and returned to the family house: how extraordinarily mundane.)
Above/featured: Belvedere Garden, north from Marble Hall in Upper Belvedere to Lower Belvedere and beyond to St. Stephen’s Cathedral at left-centre – 19 May.
It’s easy to reduce a city to stereotypes, distilling landmarks to short paragraph summaries designed for easy consumption.
Some might say: you’re making things too complicated; they’ve got to be simpler. That misguided sentiment needlessly and carelessly minimizes the diversity and complexity of a city, her people, and the infrastructure through which citizens reside, navigate, and thrive. Although I chased after traces of Otto Wagner throughout Vienna, I’m also interested in illuminating the city as reflections from past and present and as glimpses of resident and visitor.
Vienna is an exceptional city
Above/Featured: A test image with the X70: Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC – 1 May.
In continuing my year-end reviews over the last five consecutive years, I look back at 2018 through 18 Instagram images from two major travel events: Austria and Germany in May, and the American Southwest in October. One big change to the way I think about and carry out my photography has been the addition of a compact mirrorless fixed-prime camera, the Fujifilm X70, which I obtained in May.
Fotoeins Fotografie 