Canadia Blog

The circus and an inflatable slide over rows of corn at the Pumpkin Festival

So I went with my girlfriend to Hunsader Farms’ Pumpkin Festival over a month ago, and I just now got around to sortingout the photographs, so figured I’d make a blog post about it now.  Not too much to it, I suppose.  Went to the Pumpkin Festival, walked around, looked at crafts and such, had a great time.  Of particular interest was a massive pneumatic pumpkin cannon, which hurled pumpkins a thousand-some feet off into the forest (I can only hope no unfortunate persons or woodland creatures became its target).

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A kangaroo, happily munching away at some fruits and leafy greens

I was back in Bradenton for the weekend today, and ended up going out to Majical Miniatures animal sanctuary with my dad, sister, and girlfriend.  My dad’s been running a pet shop lately, and some way or other ended up meeting the woman who runs it, who offered to take in our prairie dog, who’s getting rather old, and hasn’t been handling pet-shop life particularly well (she was sort of a display animal, just there to hang out and play with the customers).  So Annie the prairie dog went away to their shelter, and today we went out to see her, and the rest of the animals.  The interesting thing is, the shelter is next door to the house and land where my family used to live out in Parish: driving back onto the property, we actually saw the old chicken coop that we built oh-so-many years ago.  Dad had told us that they had kangaroos and wallabies, and sure enough, just as soon as we walked through the door there was a kangaroo eating his lunch (or was it supper?)  I just had to bring the camera along, and got some nifty shots, albeit with only a single on-camera strobe to work with.

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Swaying grain

Today was basically the last day. We’ll be here most of tomorrow, but I’ll be spending most of it sleeping to combat jet lag, which makes this the last blog post, after pretty much the last day. Another not-doing-much day, mostly. Got up, ate breakfast, went bicycling. Ate lunch, rested some, went running and subsequently shadow boxing. Rested a little while longer, went back to Sammy J. Peppers for dinner with our hosts. I ate the same thing as last time, but this time I found it a little more bearable. Admittedly, my eyes still watered and my nose still ran like crazy, but at least there was no shock about it this time. After that, we went out to the dyke, and I made some landscapes. The landscapes will need some more post processing when I get home (ran into a little too much dynamic range out there), so for now all I have is a sort of semi-abstract of some swaying grain. And that’s it. Next time I post, I’ll be in America again.

Today I pretty much did two things: I woke up, and then we went to my grandparents’ friends’ house. They’re Indian (real Indians, not those Native American posers), and they made Indian food for us. It was kind of nifty, actually, I got to help make the flat bread, which is apparently just made of flour and water. Then you flatten it, put it on a griddle, and then put it on top of a rack over a stove element, it puffs up some (steam inside the bread) and then you take it off and it flattens out. Then come dinner time, it becomes your utensil. You just put things on your plate (we had curried chicken, rice and vegetables), and then you scoop/roll it up with torn off bits of bread, and eat it. I wasn’t the most elegant at it, but it was certainly easier (and less awkward looking) than eating with chopsticks, in any case.

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It’s starting to feel like the Canadia trip is coming to a close.  We’re half way through the last weekend now, and then it’ll be home on Tuesday.  Today I got up nice and late, and went for a bicycle ride out on the dyke with Grandpa.  Along the way, oddly enough, we saw an old farmer’s field full of heron.  Just all sitting out there on the soil.  I’d post a photograph, but I just left the camera home today.  I haven’t bicycled in a while, and I was surprised when I got off to find that my legs were actually a little bit wobbly.  Wobbliness notwithstanding, though, I went ahead and did my running and such about an hour later, and it proved a little more difficult than usual: I guess I was running on fewer calories than usual, after the long bike ride.

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A fun, albeit un-identified, little bird

Woohoo, I’m on a roll with the titles! Or not. Anyways, we got up and went back to the Reifel bird sanctuary today, which turned out much differently from yesterday. The bigger birds weren’t generally out today, so I spent a lot more time paying closer attention to the smaller birds that flitted around, and generally made themselves mighty difficult to photograph. First thing on the way in, we saw lots of these little guys. Also, as a sidenote, the Flickr plugin I just installed is acting up, so if you want to see bigger images, you’re gonna have to click through for now, I’m afraid.  [Edit - got it fixed]

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I attempted to wake up early this morning, but that didn’t work out so well. So Aunt Rhonda left really early in the morning, which leaves me with an actual room and bed now. When everyone else got back from the airport, we went over to Vancouver and picked up the rental 400mm f/5.6, and proceeded to go to assorted parks looking for birds, with little luck. As a side note, in a rare act of foresight, I went ahead and picked up an extra 2GB CF card while we were at the camera store. Then we headed over to Ladner and ate at Quiznos (as it turns out, Quiznos sort of sucks) before heading out to the Reifel Bird Sanctuary, which turned out much, much better. There were birds all over the place, with blinds and everything, and the 400/5.6 handled like a dream. Also of note, there were a lot of ducks. And I mean a lot. They’re none too graceful, either: I saw an awful lot of them crash landing whenever they took off.

As soon as we got in, we found this guy, my new friend the bald eagle, way up on top of a tree. He was way up there: even with the 400mm lens, that image is cropped in significantly. This meant not only that he ended up small in the frame, but that the angle was less than advantageous. It was really one of those situations where a 600 f/4 and teleconverters would come in handy, but I guess it worked out well enough: certainly better than it would have with my 70-200 f/4. I snapped away with him sitting up and moving his head around for a couple minutes, and then he got up and flew away.

We went on through the park, and ran into some assorted small birds, and also some bigger ones, namely the great blue heron and sand hill cranes. I got some decent shots of those, but they’re not terribly exotic, so I decided not to bother processing any for now. There is one of a smallish bird that I wasn’t able to identify below. Once again, it would have been nice to have a 600 f/4, as that one’s cropped significantly, but once again, it still worked out pretty well. Especially considering how light the 400/5.6 is. It’s sort of sad, I’ve been doing pretty much everything with my own lights lately, and I’d all but forgotten how to make the most of the camera’s built-in meter and on-camera flash. I’m happy to say, though, that I’m getting used to it again, and with some good tripod technique, I’ve been getting some results almost as good as what I get with totally controlled lighting and still subjects (did I mention that I cropped all the bird shots in this post?)

So we left there, with plans to go back tomorrow morning. After that, we picked up some big prints of our hosts’ new granddaughter that I made from Costco, got a frame, and surprised them with it when we got home. They seemed mighty pleased, and I even got a “You’re making me cry,” with a big smile, of course. Then I went for a run, came back, did some shadow boxing, dinnered, and set up a still life of my new old camera, with the nice old-looking hardwood floor in the room I’m staying in (that’s the photograph below). After that, I just watched some TV, put some batteries on the charger, and settled in to write a blog post. I guess that’s the end for now, hopefully there’ll be some great new bird photos tomorrow.

Okay, so I’m not sure I did so well on today’s title. But at least I tried. It’ll be a nice short post today, because not that much happened. We got up, had breakfast, and then went to see my grandparents’ friend. She teaches third graders, and it’s their last week of school, so we went out to the beach where they were field-tripping and talked to her/met some of them. Then we went scouting some potential birding locations, went to Costco and Future Store (basically a Circuit City), came home and had dinner.

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Beach on Vancouver Island

Alright, I really think I’m starting to get better at this whole title thing. Not too much to write about today, I suppose. We got up, and I went and worked out some. It was a sort of interesting experience, because I walked in and was shocked to find that the largest dumbbell they had was only marked “50″, but it was still really big. So I thought “Well, that’s an awfully large fifty pounder,” and went to lift it, not expecting a whole lot of resistance. This is when I remembered that Canadians measure things in kilograms. Seriously, weight manufacturers, would it be that terribly difficult to put units of measure on your dumbbells? So, I spent the rest of my time there having fun trying to figure out how much weight to use for my various exercises…in kilograms. On the bright side, they had a preacher curl machine, and preacher curls are my favorite. Turns out I’m good for ten reps with, if I recall correctly, about 60 or 70 kilograms. After that we all headed down to the nearby beach, and I actually think I got a decent landscape shot of it.

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Alright, finally a slightly more creative title. Slightly. This one encompasses two days, since we didn’t have Internet access last night. Of course, there’s no Internet tonight, either, but there is enough time to type up a blog entry to upload tomorrow.

Yesterday wasn’t too eventful, as it was mostly spent in travel. We got up a little late, and met more hosts’ neighbors’ children. I also got a graduation present from my grapndaparents’ old neighbors, which was awesome. It’s an old Kodak Browny, a foldout camera. Takes 620 roll film (hooray for medium format), and it’s thoroughly manual, in every way. There’s also apparently some odd type of flash contacts on top, so my next project will be to get some 620 film, and see if I can get this thing synced to a Pocket Wizard.

After that, we left and met with my stepdad’s mother, who just happens to live nearby, and then drove up to Whistler. Didn’t do very much that night, just checked into the hotel (for the record, the Tantalus resort is pretty nice) and went out to dinner. This morning, though, I got up early and ran (turns out running in hilly areas is awful to my shins: going downhill puts way too much pressure on them), and then my grandpa and I went on a zipline tour.

The ziplining was mighty impressive. Up above there is my awful attempt at a self-portrait while flying along on a zipline, and Grandpa also zipping along. They took us a little ways up into the mountain, and then down along a bunch of ziplines, over rivers and trees and such. A little scary, but certainly lots of fun. There’s a couple more images from the trip down below.

After that was finished, we met back up with Grandma and Aunt Rhonda, and went up to the top of Blackcomb on a chairlift. We saw a bear on the way up: that’s the first image below. Once we got up, there were lots of landscapes to be made, which I hopefully did at least a decent job at. There’s one down below the bear, that I had lots of fun making: just about fell through some snow, and had a great time trying to keep my tripod steadied. And it was cold. Very, very cold. It was a pretty great relief to make it back to the bottom.

When we finished with the mountain business, we came back down to Horseshoe Bay, and took a ferry over to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. Had a nice long ride on the ferry, and got to catch up with some photographs. Then we ate at Swiss Chalet, and finally made it back to the lodge. We’re staying in a cabin-type place now, that’s pretty nice. They’ve got a gym, too, with free weights. First time I’ll get to use those since I’ve been here. And I reckon that about finishes it. Tomorrow I’ll have to post all this, plus another entry for the day.