Back to the fireworks! This is a cropped photo of a particularly bright yellow/orange firework near the end of the Spain set. The finale involved just about every colour of firework I've ever seen! With the thumbnails of some of my other shots, I see green, pink, red, blue, orange, yellow, white, and several in between colours. It was breathtaking to watch!
This is a whole family of Geese in Stanley Park in Vancouver. I wasn't very close to these guys - thankfully I had my zoom lens on my camera at the time. There was actually several people around and one girl was very close to the little ones. The father was *very* unhappy with her presence ... I'm surprised somebody didn't get hurt ... although I'm glad an accident didn't happen.
For some reason, I love these kinds of shots. This is at the Capilano Suspension Bridge park in Vancouver. It's hard to choose the photos to post here - I have too many I want to post! Be prepared for daily updates to continue for a few weeks!
This is a tree in the park located after you cross the Capilano Suspension Bridge in Vancouver. It's very bizarre looking, but also very cool to have in a photo like this. I particularly like the perspective in this shot.
There is a long string of fireworks photos that turned out from good to very good in my eyes. Here's another one. Unfortunately, a lot of them have the person in front's camera in the way. Oh well, I'm not too sure what I can do about that.
I'll try and interleave some other holiday pictures in here so those who don't like fireworks photos won't get bored :)
I have quite a few fireworks photos that should look excellent when done, but require a bit of processing before I get them uploaded. Here's one that's pretty good all on its own. This is nearing the end of the Spain entry in the Celebration of Lights fireworks contest. It was pretty incredible! In fact, some of my shots after this were overexposed even though I only had the shutter open for relatively short amounts of time! Soooo much light.
Enjoy! Tons more photos to come!
I just bought a new macbook pro and to celebrate I decided to clean up my desk area. I swapped out my old desk with another one that I had in my room and got everything setup. So here's my setup with my old powerbook that my mom will be getting in the next day or two!
So this is my current setup. Be sure to checkout the notes for the various pieces of equipment on my desk.
This is a giant crab sculpture that stands in front of the planetarium in Vancouver. Duane, Maria, Neil and I went there on the first day we were in Vancouver to check out something in the town before settling into the AAAI conference and setting up for the man-machine match. Nolan, Josh, Mike and Andrew all joined us there later on in the afternoon.
A profile shot of the other professional poker player involved in the recent man-machine match. Ali Eslami is an incredible poker player. He's also really quite intelligent and I was rather glad to meet him.
Phil Laak's girlfriend is Jennifer Tilly. She's an actress and a pretty decent poker player in her own right. Here's a photo of her during interviews before the third match which had Phil Laak on stage and Ali Eslami closeted in a hotel room.
Again, this is one of the few shots that I got. I'm currently working on a photo gallery of the shots that Mike, Nolan, Josh, and I took at the match and that should be available on the man-machine website.
If you've been paying attention to the media attention the man-machine match received over the past couple of weeks, you may have seen this photo. This was one of the few photos from the event itself that I took myself. During the event, I was in charge up posting live updates to the webpage. As such, I didn't really have time to take photos too. So it was only in breaks of the action that I could take photos.
This shot was setup for an interview Phil was doing in front of a camera lens. I just happened to run along with my camera and grab a couple shots of Phil. This is the best one, and you may have seen it on a couple of news articles. Don't worry, they had our permission to use the photo.
More photos to come in the next few days! Stay tuned!
More fireworks photos! While in Vancouver, I was lucky enough to be able to attend two of the four "celebration of lights" fireworks competition displays. It was fantastic. I got several good fireworks photos and I'll post over the next few days.
I've got a *ton* of photos that will be coming in the next little while. I'm gonna try and get one up a day, but we'll see if that actually happens. I just got back today from my trip to Vancouver. Sorry about the lack of updates, but I'll make up for it, I promise!
Edit: This is an updated photo: I didn't like what happened with my modifications so I decided to upload the unedited version. Looks prettier imo.
I'm sorry for my lack of updates. I've got a ton of pictures so far during my trip to Vancouver. I need to sort through them all when I get home, so updates will continue to be sparse until I return on the 1st. But this one was a pretty good shot that didn't require editing, so I figured I'd get one post up anyways. The building on the right is the Hotel Vancouver, and I think the road is West Georgia street.
The man-machine event went really well, though our program lost. We're hoping to do it again soon. I'm not sure how long that'll be before we do do it again.
My research group just had some poker chips done to hand out kind of like business cards. This is the front, and the back has the url: poker.cs.ualberta.ca on it. We're going to hand these babies out at the Man-Machine poker tournament we're running and competing in next week. If you're in the Vancouver area, you should come by and check out the action!
On Canada Day, there is usually a bike race or two that go around the legislature grounds. This year was no exception, and I managed to get a couple of photos that turned out pretty well.
Diane and I crossed at this point and did a loop around the grounds and then headed to a Canada Day party we were going to that night. On the second crossing, there was a bike crash on the course and one of the guys catapulted over his handlebars and landed unceremoniously on his head. I sure hope he's okay! And that, kids, is why you where a helmet!
Another photo from the Japanese show garden at the Devonian Botanical Garden. I love how the lines in the grass are so perfect.
My camera got a bit of a workout last weekend. The fireworks was one batch of photos, but the next day we went to the Devonian Botanical Garden to wander around and look at the pretty flowers. It was a beautiful day. This is a bridge in the Japanese garden. It was really pretty -- I love reflections in water!
This is the last of my fireworks photos from this year's batch. This is probably one of my favourites.
Enjoy!
Made it to explore #497, but dropped out.
There's something about cropping a firework down to just it's surroundings. Sometimes you don't really want the landscape around and want to focus in on the burst itself. If you zoom in on the firework itself, the effect can be pretty cool.
More fireworks! This one is of one of those fireworks that explodes in a silver/gold colour and then the tips of the firework turn into different colours.
I even got some bonus fireworks from somewhere else in the background!