I was the special guest on an uber cerebral podcast last night called the Friday Night Party Line. I promise that I most definitely said something to embarrass myself. We talked about Esperanto, kids, video editing, environmental issues, polar bears, GPS, and what we would spend $5000 if we had to spend it.

What I would spend $5000 on if I was in some alternate universe where money grew on trees and responsibilities floated away on hot air balloons and the world wasn’t in peril (so I’m excluding things like rent, food, bills, saving the environment & polar bears et al.):

1. Shure SCL5 Sound Isolating Earphones ($400)
2. Canon 100mm Macro lens ($600)
3. Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 IS ($1500)
4. Heaps of Marks & Spencer biscuits ($200)
5. Plane ticket to Australia ($2000) + Dingo repellant ($19.95)
6. iPhone ($300 + $??? + 3 year contract + ∞)

Ok I went a bit over. Spending fake money is super easy.

What would buy with $5000?

Happy Birthday Canada. I <3 you a lot!

PS. Check out more shots on Flickr.
PPS. Geese necks are weird.

Every weekend this summer, I am going to try and rent a new lens to expand my portfolio and inspire myself to take more dynamic shots. This week I rented for the Canon 70-200 f/2.8 IS zoom lens. What a beautiful piece of glass. Super slick for the entire range, great dof, and simply money at the top end of the zoom. This lens can do a lot and is awesome for capturing sports/action shots, wildlife, candid people picks, and portraits.

Inspired by Scott Bourne’s wildlife photography, I spent hours trekking about in search of wildlife. I did come across a seal, a beaver, and a skunk, but those animals were much to sneaky to get a decent shot of them from a distance. I think I need to invest in some serious gumboots and really get in the muck. The only creatures I could get up close and personal with were some silly seagulls, who for pretty pesky birds were super fun to watch.

Also, I snapped some shots of some little Polish Dancer girls who were waiting to perform at the Kitsilano Showboat.

And then this dude just bike past looking so summertime funky, I just had to take a shot.

I completely fell in love with this lens, I fondly nicknamed this super huge lens, “The Beast”. My arms and back are seriously aching today from lugging him around for 3 days of “magic hours” in a row. I spent so much time waiting for magic hour, I half expected to run into Michael Bay, his sleek power mane glowing in the warm soft light, yelling profanities at his hapless crew. “More debris you a–holes!”

I’ll be uploading my other sweet shots to my 700-200 flickr photoset tomorrow.

Thanks for all your suggestions and keep ‘em comin! I think next week I’ll either go for the 10-22mm f/3.5 or a fixed wide angle. I’d like to do some Vancouver cityscapes.

And I encourage you to rent new lens next weekend with me!

Good lenses are ridiculously expenses, so for most of us, owning a bunch of good glass is just not financially feasible. I own one good lens for my Canon Xti/400D. The 50mm f/1.4. Such a beautiful lens, but limiting. I also have a crappy kit lens 18-55mm f/cr.ap, but i refuse to use it now, because I know the results will be sub-par.

The other option is to rent lenses, which is actually a lot more affordable than you think. Plus, you get to take the lens for a test spin, keep the photos, and not have to sell stolen girl guides cookies out of your garage. Come to think of it, that’s not such a bad idea… No not a good idea… A very bad idea…

You can rent pretty much any lens, even the elite L-series, for approx. $30 a day. And with most camera rental places, if you rent a lens on a Friday, you can keep it for the weekend. If you live in Vancouver check out Beau Photo or Leo’s Cameras.

So I wanted to ask all the photogs out there:

What is your favourite lens?
What awesome lenses do you think I should try?

PS. Thanks to my twitter peeps, I had a nice list going on twitter, but then the tweety bird freaked out again. So I’d like to compile a list on my blog, because I’m fairly certain WP won’t try to lift a giant whale with tiny songbirds.

I love Flickr. Everyday on Flickr, I see photographs that truly blow my face off. I am literally blown away by the quality and quantity of inspiring photos on Flickr. I love the fact that I can share my photos and get feed back and meet cool people who are also sharing their photos.

Lately, I’ve wanted to push myself to take more creative shots and explore new lenses and formats including, lomography. I’ve been thinking of joining the 365 challenge on flickr for a while, but when i went and looked at the lengthy “group rules” for 365 days, I was like “uh, it has to be a self portrait”, then “if I miss a bunch of days they’ll boot me! Uh the pressure”, then “only one photo a day”, then I was like “lame, I should do my own thing”.

I don’t think expressing yourself should have rules or limits. Plus, if I had to take a self-portrait everyday, I’d go mental. Seriously, there are enough pictures of me on teh internets.
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I felt like my blog was getting a leedle to intense and serious, so I thought I’d bust out a sweet silly vid of Justine and I frolicking from or MacBreak taping at Pixel Corps to the SF Apple Store just around the corner.

As you can tell from the video, Justine and I totally don’t get along. She even yelled at me for eating her left-over Starbucks’ chicken pesto salad and wouldn’t lend me any floss when I got green junk stuck in my teeth for most of the day.

Check out some flickr’d snaps of my time at Pixel Corps’ HQ.

Also, head on over to Mr. Adobe Frederick Van’s blog for a sweet interview with me about my photography and some photos he shot of during an impromptu TWiP photo shoot. Scott Bourne also took a neat B&W shot of me.

PS. If you are a TWiP follower or photographer send out a shout and a flickr link so I can check out your awesome photographs.

PPS. Any ideas for my next meet-up with Justine? Accent off? Dingo chase? Flip Stack?

(Lijit tee provided by Startup Schwag.)

The mozilla team just smacked one heck of an update with Firefox 3 AKA “The Browser That Has It All” and I haven’t download it. Why? Well, in my own honest opinion, Safari is 2 legit 2 quit!

I love Safari AKA. I’m basically “exclusive” with Safari. It’s been my browser of choice for a long time now, and we’ve developed quite a strong relationship. I like the way Safari looks so apple. It’s clean, efficient and it’s bookmarking skills are quite excellent. Besides the occasional flash plug-in lockout, it’s a lean, mean, sexy browser. And it is, after all, “The World’s Best Browser”. How can you challenge that?

It might be quite a battle convincing me to use Firefox. But I know there are some feisty FF users that won’t let my dare slide! Seriously, are you gonna let me talk trash about your browser? That’s like attacking your motherboard or something.

If you think Firefox is better than Safari tell me why. Oh and let me know what plug-ins you are using and how helpful they are and stuff like that.

All hail the new Vectorama: Canadian Edition champion! Steelie’s Beaver!

By Steelie
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I have never really considered what my rights are as a video blogger, as I have only filmed myself and used all Redpilot music (or GBs) and photos in my videos. But yesterday, I posted a video that I took at private party whilst I was in San Francisco and a bunch of people were unhappy.

The party hosts were angry that I didn’t ask permission before posting the video, as it was their home and they were visible in the video. What made matters worse is that the video went viral on Valleywag (basically Silicon Valley’s US Weekly).

I honestly didn’t think of any of these issues before posting the video. I was more concerned with Feist suing me for using her song. I was genuinely surprised that anyone at this high-tech, twitter/blog centric gathering would mind me posting this video, let alone think it was a violation of privacy. But it was private property and I did not ask explicit permission before posting the video which was my fault entirely.
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