There is something of a “blueness” to the Vancouver skyline. I’m not sure I can explain it exactly though by “blue” I don’t mean mood or emotion. I mean it in color. Perhaps it is due to the almost exclusive use of glass on the surface of the countless high rise commercial and residential buildings along the waterfront. Though it is most likely not the case, it almost seems as though the glass itself is tinted blue. Contrary to the style in many other cities, the “concrete” aspect of buildings there is not prominent. It is all glass. Now add the blue sky and the blue reflection from the water surface itself and everything in your photos will tend to be overly blue. Cyan, is more correct. The tendency may be to want to correct for this in Post Processing by warming up the color a little. It’s a challenge to get it right. The technical purist will resort to white balance charts and gray scale cards and tools of the sort. Fine. At this point I am happy with trying to reflect the mood and the character of the view over technical accuracy. Before anyone jumps on me for that seeming sloppiness, you should know that I am as intolerant of technical sloppiness as anyone but I don’t want it to be at the expense of artistic imagery.
By the way for general interest, I shoot all of my photographs in RAW. I’ll talk more about that in another post. I do the initial editing (any saturation, exposure, color balancing, etc.) adjustments in Canon‘s Digital Photo Professional (mostly referred to as DPP) application which comes free with Canon digital SLR cameras, and then I converted the image to TIFF. I then open the image in Adobe Photoshop and do any additional editing required. More often than not, that additional editing consits of cropping and sizing. I don’t want to spend too much time in the details in this post but mentioned this just to add to the comments in the previous paragraph.
Vancouver's Blue Waterfront Skyline
Nestled along the shoreline are many marinas berthing boats of all sizes between small outboard cruisers to fifty plus foot long ocean going yachts. More like small ships, actually. Right in the middle of a long pier otherwise lined with the almost universal color scheme of white over dark blue, brightly colored houseboats break the monotony. Yes, I mean brightly colored. Bright yellow with blue trim. Bright red or deep forest green. They certainly appear to be lived on. I wonder if they are ever moved from these docks. Probably not.
Just to the west of the float plane terminal which bases Harbor Air is a floating pedestrian dock. The dock itself runs parallel to the shoreline and I’d say is perhaps a hundred yards off shore and perhaps one and a half times as long. It is accessible on each end by a walkway. I see no purpose other than for what I saw it used for. Walk out on it to get a different view. That’s good enough a reason for its existence to me. There is a round table with fixed chairs on either end. What a place to set and take it all in for a while. That is assuming that the air is not so chilled as to make it uncomfortable to set there for very long.
It is a good spot for watching and photographing the Harbor Air Otters and occasional Beaver float planes come and go from their dock just a little to the right and further out in the water. I combine my interest in photography with my interest in Flight Simming and just enjoy airplanes in general. While briefly on the subject of Flight Simulation, I recently downloaded and have flown a couple of times the exact Harbor Air Otter I see at this dock. Takes me back to Vancouver every time I take it for a virtual flight.
On this walking venture I had affixed the B+W Circular Polarizer filter to my 17-50mm Tamron lens. Though perhaps more useful for conditions of glare – to help correct the affects of those conditions – I was more interested in seeing what sort of interesting affects the use of the filter would produce. It is a little tricky with a wider angle lens such as this one at the wider angles for in a large scene, such as out over a body of water with solid blue sky and a far distant shoreline, for example, the lighting affect can be a little uneven. One part of the picture may be darker than other parts making that part (or side of the picture perhaps) look to be in shadow. Believe me, I am still learning the best use of this filter. That said, it did help to bring out some real depth and form to the billowy clouds.
Next, the Olympic scene.
Dan W. Dooley
Dan Dooley Photography
