Autumn has well and truly fallen like a golden blanket over North Vancouver bringing with it captivating hues ranging from sunfire yellow to go-fast red and everything in between. In an attempt to immortalise what looks to be my first and only deciduous event in Canada I have been out for walks over the last couple of weekends to try and shoot some scenes which I think represent autumnal North Vancouver as seen through my perspective as an outsider.

So the other day, due to a set of not-so-complicated and thoroughly un-mysterious reasons that I won’t bother mentioning here, I found myself outside of my usual North Vancouver photographic playground and needing to kill an hour in the area of downtown Vancouver inhabited by the University of British Columbia. I had come prepared to spend the hour walking along the sea wall trying to seek out some shots of the Bay and it’s bridges. However I am quite prone to becoming distracted by things that capture my imagination and never completing my original goals. Good thing I’m not a certain 18th century British explorer as I’d probably have gotten as far as Cape Horn before being distracted by a brightly coloured bird, driving my flag into the nearest patch of dirt in the name of Her Majesty and then calling it a day. Lucky, as otherwise now I’d have nowhere to call home… and I’d also be dead.

The object of my distraction in this instance was a small sign directing me to the UBC’s Botanical Gardens. I thought it might offer an opportunity to get some unique flower and fauna shots, something I don’t have a chance to shoot all that often. The gardens also turned out to hold a spectacular plethora of brightly coloured species with which to try a few macro style experiments with.

Apart from trying to do the wonderful, naturally occurring colours justice I was also experimenting with a photographic technique known as Bokeh.

Bokeh is a Japanese term that refers to the softening or blurring of various areas in a shot as a result of using a shallow depth of field. Bokeh occurs in almost all photographs to some degree but quite often it will be exploited in order to move the emphasis of shot to highlight particular elements, usually a subject in the foreground.

I’ve found it to be an incredibly easy technique to use, only requiring the most basic camera operations to achieve. The amount and style of Bokeh achieved is highly dependant on both your camera and lens setup and also on how you form the shot but instead of pretending like I’m an expert on a technique that I’m only just starting to understand myself I will instead refer you to Robert Donovan’s blog and his excellent introduction to Bokeh for an explanation on it’s finer points.

Editing these photos also gave me a great opportunity to play around with shot composition. As a sort of personal learning experiment I decided to crop all the shots according to a particular aspect ratio, which is why they all appear as unusually wide. It turned out to be a fantastic way to learn how the inclusion of certain foreground and background elements effects the overall composition of a shot. I tend not to edit my photos as much as some others do, preferring instead to try and make the changes at the camera level before hitting the button but it also reminded me that the crop tool has it’s place in my toolbox.

That’s it for now. Feel free to explore around the site as much as you like or leave some feedback on your own experiments with Bokeh. You’ll have to excuse me though, as I’m off to buy the very cheapest bottle of red I can find to celebrate finishing the site and writing my first post.

No longer just a viewing gallery for my photography portfolio this new site seeks to make life a lot simpler for the both of us by combining my unique ability to write 2,000 words without really saying anything and my passion for framing the world around me. This site will become the new landing page for everything I’m writing and shooting and as such my travel blog will be retired to the hallowed halls of my development archives and the domain will redirect here instead. Sad yes, but let’s not get too nostalgic, instead let’s look towards the future.

If your interested in finding out more details, including what my intentions for this new site are then please feel free to hit the ‘Read More’ link below.

If however you couldn’t think of anything more boring then hearing me talk about myself—you must be new around here—or about the frustrating results of having OCDD (Obsessive Compulsive Design Disorder) I instead invite you to browse some of my photography using this shiny orange portfolio link, or to explore the projects I have on the horizon using this equally colourful project link.

How did we get here?

This new site has been a real labour of love for me. For those of you that are wondering the new site still uses Wordpress as a platform but both this site and my travel blog were both based on freely available themes with an assortment of personal front-end and back-end customisations. The problem is that although free themes are a fantastic way to get things started on your blog, they usually don’t have the same sophistication and longevity as a paid or custom option.

While it’s true that I have a reasonable amount of web development experience I really didn’t see the point in building something from scratch when there are plenty of great themes out there to use as a base. So I started shopping around and eventually came across Brandon Jones’ Atlantica Wordpress theme over at ThemeForest.

The Atlantica Theme managed to fulfill many of the requirements I had but I immediately saw that there were a number of design changes I’d like to make. The theme ended up requiring a lot more customisation then I had originally planned. Along the way I found a few bugs and areas for optimisation but mostly the work involved tweaking things to satisfy my perfectionist nature. It might not seem like it when compared to the original version of the theme but I’d estimate that I’ve sunk an extra 50 hours, on top of setup, into getting the site to what you see before you.

Where are we going?

As my grand travels are now winding to a close this site will become more focused on my journey of photographic discovery rather then my mental and physical one. That’s not to say that my passion for photography won’t hopefully take me to some new and exotic places, nor will it prevent me from getting into embarrassing or unusual circumstances, I’m sure.

I sincerely hope to use this site to develop my passion for photography into something that I might one day be able to pursue as a career and to that effect I have several upcoming projects aimed at trying to broaden my portfolio and polish my skills.

Enough words already, let’s see some photos!

Just before you leave please consider subscribing to my blog updates on this site using either RSS or E-Mail as it’s far easier then religiously checking for updates every hour, which I’m sure you all do.

Also a reminder that print versions of many of my shots can be purchased through my deviantART account. I can attest with first hand experience that the service is both secure and reliable. At the moment I am only uploading the shots that I think I have a chance of selling but I’m more then happy to make available any photo I have taken, all you need to do is get in contact with me and specify which one you would like the option of printing.

Finally I would like to thank those of you that have given me praise and encouragement for either my blogging or my photography, without it I do not think I would have the balls to try and see where this could all lead.