A Story of Missed Opportunities

Disclaimer: this one starts off a bit photography-centered. Just ignore the text, if you’re not interested in that stuff. 🙂

I was so ready to write a huge rant about the Rollei. Because, the photo above? That’s the first one in a series. Great light, with those hard shadows. Great color contrast, the warm house and cool t-shirt. I took six or seven pictures, of Tadzik, Lucja and Kazik. We even dressed them up. We played with the shadows. We had fun. Turns out, the shutter was stuck after that first photo. So it’s not the first one in a series, it’s the only one. Which kinda sucks.

Also, I was really disappointed with the prints. I can appreciate that color film is a lot more complicated to get right than black&white. And this is my first roll, so yeah. What did I expect? I opened the scans and at first, they looked just as bland as the prints.

There. That’s just ‘meh’. I admit, the scene is quite bland in itself. Crows are using a closed public pool to crack clams. They pick them up at the beach, carry them over the concrete and drop them from a few metres up. Then they land and enjoy their feast. I missed the right moment – seconds earlier, one of the crows was very close to the fence and would have made for a more interesting foreground. Also, I don’t understand how I got said fence in the picture. What was I doing? The green water in the pool would have been so much better. Oh well… Let’s go back a few weeks, when were in Poland.

The Szemplinski weekend retreat. Another ‘meh’ composition. But there’s something there that I read about in a blog some time ago and thought the guy was just babbling. But it’s true: while the overall image quality doesn’t look particularly crisp or sharp, there is so much fine detail in there, it’s impressive. So I’ll go with what the guy said: the Rollei takes photos that are both beautifully soft and impressively detailed at the same time. Nice! So, okay, I need to learn how to shoot photos that anybody would want to see, but at least I’m starting to like the Rollei’s lens.

Yep, in some of the pictures, I even like the color of the Kodak Portra film. These are blackberries (I know that you know, but what else can I say about the photo?), picked in the Lojek’s garden one sunny morning. Albert loves them, of course. And we must have picked hundreds of them. There’s another shot of ’em and I’m kind of sorry for forcing both of them on you. But while I like the composition of this one better, there’s some beautiful detail in the other one, too. I’ll put it at the end, so you’ll get at least some respite. 🙂

Will you look at that grass for a second? Lovin’ it. 🙂 And that’s after scaling it down and compressing it for the web. Huzzah! Here, Jerzyk teaches Lucja how to throw a ball further. I guess I could crop into there and make it a landscape format instead of portrait. But I like the large white-space here, I think it helps sell the tranquility of the scene, like there’s not a care in the world. So it will stay upright. 🙂

Huh. Jumping back and forth between the weekend house and the casa di Kampinos here. Bad form in storytelling, I guess. Sorry. Also, more story than style, but you can’t always have both. On the last evening out in the countryside, we had a barbecue. Krzysiek never gets to eat anything because he spends hours preparing the meat. Just look at him. Only skin and bones. The poor sod.

I could kick myself for having messed up the focus here. Albert started to get up on his feet not long before we went to Poland. Once there, he enjoyed finding new spots to pull himself up and discover his surroundings from a new angle. 🙂 Not that he bothered with crawling properly, he just pulled himself around on the floor until he found a spot to support himself standing up. And then there he stood, smiling broadly into the world. Getting photographed. Out of focus. Otherwise, this would be both story and style. 🙂

There we go. Proper focus. See those tiny strands of hair? 🙂 We found (or in this case built) a few toys to support Albert’s new hobby. But he was still quite shaky on his legs, and we kept being terribly scared pretty much all the time. I’ve ever so slightly more salt’n’pepper in my hair than I had before. 🙂 Not Agnieszka, of course. She’ll probably stay 20 until she turns 80, and then she’ll just magically transform into a 35-yr-old. And I’ll look a bit like Gandalf, only less handsome and with more hair.
Okay, one more, then we’ll move back to Vancouver.

Zero points for fashion-consciousness, but some people simply don’t have to worry about that. We filled a tiny inflatable pool with a tiny bit of water, and Albert had a lot of fun throwing stuff into it and then trying to get it back out. I love the expression on his face in this one. Sucking the sandy, dirty mud from his fingers and comparing it to the sandy, dirty mud he sucked from his other hand with such an earnestness and focus. “Hmm, this one tastes more earthy and full. Less flavor of berries (because he mostly eats them with his right hand). But which one do I like better? Let me try the other one again…” And all the while, Agnieszka just smiles her benevolent smile, thinking “You just go, little man. I’ll reap the fruits of your labor when I change your diaper next time…”

As promised, moving on. You saw this same scene in the first post, shot with a shitty mobile phone camera. I’ll… just… leave it at that. I won’t even compare the two. In case they look identical, I don’t want to find out. In any case, it was a nice moment. It’s not often that Albert can look out of a window without somebody holding him, so he enjoyed that a lot. And also, airplanes!

You’ve probably been waiting for this one. Raccoons! Real ones! On a tree! I had no idea they do that, but here we are. They came down from the tree and crossed the path we were walking on not two metres in front of us. I took another picture. The shutter was stuck. Let’s not talk about it, or I’ll through another tantrum. Anyway, there seem to be three Raccoons that stay relatively close to the edge of the woods in Stanley Park. We’ve seen them several times, they walk lazily into the park and eat whatever the tourists give them. It’s a bit like in a zoo. Seeing (almost) wild ones in the woods, however, that’s a totally different experience. That was a great day. 🙂

We walked up to Prospect Point and took a look at North Van. I’d originally looked for places to rent over there. Turns out, I ever so slightly underestimated the scale of everything I saw on Google Maps. I don’t know if I could muster the required resolve to ride my bike across that bridge (and then 12km more) to work every day, without at least a clear idea of whom to impress with the story later on. Also, the city over there looks much like the city over here, so… nope. 🙂

Here, you can almost see the building we’ll move into next week. (And the grass! And the leaves on the trees! And the little stones on the street!) Or maybe you actually can see it. I’m not sure. This is the sea wall along English Bay. A few minutes in the opposite direction, and you’ll be in Stanley Park. A few minutes ahead, you get to the West End. A few minutes more, you’re downtown. Not the most quiet neighborhood we’re moving into, but the location beats pretty much everything else. And we’re starting to get used to the city and all the strangeness of North America. (Those back alleys, complete with trash and flickering tube lights? Not a Hollywood invention, after all!)

You’ve seen this one, too. It’s the view from our apartment. In this case, I even took the exact same picture with the Canon, to compare the latitude of film vs digital. Now that I have both here, I’m too lazy to scientifically compare them :-), but I remember that I had a really hard time getting any shadow detail in the shot of the Canon and retaining the colors of the sky at the same time. This one, I even exposed down a stop in Lightroom to get more sunset beauty. And there’s still something in the dark areas. Film wins. (Of course it does. Chain-smoking is so much cheaper than shooting film. There has to be some advantage, right? RIGHT?)

Okay, last one, because it’s late again. I need to stop taking two hours to write these. This is downtown Vancouver, right in front of the Convention Centre. Between all the skyscrapers, it feels a bit New Yorky. But then, you only need a few minutes to walk through it, and then you realize that it’s really only for show. 🙂 More important than the location in this picture, by the way, is the ice cream we were having. Because it won the grand prize for Best Gelato at the international competition in Florence – the first time that prize didn’t go to an Italian. Yeah, it’s better than Old Bridge. It also costs twice as much. But we’ll treat ourselves to their ice cream some more, anyway. 🙂

Good night! And here’s the other shot of the blackberries, in which I especially like how the light catches the scratches in the bowl. Now go dream of blackberries. 🙂

Laterz!