On Sunday, I bought new shoes. On Monday, I got my Kickstarter-backed long-delayed Daguerrotype Achromat 2.9/64 Art Lens. Thus, on Tuesday I was well-prepared for a Fujifilm-sponsored photowalk on Vancouver’s Granville Island.
That’s the Granville Street bridge,
with the downtown
condo wall behind it and a supermoon above.
Sometime in the 3½ years I’ve been in Fuji-land I got on their mailing list, which is OK because it’s low-volume and, well, got me this invite. The ultimate hosts were Fujifilm Canada (whose President and SVP were there), but also present and helping were The Fuji Guys and Beau Photo.
I wish I had the cycles to do more photowalks. As I’ve written before, dropping into a mode where you’re consciously walking around looking for pictures means that you see pictures wherever you look.
You can read about the lens and see the groovy pix it took in Achromat Photowalk, and I won’t write about the shoes, they’re just shoes OK?
But that photowalk was pure fun, in the chill clear oceanside air. Obviously, we came looking for shots like this.
Many of us (the crowd was 50 or so) went to extreme lengths, deploying tripods, ninja postures, long exposures, and big lenses, all coming away with similar pictures.
There were lenses and camera bodies you could borrow; I fooled with an X-Pro2 and a 50-140 F2.8, and found both uncomfortably larger than my little X-T1 with its 35mm F1.4 nailed on almost permanently.
Fortunately, among the condo-tower-reflection clichés were visual oddities.
The yellow cylinder with the shadowed face is one of the Biennale giants.
Our hosts and guides were charming, generous with opinions and examples around making good pictures; leavened only moderately with advantages-of-Fujifilm messaging. And in fact the Fuji tools are hitting sweet spots these days; they were making a bunch of photogs smile, ambling round the wet dark seawalls and sidewalks.
Not all photographs have to be dramatic; there’s a place for calmer rhythms too.
The group I was in was led by Fuji’s Greg Poole, who taught me a few things about angles and technique and patience. I’m totally a Zen photographer, all about seizing the moment. If I had Mr Poole’s poise and determination, my pictures would be so different.
But impulse photography makes me happy, and since it’s hard to get paid for photography these days, happiness matters.
