We keep our boat at Horseshoe Bay, a pretty little place when approached by land. Boaters inbound by ocean come face-to-face with a huge antique float/pier/breakwater kind of thing, whose ugliness I’ve long found magnificent and which today I took the time to tour and photograph.
Turns out this huge steel thing is afloat, actually; here’s how it’s fastened to the land. Those are big chains and huge truck tires.
What happened was, I was out winterizing the boat. Vancouver missed autumn this year, snapped over from 18°C Indian-summer to basically zero more or less overnight. Today a few snowflakes drifted down and I was wearing a nontraditional Canadian boating toque. You can see snowflakes in all but one of today’s photos, if you look closely.
I’d neglected my camera and was thus shooting with the Pixel, really not much of a handicap for daylight photos when they’re close-ups and big landscapes. Here are one of each.
Wow, this thing is, well, “going back to nature” doesn’t feel like the right phrase. But there’s definitely an entropy gradient.
I’ve been using the Lightroom camera app, which is a little on the slow side but has nice controls and pulls the raw bits off the sensor, and I like the app’s editing primitives. But in recent weeks it’s become unusably crashy — I’ve already cleared its data once to no effect — so my fallback is the well-regarded native Android Camera app. It’s quick and the pix look good, I have to say. And while Lightroom claims to be shooting RAW and indeed emits DNG’s, they don’t contain anything like the amount of hidden potential a good RAW file from a real camera exhibits. So the native Android JPEGs are not making me unhappy.
I have to shuffle them through DropBox to get them on the Mac so I can prettify them with Lightroom; I miss Adobe’s nice smooth mobile/PC sync. Anyhow, I thought Lightroom did a nice job on this monochrome.
This float is quite a structure. It’s not solid, it’s sort of a frame so you can look down at the ocean in the middle. Well, you could, except for that piece of water is stacked up with old styrofoam, the kind that’s used to make floating docks float.
This picture isn’t beautiful or anything, but
there’s a lot happening, top to bottom, left to right.
As for the boat, I installed its low-level winter heating apparatus, ran the engine for a bit, set up support poles to protect the canvas cover from heavy snow, and adjusted the lines against winter storms; then went for a burger and beer at the waterfront alehouse.
That’s a satisfying early-winter half-day.
Comment feed for ongoing:
From: Eric H (Nov 05 2017, at 06:22)
Try Snapseed for photo editing -- surprisingly slick.
[link]