Sorry for the flash pic, but I didn’t get home to see this until the sun started to go down, and I didn’t want to miss the status update.  As you can see from above, we have forms now and the rebar is ready to be placed.  I expect the crew will be back tomorrow to finish up forming and if we go to plan the pour will happen next week.  We’re still looking for things to be done in October and I’ll continue to update you guys.

Renovating is hell.

Finally!  For those that don’t know the drawn-out saga, it has been about 2 years since this idea first began in our brains.  Truth be told, we always wanted some kind of usable garage at our house (there is currently a very narrow single car “closet” attached to the side).  At first we had thought we could build a detached unit, but there was not enough room.  At the end of the planning, a two-car garage became a two-storey addition to the back east end of our home.  Huge job, considering it’s basically a box with a roof.  But we’ll get a nice double garage as well as usable space above it, so hopefully all worth it in the end.  But what a saga so far.

First pass was to get the City of Poco Board to grant us a variance.  As it turns out, our home is zoned perpendicular to its address.  With the lot being essentially wide, not deep, the zoning was actually for the street around the corner from our home, even though our address was at the front of our house.  This turned out to be in our favour, as building the extension would no doubt have been turned down as too close to the rear-lot line.  But thanks to the wacky zoning, our rear-lot line is actually our side-lot line, allowing us to extend much further “backward”.  Long story short, the variance was actually for the side of our home closest to the lane, and for maybe 3 feet.  The Board passed us rather easily so we figured we were well on our way.  That was about 14 months ago.

Then came the permit applications.  HUGE hassle, frankly, and according to our Contractor and Engineer much more difficult than anything they’d ever encountered before.  After MANY back and forths, redrawn and re-submitted plans and even a face-to-face meeting we finally got our Permit late last year.  I won’t get into the details, but our engineer was literally coloring in walls on the plan to appease the City of Poco.  Advice: NEVER build in Poco unless you do it in the dark under a big tarp.

So after winter delays and countless other delays (weather, overbooking by our Contractor, etc.) he finally showed up this morning with a crew and a small digger.  The plan now is to dig the hole, prepare it with gravel and forms, then pour the foundation.  After that I’m guessing we wait a bit then start to actually build.  We hope to be done before the end of August - I’ll keep you posted on the progress, in words and pictures.

Great to see, especially the Coast Reporter article which appeared on the front page of their Arts & Entertainment section. In fact the full page is the article and photos (less the ads at the bottom). Kudos to Carole Rubin for writing a nice article and requesting my photos for submission!

Also ‘grats out to my brother, Chris Andersen, for writing the article in the Local. Nice job considering you were running on about 2 hours sleep after, oh I don’t know, putting together the entire festival.

I hope to do a lot more of these, of course, including the Pender Harbour Jazz Festival in September. Should be a blast.

I came over on the ferry Friday afternoon, checked in to the Sunshine Coast Resort (very nice place, btw) and then headed to the Backeddy Pub to meet up with Chris and the first act.  Bradley & McGillivray were performing, backed up by Chris and Pat Haavisto as the rythym section and accompanied by special guest Murray Porter.  Chris introduced me to everyone which was great and made me relax a bit.  This was the first night, first session of shooting for me, so I brought two bodies and two lenses to be sure I could be flexible.  The D300 had my spanky new 50mm f/1.8 (the bargain of the century, imho) and the D70 had my trusty 18-200 VR for the wide shots.

Lighting was, well, horrible.  The beginning of the set was partially lit by daylight but of course that meant wacky white balance… then later it was dark outside and almost as dark inside ;).  It was a challenging situation but I managed to get some decent shots by the end of it.  Very thankful now for the D300 and ISO 3200 …

After the first set I headed over the Garden Bay Pub to shoot the other act that evening, Neil Harnett.  He was joined by a “house band” Mark Vance put together that consisted of Peter van Deursen on keyboards, Lisa Simons on bass and Don Powrie on drums.  Right away I knew this was going to be good, both because the band was great and because the lighting was sooo much better:

While I was at the Garden Bay Pub I met Carole Rubin, a local writer and reporter for the Coast Reporter paper.  She was very friendly (all weekend, actually) and gave me a lot of info on the area, the people and the festival.  It was great hanging out with her.  She also liked my photos and asked for whatever I could give her for her article, which I had no problem doing.  During the set break, Neil came to Carole’s table and had a quick interview and then was introduced to me (I mean I had just taken 150 shots of him, least I could do ;)).  We sat down with Carole and had a good conversation - interesting guy.

I stuck around for the last set, taking more pics, and headed back (late) to my room.  Couple hours of going through photos and it’s my usual 3am bedtime.

Saturday was a busy schedule, with 3 events.  The first was a session by Murray Porter at Bud-A-Bing’s Burger Shack (I kid you not).  This was a trailer parked across from the Marketplace IGA in Madeira Park, at the front of a nice park area.  Chris asked that I pick up Murray (and his partner Elaine) from the same hotel I was staying at, so we all headed down about noon.

I had done a bonehead thing the night before in my half-awake state - I had meant to charge the D300 battery but had mistakenly put the D70 battery in the charger (which was still fully charged of course).  So the D300 stayed home and I brought the D70s and 18-200 VR.  Turned out to be better than OK as it was a sunny day (surprisingly) and I got a bunch of decent shots.

After the Burger Shack show I had a short break then headed to the Pender Harbour School of Music for the Workshop.  Murray Porter, Bradley & McGillivray, Chris, Pat Haavisto and Barry O’Hara all joined in, providing great playing as well as good discussion on making music, writing songs, the blues and more.  James Rogers showed up as a surprise a bit later, looking for a place to buy guitar strings but he ended up stepping in for a few songs which was good for the rest of us.  Not a huge turnout but very enjoyable nonetheless.

There was time for a break between the Workshop and that night’s show at the Garden Bay Pub, so I took it.  Murray and Elaine asked for a ride to the Pub so I dropped by their hotel room first and had a glass of wine and relaxed for a bit before heading out.  The act for the night was James Rogers, who had played at the Workshop earlier.

Great show, really entertaining.  The house band from the night before joined him and they were a great backup.  Peter is an amazing keyboard player, and Lisa and Don provide great bass and drums respectively.  For the last set, James invited Murray on stage as well as Ruth & Sheldon (Bradley & McGillivray) to sing a couple of songs. That really got the place going.

Sunday, thankfully, was only one event - at least one I could make.  Back to the Garden Bay Pub for the 3rd time in as many days, for the Jam Session.  Another very entertaining show with quite a few new faces, mostly locals, stepping up to perform.  One woman really rocked the place - Dalannah Gail Bowen:

She’s well known in the community and used to play the Garden Bay Pub a lot 10 years or so ago.  Actually a Jazz singer but you’d never know it from how she belted out a couple of great Blues/R&B tunes.

Headed back a bit early to the ferry, bringing Murray & Elaine (which was fine by me).  Good company and I wanted to get back earlier as Carole wanted images by Sunday night.  I ended up missing the 6:20 but got on to the overload ferry about 30 min. later, thankfully.

All in all an amazing experience.  Lots of great music, great people, great memories.  Can’t wait until next year ;).

SmugMug is a site dedicated to photography and photographs, providing unlimited online galleries for users to show, promote and sell their images.  I have created a simple gallery to start - Images of British Columbia - and will be adding more on a regular basis to have what I hope is a decent sized portfolio.  Please have a visit and let me know what you think, rank the pictures (this is available) and post comments as well if you like.  The official link to my SmugMug homepage is http://gallery.afocusedview.com/ or you can reach me via SmugMug at http://peterandersen.smugmug.com/.  Hope to see you there!

Hope to post pics to Flickr at some point and keep blogging.  Wifi is sparse, though, as of right now the only place I can get a signal is out here on the ocean facing deck - darn ;).

Finally took the leap, although it didn’t take much convincing.  Picked up a Nikon D300 on the weekend and have been spending as much time with it as possible ever since.

There are many reviews out there, but the general feeling is that this camera is amazing.  From what I know and have seen of it so far, I totally agree.  The things that stand out for me at this point are:

• Up to 6400 ISO - Clean ISO was almost unheard of in a non-pro camera until this one.  The D300 can go to ISO 3200 (that’s about 10 stops of wiggle room in low light, people!) without overbearing noise, which is amazing.  It can go to ISO 6400 before it looks like most cameras do at ISO 1600, which is completely amazing.
• Focus system - 3 main modes including single, multiple and dynamic areas.  The focus is pretty quick (apparently not as fast as it could/should be, which might mean a firmware update someday) and is typically bang on.  I can be as selective as 1 of 51 points or as broad as all 51, letting the camera figure out what to focus.  Lots of options in between as well, including face and 3D tracking (which I haven’t experimented with yet).
• Colour level and saturation - really cranks it up 10 notches from my older camera, I can get eye-popping colour out of it if I want to.  I actually set the camera at Vivid and +1 saturation and had to dial it back, it was so strong.
• 6fps out of the box.  That’s fast, for me at least.  I can goose it up 2fps more with the optional battery pack as well.  I’m not a frequent rapid-fire shooter, but maybe I’ll become one now.
• Lossless compression on RAW files.  Since I like to use RAW files, this is great.  Tons of storage requirements, but I’m willing to give that up for the ability to start with what is basically a pure image.

As for image quality, I have one picture that I can share with you right now.  This was taken on the weekend at a Field Hockey tournament.  Conditions were early morning, fairly bright sunlight.  This image was converted from a lossless RAW file and I actually had to dial down the saturation a bit:

Taken with a Nikon 18-200mm VR lens. Should be noted I did photoshop this a bit, but only for cleanup and retouch of a couple of key points (glare on the plaque, coach’s eyes needing fixing, white flecks on grass, etc.).

Can’t wait to see what else this baby can do.  Expect a lot of photos to my Flickr page.