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 ;).

Since we’ve been to Tofino a few times already, didn’t really do much in the way of sightseeing, but did get out to spot whales on Thursday.  Got lucky, too, as we saw both Grays and Humpbacks (although the Humpbacks were about 10km offshore in choppy waters).

Also checked out the Botanical Gardens, which sounds bigger than it is… basically a small series of trails totalling maybe 1km.  Seeing as how we didn’t travel far from home there weren’t exactly “exotic” sights, but room for photos nonetheless:

All of the published photos are on Flickr, culled from, oh, 1600 or so.  Yes I know, but digital is cheap and I’m always worried I’ll miss something ;).

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.

As many already know, Apple introduced a new notebook to their lineup on Tuesday. The MacBook Air is a sub-portable, very thin and light, and fills a niche that Apple has not yet competed in.  There has been a lot of text already on the unit, so I thought I would give both a quick overview and some links to other sites to make reading up on it a bit easier. 

Overview

• Thin thin thin, from .16-.76″ (40-194mm) - it slopes to thinness on all edges to make it look even thinner than it is
• Light, only 3 pounds (1.36kg)
• 13.3″ LED backlit screen with 1280 x 800 resolution - nice widescreen display, same as the current MacBooks
• 1.6Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor - shrunk down specially for the Air
• 80gb 1.8″ hard drive - same drive as in the iPod Classic
• Full size keyboard - backlit with ambient sensor, too!
• Large multi-touch trackpad - multi-touch gesturing a la iPhone, very interesting to see where this goes
• 802.11n wifi support
• Bluetooth 2.0
• Comes with Leopard and iLife ‘08 (as do all MacBooks)
• $1899 CDN
• The “uber-Air”, 1.8Ghz with a 64gb SSD instead of a hard drive is available for $3248 CDN - ya, sure….;)

Pros

• Size and weight
• Style
• Multi-touch trackpad
• LED backlit screen
• Backlit keyboard

Cons

• Price - the curse of early adoption
• Performance - would have been nice to get more for the price, but still decent
• Battery not removable - not usually an issue as most people don’t carry spares, but it should be mentioned
• RAM not upgradable - again not a huge deal as it comes with 2gb
• Tiny mono speaker - this is kind of annoying but I can understand why they did it
• No built-in drive - thin costs, especially this thin.  At least there’s an external for $99

Unknowns

• Sturdiness - it is made of aluminum which will no doubt help, but it’s so thin I have to wonder about warping and how delicate it is
• Heat - there is a fan inside but metal does conduct, so I’m wondering about heat sitting on my lap
• Scratches/Scuffs - again, it’s aluminum so I’m curious.

Competitive Products 

• Dell XPS M1330
• Sony Vaio SZ series
• Apple MacBook Pro 15″
• Apple MacBook 13″
• ASUS (various models)

My Thoughts

Well, first off, I ordered one so that pretty much says what my final opinion is on it.  There are competitive products out there (see above) but the Macs themselves do have one thing going for them that the rest don’t - they can run OS X and XP (and Linux of course) if desired.  That leaves room for a lot of flexibility, to say the least.  When comparing the MacBook Air, Pro and standard with each other it basically comes down to size (and price in the case of the Pro).  The Air is considerably lighter than both the Macbook and the MacBook Pro, which for me is a major factor.  I expect to be carrying this thing around in a backpack frequently when taking pictures, being out and about, etc. and it’s funny how a few pounds can make a big difference.  Not to mention an inch or more of thickness when the pack already has a camera, lenses, and more.

Overall I am going with the Air because of its size and because it’s a Mac, it’s that simple.  I want convenience and flexibility and for that I’m willing to give up a few cycles on a processor and I guess a few hundred dollars.  A fringe benefit is that this thing is slick looking and sometimes that is justification as well since I probably won’t get tired of looking at it or showing it off for quite some time!

Linkage

• Apple - Specifications, overview and Guided Tour
• Macworld - Hands On With the MacBook Air
• Forbes - Into Thin (MacBook) Air
• Gizmodo - Hands On
• Inquirer - Apple launches MacBook Air
• ExtremeTech - Photo slideshow
• Crave - Photos: MacBook Air
• John Biehler’s post on his upcoming MacBook Air

I’ve been told my Air will ship on Feb. 6th and should arrive by the 13th.  As soon as I have it in my hands I’ll post my impressions, photos and whatever else I can think of ;).

Duane Storey has just posted about an idea that looks great - put a bunch of large brains together in a room, mush them together to make one GIANT brain and take a concept from seed to fruit in a single weekend. He’s calling it Beer Camp 2008 and it sounds like a great place to collaborate, recharge and be creative. Sounds like a perfect way to spend 3 days with no sleep (well, one that doesn’t involve poker at least), and something people might write about later as “the place where it all started” ;)

We can dream, right? Click over to Duane’s blog and read all about Beer Camp 2008.

I don’t blog often.  I admit it.  I’m usually “too busy” to post and when I do have time I always feel I have nothing interesting to say.  Some people write what they feel, puking their emotions onto a web page.  I don’t do that either, at least until now.  

My mother’s family lost their Patriarch, her brother, my Uncle Emil, this year.  Emil was the picture of family to me in many ways - especially the extended Condrau family (my mother’s maiden name).  If there was a gathering of any kind, be it family picnic or (more significantly) the Christmas Eve celebration Emil was guaranteed to be there front and center.  To not have him here this year left a giant hole in my Christmas spirit, as I’m sure it did for a lot of us.  Nothing much was said about it, but you just knew he was a major part of everyone’s thoughts.  This was very apparent when it came to the tradition of singing Christmas carols.  Caroling is as big a part of the family gathering as Santa’s arrival and, although people joke about a huge lack of singing talent all around, it is always well received and the missed notes are forgotten quickly.  But for me this year I was not ready, loathing the thought of participating.  To play the music for the part of Christmas that is Emil, to play without him - I wasn’t ready for that.  But I also wasn’t ready for it NOT to be there, so playing won out in the end.

I have played guitar for the carols for as long as I can remember, and oftentimes it is myself and one or maybe two others that do so.  It is fairly typical to be drowned out by the singers, and usually it is a good thing since the guitar key never matches them anyway ;).  One or two guitars vs. 20+ loud and proud Condrau singers - we never stood a chance. This year, however, something amazing happened.

When I arrived at the hall, guitar cases in tow, I saw more than our two guitars there.  In fact there were 4 more.  When it came time to play for the carolers, not only did we have the rare opportunity to play on an actual stage we were suddenly a group of six (Mike, Corinne, Chris, Jeff, Terry and myself).  No one spoke of how unique this was until later, when Darlene (Emil’s daughter) and Donna (Emil’s niece) both came to me and thanked us for making it a special experience this year.  This was not planned, not meant to be of any significance.  But six spontaneously decided to show up and play, to scream out how important it was to be there and to put an exclamation mark on Emil’s tradition.

Until Sunday this year was all about panic and rush.  All about making sure that the dinner was prepared, the gifts were bought, and no one was missed.  Sunday didn’t change the fact that all of this still had to happen.  But the feeling that I had when playing and seeing multiple generations of the extended Condrau clan, arm and arm in front of me, made me forget about everything that defined stress and tension.  The Christmas spirit sang to me in 6 different keys, and it was magic.

Thank you, Emil, for showing the Condraus (and everyone else) how to sing.  I never want it any other way.

All that’s fine, get up in the morning to head back to home and …what the… 400,000 people are between you and home, all waiting for the big fat guy.  OK fine, we’ll stay and watch the way-too-many pipe bands and the army of Rogers people handing out flyers and wait for the crowd to be distracted enough for us to get home:

Actually a good parade, as far as parades go. The iPhone is no road camera, though, but it held its own and tried to get the good angles when it mattered:

Was it worth the 90 minute drive home afterwards? Well, if I complain I won’t get any presents, so I’ll say oh you bet it was.