May 2021

I've seen Osprey all over BC including on the pilings close to here but this was the first time I've seen them circling the ponds.  I didn't think the ponds had fish large enough for an Osprey to eat, but I could be wrong.  Either way, they were nice to see.

We walked around looking for whatever was in season.  Sometimes the kids like to see the Tree Swallows near the nest boxes, but this time the kids just wanted to play on the logs.

Pacific Spirit Regional Park is a quite large and I have to admit I haven't walked all of the trails.  We had a free afternoon so I went for a walk by myself to take it in.  I didn't realize the area by Salish trail was hit so hard by the wind storm in 2006, but much of the canopy here (that was once dominated by Alder and Big Leaf Maple) was torn down.  Hiking now, there is very little cover.

 
A big surprise for me - I spotted a butterfly!  I'm not a butterfly expert, but seeing big colourful butterflies in this part of the world is quite a treat!
 

The Covid numbers in BC aren't great right now.  In April the third wave was clearly getting out of control so the Health Office put in a number of new restrictions to get things back under control.  Restaurants are closed, but travel inside the provice is also restricted.  Combined with the Vaccine roll out, BC's numbers have significantly improved, but they are still high so we look for days out without crowds.  Helen has already been vaccinated though here work, but my first vaccine didn't come until Mid month and even then, it's not effective for a few weeks after.

I've wanted a timelapse of a sunset from this angle for quite a while.  Every once in a while in Vancouver you get just the right light where the sun sets below the cloud layer and uses the underside of the clouds to light everything orange.  There is no weather prediction for this - it needs to be clear enough for the sun to get through, but have enough cloud that the sun has something to light.  Today was about a 6 out of 10, but just going sure teaches you a few things about taking a timelapse.

The Lions gate bridge is a suspension bridge so it moves as the trafic goes over it.  That movement causes blur on long exposures but on timelapses it causes the image to jump around.  The usual tools (ffmpeg stablization tools) fixated on the other moving elemnts (clouds and skies) and the other tools I sometime use (Fiji/ImageJ or Photoshop) also gave up.  I was able to make it work in ffmpeg by blurring out much of the moving part of the frame, but it took me hours to get something that worked.  Learn something new every time.

While standing around the bridge for a few hours, I noticed the sunset the other way - facing back to the city, was also quite nice.  A week later I took another sunset timelapse, this time facing east.

The same problems happened - the bridge is bouncing all evening as cars and big trucks roar over behind.  Not learning my lesson, this image has even less stable elements so when I had to stabalize the movie, there was less to work with.  That said, once you have the procedure down, I was able to make the movie pretty quickly.