Illuminate Yaletown 2009

After the Strobist meetup that I recently wrote about (immediately after actually) I headed to the "Illuminate Yaletown" celebration. This took place in (unsurprisingly) Yaletown, deep in the depths of Vancouver. Basically it was a two or three block area where various businesses had color-oriented displays setup. At one there were fire dancers, another illuminated a building wall with cool moving shapes and colors, one had ice sculptures with cool lighting in and around them, there was a band playing, there was a mini-dealership with strobing lights in and around the cars... All looking very cool.

Ice Carving

Fire Dancing (one of my fav shots)

The car dealership was all lit up

Local artist shaking her stuff and singing as loud as she could!

It was actually nice because it didn't seem like a bunch of selling going alone with this. Mostly I'd expect these displays to be thin veils over companies pushing their wares on you, and while there were definitly companies associated with the different locations, it seemed like it was more about the displays and bringing people in the area together than about selling stuff. Some huge screens projected on buildings dominated the second half of the walk.

Not all the billboards worked 100% :)

There were a lot of photographers there. The Vancouver photo group at meetup.com is the group I started out with, but in the dark, really it was a free for all, and there were tons of people with tripods and DSLRs milling all around. I ended up just wandering by myself for about an hour or so and then heading for the (long) drive home.

Lots of people taking pictures too

Some funky blue orbs

This is one case where I'd have loved a faster lens. The two that I took with me were my DA 16-45/4.0 and the DA 40/2.8 Limited. The shots (as you can see) weren't all that bad, though lots of steadying myself against buildings or railings was used, and ISO was generally 400-800. Combined with the shake reduction that really helped things. I am still lusting after the DA* 16-50/2.8 though. I switched to the 40 once, around the time where I hit the display with the band, but even wide open at 2.8 it didn't seem to help much somehow. Maybe because I chose a scene with energetic moving people it just seemed that way? It's an odd focal length though.... I love the fact that I have a "Limited", but the 40mm length translates to 60mm which is in that odd place between the "normal" view of the 50mm range and the so-called "portrait" 85-110mm length. Of course, it's not like there's no place for a 60mm lens (in 35mm terms), but it doesn't have the sweet spot that much lauded FA31/1.8 Limited or the FA77/1.8 Limited has.

As an aside, if anyone has a cool $1600 USD they have no need for, contact me cause there's a couple of lenses I want to talk to you about :)

Enough of that, more pics!


(Note that this has sat here in draft form for a couple of months now, my apologies for the lack of posting again)