There was a break of clear weather for one day last weekend and for the first time since moving into my new neighbourhood I went out to the beach. Vancouver has one long line of beaches facing downtown and any one of them is suitable for wandering with dog, biking or jogging. I'm not one to lounge around on sand but maybe I will this year.

With that break in weather I went out with tripod, medium format kit and decide to try and dig myself out of a rut.*

I knew that I wanted to do a landscape of downtown Vancouver just to get it out of the way. Every tourist takes that picture and for some reason I never have. But the Olympics had a useful function of making me look at the city like a tourist and I found myself taking a step back and enjoying it as such. I shot this with a 150mm lens which would translate into a 90mm-ish lens in 35mm-terms. Anything wider and Vancouver would not be a central subject in the shot.

I wandered the mudflats for twenty minutes before I found this wavy water line in the sand that seemingly lead right up to Vancouver. With the lens tilted down and at this distance it looks to me like you could walk all the way up to that little model Vancouver and only get your feet wet up to your ankles.

Originally, the shot was blue -- not as blue as this, but it did have a bluish tone because I used a polarizer and the weather was overcast. Kodak Ektar 100, from my observation, seems to emphasize whatever color is dominant. If there are greens, greens will dominate, reds - red, etc., but not in the dayglo way that slide film shows. It is more delicate. Yes, I still am loving the Ektar. And I am still liking the detail that it preserves.

With the polarizer bringing out a lot of detail in the clouds I still was a bit worried I didn't expose the cloud layer properly, but with medium format film there is a lot of dynamic range there waiting for you to bring it out. Lightroom served ably for that.

I asked a few friends whether they preferred the warmer tone over the cooler version. I agree with one of them that they both are appropriate. The bluer version is more dramatic but the warmer one is closer emotionally to what I was feeling that day. They were 50-50 on warm vs cool.

The warm also matches this shot, one that I will present another time.

*For a few weeks now all I've done is wander with a 35mm taking shots of nothing really under the guise of 'trying out film'. But without a clear goal or subject. Last week I even shot a roll of nothing -- my mind was nowhere and I didn't even know my camera wasn't transporting its roll properly and I got back a blank roll from the developer.