Tag Archives: Victoria

Photo of the Month

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Hi Folks:  Well, if you promise not to mention that the ‘photo of the month’ post was due yesterday, I’ll pretend not to notice!

At a meeting of our local photography group recently, several people did presentations of images based on a specific theme.  Mine was on ‘faces’.  I should explain that I’m not a people photographer, and people appear in far less than 5% of my work.  I shot a wedding, once, and swore I would never do it again.  However, as a landscape photographer one thing I like to do is to look for ‘faces’ and things in other objects.  Sometimes they’re fairly obvious and sometimes they’re more elusive.  If you go through my Flickr photostream you’ll find a number of such images, but I chose one to highlight as April’s photo of the month.  It’s a piece of driftwood I found along the shore on Dallas Road – nearly an entire tree, in fact, and there are some good size rocks embedded into the roots.  However, looked at from the bottom of the tree the shape forms a fairly good representation of a human skull. Continue Reading →

Being Green – Intentional Communities

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Hi Folks:

I was going to talk about intentional communities last week but life got in the way.  Actually, last Friday night Marcia and I were at an open meeting to discuss Victoria’s Official Community Plan.  In a way this fits in as sustainability, green building, water and energy are key issues for any OCP.  Vancouver has recently gone through a similar process, as are other cities around the world.

A topic like ‘intentional communities’ is vast, certainly more than can be contained in one writing (even if that writing was a book), and the idea of an intentional community means many different things to many different people.  However, since I’m writing this I get to define some of the parameters at least, and others are most welcome to continue the discussion in the comments below.  Let’s break this down into its components: intention and community. Continue Reading →

Villa Marco Polo Inn

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Hi Folks:

Last Sunday night Marcia and I had the pleasure and the privilege of staying at the Villa Marco Polo Inn here in Victoria, giving us an opportunity to be tourists in our own town.  Before I get to that, our being there is a story in itself.

One of the e-mails that arrives in my Inbox every week is from Mindi & Dave Pettitt and the rest of the crew at HarbourLiving.ca Basically it’s a weekly newsletter that let’s us know what’s happening in and around Victoria, and it also includes information on events for the rest of the island as well.  Now, last December I noticed an article asking for a photograph and a story to do with Christmas, as a way of celebrating the holiday season.  Being a storyteller at heart I grabbed one of my Christmas images out of Lightroom, added a story, and sent it off.  Several days later we received a phone call from the folks at Tourism Victoria informing me that I had won one of the daily prizes in their ‘Christmas is Here‘ contest.  Among the prizes was a carriage tour, annual passes for the Royal BC Museum, and a stay at the Villa Marco Polo Inn. Continue Reading →

Eating Our Way Through Victoria!

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Hi Folks:

Well, as we promised, we’re devoting the last Saturday of every month to celebrating the food of Victoria!  As we mentioned in our first food post, we’re not professional food reviewers but we both have some background in the food industry and we both enjoy good food.  Also as mentioned in our first post, we’re only going to write about places we’d like to visit again!

March has been a busy month for us, including a welcome visit from a friend of ours from Ontario.  To that end, we’ve been eating out a fair bit lately.  This being our third food post we’re going to profile three places here, and we’ll put them in alphabetical order. Continue Reading →

Eating Our Way Through Victoria!

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Greetings Gourmands!

Before I delve into the tantalizingly sweet and savoury tidbits of this month’s subject, let me guide you first with a wee bit of geography and history to lay the groundwork for today’s tasty treat of a food review.

Welcome to Victoria! Victoria is the capital city of the province of British Columbia in Canada. Located on the southernmost tip of Vancouver Island, it is a mere 1 1/2 hour ferry ride through the Gulf Islands taking you to the mainland and the city of Vancouver where the final days of the 2010 Winter Olympics are winding to a close. Go Canada! Check out the location here. (Click on the photos on this map and you’ll see some of our more famous buildings!)

The Empress Hotel – now the Fairmont Empress – is a world-renowned resort hotel. Often referred to as the ‘Grand Lady’ – a castle in her own right – she rules over our Inner Harbour and is a must see attraction for visitors from all parts of the globe. You can’t come to Victoria and not wander her halls, peruse her galleries, stop for a rest and take an appreciative look and deep breath or two in her incredible rose gardens.

The Empress Hotel is the journey we take today as we eat our way through Victoria. Of the many restaurant options The Empress has to offer, it is the Bengal Lounge that shall capture and satisfy our epicurean nature. Continue Reading →

He Says, She Says…

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Hello, dear reader!

Both of us have traveled extensively throughout our lives, and to that end eating in restaurants has at times become ‘routine’ for us.  There was even a time when we co-managed a resort with a 90-guest seating capacity.  Still, we both appreciate a really good restaurant.  Food in all of its aspects – the preparation, the sharing, the sights, scents and tastes… (even the cleanup) is an important part of both our lives.  All of that is a long way of saying that we’ve decided to add a ‘Food’ category to our blog, where we’ll feature some of our favourite restaurants and we might even sneak in a favourite shared recipe or two along the way.  Neither of us is a professional food reviewer, but we know enough to know what we like and what we don’t like, so rather than having a ‘scale’ of 1-10 or whatever, we’ll just share our impressions.  If we go somewhere we don’t like for whatever reason, we just won’t write about it.  We want to share what we DO like instead.  We have broad palates and sometimes eclectic tastes, so we’ll offer our thoughts on a wide range of places with three things in common: adequate food, adequate service and adequate value (and each must be excellent to be adequate).  Look for future ‘Eating Our Way…’ posts on the last Saturday of each month.

We’re going to begin our ‘Food’ category with a local restaurant that we both appreciate: Floyd’s Diner.

Follow these links to read what He Says/She Says: Marcia’s View / Mike’s View.

P.S. You can read more of our Food posts and restaurant reviews here.

Photo of the Month

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Hi Folks:

It’s been a busy month of writing and blogging and other things, but I have managed to sneak out with my camera for a time or two!  This month I thought I’d make the focus (pun intended) of my ‘photo of the month’ page an HDR image.  The image below is a combination of nine photographs made at different exposures.  Now most photographers today are at least somewhat similar with HDR, but in my experience most people associate it with the grungy, grainy look that HDR is most famous for.  It has its place, but in my experience it’s overused.  Besides, HDR stands simply for ‘High Dynamic Range’ and is quite useful as a technique for expanding the dyanic range (the number of tones, from white to black) in an image where the tonal range of the scene is beyond the camera’s ability to capture it.  There’s an excellent article on HDR by Alexandre Buisse here.

That’s certainly the case with this image.  It was made in a local park called ‘Christmas Hill‘, and it’s one of my favourite places in this area to make photographs.  Capturing the detail in the shadow areas without blowing out the highlights where the sun strikes the moss was beyond the camera’s sensor.  I uploaded the images into Lightroom, and then used Timothy Armes’ LR/Enfuse plugin to combine them into one blended image.  Post processing included the usual (white balance, black point, white point, etc.) as well as some graduated filters to highlight the sun spot.

Click on image to see a larger version

So, that’s it for now.  Go out and make some photographs!

Mike.

P.S.  I came across this great tutorial yesterday by R.C. Concepcion on using Shadowbox JS to integrate a Lightroom web gallery into a WordPress blog.  Maybe next month…

P.S. II, the Sequel: You can find more of our posts on photography and Lightroom tutorials here, and you can find links to over 200 other sites that have Lightroom tips, tutorials and videos here.

He Says, She Says…

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Hi Folks:

In Elizabeth Gilbert’s (wonderful) book, ‘Eat Pray Love‘ she has a conversation with her friend Giulio about why Rome is a beautiful city, but it’s not ‘her’ city.  Giulio says that each city and each person has a word to describe them, and if your word and the city’s word don’t match, you’ll never be comfortable there.  It’s easier to type out the conversation than to try to explain it, so we’re including that section here (pp. 102-104): Continue Reading →

Being Green Update – Water

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Hi Folks:

First of all, for everyone following the Gregorian calendar, Happy New Year!! We wish you and those close to you a 2010 filled with as much health, happiness, peace and prosperity as you can handle!

Okay, I wanted to talk a bit about water this week. As the expression goes, “Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.” We tend to take water for granted; most of this little blue marble of ours is covered with water, and water makes up some 55-78% of our bodies depending on size, sex and age. We use water daily for drinking, for cooking, for cleaning, for waste removal, and for so many things that we don’t often consider that all of the water that comes out of the tap must be collected, transported, treated… and there is a similar ‘stream’ of actions must be taken for water that pours down our drains.

Continue Reading →