(click on image to see 4K footage from the ISS)
Happy Earth Day, everyone! As the saying goes:
“Love your Mother. Good planets are hard to find.”
Hugs,
M&M
Happy Earth Day!
Tag Archives: YYJ
Hugging Victoria, 2016!
Hi Folks! This is our (drum roll…) seventh year of hugging Victorians and everyone else who wanders by and wants one! We still remember how terrified we were on our first hugging adventure, and how enervated we are now when the opportunity presents itself. We didn’t have as many opportunities last year as we would have liked, but in 2014 we hugged people from 41 countries (that we know about). We wanted to get a jump on things this year, and since we’ve been having such lovely weather lately, we went out on our earliest ever Hugging session on April 2. Well, we hugged people from Victoria and other places on the island, people from mainland BC, Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. We hugged neighbours from Washington and Montana, and neighbours from as far away as South Carolina. And we hugged people from Brazil, Chile, China, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Romania, Thailand and Vietnam. Thirteen countries so far, and that’s only our first outing!
Eating Our Way Through Victoria – Terroir Tea Merchant
Hi Folks:
As mentioned in our last post, the end of February marked Victoria’s “Be a Tourist in Your Own Hometown” for 2016. It’s a great opportunity for locals to get out to places they may not yet have discovered in the greater Victoria area. We had loose plans to visit a few places on the Friday afternoon, but they pretty much evaporated when we crossed the threshold of Terroir Tea Merchant (on Fort, between Quadra and Blanshard).
Let’s begin with what Terroir is not: They don’t sell coffee, bottled water, fruit juice, cookies or doughnuts. What they do offer are more than two dozen different teas from the various tea-growing regions, sourced wherever possible from the growers themselves. Our tea was carefully prepared by a tea master, a woman so warm and engaging we abandoned our loosely-knit plans and took up far too much of her time instead. Charity is a certified tea master with accreditation from Australia and her partner (in tea and in life) Jason is a tea specialist with a science background. They are equally open, incredibly knowledgeable and wonderful to talk with. Terroir comes from the French language and encompasses not only the soil of a region but also the climate, rainfall, sun, as well as the culture and heritage of that region as all of these and more impact the plants growing there. An Oolong tea from Taiwan and an Oolong tea from Nepal are not the same by any means. Even plants from the same region, growing at different altitudes or picked at different times will have different flavours to offer.
Charity and Jason also understand the true nature of the word ‘competition’: to strive together. If they don’t have what a customer is looking for, they’ll refer them to someone who might. They have and will continue to incorporate tea pairings with other local businesses, combining their tea offerings with chocolate, perhaps, or different cheeses. More information on upcoming events is available on their website. They’re also developing and offering courses and workshops for those interested in learning more about the art of tea.
We’ve already told several friends about Terroir, and their responses can best be summed up by our friend A. who replied, “Yes! Their tea is amazing! I’m glad you’ve discovered them too!”
Do drop by their store on Front Street, and while you’re there take the time to watch the tea being prepared in what may be the coolest tea-making machine in Victoria. It looks like a French press on steroids and is controlled via an Android tablet. The software allows the simultaneous preparation of four different teas, each brewed for a specific time and at a specific temperature. If a customer has a certain preferences – longer steeping time or difference in temperature for example, custom recipes can be programmed into memory. They wouldn’t say, but we’re reasonably confident it can also monitor and track several small satellites… 🙂
Do drop by; you’ll be glad you did!
Hugs,
M&M
P.S. If you really want to know about the gummi bear tea (no, they do not sell it) well, you’ll have to ask. 😉
Photo of the Month – February
Hi Folks:
At the end of February we took advantage of the Be a Tourist in Your Own Hometown celebration to pay a visit to the world-famous Butchart Gardens. The Gardens were busy for this time of year, but not overly, and with a little patience we were able to wander around for several hours and make some good images. Below are two of them.
The first is an image made by Marcia in the Japanese Garden, converted to a monochrome sepia. And no, the white in the image is not snow, but moss. The mosses were so vibrant that day we needed to reduce the saturation on many of the images to make them look believable!
The second image was made by Mike in the Sunken Garden. This tree is a favourite of ours, and one of Marcia’s favourite images (for both of us) was made of this tree. The processing here was actually an accident, in part, but it looks as though the tree and surroundings are emerging slowly onto the page, radiating out from the centre.
Okay, that’s it.
Now go out and make some photographs!
Hugs,
M&M
Dine Around & Stay in Town, 2016
Hi Folks:
One of the challenges with living in Victoria is that there’s always so much to do! Often one has to choose this instead of that (heavy sigh.. 🙂 ). As example, starting last Friday (February 19) and running until March 6 is the 2016 Dine Around and Stay in Town event. It’s an invitation for both residents and visitors to check out over 60 different local restaurants and try one of their prix fixe menus, with prices ranging from $20-$50/plate. Many places also have suggestions for wine or beer pairings. In addition to the food choices, a dozen hotels are offering rooms at rates beginning at $79.
Photo of the Month – January
Hi Folks:
As we’re both writers as well as photographers, we’re including two images for January’s photo of the month post, along with poems inspired by them. Enjoy! Continue Reading →
Victoria’s Public Menorah Lighting
Hi Folks:
The other night we were both pleased and privileged to attend Victoria’s public Menorah lighting at Centennial Square – the same place where we’d been a couple of weeks before to celebrate the annual Christmas tree lighting and Santa Claus parade.
Victoria’s Public Menorah lighting (click the image to see the video)
Photo of the Month – November
Hi Folks:
One of the (many) benefits of living in Victoria is that we generally have flowers in bloom all 12 months of the year. A favourite thing for us to do on New Year’s Day is to go to the Lieutenant Governor’s levée (reception) and then wander the grounds, making images of the flowers (images we dutifully send back east, to remind friends and family of what is coming for them). 🙂
We’re not entirely without winter’s chill, however. Marcia made the following image of hoar frost on English ivy leaves one November morning on her commute through Beacon Hill Park.
Okay, that’s it! Go out and make some photographs!
Hugs,
M&M
Shooting Fall Colours… sort of
Hi Folks:
If you live in the northern hemisphere then autumn is upon you, and if you’re fortunate enough to be in an area that has deciduous trees, then they’re likely in the process of turning the glorious colours of fall – reds, yellows, oranges, browns… (NB: if you want to know why the leaves change colour in the fall, click here). This is a great time of year to be a landscape photographer, and it’s easy to become seduced by all of those colours. However, it’s also a good time to look at the underlying skeleton of your photographs, and one way to do that is to remove the colour and move to a monochrome palette. (Yes, this is an attempt to put off the ‘learning to see in black and white’ post I keep thinking I should write, but for now this will serve well as placeholder. 🙂 ) By shifting away from the colours of the leaves we can look at shapes, at form, at movement, at textures, at light and shadow… All of these essential components exist in colour images as well, but they can get moved to the background of your compositions if you’re not careful.
The images below were all shot in nearby Beacon Hill Park on the same day. All were shot with my cell phone as I was walking through the park, and they all share similar processing in Lightroom. They all reveal what lies behind the colours that are so wondrously revealing themselves right now.
Okay, that’s it. Now go out and make some photographs!
Hugs,
M&M
P.S. It’s important to remember that unless you have a camera with an achromatic sensor (since there are only a few companies in the world that make them, if you had one, you’d know) with digital you’re always capturing colour information even when you’re shooting in B&W. As such you can adjust the luminance values of the various colours (shown as grayscale) to change the contrast and overall look of a B&W image either in camera (when shooting jpg, by choosing a different recipe) or in your raw file conversion software.