Rock Bay

Victoria is not all parks and groves and delightful little bays with seawall walkways. It has its industrial side as well although tourism and government are probably the primary employers. I've mentioned the Gorge before as a long arm of the ocean that reaches into Victoria. The Inner Harbor is the first area on this arm. After passing under the Johnson Street Bridge, the Gorge enters the predominantly industrial neighborhood known as Rock Bay, pictured above. The photo below is just to the right of the above shot and shows the backside of buildings on Store Street in downtown Victoria. The Johnson Street bridge is directly to the right side of the photo below and the Bay Street (Point Ellice) Bridge is just to the left of the photo above. And if all that doesn't confuse you thoroughly, I give up.

Harbor Seal

Now that the kids are back in school and the weather is cooling down, the tourist core of Victoria is much quieter and I have begun to explore and re-explore areas a little further from the Victoria city center such as Macaulay Point and Fleming Beach in Esquimalt, where I chanced to meet this Harbor Seal enjoying a placid swim near the dock. I like this picture because the seal is looking up at me. As he approached he was focused on the bottom then he bent his head up and gazed at me. A few seconds later he surfaced and had a better look at me. If I'd had a fish (or maybe a ball) we could have had a little more conversation. But since nothing was forthcoming he rolled over and continued his leisurely survey of the bottom. The water is about a meter and a half (five feet) deep here and he was about a half meter below the surface when I took this picture.

Lights

One of the nicer features of the sky over Victoria at night is the bright light pictured above. It's made from natural stone and operates by reflected light (solar powered!) so is environmentally sustainable. It's also quite attractive and I suspect other cities will try to obtain their own once it becomes more widely known. Below is another environmentally sound light that I noticed tonight while cycling past one of the new condo development projects nearby, Dockside Green, which has an admirable number of other green initiatives. Yes, that is a solar array above the light.

Evening Sunlight - Cairn Park

Cairn Park is a small park, really just a rocky hill, in the midst of a dense residential neighborhood near where I live. This photo was taken just before sunset. I like the way the slanting sunlight catches the dry grass.

Reference Subject

Above is a subject I photograph almost every week so it seemed like a good reference subject for me to try out a new photo-processing technique. For those of you who don't recognize it, the above is an example of an HDR or High Dynamic Range image. The above is actually faux HDR since it is extracted from one RAW image rather than several images. However the effect is the very nearly the same. Below is the same image as it came from the camera without the HDR processing. Click on these to look at the large versions for comparison.