Posts Tagged Whistler-Blackcomb
December 11, 2009 – Glacier Express, Blackcomb
Posted by Dave in British Columbia, Picture of the Day, Winter/Snow on December 11, 2009
Glacier Express, Blackcomb Mountain
Friday, December 11, 2009
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=876
Hello again everyone, welcome to another Friday during ski season! To celebrate all of the upcoming turns this weekend, here’s a shot taken on the Glacier Express chair on Blackcomb Mountain. (Which is of course part of Whistler-Blackcomb Ski Resort, where the 2010 Olympics will be held.) I say that, but it’s not actually clear if I’ll be making it up to the hill or not this weekend. But a man can dream, a man can dream…
The day that this picture was taken was exceptional for a lot of reasons. It was taken over Thanksgiving weekend, and before we headed up there they hadn’t really gotten any snow at all, so all of the rooms were super cheap and there was nobody there. But once we got there it started Dumping. (With a capital D, did you notice?!) So the skiing was fantastic. Plus, while the weather on this particular day looked pretty crappy down in the village, once we got up top, as you can see, it was really beautiful. (Don’t believe me? Here’s another example.) That always brings a smile to my face. Know what else brings a smile to my face? The fact that all that great stuff happened on my birthday. Actually, that’s not the whole story. Birthdays don’t bring a smile to my face any more. This was in fact the last birthday that did so, because it was my 29th. Ah, those were the days.
Make sure you get outside and enjoy your weekend, it should be a great one! Even if you’re not a skier. What do you people do with your time between November and May??
Notes: Canon PowerShot SD700 IS (Point and shoot). 1/1000s, f/5.6.
Subscribe to the Picture of the Day via: Popularity: 7%
October 30, 2009 – Whistler Mountain
Posted by Dave in British Columbia, Mountains, Picture of the Day on October 30, 2009
Half Note Trail - Whistler Mountain
Friday, October 30, 2009
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=1142
What’s up Dan, Diane, Shannon, and my other Facebook reader?! (Richard.) Hello too to my nameless Picture-of-the-day.com readers! And to my Picture-of-the-day.com readers that have names but whose identities I don’t know. And, of course, hello to Will also. Today’s picture was taken near the summit of Whistler Mountain. Julie and I took took the gondola up there to go hiking around, since it’s an easy way to get up to the high country, without having to, you know, walk all the way. This particular little pocket (right along the Half Note trail) was a bit odd because it was all white granite everywhere, whereas most of the rock up there is much darker. Since none of us are geologists, that’s probably not interesting, but there’s still two interesting nuggets in there, so the quota is fulfilled. That’s how I work: I do just enough to get the job done, but I don’t have the drive to do any more.
I used my new new wide angle lens for this shot. I say “new new” because the first time I bought it, it had this weird distortion in the middle, so I had to exchange it for another one. I would normally use a polarizing filter for this kind of shot, so that the clouds would really stand out against the blue sky. But I don’t have one yet for that lens, so that will have to wait until next time I guess.
Summer (and fall) is a great time to visit Whistler. Whistler is hosting the Olympics. The Olympics are cool. I’d say more, but I’ve run out of sentences.
That’s all for today folks, have a great Halloween!
End template.
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel T1i, Tokina 11-16 mm lens. 1/400s, f/10.0, ISO 100. Focal length: 13 mm.
Popularity: 9%
September 17, 2009 – Blackcomb
Posted by Dave in British Columbia, Mountains, Picture of the Day, Winter/Snow on September 17, 2009
View from Blackcomb Mountain
Thursday, September 17, 2009
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=877
It’s full-on ski-pass-buying season now, so to celebrate, here’s a nice, snowy picture to bring back happy memories from last winter. This picture was taken from near the top of the Glacier Express on Blackcomb Mountain. Since I’m not afraid of providing every last detail no matter how mundane or obvious, I’ll go ahead and point out that Blackcomb is half of Whistler-Blackcomb, which is in British Columbia, about a 4 or 5 hour drive from where I live in Seattle. I actually thought I had used this photo awhile ago, so I was really surprised when I just went back to check and didn’t see it.
I’m pretty excited for this upcoming winter/ski season, since I now have an official “skiing camera”. I upgraded my SLR this summer (from the Canon EOS Rebel XT – Amazon link: http://bit.ly/O1fAh – to the Canon EOS Rebel T1i – Amazon link: http://bit.ly/kKTkV ), so now I have my spare camera that I can toss in my backpack when I head to the hills. My ski buddies will of course hate me even more now, because now each time I stop I’ll have to take off the backpack, unzip it, etc, etc, etc. But I’m pretty excited. It still won’t solve the problem that I only ever go to about 3 or 4 different places between November and May, but at least those 3 or 4 places will be documented in excruciating detail now.
Map: http://bit.ly/rSpSR (This one’s weird – they took the satellite photo when it was snowy, but then turned it green so it looks like grass.
Notes: Canon PowerShot SD700 IS (Point and shoot). 1/400s, f/10.0.
Popularity: 5%
July 10, 2009 – Whistler Mountain
Posted by Dave in British Columbia, Mountains, Picture of the Day on July 10, 2009
Hiking on Whistler Mountain
Friday, July 10, 2009
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=611
So I had originally planned to post another picture from last summer’s Whistler weekend today, but this morning, I just wasn’t feeling it. Maybe it just wasn’t the right picture for my mood, or maybe I decided the picture sucks afterall. Not really clear, we’ll see how I feel about it next week. But, to soothe your disappointment as much as I can, I at least decided to post a picture from the same area.
This picture was taken a couple years earlier, on Whistler Mountain. (The one I was originally going to post was from Blackcomb.) It’s still from the summer and all that though. This was taken along one of the hiking trails accessible from the top of the gondola. In fact, if you’re familiar with the layout of the mountain at all, this might help: this was overlooking Harmony basin. You know, the basin where the Harmony chair is. That mountain you see in the distance is presumably Overlord Peak, which is purely a guess given that the snowy part is the Overlord Glacier.
I love those pine trees. I’ve never seen that particular kind of tree anywhere but up here in the Pacific Northwest. That’s not to say they don’t exist anywhere else, I really have no clue. But that’s the only place I’ve actually seen them. They’ve got so much character tough. They’re so perfectly straight, but all the little knobbly things poking off of them makes for a great texture in a photo. But, I’ve found that I have to silhouette them against something else to really draw it out. They’re such a dark green that it’s hard to make them turn out in pictures. The light has to be just right, or you have to be contrasting them against the background as I’m doing here. They can be really frustrating, because this is one of those cases where our eyes see something different from what the camera sees. So it’s tough to translate something that looks fantastic in person to something that doesn’t just look like crap on “film”.
Some of you may have noticed that my post came a bit early today. Crazy, right? I’ve got an all-day meeting at work, so this is the only chance I’ll have to write anything up today. Not that I, you know, do this stuff at work, or anything. Yeah, whatever man.
Anyway, have a great Friday, and a great weekend!
Map: http://bit.ly/2xqwT
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel XT, lens unknown. 1/125s, f/7.1, ISO 100. Focal length: 54mm.
Popularity: 2%
July 8, 2009 – Blackcomb Mountain
Posted by Dave in British Columbia, Mountains, Picture of the Day on July 8, 2009
Blackcomb Mountain
Wednesday, July 8, 2009.
http://davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=937
I was going through some pictures from last summer recently, and I dug up a bunch from a quick overnight trip up to Whistler that Julie and I took. We were only there for one night, but we scored a great deal at I’m pretty sure it was the Fairmont Chateau. (Courtesy of HotWire.com)
Since she was fairly pregnant at the time, she decided to spend much of the next day hanging around the (extremely nice) pool sipping cocktails (virgin, presumably), while I wanted to head up onto the mountain to do some hiking. I had been up the gondola on Whistler several times in the summer (that’s where all the hiking is), but I had never gotten around to making it up on Blackcomb. (They have summer skiing on the Horstman Glacier up there, but not so much in terms of hiking trails.) So, that was the plan for me.
Whereas the Whistler side is nice and easy to get up top (one gondola ride and you’re there), Blackcomb is a bit more of a pain in the ass. You have to ride two chairlifts (Wizard and Solar Coaster), then ride a bus over to the bottom of a third chair (7th Heaven), then ride that one up as well. But, definitely worth seeing if you’re up there, and I’ve heard that they’ve actually added some real hiking trails on the Blackcomb side as well for this year.
Anyway, I spent a few hours up there walking around, and when I was flipping through my pics last night, I found a couple that I wanted to post here. (I’ll post one today, and one Friday. That means that tomorrow is going to be a SURPRISE!!! Not, like, the exciting kind, more of just the “neither one of us know what’s coming” kind.)
Both of the pictures are playing with the same theme: some cool rocks in the extreme foreground, and other stuff way behind. The big question mark when you’re taking a picture like that is what you want to be in focus. Assuming you make the stuff in the foreground sharp (which you don’t have to), changing how in-focus the stuff in the distance is can make for a completely different picture. To change that, you of course need to change the size of the aperture. A wide-open aperture means your depth of field is really shallow. Which means that only things that are very close to the focus point (close in terms of distance away from you) will be sharp, and everything else will be fuzzy. A smaller aperture widens the depth of field, to the extreme case where if your aperture is as small as possible, you can make both things that are close and things that are very far away come out in focus.
The two pictures I’m going to post don’t really show off the difference too well (both of them I used a pretty small aperture), but it’s still worth talking about. It’s of course nice if everything in the frame is nice and crisp, such that you can see all the detail in everything, but it’s not always desirable. For example, if only one part of the picture is sharp, your eye is naturally drawn to that spot, so it can be a great way to add emphasis to the subject. The rest of the stuff in there adds context and all that, but it doesn’t detract any attention from the point of interest. Also, differences in focus are another way of adding contrast – if everything is in focus it can be tough to tell what’s close and what’s far away, which flattens the picture and everything blends together. In this case in particular, that wasn’t necessary because the colors and the patterns in the rocks are completely different, but that’s not always true.
And of course there are other pitfalls to changing up the aperture size. Sometimes it would be really nice to use a small aperture, but there’s just not enough light to allow it. Using a smaller aperture means you’ve got to keep the shutter open longer, to get in enough light to expose the image. In bright sunlight this isn’t as much of an issue, but in other cases you have to choose between an image that’s got a really narrow depth of field or one that’s completely blurry because of camera shake. Not a hard choice, but it does limit your options. My general rule of thumb is to use the smallest aperture I can get away with (meaning my shutter speed is 1/200th of a second or faster), although in certain situations when a small depth of field is desirable, I go the other way. (I keep my camera in Aperture-Priority mode (“Av” on Canon cameras) when I’m taking outside shots. Although I use Shutter-Priority (“Tv”) for things like taking pictures of my kid, but I’m not going to go into that now.)
Man, after spending all that time talking about keeping the background in focus vs. making it blurry, I’m starting to reconsider the image I picked for Friday. Maybe I should actually choose something that illustrates this. Hmm, we’ll see. Regardless, get EXCITED about TOMORROW! Who KNOWS what I’ll be putting up here?!?! You’re right, probably a stupid flower picture.
Map: http://bit.ly/14EIH7
Notes: Canon EOS Rebel XT, Tamron 28-300 mm VC lens. 1/40s, f/32.0, ISO 400. Focal length: 119 mm.
Popularity: 2%
May 26, 2009 – Whistler Mountain
Posted by Dave in British Columbia, Mountains, Picture of the Day, Winter/Snow on May 26, 2009
View from Whistler Mountain
Tuesday, May 26, 2009.
Vote on this picture:
http://www.davefry.net/rate/index.php?viewimage=705
This was taken up near the summit of Whistler Mountain, which, as the name kind of implies, is a fairly large portion of Whistler-Blackcomb, the ski resort. Since it’s one of the closest large destination resorts to Seattle (and definitely the largest), those of us in Seattle that call ourselves skiers tend to spend a fair amount of time up there.
The valley that you’re overlooking in this image is the valley that Highway 99 comes up through. It leaves Vancouver, heads up along Howe Sound to Squamish, then cuts into the mountains to Whistler, then it continues on to Pemberton further north-ish. The mountains in the area are all super-young and glacier carved, so they’re super rocky and steep. There’s a huge Provincial Park in the area too, Garibaldi. (Province = state, pretty much). Lots of cool stuff to explore. Sorry if this description seems composed more of random fragmented thoughts than a cohesive story, I’ve been interrupted about 6 times while writing it, and I’m not motivated enough to go back and rewrite it. That’s okay though, just look at the pretty picture and move on. 
Map: http://tinyurl.com/ou2v67
Notes: Canon Powershot SD700 IS (Point and Shoot). 1/500s, f/8.0.
Popularity: 4%