I spent the night of the 28th of November on Bowen Island at a retreat for my department at work. I set my alarm so as to wake up early on the 29th, so I could go out and get some photos, but it turned out that my internal alarm clock woke me up before the external one. Anyhow, it looked overcast and cold outside, so I bundled myself up and went out with the camera.

It was raining and that put the damper on my plan to walk over to a nearby park. Instead, I stayed on the grounds of the lodge to take a few sunrise landscapes. Unfortunately, there is a big mountain directly east of Bowen, and it was solidly overcast, so sunrise was just everything turning from dark grey to light grey, providing me with no good morning light and no good colors to photograph. The best shot I got while out was this one, looking back at the lodge.

There was a raindrop on my lens there, which you can see in the bottom middle of the photo.

The morning wasn't a complete bust, though, as it soon began to snow. This brightened things up and gave it all quite a different look.

I watched them for a while. One very typical goose gesture (called a head flip) involves lengthening the neck while wiggling the head from side to side a bit, sometimes making little grunts. Head flips are given when a goose is a little agitated or sometimes when it is about to move. (More severe agitation and aggression are indicated by other gestures.) In the following photo, the closest goose is doing a head flip, and indeed went walking to my left after this.

And yes, that's the partial albino in the back.

After taking these shots (some of them during the first working session of the retreat) I wandered back inside and didn't get back to photography until the end of the retreat, which we accelerated because of the bad weather—we didn't want to get caught in rush-hour traffic in Vancouver on a snowy day. So my next photos were from the line for the ferry. Here's the view from where I was parked in the lineup; that orangish truck is at the front of the line.

I find it cool that you can only see roughly half of David's face here, and it's at an odd angle, and yet you can still really read his usual lively, good-natured expression. When I see this photo, I get a sense of eager anticipation (that's from his expression) with a bit of mystery and excitement.(I think that's from the way it's framed). I like it when I can capture photos that somehow express these sorts of things.

Then again, maybe that's just my reaction, and you don't have the same one.

Shortly after the shot above, I took a few shots of Eugenia. For these photos, I was holding my camera down at my waist, shooting from the hip, as it were. I was holding the camera roughly upside-down, so the shots came out inverted. Since I wasn't looking through the viewfinder, I wasn't sure where I was focussing or how I was framing the shot. I didn't get any shots with her in focus, but I did get some shots that I think are fabulous. Have a look at this and see what you think.

There's something about that shot that I just really really like. It's a combination of her expression, the framing, the focus the wires behind her head, and the upside-downness of it all. It doesn't work as well right-side-up; I looked at it that way, too.

The ferry soon arrived and we were off to our respective cars and onto the ferry. I took a few photos of Bowen as we started away from the dock. Here's a couple of little businesses by the dock: a gift shop and the taco stand. Some folks had noticed the taco stand on the way in, and had made a trip down to it during the retreat, but they for some reason weren't able to get tacos. I wasn't part of that expedition, so I don't recall why that was.

The mainland hadn't gotten as much snow as Bowen Island had, and the traffic heading home was heavy but quite tolerable. However, it was rainy most of the way, and for the rest of the day, so that was it for photography that day.

No longer retreating,
Tom