Saturday, August 29, 2009

Granville Street, Vancouver







I'm getting ready to have a big garage sale, and was going through some old gear that I was thinking of selling off. In with the pile were two lenses that I used for about 80% of the photos I took when I was a news photographer in South Africa during the mid 1990's, a 35 mm AF f/2, and an 85 mm AF f/1.8. Those are the two classic photo-journalistic lenses, but with the jump to digital and it's 1.5 x focal length multiplier, I had thrown the two lenses into a filing cabinet and forgotten about them. That is, until I bought a Nikon d700 with a 'full frame' 35mm sized image sensor. As an experiment, the last time I was in Vancouver, I left my 25 lb camera bag, with it's heavy, high speed zoom lenses, at home in favour of the D700 with the 35 mm lens. I packed the 85 mm lens, along with a small notebook, into a Domke belt pack, and spent the evening shooting snaps around Vancouver.

Granville Street is a traditionally seedy entertainment area in Vancouver that is becoming gentrified with the new Canada Line transit line. There's parts of it, like the sadly un-aptly named Regal Hotel, that give you a feel for the old Granville, but those I think are not long for the world.

Tech Stuff:
For evening photos, you want enough light in the sky to give it some density without overpowering the neon lighting. With the fast lenses, I used a still reasonable ISO 800.

Camera: Nikon d700
Lenses: Nikon 35mm and 85 mm Af lenses

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