Little Neighbours

Little Neighbours The best part about anchoring the ship in Pina's Bay, are all of the wonderful people that would paddle over to check us out. The Mama Nido became the hang out spot, the coolest place in the bay, the place where everyone wanted to be.  Not a day went by in our 20 something days at anchor where we didn't have more than 3-10 different Little Neighbors all the time just hanging out. The kids would be hand lining for fish off of the back swim transom, everyone smiling and having a great time. Or swimming around the ship, laughing and giggling.

Every day after fishing, we would pull up to the Mama Nido and all eyes would be focused on our crew to see what they might pull out of their fish coolers. Our boys would often save extra pieces of Bonito or other fish, to give to our Little Neighbours, so they could use it for hand lining.

The back of the Mama Nido became a Canoe parking lot and a safe haven for people to congregate on when a big storm was rolling through.

 Here are some pictures of our Smiling Little Neighbours. We are headed back down to Pina’s Bay next week and I can’t wait to capture more of them!!!

 

  

 

 

Hand Lining in the early Morning Hours

We unfortunately had a Blue Marlin die on us, but that one fish most likely fed over 20 families from Pina's Bay.

A whole group of our Little Neighbours, just hanging out!

The Kids are pretty shy at first, but then they seem to love the camera!

Chasing Records

Chasing Records

The Hooker was nursing a broken Turbo Booster, so the beautiful Picaflor was to be our trusty ship for 9 days of Record Fishing with Gary Carter in Pinas, Panama.

With Captain Wade leading the charge, Gary and the Picaflor managed to raise 17 Blue Marlin, Caught 7,  broke 2 record fish off the line; and caught plenty of sailfish and Tuna. Even though he didn’t yet get his record on this trip, the fishing was hot and the Weather was a bit variable.  Gary was using light pound test line, 8lbs, 12lbs and 30lbs line. He was trying to get the 8lbs Blue Marlin Record, 12lbs Blue Record and 8lbs Dorado Record as well.

In the releases that Gary had, he managed to hook 2 different fish on 8lbs test line. Both fish were too small for the record of 315lbs, but he came close with both of the fish approximated weight around 280lbs or so.

Here is a Selection of Shots from our 9 Days of Fishing with Gary. Record Fishing was pretty neat to watch, the patience and skill it takes to be able to handle the fish is truly an art!

30lbs Test Line, Nice 360lbs Blue Marlin

Nice Blue Marlin

Gary on 30lbs Test.

Nice Blue Marlin

Gary's Captain from the SILVER-ROD-O, Yoan; tries his hand at leadering!

Taken from a remote camera on the Tower of the Picaflor.

"DUCK!!"

The Picaflor got Her work out on this Marlin Fight!

"Whoops"

Nice Blue Marlin smacking at the drop back bait.

We had this guy on 8bls test. The pictures later revealed that he wasn't actually hooked. Just carrying the bait around with him.

Captain Yoan, ready for the Fish.

Bait Ball's stacking up under the boat.

Yoan and Gary ready to Gaff in a nice Tuna! Gary using 8lbs Test Line and a Spinner Real.

Captain Wade Richardson, trying his hand at Leadering! Nice 200lbs Blue Marlin.

If you are looking to stay dry, then the back of the Picaflor is not for you!

Gary Taking a much needed Reeling Break.

Yoan, Trying to get us some bait!

Bait Ball's are one of the coolest things to be able to photograph.

Hand Lining with Wade 101!

TUNA Frenzy!

Ligorio Showing off his Filleting skills!

The Man and General Badass!!

Nikon 105mm Micro

Nikon 105mm Micro

I went out today and purchased a used Nikon 105mm 2.8 Micro VR lens. I bought it primarily to use for Wedding Detail shots and some commercial shots, but after giving this lens a little test-drive today; I have decided that it could possibly be used for many other applications as well. Macro is just one of the many amazing uses.

This is by no means an official review and I won't be posting 100% crops, because that just takes to much time and is tedious haha!

The feel of the lens is pretty amazing. It’s pretty beefy and has an incredibly sturdy feel to it. The Af-S on this camera is extremely accurate and quick. It does skip around a tad bit when you are extremely close to your subject, but it doesn't skip around enough to make me crazy.

The sharpness of this lens is truly amazing, but I think my favorite part is the fact that you are not completely dedicated to shooting Macro. You could be shooting a very fine detail shot of your Bride & Groom’s Wedding rings and then all of a sudden without skipping a beat you can suddenly turn around and start snapping portraits as well. I am extremely happy to have added this to my kit and I know it will get lots of use!

Here are my not so interesting images, but I had fun shooting them and I guess that is what counts!!!! ;-)

This shot was taken at the closes focusing distance. 1ft or so. You have to stop down a bit in order to widen your depth of field otherwise hitting focus is a defiant fine line.

The sharpness on this flower is really incredible.

Never Ending Fog here in Vancouver.

Fogcouver

Fogcouver

Well its been around 2 straight weeks of fog sitting over the beautiful city of Vancouver, but today the sun finally came through and the fog dropped low enough to get some nice shots of Downtown Vancouver.  The sun was setting and I headed out to start shooting. The shots where taken on a Nikon D800 with a 70-200 2.8 VR 2.

I stitched together a couple of Pano's using Autopano Pro. Super easy amazing program that doesn't make your computer churn as much as when trying to process large files in Photoshop.

Here are some of the shots that I got.

As the Sun set's behind Vancouver Island, you can just see the Lighthouse at Lighthouse Park clearing from underneath the fog.

City of downtown and finally be spotted after almost 2 straight weeks of Fog Cover.

West Vancouver's shore line has not seen the sun in weeks!

Landscape shot of the city

Sun setting behind Vancouver Island. The ships in the Straight of Georgia have been sounding their fog horns non-stop!

19 image Pano Stitch---Keep Scrolling to the right on the picture to see the whole Pano. Or click the image to enlarge it.

Portrait Panorama

Portrait Panorama

The other day I ran across some information about the Ryan Brenizer Method. I would try and explain it, but I know right off the bat that I would explain it wrong. So basically  to sum it up, you just take a portrait shot of your subject with a telephoto lens (preferably 1.2-1.8 f-stop) and then you keep shooting all around your subject like you would with a Pano. Once you are finished, you then merge them together using some kind of Pano software and "voila" you get an amazing photograph with a impossible depth of field! You are really creating your own lenses!!

Here is his Website, which I highly recommend you check out. WEBSITE

or some video info on You Tube: Link

Here are my 2 attempts. I have a lot of work to do, but I am so excited to try and apply it so some of my Wedding Photography and Portrait work!

This is my first attempt at the Method. This image is around 24 Images merged together. The high-res version is incredible, because you can basically zoom in forever. There is a defiant fine line of focus in the shot, but I am only shooting with a Nikkor 85mm 1.8 and would love to try it with a f1.4 instead.  Also, these shots where taken RAW on a Nikon D800 and it took forever for my computer to minimize them to jpegs and then attempt to crunch them into a Portrait Panorama.

Here is a Sample of the images that where taken to create the image above. 24 images where merged together.

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Portrait Panorama

Round 2. This image actually stitched together very easily. Around 25 images. No real fixing in postproduction. The image itself is not to thrilling, but practice makes perfect and I need to keep on practicing the technique to really feel comfortable applying it to my work.

Ok so this image is not the method at all. I just took a couple of stills as well while I was shooting. This shot was taken with my New Sigma 35mm 1.4 lens, shot on a Nikon D800. I love the lens by the way. Super creamy Bokeh and super sharp, fast focus

Overall, I would recommend downloading and paying for a very long 2-hour video produced by Ryan Brenizer on the method. You can download it from his website. It’s a crazy interesting affect and I am super excited to practice and learn more about it. I am going to keep trying to post more samples as I play with this method, so hopefully I can start to shoot more overlapping images and not have to do to much crazy post in fixing messed up areas.

Software that I am using:

Lightroom 5 to sort the shots and to make the RAW files into JPEGS

Autopano Pro 3.0 to create the Pano's. Photoshop will work too, but you might wait forever for the program to rifle through the shots.