Another first for me – a soccer game. I’ve never played but can certainly appreciate the stamina and skill involved. I was exhausted just watching the game. Thanks to Steve H. – NW Rebel Photography – I got a chance to shoot this game last Saturday. The weather was about perfect, the light actually pretty good, and the color and action terrific. Learning to shoot this sport is a real challenge. The action is fast (and a long way off most of the time) and quite unpredictable to my untrained eyes. Thanks to some coaching by Steve and some help from the fans on the sidelines I managed to get a few keepers. I used the Canon 70-200/2.8 IS the whole day – an amazing lens. The full set of images is available on my photo site.

Night wandering sometimes produces very strange results.

But things quickly get back to normal, the storm passes, and life resumes.

After the trip to Fort Vancouver in search of sunflowers I gave in and found out where Beth’s friend had found them and it turns out it’s not too far from home. On the corner of 156th and 92nd Avenue, Vancouver, is a terrific little vegetable stand run by Betty A. and her son Duane. Betty is a delightful lady who obviously loves growing top quality farm produce. While I was busy with the sunflowers (which were rapidly fading, being a week or more past their prime) Beth was perusing the offerings of fresh vegetables. For lunch today we had, without a doubt, the best sweet corn we’ve had since arriving in the NW some 20 years ago. Betty also gave me free run of her sunflower patch for photographs. As it turns out the entire patch this year is made up of volunteers. We also ended up with some sunflower heads for my backyard bird photography. More photos available at NorwoodPhotos.

One of the ladies in Beth’s painting group recently took some terrific photos of sunflowers and I was hooked. I had to find some sunflowers to photograph. I remembered that the small garden just outside the entrance to Fort Vancouver had sunflowers galore and so I headed on over. It’s a small demonstration garden and this year they weren’t demonstrating sunflowers – not even one.

Not wanting to pass up an opportunity to use my Senior Parks pass I decided to go on into the Fort. Fort Vancouver is NOT a very busy place during the week which left much of it open for unobstructed photography so I played a bit. Nothing special, just interesting – to me at least.

I am catching up on some older works that should have been posted long ago. These three shots were done within a 2 minute walk of each other in Vancouver. The vignettes are the result spending some time with another photographer, Todd N., who has a real knack for seeing the picture within a picture.