Anchor Why, When, Where

I was in Vancouver in February, at a family practice conference, lectures all morning from 8-12:30 but the afternoons off. I was still at the farmers market selling pictures so could be reasonably sure of selling any interesting images, for a few hundred dollars. I checked on cruises of the harbour but in February, wasn't surprised to find out they were all tucked away for the winter. Our Concierge however was able to point me to an outfit which would provide boat and driver for $300. This seemed a reasonable gamble and not a little fun, so that afternoon my wife and went to the dock and shortly climbed aboard a rather large speedboat (obviously designed for sight seeing, complete with driver and commentator, a film maker owner of the boat who tagged along for th fun of it and who was most helpful.

The first image was when the boat headed for a container ship tied up and loading. He took us right under the bow and I was able to get a series of shots from various distances so that when home I could pick the ideal compositions.



The first image to be processed was the straight on bow shot in colour seen above but eventually I started playing with one of the images taken from slightly side on, converting it to black and white to work with the tones rather than the dramatic colours and the image below was the result.



We went round the harbour from Lions Gate Bridge to First Narrows Bridge and under both.

Working our way along the north side, there were a number of smaller frieghters, bows dark in the very late afternoon winter sun just above the horizon. In a couple of cases their anchors were stuck far enough out to catch these warm rays of day's end and thus I was able to capture the two anchor images seen here.

They were shot hand held, with a rented 70-200 f2.8, IS, ei. 400 on my Canon 1Ds2 which did a creditable job of recording the shaded and dark toned hulls while not blowing out the brightly lit anchors.