The Celebration of Light is an annual fireworks competition held over English Bay in Vancouver, BC. Three countries competed this year: China, the USA, and Canada. All of these pictures are from Canada's program. I wasn't able to make it to any of the others. The Canadian display was based upon the Godzilla theme. There was more than 30 minutes of constant fireworks complete with a "we're under attack" radio broadcast and synchronized music.

Some 100,000 people attend this event, and transportation is a nightmare! I rode the Skytrain to a friend's condo (right off the water) and we walked down to the beach (a 3-minute walk) where we watched the fireworks. I was able to get a front-row seat right on the edge of the water (without any heads in front of me...) I spent the night at his place because it would have taken me hours to get home.

All-in-all, it was an awesome experience, and one I hope to repeat someday! Here's a few more pictures. I'll keep adding them as I get them edited, so check back.

HSBC Celebration of Light 2008:

Without a doubt the most spectacular fireworks display I've ever witnessed! Truly an awesome experience. I'd love to be able to do it again someday.







More pictures and details to come when I get a chance.

It's said that beauty is in the eye of the beholder - I disagree. I think beauty transcends perspective. Does beauty exist where it is often overlooked and rarely appreciated? Perhaps it is there more striking than anywhere else.

I have to teach tomorrow, but instead of preparing my material I'm posting pictures...

Got my computer up and running on the new drive - 190GB free space now. More blogs to come, but here's a teaser:

My first PC had a two 1.5GB hard drives. For those of you who aren't tech savvy, Windows XP requires 5GB+. I was running Windows 3.1. Then I acquired a huge 4GB Hard drive. Wow, I'd never run out of space now. And I didn't. The computer was replaced before I filled up all 7GBs and I had a computer with a much larger hard disk - somewhere around 16-20GB. And about the time I maxed that out, it died (struck by lightning). The replacement computer boasted a whopping 40GB hard drive - whoa, that should last a while! It didn't really. I switched to a laptop that had 40GB shortly thereafter lived off of that for a number of years. Then I upgraded to my Mac - 120GB! Wow, this should be enough to last me forever. Especially since I had a 250GB external disk for storage.

Well, I filled it up this week - both of them. These weddings are killing me! Let me explain:

In two days I shot over 2000 RAW images. That's something like 10+ gigabytes worth of pictures. I use Aperture to edit/organize my files. Aperture makes smaller copies of each image for quick previews (a RAW image takes a long time to load) which increases the total by about 20-30%. I do some color correction, sharpening, and alignment/cropping in Aperture and export these images to Photoshop. Aperture exports 16-bit images to Photoshop, which means that (depending on how many layers I'm working with in Photoshop) one image can require up to 3 gigabytes of hard disk space while editing. Each 16-bit PSD file that I save requires 300+MB of disk space. I have about 6 GB of hard disk space left - so I can edit one image at a time, save it, clear the clipboard, and open another. IT'S DRIVING ME NUTS!

So I just bought a 320GB hard drive for my laptop last week. And in an attempt to fix this storage problem for a good while, I plan on buying a 1TB or 1.5TB hard disk for archiving photos. That's about 1,000 times larger than my first computer's hard drive. How long will that last? Well, when I upgrade my camera to a 12+ megapixel, not long enough.

My hard drive should get here in the next week or so, and then I'll post some pictures from the wedding.