Blowing Through Vancouver

When I received the call from Getty Images to go shoot travel/tourism, aka: “pretty pictures” in Vancouver a couple of weeks ago with the budgetary stipulation that I could go for only 3 days, and had to have it filed by end of Feb I was outwardly confident and happily accepted. On the inside I was a little bit unsure. After all, it’s February, in the Pacific North-West, there are no flowers, no leaves, relatively short days, virtually no tourists and a high probability of rain on any given day – could this even be done?

{click on any image to view slide show!}

As it turns out there are a couple of advantages and I did get lucky with the weather with Sun every day I was there. Few tourists means fewer obstructed views, shorter lines getting into certain “attractions”, less traffic (I did a LOT of driving around). Thanks to weather.com being fairly accurate I even managed to pick the right 3 day slot but still only decided the day before leaving to actually commit to hit the road as forecasts change from day to day.

I’ve been to Vancouver quite a few times for work but only once to see the sights and briefly at that… I had quite a few ideas, but probably not enough.

While looking at Google maps, to find directions to the Marriott, I noticed the “photo overlay” feature for the first time. Yeah, I think it’s been there for a while, but I never played with it. Turns out this was a hugely valuable research tool to plot my trip and find locations of interest. Believe it or not, there are lots of good amateurs out there and while I didn’t outright copy anything I found online I’m not ashamed to admit some of the pictures I found there inspired my own versions.

Here are 14 of the 66 pictures that ended up in the final edit. They are some of my favorites but I think they are also representative of the whole take. ~ Please comment!