Click the photo to see the full panorama.

I don’t normally do panoramas, but seeing this view instantly made me think it was worthwhile. The air up here is so fresh it hurts, and the quietness and calmness makes it the perfect place to spend part of February, especially considering it’s about 12 degrees most of the time. We had a fire by the lake last night, and I thought to myself, when was the last time I had a camp fire in early February with a view like this?  It’s been epic.

Fresh Air. Nature. Hiking. Perfectly Calm Lakes. Good people. Good food. Good times.

Right now I am up at Evan’s Lake outside of Squamish, BC. What a change, it’s hard to believe that less than 24 hours after freezing my butt off in Toronto, I was walking around in the woods in BC. Wearing nothing but a hoody. It’s been great up here, one of the things I love most about travelling is that I get to come home to a place I love.

Now back home in Vancouver.  Toronto was great, but it’s at least 15 degrees warmer here….(And raining, of course.)

Packing my bags, gone to Toronto for the weekend….

Noted West Coast Architect Paul Merrick, pictured in his workshop at his home in Sooke, BC on January 12, 2010.  Brett Beadle for the Financial Times.

Paul was a really great person to have met and photographed and I fell in love with his home out in Sooke.  It’s rural, close to the ocean, has lots of evergreen trees, and has lots of space for his and his wife’s pets (A sheep, two goats, and 3 dogs).  Really an inspiration in terms of what I would like my future home to look like.

To learn about more about his background and specifically Vancouver architecture, check out this article from The Walrus: http://www.walrusmagazine.com/articles/2009.09-architecture-almost-grown-vancouver-paul-merrick-melora-koepke/

2009. And this was only a very small portion of it. It was a good year.                                                               Music / Dan Auerbach – Goin’ Home

To watch the video in HD, go here: http://vimeo.com/8800128

Had a shoot in Victoria yesterday for a client in the UK, so I took the ferry over for the shoot out in Sooke, and saw this on my way back through East Sooke. I forgot how rugged and beautiful the landscape is over there, I hadn’t visited since my time when I went to photo school over in Victoria. Seeing this as I drove by kind of reminded me of an oil painting….

I’m trying to get back to posting more, the start of 2010 has been full of planning/editing/website overhauls so I have been busy doing the more tedious side of work-related things.

Jan 1, 2009 – A couple embrace after a successful marriage proposal as fireworks go off on the Space Needle in Seattle.

I hope you all have a great New Year’s!

Plaza de la Constitución – Huancayo, Peru

I feel bad for our North American pigeons sometimes.  Well not that often. Not when they are trying to steal my food at Granville Island. But man do those South American pigeons have it good with their beautiful town Plazas to hang out it at, where people feed them all day long. These photos really take me back to another man who fed pigeons that I photographed in Leon, Nicaragua this spring. It still pains me to think about the fact that those rolls of Tri-X I shot on my Hasselblad are probably rotting, undeveloped, in a dump in Managua somewhere. Losing three months worth of work that you love is a feeling I can’t quite relate to anything else.